Les Trois Marches is a farmhouse inn on the edge of the countryside outside Rennes that becomes Georges Picquart and Edmond’s daily meeting place during the Dreyfus trial. It offers food and company, but its location also turns it into an unlikely political landmark: across the road stands the house where Auguste Mercier is staying under guard. The inn’s repeated meals gather prominent Dreyfusards within sight of the former war minister’s protected residence, while Picquart’s decision to dismiss his own police escort makes the place a setting for both fellowship and wary observation.

Setting and Discovery

Edmond finds the restaurant close to the lodgings he shares with Picquart and describes it as a hidden gem, almost like Alsace. Reaching it means laboring uphill in the broiling August sun, with Picquart’s bodyguards trailing them. The Jarlets run the auberge as a working farmhouse, complete with a garden, orchard, stables, barn, and pigsty. The pair sit outside on benches beneath a tree, drink cider, and discuss the morning’s court proceedings as wasps buzz around them. A plate of pâté de campagne is being laid out when Picquart notices gendarmes across the street and asks the proprietor whom they are guarding.

The answer changes the meaning of the view from the inn. The gendarmes stand outside the house of General de Saint-Germain, who commands the army in the area, but they are not there for him: their charge is the man staying in his house, Auguste Mercier. Edmond laughs at the discovery and proposes what he calls establishing a permanent bridgehead near the enemy. He promptly offers to reserve a table for ten for every lunch and dinner for the duration of the trial. The inn’s location has turned a chance meal into a place from which the Dreyfusards can gather close to a senior figure associated with the case.

A Daily Gathering

The Jarlets accept Edmond’s offer, and the arrangement becomes the gathering that right-wing newspapers call the Conspiracy of Les Trois Marches. The leading Dreyfusards meet there every day at noon and seven, eating the inn’s plain bourgeois fare. Regulars include the Clemenceau brothers, the socialists Jean Jaurès and René Viviani, the journalists Lacroix and Séverine, and the intellectuals Octave Mirabeau, Gabriel Monod, and Victor Basch. The paper’s label gives a conspiratorial cast to a visible, recurring social routine: the group assembles to eat at a farmhouse while Mercier remains across the road behind a guard.

The contrast between the guarded house and the restaurant’s ordinary hospitality becomes a recurring point of Picquart’s observation. He questions why Mercier needs protection from this company, wryly imagining the historian Gabriel Monod attacking him with a rolled copy of the Revue Historique. The joke highlights the distance between the atmosphere of threat suggested by Mercier’s guard and the intellectual, journalistic, and political character of the people gathered at the inn. The book does not present the restaurant as a secret command center; its importance lies in the regularity and visibility of the gathering, and in the irony of its name as assigned by hostile papers.

The Inn’s People and Routine

People come and go throughout the week, but the pattern is not identical for everyone involved. Mathieu Dreyfus appears at the inn; Lucie Dreyfus does not, staying instead with a widow in town. Fernand Labori, who has lodgings close to Picquart and Edmond, walks up the hill most evenings with Marguerite after finishing consultations with his client in the military prison. His visits connect the group’s sociable meals to the work of defending Dreyfus, while keeping the difference between public gathering and prison consultation clear.

Picquart asks Labori how Dreyfus is bearing up. Labori, who has seen him almost every day for a month, answers that he is bearing up remarkably well, but remains difficult to know: even with repeated meetings, Dreyfus seems no closer to him than during their first ten minutes. The exchange makes the inn a place where the absent prisoner is discussed and considered, even though he is not among its regular diners. The restaurant’s repeated meals also provide a steady rhythm around the trial’s interruptions, bringing the same circle back together as hearings and consultations continue.

That routine extends to breakfast. On the morning Picquart and Edmond set out early, they eat omelettes and baguettes in the inn’s small parlour. Across the road, the shutters of Mercier’s house remain tightly closed, while a yawning gendarme walks up and down outside. The juxtaposition compresses the inn’s recurring arrangement into one scene: an ordinary breakfast indoors, a guarded residence opposite, and the surveillance that surrounds the men involved in the trial. Picquart asks for his own police protection to be withdrawn, considering it unnecessary and suspecting that the officers pass information about him to the authorities. The place is therefore not outside the trial’s watchfulness, even as it offers a regular place to meet.

Farewell and Departure

On the evening of Thursday, 7 September, Edmond and Picquart return to Les Trois Marches for a farewell supper. Fernand Labori and Marguerite are there, but Mathieu Dreyfus and Edgar Demange do not attend. The company raises a final toast to victory, directing their glasses toward Mercier’s house across the road. The gesture brings together the inn’s two defining features: a meal among allies and the guarded residence that has given their gathering its pointed geography.

After supper, Picquart and Edmond take a taxi to the deserted railway station and board the evening train to Paris. They leave without being seen, and the town recedes into darkness behind them. The farewell closes the inn’s role as their Rennes base, but does not settle the trial’s outcome: the verdict is still due on Saturday afternoon. Les Trois Marches is thus associated with a period of waiting as much as with public confrontation, its recurring meals carrying Picquart and his companions through the interval before judgment.

Narrative Significance

The restaurant’s modest farmhouse setting supplies a counterpoint to the military court and the guarded house across the street. Benches beneath a tree, cider, pâté, omelettes, and baguettes place the Dreyfusards’ repeated meetings within everyday rural hospitality; the gendarmes and Mercier’s closed shutters keep the pressure of the case in view. The inn does not replace the courtroom as the site where the trial is decided. Instead, it gives the narrative a social setting in which the case’s supporters repeatedly meet, exchange observations, and return to the same pointed sightline.

Its significance is also carried by recurrence. The first lunch follows the announcement of closed hearings; the daily lunches and dinners establish a gathering; breakfast precedes another walk toward court; and the final supper precedes Picquart and Edmond’s departure. Across these appearances, Les Trois Marches becomes a practical base and a quietly ironic emblem of public solidarity: the place where a group accused in the press of conspiracy eats openly, while the man they regard as an adversary remains protected just across the road.