Marseille serves as both a point of escape and a stage for public exposure in the Dreyfus affair. For Georges Picquart, it is the first French city reached on a clandestine return from Tunisia, where an uncertain threat of surveillance follows him from ship to railway station. In a later harbor scene, the arrival of a colonel draws a crowd and turns the affair’s public significance into a visible fact.

A precarious arrival from Tunisia

After Jérôme Leclerc gave Georges Picquart official permission to leave Tunisia on compassionate leave, Picquart travelled by passenger ferry from Tunis to Marseille. To get aboard, he bribed a clerk for a small cabin and to keep his name off the passenger manifest. He travelled in civilian clothes and remained below deck, wary of being recognized. The confined, overheated cabin recalled Alfred Dreyfus’s account of being kept inside his cell aboard a warship near Devil’s Island, linking Picquart’s flight to the earlier experience of imprisonment that had become central to the case.

Marseille offered no immediate security. The ferry arrived during a summer downpour, and Picquart went straight to the Gare Saint-Charles to buy a ticket for the first available train to Paris. He assumed that Flavian-Uband Savignaud might have reported his visit to Tunis and his failure to return to Sousse; he feared that Charles-Arthur Gonse and Hubert-Joseph Henry could therefore anticipate his route. Picquart imagined that Henry might have alerted the French Sûreté to watch the station, though he had no confirmation that such a plan existed.

The station and the uncertain pursuit

Picquart waited beneath the station clock with his head hidden by a newspaper until the Paris train began to move. He then ran through the barrier, past a guard who tried to stop him, and along the platform, managing to board through the rearmost door as the train gathered speed. A thickset man in a brown suit had also run after the train and missed it. Picquart could not tell whether the man was simply a late passenger or an agent pursuing him; Marseille thus marks not a confirmed confrontation, but a flight governed by uncertainty.

Even aboard the crowded train, Picquart remained on guard. He kept his suitcase on his lap rather than placing it overhead, and repeatedly woke when the train stopped or passengers moved through the compartment. The journey from Marseille was shaped by the possibility of being recognized or followed, extending the city’s role from arrival point to the threshold of a precarious return to Paris.

A harbor made public

In a later harbor episode, a colonel is transferred from a ship to a tug outside the harbor entrance, with several dozen passengers watching from the rails. Once the tug reaches a military dock, a crowd of at least a hundred or two waits near the ferry berths. A young officer helps the colonel ashore and advises him to crouch low in the cab until they are clear of the port. The departure is treated as a public spectacle, and the colonel returns to France under visible caution.

The scene gives Marseille a significance beyond transit. The watching passengers, the larger crowd at the harbor, and the officer’s careful escort make the Dreyfus affair’s reach palpable without establishing what each onlooker believes. For Picquart, the city had been a place to pass through unseen; in this later arrival, it is a place where the affair’s growing hold on the public imagination can no longer be missed.