The Dreyfus Case /^tti(.«.f^i^Jt-4^t- '!7ARy ♦ .V OF : .MA AN DiEGO / ALFRED DREYFUS AFTER HIS DEGRADATION, JAN. 5, 1895. Frontispiece. The Dreyfus Case By Fred. C. Conybeare, M.A. Late Fellow oT University College Oxford With Twelve Illustrations and Facsimiles of the Bordereau, &c. London George Allen, 156 Charing Cross Road 1898 [.^// rights reserved^ Printed by Ballaniyne, Hanson &^ Co. At the Ballantyne Press TO LIEUT.-COLONEL GEORGE PICQUART, THE TRUE, THE DUTIFUL, THE BRAVE, THIS HUMBLE VOLUME IS INSCRIBED, WITHOUT THAT PERMISSION WHICH I WOULD FAIN HAVE OBTAINED, BUT WHICH A MILITARY TYRANNY, IMMURING HIM AU SECRET ON A FALSE AND PERFIDIOUS CHARGE, HAS PRECLUDED ME FROM EVEN SEEKING. PREFACE In writing this history of the Dreyfus Case I have endeavoured, so far as I could, to let documents and depositions speak for themselves. A record of the personal impressions left upon one's mind by a perusal of them might be more interesting, but would be less convincing to a reader who desires to form a judgment for himself upon the grave events which have for the last four years unrolled themselves in France. I hold that it is of the highest consequence to Englishmen to understand aright what is taking place in a country nearer to us than any other, and among a people whose welfare is, after all, more closely bound up with our own than that of any other. There is no city in the world so central as Paris, in the sense that whatever happens there at once attracts the atten- tion of all Europe , and in no city do the voices of Paris so speedily find an echo, sympathetic or the reverse, as in London, I write as one who would ever like to be in sympathy with France, as one who has French ancestors. viii PREFACE I ma}^ briefly indicate the sources I have used. These are, first and foremost, the shorthand report of the Zola trial, which took place in February 1898, and the official documents of the Dreyfus and Esterhazy court-martials, so far as they have been published. The first two hundred pages of my book were already in print before the report of the first three sessions of the Cour de Cassation on October 27th and the following days was published. This often supplements, but seldom corrects, the earlier part of my narrative ; and I have tried to add whatever it contains of new or striking. I have also used Prof. Albert Reville's Les Etapes d'un Intellectuel, and the various brochures of M. Yves Guyot, Justin Vanex, Jaures, and others. It is no exaggeration to say that the actions of the French War Office have outraged the conscience of the civilised world ; and the too tardy advent of justice during the past month has brought relief to all. We may hope before long to see the victim back among his countrymen, restored to his family, and to the army, against which, in spite of its treat- ment of him, he has never breathed ill wish or evil word. Throughout his long weary confinement in the Devil's Island he has been buoyed up by a clear conscience and an indomitable will, let us add by PREFACE ix the afFection of a noble wife, and the hope of being rehabilitated, if not for his own sake, at least for that of his children. But alas, his health of mind and body must have sorely suffered. It is said that his hair has turned white with the anguish which devoured his soul ; and with a refinement of cruelty the French Government made his captivity more galling and irksome from the moment Avhen Colonel Picquart first established his innocence. They thenceforth allowed no more letters in his hand- writing to pass to his wife, and it is even said that they put him in irons and built a palisade round his prison that he might not any more gaze out upon the sea — his only solace. His wife was not allowed to go out to nurse him in illness — a privilege allowed to vulgarer convicts — and even his supply of books was cut off. In this terrible history the contrasts of honour and baseness, of loyalty and treason, are presented with dramatic intensity : Dreyfus and Esterhazy, Picquart and Henry ; patriots like Zola, Yves Guyot, Joseph Reinach, P.-V. Stock, Clemenceau, Demange, Jaures, Labori, Pressense, Trarieux, Ranc, Scheurer- Kestner, Gabriel Monod, Paul Meyer, Grimaux, Bernard Lazare, Gerault Richard, Albert Reville, J.-Elie Pecault, Paul VioUet, M. Brdal, Stapfer, Buis- son, Pere Hyacinthe, Gaston Paris, Giry, Havet, X PREFACE Anatole France, Molinari, Jean Psichari, on the side of truth and justice ; wretches Hke Rochefort, Pere Didon, Drumont, Du Paty de Clam, Vervoort, Judet, Brunetiere, Deroulede, Millevoye, and others better left in obscurity, on the side of Jesuitry, treason, and pra3torian insolence. In conclusion, I owe my best thanks to those without whose help my book would have been marred by many inaccuracies — indeed, could not have been written; particularly to M. P.-V. Stock, who allowed me to use the facsimile of the bordereau given in M. Guyot's book. La Revision du Froccs Dreyfus, FEED. C. CONYBEARE. November 19, 1898, CONTENTS CHAP, I. THE GENESIS OF THE DREYFUS CASE II. ESTERHAZY THE MERCENARY III. THE BORDEREAU . IV. THE COURT-MARTIAL V. THE VEHMGERICHT VI. PICQUART's DISCOVERY . VII, THE FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE . VIII, THE MACHINATIONS AGAINST PICQUART IX. THE AWAKENING . . . , X. ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY DE CLAM XI. THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON XII. THE ZOLA TRIAL .... XIII. THE REIGN OF TERROR . XIV. HENRY THE FORGER XV. REVISION AT LAST. PAQK I 14 30 49 71 96 116 146 i6s 185 226 247 267 300 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Alfred Dreyfus, after his Degradation, January 5, 1895 Frontispiece Facsimile of the Bordereau . juviny /, 5) aye lo „ 32 Captain Alfred Dreyfus . » „ 40 Identity of Esterhazy's Writing wite [ THAT of the Bordereau 55 ,5 48 Facsimile of Dreyfus' Handwriting )) „ 48 General Mercier .... )) ,5 56 Colonel G. Picquart 55 „ 112 General Billot 55 5, 144 General De Boisdeppre . 55 5, 152 General De Pellieux „ „ 192 Emile Zola 55 5, 226 MaItre Labori 5) 5 5 246 Paul Cavaignac .... 5) ,5 272 General Zurlinden .... 55 „ 288 CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF CHIEF EVENTS 1894 April I (about). Esterbazy's bordereau written. Oct, 13, Bertillon pronounces the bordereau to be in the hand- writing of Dreyfus. ,, 15. Dreyfus examined by Du Paty de Clam and arrested, Dec, 9. D'Ormescheville's Act of Accusation drawn up. ,, 19, Dreyfus' court-martial begins. 1895 Jan. 5. Dreyfus publicly degraded. Feb. 9. French Chamber makes a law to send Dreyfus to French Guiana. June I. Colonel Picquart appointed head of the Intelligence Bureau. 1896 May I (about). The Petit bleu brought to Picquart. July Picquart acquaints Boisdefifre with case against Esterhazy, and with his discovery of Dreyfus' innocence. Sept. 3. Picquart acquaints Gonse with the same. ,, 3. False report in English press of Dreyfus' escape. ,, 14. Article in Eclair divulges use of secret evidence at Dreyfus' trial. Nov. I (about). Henry forges evidence against Dreyfus. ,, (early in). Bernard Lazare's first brochure, La Veriti sur V Affaire Dreyfus. ,, 10. The Matin publishes a facsimile o[ the bordereau. „ 16. Picquart dismissed from Paris and succeeded by Colonel Henry. „ 18. Castelin's interpellation. Cliose jugee invented by Billot, Dec. 15. A forged letter signed Speranza sent to Picquart. 1897 Jan. 13. Picquart reaches Tunis. June (early in). Picquart receives Henry's threatening letter, and consults Leblois in Paris. Oct. 16. Esterhazy's last interview with Schwartzkoppen. xvi LIST OF CHIEF EVENTS Oct. (end of). De Castro recognises bordereau as Esterhazy's. ,, 24. Esterhazy's threatening letter to M. Hadamard. ,, 30. Scheurer-Kestner interviews Billot. Nov, 3. Pellieux searches Picquart's rooms in Paris in his absence. ,, 10 or II. Picquart in Tunisia receives false telegrams from Esterhazy and Du Paty de Clam. ,, 14. Esterhazy restores the document liberateur to War Office. ,, 15. Mathieu Dreyfus denounces Esterhazy as author of the bordereau. ,, 25. Picquart returns to Paris. Dec. 31. Ravary reports in favour of not prosecuting Esterhazy. 1898 Jan. 2. General Saussy orders court-martial of Esterhazy. ,, 7. Siede publishes D'Ormescheville's Act of Accusation of Dreyfus. ,, II. Esterhazy acquitted " to order" of high treason. ,, 12. Picquart arrested by military authorities. ,, 13. Zola's letter /'accuse appears in the ^Mrore. Feb. 11-23. First trial of MM. Zola and Perrenx, ,, 24 (about). Picquart expelled from the French army. April 2. Cour de Cassation quashes sentence on Zola and Perrenx. „ 7. Casella's revelations. Fresh prosecution of Zola ordered. June 24. Joseph Reinach court-martialled for translating article in the National Review. July 7. Cavaignac parades Henry's forgery in French Chamber. ,, 9. Picquart denounces the forgery. ,, 13. Picquart and Leblois prosecuted by Cavaignac. Esterhazy arrested by Judge Bertulus. ,, 14. Picquart arrested and taken to a civil prison. ,, 18. Second trial of MM. Zola and Perrenx. Zola quits France. Aug. 30. Henry avows his forgery before Cavaignac. ,, 31. Henry's suicide in Mont Valerien. Sept. 5. Cavaignac resigns the Ministry of War. ,, 6. Zurlinden becomes Minister of War. ,, 9. Esterhazy flees from France. ,, 14 and 15. Picquart's two letters to M. Sarrien. ,, 17. Zurlinden resigns, being opposed to revision. ,, 20. As Governor of Paris, Zurlinden arrests Picquart on charge of forgery, and immures him au secret in a military prison. 26. Brisson finally refers the Dreyfus verdict to the Cour de Cassation for revision. Oct. 25. General Chanoine resigns. ,, 28. The Cour de Cassation begins the work of revision. Nov. 15. Dreyfus is informed of the pending revision just one year after his brother's denunciation of Esterhazy. ERRATA Page II, line lo, for 'Drumont's' rear:/ ' Guerin's.' 15, ,, 24, for ' Sfax ' read ' Soussa.' 49, ,, II, for ' Echeman ' read ' Echernann. 46, ,, I, for ' Verwoort ' read ' Vervoort.' loi, ,, I, /or ' Knight ' rifa;/ 'dignitary.' 124, ,, " In public offices it is too common for employes 58 THE DREYFUS CASE to hurry away an hour before they ought to ; but it appears that in the French War Office special industry and addiction to hard work expose a man to the suspicion of being a spy. If Moltke and the organisers of the German army had been in the habit of quitting work early and hurrying off to cards and ladies, the victory of Sedan would never have been won. Are not the authorities of the French War Office paving the way for another such defeat ? " Captain Dreyfus underwent a long interrogatory before the officer of judiciary police {i.e. Du Paty). His answers, to put it mildly, constanthj admit of contradiction. Some of them deserve special notice, notably that which he gave on being arrested on the 1 5 th of October last, when they searched his pockets, and he said, ' Take my keys, open every- thing in my house, you will find nothing.' A search was made at his house, and gave, or very nearly gave, the results indicated by him. But it is permissible to suppose that, since no letter, even no family letters, Avith the exception of those addressed to Madame Dreyfus during his engagement to her, no notes, even of tradesmen, were found in the course of this search, the true explanation is that, whatever could in any way compromise him had been hidden or destroyed long before." Where the contradiction lies between Dreyfus' assertion and the facts is not very clear. The next bit of reasoning is beautiful. There were no treasonable documents, cryo, there had been, but THE COURT-MARTIAL 59 Dreyfus had destroyed tliem. But why should a German spy in the French army be expected to destroy with so much care his butchers' and bakers' bills, as well as his correspondence with the Schwartz- koppens and the Panizzardis ? However, the French War Office was not to be cheated in this way ; so, from 1896 onwards, they set their intelligence de- partment, presided over by Henry and assisted by MM. Lauth, Lemercier-Picard, Du Paty, and Dru- mont, to supply all these documents which Drejrfus had, in 1894, so unkindly neglected to have in his house ready for them to seize. " Dreyfus' answers under cross-examination are everywhere interspersed with persistent denials of, and also with protests against, the charge alleged against him. When the cross-examination first began, he said that he seemed in a vague way to recognise in the bordereau the handwriting of an officer employed in the bureaux of the 6tat major. Afterwards in our presence he withdrew formally this allegation." In face of the above admission, what becomes of Dreyfus' pretended confession of guilt ? What of the hypothesis of the experts, Couard, Belhomme, and Varinard, accepted in January 1898 by Ester- hazy's judges and remunerated at the rate of 10,000 francs apiece by the French civil tribunals, that Dreyfus traced the bordereau from Esterhazy's handwriting in order to conceal his own guilt and incriminate another ? 6o THE DREYFUS CASE " If one compares the answers which Captain Dreyfus gave with the depositions of some of the witnesses heard, one is left with the very painful impression that he often disguises the truth ; and that, whenever he feels himself hard pressed, he gets out of it without much difficulty, thanks to the supple character of his mind." How perfidiously clever of Dreyfus not to fall into any of the traps laid for him ! He not only will not confess his guilt, but he routs their argu- ments. What a want of respect for his inquisitors ! " It seems that his motive for this systematic ferreting, for his provoking these conversations of an indiscreet kind, for these investigations over and above what he was charged to know, was that he felt the necessity of procuring as much information as possible, oral or written, before his stay in the War Office came to an end. Such an attitude is suspicious from many points of view, and is very like that of persons who practise espionage." We turn over two pages and we have an example of Dreyfus' suspicious zeal for information : — " In the month of February last. Corporal Bernolin, then secretary of M. le Colonel de Sancy, head of the second bureau of the 6tat major, made a copy of a work of about twenty-two pages on Madagascar in the ante-chamber of that higher officer's study. The making of this copy took five days, during which both the minute and the copy of it were left in a carton^ on the corporars table at the end of each ^ An open cardboard box, such as one lays letters to be answered in. THE COURT-MARTIAL 6i day's work. Moreover, when, during working hours, the non-commissioned officer left his room for a time, the work he was at was loft open, and could consequently bo read." This minute was one of the documents enu- merated in the bordereau, and Schwartzkoppen, as we read above, has related to Panizzardi how he received it along with the others from Ester- hazy in the spring of 1894. If it was given to a corporal to copy, and left lying about as described, surely it needed no particular ferreting on Dreyfus' part to learn, supposing he did ever learn, its con- tents. Any one who liked could look at it, yet the indictment argues that, because Dreyfus had read it, therefore he wrote the bordereau. Why should not the corporal equally well have written it ? But then Dreyfus' habits were so strange. He wanted to know about everything. If the best of the young French officers on being breveted go into the staff office for a time, it is nevertheless evident that they are not su]3posed to learn what goes on there by way of completing their military education. And yet this is what Dreyfus set himself to do. What a suspicious wretch to be ever trying " to procure as much information as he could" about matters pertaining to his profession ! Let French officers take warning. None but spies are expected by the French War Office to be anxious to learn their business. The letters of Dreyfus, written since his arrest 62 THE DREYFUS CASE iu 1 894, and of which I have translated the first few and given them in the course of the present pages, reveal him to us as the most tender and affectionate of husbands and fathers. Yet listen to this : — " Captain Dreyfus is also en relations with a woman Dida, older than himself, very rich, and with the reputation of paying her lovers, and who at the end of 1890 was assassinated by Wladimiroff. Captain Dreyfus, who was then at the Military School, and had just married, was cited as a wit- ness in this scandalous business, which came before the Assize Court of Versailles, January 25, 1891." Now, turn to the testimony of the doctor, A. Lataud, who attended Mme. Dida, pubUshed lately in the high - class scientific journal La Medicine Moderne : — " I was cited as a witness before the Versailles Court, along with Doctor Motet and several others who had come into contact with the victim. Dreyfus was also cited, and the President of the Assizes com- plimented him on the high principle he had shown in all his behaviour in respect of Mme. Dida. Such are the facts, on which it is necessary to insist, not only because they have been falsified (to wit, in the Dreyfus case), but also because we cannot allow a stain to be inflicted on the memory of Mme. Dida, who has left children." Let us resume this part of the act of accusation : — " Has Dreyfus since his marriage changed his habits in this respect ? We think not, for he has THE COURT-MARTIAL 63 declared that he stopped the woman Y in the street m 1893, and that he made the acquaintance of the woman Z at the races in 1894. The first of these women is Austrian, and speaks several languages well, esincially German. She has a brother who is an officer in the Austrian service, another is an engineer, and she receives officers socially." We shall see presently that French officers know German at their peril ; but it appears from the above that it is also dangerous for one of them even to possess the acquaintance of a lady in good society who speaks that language. " Although Dreyfus has declared that he never cared for gambling, yet it appears from the informa- tion collected by us on the point that he has fre- quented several clubs in Paris where they gamble a good deal. In his cross-examination he has admitted having gone to the Press Club, though only as a guest, for dinner. He declares that he did not play cards there. There are fast clubs in Paris, like the Washington, the Betting Club, the Fencing Clubs, and the Press Club ; but they have no lists of mem- bers, and, their clientele not being very respectable, the witnesses lohom we migld have found would have been not a little suspect ; consequently we have refrained from hearing them." Probably they did hunt for such witnesses ; but even the betting men of Paris were too honest for the Sandherrs, the Henrys, and De Clams of the etat major. But what does that matter ? Dreyfus is a convicted gambler, and that is enough. 64 THE DREYFUS CASE " Captain Dreyfus' family lives at Mulhouse. His father and mother are dead. He has three brothers left and three sisters. The latter are married, and live, one at Bar-le-Duc, another at Carpentras, and the third in Paris. His brothers get their living from a spinning-mill at Mulhouse. The eldest, Jacques, aged fifty, has not ojDted for the French nationality." But only the eldest of the four brothers really lived at Mulhouse. The innuendo is that he was not loyal to France ; but we have seen what M. Lalance had to say on this point. The indictment, after a little, gives a sketch of Dreyfus' career. He entered the Artillery, and was admitted at the Ecole de Ghierrc on April 21, 1890, the sixty-seventh in order of merit. He quitted it in 1892, the ninth in the same order, and with the note " tris hien " added to his name. In the leaving examination one of the examiners, a general after the heart of Drumont, gave Dreyfus lower marks than he was entitled to, because he was a Jew. Dreyfus detected the unfairness, and successfully exposed it. D'Ormescheville relates the incident, and then comments as follows : — " It may be remarked that the mark of which Captain Dreyfus complained was secret ; and one justly wonders how he could have found out about it, save by some indiscretion which he committed or ^^rovoked. As, however, indiscretion is his leading characteristic, we need not be surprised at his having been able to find out these secret marks." THE COURT-MARTIAL 65 Dreyfus " complained that this mark had been given him from parti jjris, and because of his re- ligion." What does all this amount to ? This, that anti- Semitic generals in the French army cheat when they are put on to examine, and are sometimes caught at it. The Jesuits, who in France train young men of good family for the army, have been many times convicted of getting hold beforehand of the questions to be set at Saint- Cyr, and of giving them to their pupils. Last May, for example, the pupils in the Jesuit school of Sainte-Genevieve at Paris, an establishment patronised by the Comte de Mun, were warned beforehand Avhat essay was to be set, and one of them generously wrote to a friend in the Lycee at Tours, and handed on the " tip " to him. Billot, the Minister of War, as might be ex- pected, declared that it was a mere coincidence that the Jesuit pupils knew beforehand that the alterna- tive subjects set for the essay would be " The Cam- paign in Egypt," " Bonaparte and Kleber," or " The Letter of Colbert to Louis XIV. proposing the founding of an Academy of Science." However, the papers were cancelled. In 1876 the Jesuits of the Rue des Postes were convicted of the same offence, and as Gambetta was then alive, they were treated with less consideration than Meline and Billot lately showed. The general who falsified Dreyfus' marks must have been educated in a Jesuit school, and no doubt regarded his action as patriotic, just as E 66 THE DREYFUS CASE Drumont and Verwoort, and their epauletted readers, regard Henry's forgeries. Dreyfus, says the acte d' accusation, " provoked indiscretions." How ill-bred of him, to be sure, to detect and expose an injustice done to him as a Jew ! However, it all goes to prove that he wrote the bordereau. But let us pass on. " As regards the journeys of Captain Dreyfus, it is clear from his answers under cross-examination that he could go to Alsace by stealth almost whenever he wished to do so ; and that the German authori- ties shut their eyes to his presence there. This faculty of clandestine travel may properly be made a charge against him." But is not Alsace still in the eyes of patriotic Frenchmen a part of France — even M. Hanotaux has lately declared it to be so ? Where, then, was the harm of dodging the German authorities and going there ? Dreyfus, indeed, never did so, though he may have said that it could be done. However, the official Strassburger Post of January lo, 1898, states the truth in the following paragraph : — " In reality, Dreyfus asked for a permit to be in Alsace in June and July 1892, and on both occa- sions his demand was rejected. In December 1893 a permit was granted to him to be there for five days, because his father was seriously ill." It is the more necessary to emphasize this point, because Esterhazy or his reporters in then- recent THE COURT-MARTIAL 67 rev.elations in the Observer and Daily News have revived this particular fable about Dreyfus, seeking to incriminate him thereby. The passage which follows deserves to be quoted, because it suggested to Esterhazy the lame and false account lately attributed to him by certain English journals of the circumstances under which he wrote the bor- dereau : — " Captain Dreyfus insinuates that it is the practice of the Ministry of War to set traps and decoys to catch individuals. The object of his insinuations appears to us to be to leave himself with a means of defending himself should he be some day caught with secret or confidential documents in his pocket. It was no doubt with a view to this that he took so little pains to disguise his handwriting in the incrimi- nating bordereau. On the other hand, the few wilful changes introduced in it by him were meant to enable him to argue that it was a forgery in the very improbable contingency of the document find- ing its way back to the Ministry after reaching its destination." It is not very surprising if Dreyfus did refer to the decoy-duck habits of the Ministry of War. They are the elementary tactics of the French police, civil and military. The graphological argument of D'Ormescheville assumes an almost comic air in view of the finding of the later experts, that the bordereau was decalque sur I'dcriture d'lEsterhazy, that is to say traced letter by letter on his writing. 68 THE DREYFUS CASE Then follow three paragraphs about the bordereau, and a final summing up of the case against Dreyfus, as follows : — " In short, the grounds of the accusations brought against Captain Dreyfus are of two kinds — moral and material. We have examined the former. The latter consist of the incriminating lettre missive. The majority of the experts, as well as ourselves and the witnesses who have seen it, are agreed that, except for intentional dissimilarities, it offers a perfect resemblance to the authentic writing of Captain Dreyfus. " Over and above what precedes, we may say that Captain Dreyfus possesses, along with very extensive knowledge, a remarkable memory ; that he speaks several languages, notally German, which he knows thoroughly, and Italian, of which he pretends that he has but vague ideas ; that he is, moreover, gifted with a character very supple, nay, even obsequious, such as is very suitable to relations of espionage with foreign agents. " Captain Dreyfus, therefore, was in every way marked out for the miserable and disgraceful mission which he has solicited or accepted, and to which, most happily perhaps for France, the discovery of his plots has put an end," Most happily indeed ! The reference to the German and Italian languages once more proves how mistaken were those who alleged that Dreyfus' pretended treason had anything to do with Russia. Those who conducted his prosecution were, it is THE COURT-MARTIAL 69 clear, resolved that he should be made to talk Italian as well as German, even if he did not know- it. The court-martial seems to have entertained no doubt of the extreme impropriety of a French officer's knowing German, even although he were an Alsatian. It is also clear that it is dangerous for a French officer to have " extensive knowledge " or a " good memory," or any adaptability of mind and manner. If he has any of these characteristics, he may be mistaken for a spy, and if he be also a Jew, will certainly be condemned as such. Of the two score or so of French officers who, in connection with the case, have come before the eye of Europe, there is certainly not one, except Picquart, who has shown any of the solid and sterling qualities of mind and character which have earned for Dreyfus condemna- tion and infamy in the eyes of Frenchmen. And this is probably the reason why Picquart has been also accused of treason and forgery, and kept for months au secret in a military prison, as were the intellectuels of Naples sixty years ago by King Bomba. I meet every day friends who, unacquainted with the peculiarities of French military justice, ask me, " But do you really think that Dreyfus was wholly innocent ? " To help them to form a judgment for themselves it was necessary to thus translate and analyse the " brief " of those who prosecuted and condemned him. It is a document instinct through- out with the inspiration of Loyola, and it proves 70 THE DREYFUS CASE most painfully the fierce aberrations of which men are capable who know nothing of judicial methods, and whose minds are full of sectarian prejudices. Henceforth it belongs to history, and will be cata- logued among the darkest pages of human in- justice. CHAPTER V THE VEHMGERICHT Commandant Forzinetti has given us some glimpses of the agony endured by Captain Dreyfus when he found himself suddenly arrested and thrown into prison on a vague charge of treason. For seven weeks he was not allowed to see an advocate or communicate with his wife and friends. At last, on December 5, he was allowed to write to his wife. The letters which from that day up to March 5, 1898, the unhappy man wrote to her have been published in Paris under the title Lettres d'un Inno- cent. They are sad reading ; but the soldierly patience, courage, and dignity, the warm home and family affections which breathe through them, will make them a French classic for all time. The first two of the series I now give. If they seem overwrought to the reader, I would beg him to bear in mind that for seven weeks Dreyfus had been in solitary confinement, save for the visits of his inquisitor and torturer Du Paty. " Cherche-midi Prison, Tucsdmj, December ^th, 1894. " My dear Lucy, — At last I can Avrite you a word, for they have just informed me that I shall be put upon my trial on the 19th of this month. They refuse me the right to see you. 72 THE DREYFUS CASE " I will not tell you all that I have suffered, for in the whole world there are no words pathetic enough for that. Do you remember my telling you how happy we were ? Everything smiled for us in life. Then all of a sudden a clap of thunder so appalling that my brain still reels. I, accused of the most monstrous crime that a soldier can commit ! To-day again I feel myself afresh the plaything of a dreadful nightmare. " But I have hopes in God and in justice, and the truth will end by declaring itself My conscience is calm and quiet, and reproaches me with nothing. I have always done my duty, I have never stooped to anything. I have been overwhelmed and prostrate in my dark prison in solitary converse with my own brain. I have had moments of wild madness, I have even wandered ; but my conscience kept awake. And it said to me, ' Lift up your head and look the Avorld in the face. Strong in your good conscience, walk straight and hold yourself upright. It is a terrible trial, but you must undergo it.' " I do not write to you any more, for I want this letter to go to-night. But write me a long letter, and tell me in it all that our household are doing. " I embrace you a thousand times, as I love you, as I adore you, my darling Lucy. A thousand kisses for the children. I don't dare to speak to you more at length about them, for the tears come into my eyes when I think of them. " Write to me soon. Alfred. " My kindest regards to all the family, and do tell them that I am to-day exactly what I was THE VEHMGERICHT 73 yesterday — solicitous only of one thing, wliich is to do my duty. " The Commissary of the Government has in- formed me that it will be Mattre Demange who will undertake my defence. So I think I shall see him to-day. Write to me at the prison ; your letters will pass, like my own, through the hands of the Com- missary of the Government." " Thursday Morning, December 'jth, 1894. " I await with impatience a letter from you. You are my hope, you are my consolation ; otherwise life would be a burden to me. I should have nothing to do but to think of how they could accuse me of so awful a crime, of a crime so monstrous that all my being starts at it, all my body revolts. To have worked all one's life for one single end, and that end the taking of revenge against that infamous robber who had despoiled us of our dear Alsace, and then to see oneself accused of treason towards that country — no, my darling, my mind refuses to take it in. Do you remember how I told you about my being ten years ago at Mulhouse, in the month of September it was, and I heard one day passing under our windows a German band celebrating the anni- versary of Sedan ? My anguish was such that I wept with rage, that I bit my sheets with anger, and swore to consecrate all my strength, all my under- standing, to the service of my country against those who thus trampled on the Alsatians in their anguish. " No, no, I will not dwell upon it; for I should go mad if 1 did, and I must needs keep all my senses about me. And besides, my life has now but one 74 THE DREYFUS CASE single aim, and that is to discover the wretch who has betrayed his country, to discover the traitor for whom no punishment will be too great. Oh, my own dear France, that I love with all my soul, with all my heart, you to whom I have consecrated all my strength, all my understanding, how can they have accused me of so stupendous a crime ? I brood, my darling, over this matter till I literally choke. Never, in sooth, has any one undergone the martyr- dom that I endure. No physical suffering is to be compared with the moral anguish that I feel when- ever my thoughts hark back to this accusation. If I had not my own honour to defend, I assure you that I would much prefer death ; at any rate, it would be forgetfulness. " Write to me very soon. My affectionate regards to all." The following letter is also of interest, for it shows how, as we have seen in the acte d'accusation, the very virtues of the man were construed as indicia of his guilt : — "December 1894. "My Own Darling, — I was waiting for your letter impatiently, and it has given me great relief; though, at the same time, it has brought the tears into my eyes when I think of you, my own darling. "I am not perfect. What man can boast of being ? But one thing I can assure you of, and that is, that I have always walked in the path of duty and of honour. Never have I had any com- promise with my conscience in this respect. And also, if I have suffered much, if I have undergone THE VEHMGERICHT 75 the most terrible martyrdom which it is possible to imagine, I have always been sustained in this terrible struggle by my conscience, which watched over me upright and inflexible. " It is my rather haughty reserve, my liberty of word and judgment, my devotion to hard work, that to-day do me the deepest wrong. I have been neither supple, nor pliable, nor a flatterer. Never were we disposed to pay visits ; but we kept strictly to our own quarters, quite content with our domestic happiness. And yet to-day they accuse me of the most monstrous crime that a soldier can commit. " Ah ! if I only had hold of the wretch who has not only betrayed his country but has also tried to throw the blame of his infamy on me, I hardly loiow what torture I would invent by way of making him expiate the moments through which he has made me pass. Nevertheless, one must hope that in the end they will find the culprit. Otherwise one would have to despair of justice in this world. So do you give up to this investigation all your efforts, all your intelligence, all my fortune if needs be. Money is nothing, honour is everything. Tell Mathieu that I reckon on him to do this. It is not above his strength. If it be necessary to move heaven and earth, we must do so to discover this wretch. " I embrace you a thousand times, as I love you, your devoted Alfred. "A thousand kisses for the children, and my affectionate regards to all our relations, and thank them for their devotion to the cause of an innocent man." 76 THE DREYFUS CASE And tlie following letters, written just before the court-martial began, indicate how sure he felt of the honesty of the officers before whom he appeared, and therefore of acquittal by them : — " Wcdiiesday, December iSth, 1894. " My Dear Lucy, — I have received your kind letter as well as mamma's. Thank her for the sentiments that she expresses about me, sentiments of which I never doubted, and which I have always deserved, as I can confidently say. " At last there draws nigh the day when I shall appear before my judges ; so then there will be an end of this moral torture. My confidence is abso- lute ; when one has a conscience that is clear and tranquil, one can face any one and any thing without flinching. I shall have to deal with soldiers who will listen to me and will understand me. The con- viction of my innocence will make its way into their hearts, as it has never quitted those of my friends and of all who have known me intimately. " My whole life is the best proof of it. I do not speak of the infamous and anonymous calumnies which they have spread abroad about me. They have not touched me, and 1 scorn them. " Give a good hug to our darlings for me, and take for yourself the tender kisses of your devoted husband, Alfred." " Wednesday, December z^rd, 1S94. " My Own Darling, — At last I reach the end of my sufferings, the end of my martjn'dom. To- morrow I shall appear before my judges without flinching, head erect, without misgivings. THE VEHMGERICHT 77 " The trial which I have just undergone, terrible trial as it has been, has yet purified my soul. I shall come back to you better than I Avas before. I will consecrate to you, to my children, to our dear families, all that still is left to me of life. " As I have told you, I have passed through the most awful time. I have had real moments of raging madness at the mere thought of being accused of so monstrous a crime. I am ready to appear before soldiers as a soldier who has nothing to reproach himself with. They will see in my face, they will read in my soul, they will win the conviction of my innocence, as do all who know me. " Devoted to my country, to which I have conse- crated all my strength, all my understanding, I have nothing to fear. " So sleep quietly, my darling, and do not be at all anxious. Only think of the joy that we shall experience at finding ourselves soon in one another's arms, in forgetting quickly these sad, dark days. " Before long then, my own darling, before long I shall have the happiness of taking you as well as our darlings into my arms, " And meanwhile, as we wait for that happy moment, a thousand kisses. Alfred." The seven officers who composed the court-martial do not seem to have been convinced by the " moral" proofs which take up so large a part of the acte d' accusation. Maitre Demange had before long demolished the whole fabric, and proved that nothing worthy to be called evidence remained except the 78 THE DREYFUS CASE bordereau, which was not the work of Dreyfus. Commandant Brisset, the commissary of the Govern- ment, is credibly reported to have said, " The moral considerations against Dreyfus have dis- appeared. But there remains the document written by Dreyfus. Take your magnifying-glasses, gentle- men, and examine it. I affirm it to be Dreyfus', along with the experts." If he had said " along with Bertillon," he would have been more correct. Chief of the department of " criminal identification," Bertillon was ready to identify everything, and so were two minor grapho- logists, whom he was allowed to choose. M. Gobert and another independent expert, M. Pelletier, contested Bertillon's view. The acte d'accusation throws suspicions on M. Pelletier because he refused to wait upon M. Bertillon and work in his office. The Colonel D'Aboville, whom we have already come across, also set up for being an expert in handwriting, and made an affidavit affirming the bordereau to have been written by Dreyfus. It is to the credit of the seven officers that even their magnifying-glasses failed to enthely convince them, and they still wavered. What followed — and it is momentous — has been related by the same correspondent of the Eclair whom I have already quoted and shown to have been behind the scenes. On the 14th September 1896 this officer com- municated the following to that paper under the heading " The Traitor " : — THE VEHMGERICHT 79 " The reasons which militated in favour of silence no longer exist ; the difficulties which might arise from the divulging of certain facts have been smoothed away, and we are persuaded that we can, without fear of embarrassments or delicate com- plications, lay before all what could not be produced just at the time of the hearing of the case— the proof, namely, the irrefutable proof, the proof written large, of the treason. This proof it was that led the officers composing the court-martial to bring in an unanimous verdict against the prisoner. . . . " It was a letter in the cipher of the German Embassy. We had this cipher, and it was rightly considered to be too useful a secret for us to di^ailge. That was why the letter in question was not included in the overt evidence against the accused." In passing I may observe, that this talk about cipher must be mere Uaguc, introduced by way of justifying in the eyes of the French public so flagrant an illegality. I resume the text : — " Towards September 20(1 894), Colonel Sandherr, head of the statistical section, communicated to General Mercier this letter, which had been de- ciphered. It read thus, ' Decidedly this animal Dreyfus is getting to be too exigent ' (DScid^ment cet animal de Dreyfus deviPMt twp exigeant)" The Eclair printed the name Dreyfus in capitals, and ended its article with a paragraph entitled, "The proof under the eyes of the judges.' After admitting that Dreyfus to the end always persisted in protest- ing his innocence, it added : — 8o THE DREYFUS CASE " It is true that Dreyfus did not know, and is perhaps still unaware, that the Ministry of War had in its possession a photograph of the letter exchanged between the German and Italian mihtary attaches, the only document in which his name figured. The letter {i.e., the bordereau) which he had written, but taken good care not to sign, could only be a moral element in the case. Indeed, if two of the handwriting experts, Charavay and Bertillon, affirmed that ' it was certainly Dreyfus,' the three others hesi- tated. " One proof alone allowed of no hesitation, and it consisted in the production of the very piece in which Dreyfus was named. It was enough to convince the tribunal, and it was important that the traitor should not escape his due punishment. But this important docu- ment was confidential in an extraordinary degree, and the Minister could not give it up without a formal requisition of the court.»- " It was therefore needful for a formal search to be made at the Ministry. It was made ; but in order to save the commissary of the Government the trouble of turning over so many secret dossiers, it ivas arranged that it should he the first for him to lay his hand upon. " It was, however, stipulated that in any case it should not he openhj discussed before the court-martial, although it had been regularly seized. It was, there- fore, communicated to the judges alone in their private council-room. " Irrefutable evidence, it thoroughly convinced the members of the court-martial, and they were unani- mous when they had to pronounce their verdict in THE VEHMGERICHT 8i regard to the traitor's guilt and the penalty to be inflicted on him." What truth is there in the above ? I have already pointed out how well informed in many ways this correspondent was. He knew all the details of Du Paty's inquisition, as the official act of accusation, only published two years later, revealed them. He had also seen the bordereau, which had not yet been published in facsimile in the Matin, and in the same article accurately detailed its contents. Obviously he was either one of the judges or one of the officers immediately connected with the prosecution. Was there then a secret dossier of Dreyfus, and was it used at his court-martial in the way this obviously inspired source declares ? That there was is clear from an official document put forth by the War Office itself on January lo, 1898. This is the rapport of the Commandant Ravary, who was then charged with the task of drawing up the case — we cannot say against — but for Esterhazy, when at last it became requisite to go through the form of acquitting him of having written the bordereau. In this we have the follow- ing passage, which clearly slipped out unawares : — " One evening when Lieutenant- Colonel Henry, having returned to Paris, had entered rather sud- denly M. Picquart's room, he saw Maitre Leblois, the advocate . . . sitting by his desk and turning over along with him the secret dossier. A photograph F 82 THE DREYFUS CASE bearing the words ' cette canaille de D . . . .' had got out of the dossier and was lying spread out upon the desk." Here, then, we have the formal admission that, as early as the October of 1896, when this alleged scene must — if at all — have taken place, the French War Office had a secret dossier. Thus the writer in the Eclair is confirmed, and the very document which he declares to have been privily laid before the judges in 1894 is in 1898 admitted to have been part of the secret dossier in the summer of 1 896. Another proof that Dreyfus' conviction was arrived at in this illegal manner is that M. Mcline's Govern- ment could not and did not deny it when, on January 24, 1898, M. Jaures addressed to the president of the Cabinet (M. Meline) the following question, after quoting the above paragraph of Ravary's ra'p'port : — " Yes or no. Did the judges who had to pro- nounce judgment on Dreyfus have laid before them documents of a sort to establish or confirm his guilt, without those documents having been communicated to the accused and his counsel, or did they not ? " M. Paschal Grousset interjected the remark, " That is the whole question," and M. Jaures went on thus : — " Gentlemen, my question is a clear and straight- forward one ; it admits only of being answered with a yes or no. This answer you will be so kind as to make. Yes or no. I am waiting for it." THE VEHMGERICHT 83 I would have my readers note the answer. M. Jules M^line said, " I answer you that we will not discuss the matter in the tribune. That is certain, and I will not walk into your trap." Then a few minutes later, feeling that he had left the ground too exposed by his evasive answer, M. M^line said : — " One word only, gentlemen, to say that I have already answered those points in M. Jaures' speech which it was permissible to the Government to answer. I refuse to engage with him on the topic which he just now broached ; because the Govern- ment — I repeat it once more — has not the right to discuss from the tribune a verdict regularly passed." Yet it would have been enough to have answered, "No; secret evidence Avas not used." Meliue's answer was too plainly that of a Government anxious to hush up an infamy. On February 9, 1898, in the Zola trial, Mercier himself was in the box. Asked point-blank by Maitre Labori if a secret document had not been com- municated to Dreyfus' judges, he could only answer evasively thus : " I think that the Dreyfus affair is not in question, and that a decree of the court has forbidden us to trench upon it." Maitre Labori again asked : — " Does General Mercier affirm that it is not true that a secret document was communicated ? or does he affirm that he has not himself repeated the fact to certain persons ? I beg him to answer unequivocally." 84 THE DREYFUS CASE Aud the first part of Mercier's answer caused a general sensation in the court. The whole was as follows : — " It is not my business to answer the first question ; but as regards the second, I say that it is not true." It could hardly have been anxiety on his part to observe the absurd ruling of the court, by which no reference to the cJiose jugde was allowed, that inspired so evasive an answer as the above ; for in reply to the judge's further question, whether he had any- thing to add, he felt himself obliged, in order to counteract the effect on his audience of his first answer, to blurt out the stereotyped falsehood of Billot, " that Dreyfus was a traitor who had been justly and legally condemned." Lastly, it is worth noticing that M. Salles, a Paris advocate, had it from the lips of one of the judges in Dreyfus' court-martial that they had had a secret document laid before them. M. Salles was precluded in the Zola trial from giving his evidence by the ruling of the judge. But the judge in that trial could not prevent Maitre Demange from giving his evidence, which he did on February lo, 1898, in these words : — " I had learned through M. Salles that there had been a violation of the law . . . " M. Labori asked : What violation ? " The Judge : No, no, Maitre Demange, do not answer. THE VEHMGERICHT 85 " M. Cl^menceau : . . . Was it not because a judge of the court-martial affirmed it to M. Salles, who repeated it to Maitre Demange ? " M. Demange : Why, yes ; of course. " The Judge : Maitre Demange, you have no right to speak." The point became quite clear on July 7, 1898, when Cavaignac made his celebrated declaration in the French Chamber. Not only did he throw over the bordereau, but with it the contention of his pre- decessor, Billot, that Dreyfus had been justly and Icgalhj condemned. The formula was now changed to this, that " the honest people who composed the court-martial had judged in accordance with their conscience and with absence of passion." Lastly, on September 15, 1898, Picquart himself assured the garde des sceattx, in a letter which I shall translate in its place, that four secret documents were communicated to the judges. My reader will have noticed the infamous trick of the writer in the Eclair of September 14, 1896. He printed, " Get animal de Dreyfus," where the document itself, as Ravary's rapport proves, has only the initial letter D . . . This fact suggests, nay, almost makes it certain, that the letter was read out loud to the judges and not shown to them, and that the person who so read it filled in the name in order to leave the judges no alternative but to condemn an innocent man. Had the judges seen the docu- ment itself they would have noticed : ( i ) that the 86 THE DREYFUS CASE name of Dreyfus was not there ; (2) that the letter was not in cipher, as pretended; (3) that there were things said in it of the wife oi I) . . . which could not possibly apply to Madame Dreyfus. I think it well to add what I have been assured of, on the highest possible authority, that the letter con- taining this phrase as a postscript was not the only document secretly adduced to the judges. They were also acquainted with the two letters read out by Cavaignac to the French Chamber on July 7, 1898. These two are to my knowledge in the handwriting of Colonel Panizzardi ; and the one with the post- script was probably written by Schwartzkoppen. Thus Dreyfus was condemned. He appealed to the higher military council, before which the sen- tence of a court-martial goes for revision in the first instance. This court, composed of the highest officers in the land, mechanically allowed the verdict to hold good, without examining it ; and Dreyfus was informed, on December 30, that his formal degradation and expulsion from the French army would take place on January 5,1895. In view of this dreadful ceremony he wrote the following letter to his wife on January the 3rd : — " Tuesday/, mid-day. " My Darling, — They inform me that the supreme humiliation is to take place the day after to-morrow. I was waiting for it, I was prepared for it ; but nevertheless the blow has fallen heavily on me. I THE VEHMGERICHT 87 shall bear up under it, for I have promised you that I will. I shall draw the strength which is still necessary for me from your love, from the affection of all of you, from the thought of my darling children, from the last hope that the truth will be found out. I must needs feel your affection irra- diating me all round, feel you too at my side sharing the struggle with me. So, then, continue your inves- tigations without truce and without respite. I hope to see you very soon and to draw fresh strength from your eyes. Let us be one another's support towards all and against all. I require your love in order to live, and without it my mainspring would be broken. " When I am gone, try to persuade every one that they must not flag or halt in the quest. " Please take the necessary steps in order to come to see me upon Saturday and on the following days at the prison De la SanU. It is there more than anywhere else that I shall need support. " Find out also about the matters of which I spoke to you yesterday ; about the time of my going, of the way I shall go, &c. " One must be prepared for everything, and not let oneself be taken by surprise. Alfred." On the same day he wrote the following also to his counsel, Maitre Demange : — "Thursday, mid-day, January ^rd, 1S95. " Dear Master, — I have just been informed that I shall to-morrow undersfo the last affront which can be inflicted on a soldier. I awaited it, I had prepared 88 THE DREYFUS CASE myself for it ; but nevertheless the blow has been terrible to bear. In spite of everything, up to the very last moment, I hoped that some providential chance would bring about the discovery of the true culprit. " I shall march to meet this awful punishment, which is worse than death, my head upright, with- out a blush. " To tell you that my heart will not be dread- fully tortured when they tear from me the decora- tions which I have won by the sweat of my brow, that would not be true. " I would certainly a thousand times have pre- ferred death. " But you have indicated to me my duty, dear master, and I cannot avoid it, whatever the torture which awaits me. You have taught me to hope ; you have penetrated my whole being with a feeling that an innocent man cannot remain for ever wrongly condemned ; you have given me faith. " Thanks once more, dear master, for all that you have done for an innocent man. " To-morrow they will take me to the other prison, a, la S(Xnt^. " It would make me very happy if you could console me afresh with your burning words, with your eloquence, and revive my drooping heart. I count always upon you, upon all my family, to de- cipher this dreadful mystery. " Wherever I go, the thought of you will follow me. It will be the star to which I shall look for my happiness. Believe me, dear master, and accept my respectful sympathy, A. Dreyfus. THE VEHMGERICHT 89 " At this very moment I learn that my degrada- tion will not take place till Saturday ; but all the same I send you this letter." The ceremony of the degradation itself on January 5, 1895, is terrible reading; not because of the behaviour of the victim, who was almost the only man present who retained his dignity, but because of the conduct of the mob of Parisians who looked on, and of the insensate criticisms of the victim's noble bearing with which the Paris reporters interspersed their accounts. I select for my readers that which appeared in L'AutoritS, a journal hostile to Dreyfus : — " At the first stroke of nine from the clock of the Military School, General Darras lifts his sword and gives the command, which is repeated along the front of each company — ' Shoulder arms ! ' " The troops execute the order, and an absolute silence follows. " Hearts cease to beat, and all eyes are turned towards the right-hand corner of the square, where Dreyfus is shut up in a little building on the terrace. " In a moment a small group is seen : it is Alfred Dreyfus in the midst of four artillerymen, accom- panied by a lieutenant of the Republican Guard and by the senior petty officer of the escort. He ap- proaches, and between the dark pelisses of the artillerymen one discerns quite clearly the three galloons, trefoil shaped, and the gold brocade of the officer's cap. His sword glints, and from afar one can distinguish the black knot fastened to its handle " Dreyfus walks with a quiet, firm step. 90 THE DREYFUS CASE " ' Just look how erect he walks, the scoundrel,' is the remark one hears, " The group advances towards General Darras, in front of whom stands the clerk of the court-martial, M. Vallecalle. " Amidst the crowd outside shouts are audible as the group halts. " The officer in command makes a sign, and the drums beat and bugles sound ; then there is a fresh spell of silence, this time tragic in its import. " The gunners who accompany Dreyfus fall back a few steps, and the condemned man is seen alone and apart. " The clerk gives the general the military salute, and then, turning towards Dreyfus, reads out in a loud clear voice the judgment which sentences him to deportation to a fortified station and to military degradation. " When he has read it, the clerk turns round again to the general and gives the military salute. " Dreyfus has listened in silence. The voice of General Darras is next heard. It is raised and slightly touched with emotion, and one hears clearly the words : " ' Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the French people, we degrade you.' " Then Dreyfus is seen to raise both arms ; and, head erect, he cries out in a strong voice, in which one cannot detect the least tremor : " ' I am innocent. I swear that I am innocent. Viv6 la France.' " The vast crowd outside answers with a loud shout of 'A mort.' THE VEHMGERICHT 91 " But the noise drops in a moment, for they see that the adjutant charged with the melancholy duty of depriving the degraded man of his galloons and arms, has laid his hand on him, and already the first galloons and cuffs, which have been unsewn beforehand, have been torn off by him and thrown to the ground. " Dreyfus seizes the opportunity to protest anew against his condemnation, and his cries reach the crowd and are distinctly audible : " ' On the heads of my wife and children, I swear that I am innocent. I swear it. VivS la France' " However, the adjutant has rapidly torn off the galloons of the cap, the trefoils of the sleeves, the buttons of the pelisse, the numbers on the neck, and the red stripes which the condemned man has worn on his trousers ever since he entered the Ecole Polytechniqne. " The sword is left. The adjutant draws it out and breaks it across his knee. The dry snap is heard, and the two broken fragments are cast on the ground like the rest. Then the sword-belt is unfastened, and the scabbard in its turn falls to the ground. " It is all over, but the few seconds have seemed a century. We had never before felt pangs of anguish so keen. "And afresh, clear, and without any touch of emotion, is heard the voice of the condemned man in a raised tone, crying : " ' You degrade an innocent man ! ' " Next, the condemned man has to pass along before his comrades in arms, and the men formerly 92 THE DREYFUS CASE under his command. For any other man the suf- fering would be horrible ; but Dreyfus does not seem particularly distressed, for he steps firmly over the insignia of his former rank, which two gendarmes will presently gather up, and he takes his place of himself between the gunners with naked swords who led him before General D arras. " The little group, led by two officers of the Republican Guard, turns its steps towards the band, which is stationed in front of the prison van, and so begins to defile along the front of the troops, within about a yard of them, " Dreyfus, as he marches along, keeps his head erect. The public cries ' A mort.' Presently he comes up close before the iron railing, where the crowd sees him better. Their cries redouble, and from thousands of throats rings the demand for the death of the wretch who still cries aloud, ' I am innocent, Vivd la France! " The crowd has not heard him, but it has seen him turn towards it and utter his cry. A broadside of hisses is their answer, and then a shout which passes like the breath of a tempest across the vast court, ' A mort ! A mort ! ' " And outside there is a terrible rush amidst the sombre masses, like the current of a whirlpool, and the police have extraordinary trouble to prevent the people from throwing themselves on the Military School and taking the place by assault, in order to take a vengeance at once quicker and niore rational on such infamy as that of Dreyfus. " But he continues his march, and on reaching the spot in front of the group of reporters, he says : THE VEHMGERICHT 93 " ' You will tell the whole of France that I am innocent/ " ' Hold your tongue, wretch,' is the answer of some of them, while others cry: 'Dastard! Traitor! Judas!' "At the insult, the abject wretch draws himself up, and, casting on us a glance of fierce hatred, ex- claims, ' You have not the right to insult me.' From the pressmen's group a clear voice is heard contradicting him : ' You know very well that you are not innocent.' ' Vive la France ! ' ' Filthy Jew ! ' and other cries are hurled at him as he continues his march. ' His dress is pitiable to look at. Instead of gal- loons, there hang down long ends of threads, and his hSpi has lost all shape. " Dreyfus draws himself up once more, but he has only passed in front of half of the troops massed there ; and it is evident that the continuous cries of the crowd and the various incidents of this parade begin to tell on him. True, the wretch keeps his head turned insolently towards the troops, as if in defiance of them, but his legs begin to totter and his steps grow heavier. The group advances but slowly, and now it passes in front of the ' Blues.' " The march round the court is finished. Dreyfus is again handed over to the two gendarmes, who have come to pick up his galloons and the remains of his SAvord. They hurry him into the prison van. The coachman whips up his horses and the carriage dashes off, surrounded by a detachment of Republi- can Guards, at the head of whom ride two of their number clasping their revolvers. ' " The parade has lasted just ten minutes." 94 THE DREYFUS CASE I have been told by an Englishman who was pre- sent that Captain Dreyfus was the single actor in this terrible drama who behaved himself with dignity, and he quitted the scene with a profound conviction of his innocence, and filled with forebodings for the future of France. The following letter was written by Captain Dreyfus to Maitre Demange soon after the cere- mony of degradation was over : — " Pkison de la SANTi; {Saturday). " Dear Master, — I have kept the promise that I made you. " Innocent, I have faced the most awful martyr- dom which can be inflicted on a soldier. I have felt all round me the scorn of a crowd ; I have suffered the most terrible torture that can be ima- gined. How much happier I should have been in the tomb. All would be ended. I should be at rest, all my sufferings forgotten. " But alas ! duty does not permit it, as you have so well explained to me. " I am obliged to live, obliged to allow myself to be martyred for long weeks to come, before the truth can be discovered and my name rehabilitated. " Alas ! when all that is over, when shall I regain my old happiness ? " Well, I count upon you, dear master. I still tremble at the thought of all that I have endured to-day, of all the sufferings which still await me. " Support me, dear master, with your burning and eloquent words. See that this martyrdom has an THE VEHMGERICHT 95 end, that they despatch me as soon as possible yonder, where I shall, along with my wife, wait patiently for them to throw light on this mournful business and give me back my honour. " For the present this is the only grace I ask for. If they have any doubts, if they believe in my in- nocence, I ask but a single favour for the present, and that is, air, the society of my wife, and then I shall wait for all who love me to have unriddled this mournful affair. But let them do it as soon as possible, for I have nearly reached the limit of my powers of resistance. It is really too tragic, too cruel, to be innocent and to be condemned for so awful a crime. " Excuse the loose way in which I write. I am not yet master of my thoughts. I am so profoundly dejected in mind and body. My heart has bled too much this day. " For God's sake, then, dear master, let them shorten my undeserved punishment. " Meanwhile, you will investigate, and I trust, I am firmly convinced, you will find it all out. " Believe me, ever your devoted and unhappy "A. Dreyfus." CHAPTER VI picquart's discovery The Jesuits had secured their victim, their indis- pensable traitor. Through their organ, the Libre Parole, they had hitherto declared, with every acces- sory of literary violence and rancour, that because all Jews were traitors therefore Dreyfus was one. Henceforward they could indulge in the comple- mentary argument that, Dreyfus being a traitor, all Jews were traitors as well. The letter which Dreyfus wrote to his wife im- mediately after his degradation is not less charac- teristic than the rest, and because it so admirably expresses all that he had now to hope for or fear from the future, I translate the first few lines of it: — "Prison of la Sante, Saturday, January 5^/4, 1895. " My Darling, — Tell you all that I have suffered this day, I will not. Your sorrow is already so great that I will not make it greater. " In promising you to live, promising you to keep firm until my name is rehabilitated, I have made you the greatest sacrifice that a man of feeling, a man of honour, from whom they have just torn his honour can make. Provided only, God help me 96 PICQUART'S DISCOVERY 97 that my physical strength does not leave me. The will is there, and my conscience, which reproaches me with nothing, bears me up ; but I begin to reach the end of my endurance and of my strength. To think that I have consecrated all my life to honour, to have never done anything to forfeit it, and to find myself where I am, after undergoing the most outrageous affront that can be inflicted on a soldier ! . . . " So then, my darling, do all in the world you can to find the true culprit, never relax your efforts for a moment. It is my only hope in the awful misfortune that pursues me." . . . In contravention of all principles of justice, the French Government under M. Dupuy, then prime minister, proposed, and the Chamber adopted, the law of February 9th, 1895, in virtue of which Dreyfus was deported to the Devil's Island, just off the fever-stricken and swampy coast of French Guiana. In the natural course of things he would have gone to New Caledonia in the Pacific. But that was reckoned too healthy for a Jewish traitor ; so the new law, sanctioning the use for convicts of the old lazaretto off Guiana, was made retrospective, in order that Dreyfus might go there. This was a blunder on the part of his enemies. To be chained to a barren sun-beaten rock, with the vast ocean spread out before, and behind the great unexplored mysterious continent of South America, invests a victim with a certain distinction. His isolation in such surroundings confers a dignity on G 98 THE DREYFUS CASE him. It is doubtful whether Napoleon would after Waterloo have remained such a great, such a mysterious figure, had his enemies given him a lodging in the midst of other criminals in Botany Bay, instead of isolating him on an island in the midst of the sea. It has somehow been the easier to fix and concentrate the interest of Frenchmen on Dreyfus, just because he was thus pilloried on a solitary islet. In his family and among his friends, in particular by his counsel, he could not be forgotten. " No one becomes base in a moment," says the old Latin pro- verb ; and there were many who, from the first, although they did not know him, had doubts of his guilt. He had not, like Esterhazy, powerful motives to drive him to crime. His was no scabrous and disorderly private life, no cheated ambition, no debts, no burning desire to avenge himself on France for imaginary or real wrongs. He had an ample fortune of his own, a wife and little children whom he idolised, a splendid career opening before him. What could have led him to risk the loss of all these blessings ? Base gain could surely not have led him on ; indeed, even the Libre Parole acquitted him of having taken money for his treason. Was it then love of Ger- many ? But for thirty years his family had been notorious for the warmth of its Alsatian patriotism, of its loyalty to France. In September 1896, before the Eclair revealed the illegalities of the trial, these doubts found PICQUART'S DISCOVERY 99 utterance in the Jour. In that journal M. Adolphe Possien, on September 11, 1896, wrote an article entitled, " Is the ex-Captain Dreyfus guilty ? — Our inquiry," in which, after emphasising the division of opinion among the experts in regard to the bor- dereau, he ended thus : " I do not pretend to prove his innocence, but my aim is to show that his guilt has not been proved." On the 14th of September M. de Cassagnac, a leading exponent of Monarchist opinion, wrote the following : — " Like most of our fellow-citizens we think Dreyfus is guilty ; but like our colleague (of the Jour) we are not sure of it. We too, as well as he, have the courage to say so, and we cannot, as all are aware, be accused of being favourable to the Jews." . . . The writer then deplores the secrecy with which the trial had been conducted, and which prevented its being controlled or revised. " But," he continues, " you will tell me that those who declared Captain Dreyfus guilty were French officers, the incarnation of honour and patriotism ? " That is true. " Only, and in spite of my esteem and respect for French officers, I must make the observation that they are no more honourable than their brothers, cousins, and friends, who, under the name of jurors, dispense justice in the assize courts in the name of the French people. . . . " My illustrious friend, the advocate Demange, loo THE DREYFUS CASE was quite right wlien he insisted on pubHcity of the discussion. Jurors often make mistakes ; and it has not yet been demonstrated to anybody that the officers of a court-martial are infallible. " It was said at the time, and it was denied by no one, that Dreyfus was condemned on the strength of a document written by him, and that his author- ship of it was affirmed by two experts, MM. Chara- vay and Bertillon ; while three others, of whom M. Gobert, expert to the Banquc dc France, was one, pru- dently abstained from such an inference. " Besides which, one knows the value and weight of the science of experts in handwriting. Nothing is vainer, more uncertain, and at times more grotesque." It is infinitely regrettable that the French press have not treated the question of Dreyfus' guilt with the calmness and judicial fairness here evinced by M. de Cassagnac. Alas ! he has not himself consistently observed this attitude. His associations have over- powered him, and have led him the other way. But already, when these articles appeared, there was a small circle of people inside the War Office who knew the truth, because Colonel Picquart had discovered it for them. This officer, whose name will be written in letters of gold by those who, in after ages, write for French- men their history during the last decade of this century, is an Alsatian, and was born at Strasbourg in 1855, fifteen years before the dismemberment of France. At thirty-three years of age he was already a major. He left the £cole de Guerre a breveted PICQUART'S DISCOVERY loi officer, and is a Knight of the Legion of Honour. He was first a Professor of the £cole de Guerre, then head of the third bureau of the 4tat major ; and in the middle of 1895 he replaced Colonel Sandherr as head of the information department. As such he was a sort of prefect of military police, with the special duty of tracing spies and traitors, and of bringing them to justice. In 1896 he was made a lieutenant-colonel, and after he left Paris he was put at the head of the tirailleurs al(j4riens. But I anticipate. At the Zola trial, on February 11, 1898, Colonel Picquart related under oath how he made his dis- covery of the true authorship of the bordereau, and I will let him tell it in his own words : — "At the beginning of the month of May 1896, the fragments of a telegram-card fell into my hands. These fragments were gummed together and sent back to me by an officer in my service, Com- mandant Lanth, then a captain. When he had finished, he brought me back the telegram-card,^ which was addressed to Commandant Esterhazy, I no longer remember the exact terms of this card, but everything in it seemed to indicate that between the person who had written it and the Commandant Esterhazy there existed relations rather suspicious than not. Before submitting to my superiors this card, which constituted, not indeed a proof, but a ^ A telegram-card is like an English letter-card, and they only circulate in Paris ; being blown through tubes, they are delivered more quickly than ordinary letters. 102 THE DREYFUS CASE presumption against Commandant Esterhazy, in view of the quarter from which it came, I was obhged to get some information about Conmiandant Ester- hazy, and I addressed myself to an officer who knew him and had been in the same regiment with him." Before going further with Picquart's deposition, let us supplement it with the text of the telegram - card, or ^jc/t7 hleu, as this sort of letter is called in Paris. It was divulged by the War Office authorities at the mock court-martial of Esterhazy in January 1898. It is directed to " M. le Commandant Ester- hazy, 27 Rue de la Bienfaisance, Paris." Inside it is the following : — " I await before everything a more detailed ex- planation than what you gave me the other day in regard to the question at issue. In consequence, I beg you to give it me in writing, so that I may judge if I can continue my relations with the firm R ... or not." Colonel Picquart continued his deposition as follows : — " I do not lay stress on the nature of the in- formation furnished me. It was not favourable to Commandant Esterhazy, and it led me to continue my researches, and to make some investigations of that officer's way of life and general behaviour. These investigations were also unfavourable. Ester- hazy was a man always short of money, and had led a chequered existence. Then there was, above all, this odd fact about him, that, being an officer who PICQUART'S DISCOVERY 103 certainly did not altogether mind his own business — far from it — he yet manifested a very great curiosity in any documents which had to do -svith extremely coutidential matters and possessed special interest from a military point of view. When I had carried my inquiry so far, I felt myself authorised to inform my superiors that there Avas an officer in the French army who might be gravely suspected. My superiors bade me continue my researches. " There is a thing we generally do when we are concerned with an}'^ one whose conduct strikes us as suspicious : we take a specimen of his Avriting, and compare it with certain documents in our possession. Such a comparison may end in confirming or weaken- ing the suspicions which weigh upon him. Accord- ingly I interested myself to obtain the handwriting of Commandant Esterhazy ; and, contrarily to what has often been said, notably in the letter Avritten to me by Esterhaz}^ I proceeded to obtain it in a perfectly regular manner. With the assent of my superiors, I went straight to the colonel of the regi- ment to which Esterhazy belonged. I asked him to give me specimens of his Avriting, which he did in the form of letters concerning the service. The moment I got the letters I Avas remarkably struck by one thing about them, and that Avas the re- semblance of their Avriting to that of the famous bordereau, of Avhich people have talked so much. But I had no right, since I Avas not an expert in hand Avri ting, to trust to my unaided impressions. " This is Avhy I had photographs prepared of these service letters, in Avhich ... I had such Avords as ' my colonel ' effaced, as well as the signature, along I04 THE DREYFUS CASE with any other indications which might reveal their authorship. I showed the photographs thus obtained to two persons perfectly qualified to give an opinion about the matter. One of them was M. Bertillon, the other Commandant Du Paty de Clam. M. Bertillon, as soon as ever I laid the photograph before him, said, ' Wliy, it is the same wi'iting as the bordereau.' I replied, ' Do not be in a hurry ; will you not take this specimen and examine it at leisure ? ' He replied, ' No, there is no use in my doing so ; it is the writing of the bordereau. Where did you get it ? ' 'I cannot tell you,' I answered. ' Then it belongs to an earlier date.' ... ' No,' I said ; ' it is later.' Then M. Bertillon used these very words : ' For a year past the Jews have been keeping some one hard at work to produce the writing of the bordereau, and they have perfectly succeeded ; that is evident.' I left the photograph of Com- mandant Esterhazy's letter, along with a photograph of the bordereau, for two days in M. Bertillon's hands. At the end of those two days he came and said identically the same thing as he had said two days previously. " The second person to whom I showed a speci- men of Commandant Esterhazy's writing was Colonel Du Paty, then commandant. I only left him a few minutes — five, I think — and he said to me, ' It is the writing of Mathieu Dreyfus.' I must tell you, by way of explaining his remark, that Colonel Du Paty pretended that, in writing the bordereau, Alfred Dreyfus had blended his own handwriting with his brother's. Anyhow the hint he gave me was valuable. PICQUART'S DISCOVERY 105 "There was another thing about Esterhazy to attract my attention ... A detective had said that an officer of higher grade . . . aged about fifty, was supplying such and such documents to a foreign Power. Now, the documents he mentioned were exactly those which had been mentioned to me by the comrade to whom I first went on discovering the telegram-card. " I have just set before you the question of hand- writings ; I now come to a period when I was instructed by General Gonse to find out, as one can see by his letters, whether the documents mentioned in the bordereau could have been copied for Esterhazy 's purposes. " I knew that Esterhazy had a good many docu- ments, which he procured, copied at his house ; and I was told to address myself to the secretaries he had had, and to try and find out if he had really copied those documents. " The matter was a serious one. I admit that at that moment I almost regarded my task as accom- plished. I said to myself: Here is a telegram-card which has put me on the track of Esterhazy ; it is not a document sufficient to condemn him upon, but it is a clue. Then again we have the testimony of a detective — that is not yet enough — still there is the astonishing coincidence. The detective says : ' Here is a man who betrays such and such secrets,' and quite independently one of Esterhazy's regimental comrades said to me, ' This officer asks for this and that.' Lastly, there was another thing on top of all that, a thing which I cannot be more precise about, since I am not authorised to divulge the io6 THE DREYFUS CASE secret. However, in the report of M. Ravary^ there is a characteristic phrase. The Commandant Ravary says, speaking of me : ' That officer's conviction seemed to be fully established when he had assured himself that a document in the secret dossier applied to Esterhazy rather than to Dreyfus.' Well, that is true. For having taken the secret dossier, as Com- mandant Henry has said, I did see that a document it contained applied not to Dreyfus, as they had thought, but wholly to Esterhazy." It is to be noticed in the above that Colonel Picquart revealed his discovery on the one hand to Du Paty, Dreyfus' arch -inquisitor and the most important witness against him in the court-martial of 1894; on the other hand, to his own hierarchical superiors, the Generals Gonse and Le Mouton de Boisdefifre, the former under-chief, the latter chief of the 6tat major. The first-named officer, Gonse, paid great attention to Picquart's investigation, and for a time favoured it, as is clear both from the above deposition and from letters written at the time to Picquart. The turn taken by events was indeed of a kind to perturb all who had been officially connected with Dreyfus' trial and degrada- tion ; for here was a telegram-card addressed to Ester- hazy brought in by the same agent that had brought the bordereau, and from the same place, viz., the German Embassy ; " and Esterhazy's handwriting 1 Namel)', at Esterhazy's court-martial in January 1898. - Colonel Picquart deposed on oath to these facts in his subse- quent cross-examination. See Proces Verbal, I. p. 311. PICQUART'S DISCOVERY 107 was identified with that of the bordereau. It is very important to certify what was the attitude under these circumstances of Picquart's superiors, and this we learn from Gonse's letters. Thus, in answer to a letter of Picquart's, dated September 5 , he writes : — " My Dear Picquart, — I have received your letter of the 5 th, and, after reflection on all you have said, I hasten to assure you that it seems to me best to proceed very prudently in this matter, distrusting one's first impressions. It will be necessary now to be quite sure as to the nature of the documents. How could they have been copied ? What were the requests for information made to other persons ? " It may be answered that, if one pursues that method, it will be difficult to get any result without raising an alarm. I admit that it is so ; yet, in my opinion, it is the best way and the safest. " The continuing of the inquiry from the j^oint of view of the handwriting has the disadvantage that it obliges us to take fresh people into our confidence. ... In short, my feeling is that it is necessary to proceed with extreme prudence. " I shake your hand, my dear Picquart, very affec- tionately, your devoted A. Gonse." The above letter proves that it was with the full assent of his superiors that Picquart had until then pursued his investigations. He answered Gonse thus on September 8, 1896 : — " My General, — I have read your letter carefully, and I will scrupulously follow your instructions. But I think I ought to say this much. io8 THE DREYFUS CASE " Numerous signs and a fait gram, of whicli I shall tell you on my return, show me that the moment is near at hand when people who are convinced that a mistake has been committed in regard to them will make a desperate attempt to have it rectified, and will also produce a great scandal. " I think I have taken all the steps necessary for the initiative to come from ourselves. " If we lose too much time, the initiative will be taken by outsiders, and that, apart from loftier con- siderations, will put us in an odious light. " I may add that these people do not appear to me so well informed as we are, and that their at- tempt seems to me bound to result in a mess, a scandal, a great deal of noise, without however throwing light on the matter. " It will be a troublesome crisis, useless, and one which we can avoid by doing justice in time. Yours ... G. PiCQUART." The above letter is full of foresight. At that time Picquart was anxious to have Esterhazy ar- rested, but Gonse had probably other interests at heart than the doing of justice. Apart from the enormous publicity given to the formal degradation of Dreyfus, in itself a great impediment to any re- vision of the sentence, he must have been aware that the verdict had been obtained by illegal means. This is why already at that time Gonse was trying to limit the scope of Picquart's investigation to other charges against Esterhazy than the actual writing of the bordereau. He actually instructed PICQUART'S DISCOVERY 109 Picquart not to investigate whether Esterhazy had stolen, or borrowed, or had copied any of the docu- ments enumerated in the bordereau, but to confine himself to the detection of other documents not in the bordereau, yet betrayed to the Germans. He was to impHcate Esterhazy as a traitor, but not to acquit Dreyfus, whose guilt was to be upheld as if it were a religious dogma. The sanctity of the cliose jug6c begins to make itself felt as the controlling factor in the case. Gonse, in fact, was sensible that the ground was crumbling under his feet. He did not want the full truth to come out, and yet he was keenly alive to the justice of the remarks addressed to him by Picquart. Therefore he wrote him a second letter in these terms : — " lUh Sept. 1896. " My Dear Picquart, — I have received your letter of the 8th. After reflection, and in spite of what it contains of ' disquieting ' news, I adhere to my first feelings. " I think it is necessary to act with extreme cir- cumspection. At the point you have reached in your inquiry, it is not a question of course of avoid' ing the lights hut we must hioio how best to go to work in order to bring about the manifestation of the truth. " This premised, we must avoid all false man- oeuvres, and above all be on our guard against irre- parable false steps. What is necessary is, it seems to me, to reach in silence, and by following out the no THE DREYFUS CASE line I have indicated to you, a certitude as complete as possible before compromising anything. . . . " I have occasion to write to General de Bois- deffre, and I add in my letter to him a few words to the same effect as these to you. " Prudence, prudence ! You see the word which you must always have before your eyes. . . . " Shaking your hand, my dear Picquart, very affectionately, your devoted H. Gonse." This is a half-hearted letter, the utterance of a man who shirks the responsibility of ripping up a case in which the reputation of his order and of his bureau is so deeply involved. But Picquart's motto was " Be just and fear not," so he answered Gonse as follows : — "Paris, 14^/1 September 1896. ' " My General. — I had the honour to draw your attention to the scandal which certain people threatened before long to provoke ; and I allowed myself to say, that in my opinion, if we did not take the initiative, we should be burdening ourselves with huge perplexities. " The article from the Eclair, which I enclose, is a confirmation, and a distressing one, of my opinion. I shall try with all care to find out who could have launched this bombshell. " But I think it my duty to assure you once more that it is necessary to act at once. If we wait any longer we shall be taken by surprise, shut up in a position from which it will be impossible to extricate ourselves, and in which we shall no longer find the means of establishing the real truth. G. Picquart." PICQUART'S DISCOVERY iii This is a manly letter, and if there had been any men of principle around Picquart in the War Office, he would have been supported in his demands for justice. France would have been spared a dangerous crisis, the credit of her dtat major would not have suffered, the innocent man would have been released, and several persons would have escaped assassination. Above all, the French would not have lost caste in the eyes of every civilised nation in the world, by the addition to her history of a page infamous almost beyond any which record the misdeeds of the ancicn regime. The fait grave referred to in Picquart's first letter could not be the article in the Jour to which I have referred, still less the article in the journal L'Autorite, for the letter is prior to them. Picquart must have had some premonition of the article which was to appear in the Eclair on September 14, 1896, to which in his second letter to Gonse he explicitly refers. What was the genesis of this letter ? There were at least two men in the War Office who had an interest in keeping things quiet, and were dismayed at Picquart's discovery. These were Du Paty de Clam and Henry. We have seen that Picquart virtually connnuuicated his discovery to the former, and the latter, being Picquart's own subordinate in the Bttreau des Informations, must necessarily have known all about it. To these two officers Colonel Sandherr, not long before his death, committed the Dreyfus affair as a sort of legacy. 112 THE DREYFUS CASE He had begged thein to watch over it and see that this chef d'ceuvre of the War Office was touched by no one. Now it is clear that the person who communi- cated to the Eclair the secret document used at Dreyfus' court-martial, and who in comnmnicating it falsified it by writing in " Dreyfus " in capital letters where only the initial D stood in the original, was anxious to discount in public opinion Picquart's discovery of the real authorship of the bordereau. That piece of evidence was felt by him to be crumbling ; it had already been pooh-poohed in the Jour of September ii, 1896, and the secret of its entire worthlessness might at any moment be divulged, now that Picquart and Bertillon, Gonse and Boisdeffre, and probably others as well, were cogni- sant of it. Hence the necessity of acquainting the French public with the fact that the bordereau was far from being all, or even the most important, evidence adduced against Dreyfus, They must be made to understand that it was the secret dossier that had really convinced his judges, and not the bordereau at all. That might be discredited and thrown over, yet there was left plenty of evidence to justify Dreyfus' retention in the Isle du Diable, plenty to warrant a dogged opposition to any revi- sion of his sentence. Such is the aim which inspired this communica- tion in the Eclair, and the writer of it was clearly a man who saw little harm in the production of COLONEL G. PICQUART. PICQUART'S DISCOVERY 113 evidence to the judges which was at the same time withheld from the accused and his counsel. It was withheld, he says ; otherwise the defence would have learned that the French War Office was in possession of the German cipher. This is clearly a cock-and- bull story designed to palliate to the readers of the Eclair the flagrant illegality of the transaction. Who was the man behind the scenes, so anxious to preju- dice the public mind, and to discount the revelation which it was expected within the War Office Picquart might at any moment make, and that with the assent of Gonse and Boisdeffre ? It was clearly either Du Paty or Henry, or both acting with the conni- vance of Mercier, who had now, indeed, lost his position in the War Office, but whose sinister person- ality reveals itself in the background as the inspirer of the orgies of fraud and crime, of which as soon as Picquart's back is turned the War Office was to become the temple. The same person or persons who, as Picquart says, launched this bombshell in the Eclair, soon perceived that, by this cynical divulgation of ille- galities committed at the Dreyfus court-martial, they had done their own cause harm, and placed a weapon in the hands of those who asked for revision. Madame Dreyfus herself lost no time in petitioning the Chamber to send the case for revision before the Cour de Cassation, on the ground that her husband's condemnation had been procured by illegal means, Maitre Demange, at the same time, H 114 THE DREYFUS CASE drew the attention of the President of the Chamber to the matter. It Avas also in consequence of the revelations in the Eclair that M. Bernard Lazare brought out his first brochure entitled : " The Truth about the Dreyfus Affair," in which he gave a more correct text of the bordereau than the Eclair had contained, and argued that the writer in the Eclair had intentionally falsified certain details of it. When on November loth the facsimile of the bordereau appeared in the Matin, this was seen to have been the case. An antidote to the Eclair was now becoming necessary, and we shall presently see how it took the form of a return to the bordereau as evidence. Meanwhile it was felt to be important by those who were resolved to uphold Sandherr's chef d'ceuvrc to warn Esterhazy of what was brewing. At any moment Picquart's superiors might order him to search Esterhazy's lodgings ; treasonable documents were sure to be found in them, and then the substitution of the guilty man for the innocent one would be inevitable. Picquart saw through this plot, and thus records it in his deposition. " It was just after the publication of the article in the Eclair that Esterhazy, I am convinced, was warned. He knew for certain, thanks to this article, that the bordereau was known (to the French authorities). . . . Just then, as the inquiry was at a stand-still, one of my chiefs spoke to me of the advisability of making a search at his house. I confess that I did not consider the moment an PICQUART'S DISCOVERY 115 opportune one. It seemed to me that it ought to have been made at an earlier time. . . . However, desirous to do what I was asked, I spoke about it to the agent who watched Esterhazy and knew the ins and outs of his house. I said to him, * You see what they ask me to do. I think the search will be a farce.' " And so it was, Esterhazy had decamped with all his goods to Rouen, leaving nothing in his old habitation except a heap of burned papers on the hearth. The agent on arriving had found a placard up that the flat was to let ; so, on pretence of look- ing at the rooms, he had gone in as any one else might have done. CHAPTER VII THE FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE It is curious to observe how insignificant things appearing in the English press have more than once led to weighty developments of the Dreyfus case. On September 3, 1896, an English journal published a dispatch, probably an intentional forgery of French origin, declaring that Dreyfus had escaped from the Devil's Island. M. Castelin, one of those mischie- vous persons who in France claim for themselves a monopoly of patriotism, and who, along with a few others like himself, formed the dregs of the Bou- langist faction, made this report the occasion of an interpellation to be addressed to the Government. The interpellation was fixed for November 18, 1896, and the prospect of it caused a flutter inside the War Ofiice. What was to be done ? Picquart had shown that the bordereau was in Esterhazy's hand- writing; and not only his hierarchical superiors, like Gonse and Boisdeffre, but Henry, Du Paty, and a few others had become aware of it. Now that the matter was going to be ventilated in the tribune of the Chamber, the War Office would have to take a line, to make up its mind ; and that, as we have seen from Gonse's letters, was the thing which, least FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE 117 of all others, it just then desired to do. For a few- weeks during the summer, when they had Picquart, manly and truthful, upholding before their eyes the ideal not only of courage and justice, but also of common prudence, Gonse and Boisdeffre had been half-inclined to clear the matter up. At any rate, they had not yet so firmly entrenched themselves behind their official conscience as to look that bright spirit in the face and say outright, " We will not have light ; we will have darkness." However, they were ready to be pushed into crime, and the legatees of Sandherr were there to show them the way. They felt that the next step to be taken was to rehabilitate, if they could, the credit of the bordereau, and to convince people afresh that Dreyfus, even though a Jew, had not only been justly, but also legally condemned. The secret document stood for justice, the bordereau for legality. Therefore, with a fitting flourish of trum- pets, the bordereau must be produced. Accordingly it was communicated in facsimile to the Matin on November 10, 1896, eight days before the task would devolve on the new Minister of War, General Billot, of saying something reassuring about the Dreyfus trial. The writer in the Matin introduced the fac-simile with the following laboured references to the agitation for revision, already begun with the publication of M. Bernard Lazare's brochure : — " By means of clever but dark manoeuvres, and by giving the air of a mere appeal for light to deft ii8 THE DREYFUS CASE pleadings, by appealing to the sentiments of justice and generosity which haunt every heart in this country, certain individuals are harnessing them- selves to that superhuman work : the revision of the trial of the traitor Dreyfus. " Under the deceitful pretext that there had been revived against him certain inquisitorial practices, they would have him come back to France, there to appear once more before his judges. " Fool's play, the whole of it ! Dreyfus is indeed guilty of the greatest of all crimes. And in order to stop all pity for him, by leaving it no time to be born, no possibility thereof, it is our duty to produce the material and undeniable proof of his misdeed. " On what is the accusation based ? How is the punishment inflicted on the ex-Captain Dreyfus justified ? This is what the Matin is in a position to state. " In order to achieve this work, both patriotic and health-giving, we publish the facsimile of the famous bordereau, written with Dreyfus' own hand. " To any one who has been able to compare the admitted writing of Dreyfus with that of the document which we here reproduce, it will be clear that it was his hand which traced these lines." This melodramatic exordium smacks of Du Paty de Clam ; and it is easy to read between its lines his real intention, which was to brace up Billot to make such an announcement in the Chamber as would effectually hinder in the future any attempt at revision. The Government must be committed FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE 119 to the lie, and that without delay. I may notice in passing that no specimens of Dreyfus' writing were published alongside of the facsimile, still less any of Du Paty's numerous dictations of the bor- dereau. To supply his readers with any sort of touchstone of the truth was far from being the writer's aim. If he could achieve a momentary success and commit the French Government to Drumont's position, he was satisfied. And he succeeded, for on November 1 8 General Billot mounted the tribune and spoke thus : — " Gentlemen, the question submitted to the Chamber by the Honourable M. Castelin is a grave one. It concerns the justice of our country and the security of the State. This melancholy affair was two years ago the object of a judgment provoked by one of my predecessors at the Ministry of War. Justice was then done. The preliminary hearing (instruction) of the case, the arguments, the judgment, were all conducted conformably to the rules of military procedure." When we consider that the use of secret evidence was already admitted, we shall not be surprised to learn that Billot continued as follows : — " The court - martial, regularly composed, was regular in its deliberations, and having fully ac- quainted itself with the case, pronounced its verdict unanimously. " The council of revision unanimously rejected the appeal of the condemned. Consequently it is I20 THE DREYFUS CASE a chose jug^e, and it is not permitted to any one to go back on the trial. " Since his condemnation, all precautions have been taken to prevent any attempt to escape on the part of the condemned. " But the reasons of State which necessitated, in 1894, the hearing of the case in camera have lost none of their weight." This last declaration evoked applauding shouts of " THs Men / tris hien ! " from Billot's hearers, who, if they had been anything but French deputies, would surely have asked why, in the face of such de- clarations of the Minister of War, the War Office itself had passed over unnoticed and without censure the publications in the Eclair and the Matin ? Thus the French Government was committed to the crime. That i8th of November was the great parting of the ways. The men who were at the head of the French army, and those who composed the civil government, alike feared the light. Georges Picquart had revealed to them the truth ; but they feared the clamour of Drumont, feared the unpopularity which they would incur by championing the cause of an innocent and out- raged Jew ; and they capitulated to Hemy and Du Paty and Mercier. Meanwhile Picquart, whose presence in the War Office had long become an element of discomfort even to Gonse and Boisdeflfre, had been sent about his business. The War Office was no longer a place for a man of principle and FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE 121 honour. Accordingly, on November 16, on the eve of Castelin's interpellation, Picquart was informed that he must leave at five minutes' notice, because they had a mission for him ; and when Billot in- augurated the dogma of the chose jug^e, he had already left Paris nearly forty-eight hours. But there was one person who derived comfort and fresh courage from Billot's declaration : that was the true traitor, Esterhazy. The publication in the Matin of the facsimile of his writing had been too much for his nerves. His writing was familiar to many persons, any one of whom might recognise it in the bordereau. He hied to Paris from Rouen, and there, as witnesses have come forward to attest, his behaviour was extraordinary. On the day after the publication he was running about the streets in the pelting rain like a madman. But Billot's de- claration reassured him. He discerned that the War Office had finally espoused the policy of smothering the truth. Even if the secret of the bordereau were to escape, he would now be safe, for the War Ofiice authorities would be bound to pro- tect him in order to protect themselves. However, he took the precaution of altering his handwriting, and, in particular, abandoned his old and charac- teristic way of making the capitals M. N. A. He also ceased to hold communications with Colonel von Schwartzkoppen. We will not for the moment follow Colonel Picquart on his mission, but fix our attention on 122 THE DREYFUS CASE the War Office. Picqiiart, when he left, handed over his department, along with the secrets he had unearthed, to General Gonse, who proceeded to appoint Henry head of the Intelligence Department. Now Hemy's qualifications for this post were not very obvious. Of all the situations in the War Office it was that in which a knowledge of German was most imperative, but he did not know a word of that language either to read or speak. He was selected as being the fittest man to uphold the chose jug^e and to resume the tradition of Sandherr, temporarily in- terrupted by Picquart. Henry has, in his deposi- tions at the Zola trial on February 8, 1898, related how he considered himself the special guardian of the secret dossier of Dreyfus. Picquart had been accused in the Esterhazy court-martial of January 1898 of having in 1896 stolen this dossier out of Henry's safe. In answer to a question on this point Henry said: — " I was away from the War Office when the dossier was taken by Colonel Picquart. I was on furlough in August or September 1896. Colonel Picquart asked M. Gribelin (the archivist who kept the documents) for it, and he gave it him. . . . I had given M. Gribelin the key as well as the ' word ' of my safe. " The Judge said : M. Gribelin was under the orders of M. Picquart " M. Labori asked : Under whose orders was Colonel, then Major, Henry ? FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE 123 " Colonel Henry : Under those of Colonel Picquart. Not at that moment, however, since I was on fur- lough. " M. Labor! : M. Picquart was head of the depart- ment. Consequently, if I understand aright, Colonel Picquart, as head of it, asked M. Gribelin, who was his subordinate, as was also Major Henry himself, to open the safe with the hey, that is to say, in the proper and natural manner, and to give him out of it a dossier which belonged to M. Picquart's depart- ment. Is that not so ? " Colonel Henry : Quite so. If I had been present I should have observed to Colonel Picquart that my charge — a charge which, moreover, had been in- trusted to me by Colonel Sandherr — consisted in this : that I was not to give this dossier to any one, no matter who, or allow him to acquaint himself with it, except in the presence of the under-chief of the etat major, of its chief, and of myself " The Judge : It was Colonel Sandherr Avho had given you these orders. Ho is dead, I think. " Colonel Henry : He was ill, and had lost con- sciousness. " M. Labori : And this being so. Colonel Sandherr had been replaced by Colonel Picquart. But Colonel Henry invokes against Colonel Picquart, then his superior, a trust committed to him by his former superior. Is that not so ? " In the same hearing Henry, with an effrontery which almost excites our admiration when we re- remember that he was forger-in-chief, said : — " What is more, I will explain all about this 124 THE DREYFUS CASE dossier. It is a long time since I took on myself the whole responsihilit'i/ of it. " Certainly, M. le Colonel. " Very well. Here goes ! " . . . The above extract sets before us Henry's concep- tion of his duty. Sandherr had set him as a sort of watch-dog to guard the secret dossier, with whatever forgeries it contained, which dossier had been illegally communicated to Dreyfus' judges. It was so sacred that Sandherr's successor could not, in discharge of his duty and in simple exercise of his rights as head of the department, demand it and inspect it without being accused subsequently of stealing it. What was in this secret dossier of Dreyfus ? First, there was the letter between Panizzardi and Schwartzkoppen, which had the postscript, " Cette canaille de D . . . . devient trop exigeant." The body of this letter referred chiefly to petit sonpers, at which the two attaches had entertained the charm- ing wife of D . . . . It may be that Sandherr in 1894 took these references to be the cipher of the German Embassy, and saw menaces to France in every phrase. This may seem absurd, but not so if we bear in mind that the ingenious M. Bertillon, in his three hours' long deposition before Drejrfns' judges, affirmed that, with the help of methods specially known to himself, he had found in the bordereau the exact sum paid to Captain Dreyfus as the price of his treason, to wit, five hundred thou- sand francs ! FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE 125 Secondly, there were in the secret dossier two genuine letters addressed by Colonel Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen, They are — and here I speak from personal knowledge — in Panizzardi's handwriting. M. Cavaignac, French Minister of War, read them out to the Chamber on July 7, 1898. The first was brought to the Intelligence Depart- ment of the French War Office in March 1894, and ran thus : — " Last evening I finally decided to send for a doctor, who forbade me to go out. Being unable to go and see you to-morrow, I beg you to come to me in the morning, for D . . . . has brought me a number of very interesting things, and we must divide up the work, as we have only ten days' time." The other was dated April 16, 1894, and was as follows : — " I very much regret that I did not see you before my departure. However, I shall be back in a week. I enclose twelve plans of — (here he gives the name of one of our fortresses, which I omit) — which that canaille de D . . . . gave me for you. I told him you had no intention of resuming relations. He alleges that there has been a misunderstanding, and that he will do all in his power to satisfy you. He says he was obstinate, and that you will not bear a grudge against him. I replied that he was mad, and that I did not believe you cared to resume rela- tions. Do as you like." 126 THE DREYFUS CASE I have it on the highest authority that not one, but three or four secret documents were shown, or more probably read out to, Dreyfus' judges, behind the back of himself and his counsel. It is certain that the first of these letters was so communicated, and there can be no doubt that the other two were also. It was to these two that Cavaignac especi- ally appealed on July 7, 1898, when he undertook to lay before the Chamber Dreyfus' secret dossier. Lastly, there were in Dreyfus' secret dossier documents which, as Picquart pointed out in his deposition, applied to Esterhazy alone. Now all three of these documents suffer from a defect ; they do not mention Dre}^us by name, and might equally well apply to Drumont — indeed much better, since he has so long been the friend and accomplice of the traitor Esterhazy, The writer in the Eclair, as we have seen, felt this defect so acutely that he filled up the blank with Dreyfus' name written in capitals. The simplest way of remedying the defect was obviously to have further documents akin in their general character to these three letters, but in which Dreyfus should be named ; and Henry, even before he succeeded to the post from which Picquart was, on November 16, 1896, abruptly hurried away, already set himself to supply what was required by means of forgery. Panizzardi's two letters were scribbled on a particular sort of ruled paper and with a blue pencil. Accordingly, he procured paper FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE 127 as nearly of the same kind as he could, and a blue pencil. Then he took an ex-policeman, who had been expelled from his profession for crime, into his confidence, and the two of them together, perhaps with the aid of Du Paty de Clam, Lauth, and Gribelin, and almost for a certainty with the connivance of Boisdeflfre, if not of Gonse, concocted the following letter, the text of which we owe equally to the candid M. Cavaignac : — " I have read that a deputy is going to make an interpellation on Dreyfus. If — (here is a por- tion of a phrase which I am unable to read) — I shall say that never have I had any relations with this Jew. That is understood. If you are asked, say the same, for nobody must ever know what has occurred with him." It is necessary to give this in the original French, and I do so, italicising words or phrases which involve elementary faults in French grammar and parlance, such as Colonel Panizzardi or Colonel Schwartz- koppen, who are both of them graceful French scholars, could not possibly have committed : — "Si . . . je dirai que jamais jamds des relations avec ce juit. C'est entendu. Si on vous demande, dites comme ga, car il faut pas que on sache jamais fersonne ce qui est arrive avec lui." The last phrase seems to have been modelled on a German original : " was mit ihm geschehen ist." I should conjecture that Lauth, who was an Alsa- 128 THE DREYFUS CASE tian, and tlie only man in the bureau who knew German, first constructed the letter in that language, and then reproduced the idiom in the French by way of imparting to the whole the needful air of a German provenance. Probably they were all of them too ignorant to recognise in the two genuine letters mentioning a spy D. . . . the handwriting of Paniz- zardi, and thought that they were Schwartzkoppen's. However this may be, it is certain that Lemercier- Picard did the caligraphy ; and having discharged his task for the War Office, he went to Colonel Schwartzkoppen and earned an extra pourboire by revealing to him the exact character and extent of the forgeries with which the dtat major was arming itself against those who might agitate for a revision of Dreyfus' sentence. But this letter, written in a French worthy of a negro of Hayti, was only one of a series of which each item must be equally a forgery with this one. The existence in the archives of this forged corre- spondence between the German and Italian attaches was revealed by M. Cavaignac on July 7, 1898, when the chcumstance that it belonged to and formed part of a coherent series was invoked in favour of its genuineness : — " Its genuineness is proved beyond doubt by the fact that it forms part of a whole correspondence which tooh place in 1896. The first letter is that which I have just read out to you. An ansiver to it con- tains two words which evidently tend to reassure FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE 129 tlie author of the first letter. A third letter follows of a kind to dissipate many of the obscurities, and indicates, with absolute precision — so absolute that I cannot read to you a single word of it — the very reason why the correspondents {i.e. Panizzardi and Schwartzkoppen) felt so much anxiety. . . . Thus the guilt of Dreyfus is not established merely by the judgment of the court which condemned him ; but still further by a piece two years later in date, a piece which fits quite naturally into its jylace in a long correspondence, of which the authenticity is beyond discussion." It is clear from the above that the whole of their supposititious correspondence was suggested by the interpellation of Castelin on November 18, 1896. That is the incident referred to in the first letter, and this entire mass of forgeries was complete soon after Henry replaced Picquart at that date. It was indeed the turning-point in the history of the case ; for from that moment Dreyfus' condemnation ceased to be a judicial error, if indeed it had ever really been one, and became a dark crime, of which the heads of the French army and the leading politicians now made themselves spontaneously the accom- plices. Meanwhile the publication of the facsimile of the bordereau in the Matin on November 10, 1896, had given to those who had never believed in the guilt of Dreyfus just the weapon they wanted — namely, the solitary piece of material evidence that had been overtly advanced in his court-martial, I I30 THE DREYFUS CASE They did not indeed know tlaat it was Esterhazy's handwriting. To learn that they were yet to wait for another weary year, and even then it was not through Picquart, but through De Castro, Esterhazy's stockbroker, that this appalhng truth was to burst upon the world. Still negative results are worth attaining to in some cases ; and it could at least be shown that Dreyfus had not written the bordereau, now that a photograph of it was procurable for a couple of sous. M. Bernard Lazare, who had already published in the autumn of 1896 the small brochure above mentioned, published in 1897 a second and larger work, entitled " L' Affaire Dreyfus." In this he pub- lished the graphological results reached by nine of the leading experts in handwriting in Europe and America. These were MM. Cr^pieux-Jamin, Gustave Bridier, De Rougemont, Paul Moriaud, E. de Mar- neffe, De Gray Birch, Th. Gurrin, J.-H. Schooling, J. Carvalho. They were supplied on the one hand with facsimiles of the bordereau, and on the other with facsimiles of no less than sixteen private letters of Dreyfus, written during the period 1890 to March 1897. They worked independently, and each em- bodied in a report full of the minutest observations the reasons on which he formed his judgment. With singular unanimity they all declared that the bordereau was written currently, and in the normal hand of the writer, but by another person than Dreyfus. For those who take an interest in the FORGERS OF THE WAR OFFICE 131 study of handwriting this volume of M. Lazare's is a mine of information. In a thousand subtle ways the two handwritings are shown to be distinct, and it is a revelation to any one unschooled in this field of research to be shown how intensely individual is a person's handwriting, and in what manifold ways, unnoticed by a prejudiced blunderer like Ber- tillon, that individuality must reveal itself. And in view of the subsequent disclosures of the real traitor, it is curious to read his moral physiog- nomy as it was detected beforehand in his hand- writing by M. Cr^pieux-Jamin, whose conclusion was that though there were no fundamental resemblances between the two handwritings, yet there was enough superficial resemblance to suggest that the writer of the bordereau had imitated Dreyfus' handwriting. The subsequent comparison, impossible then, with Esterhazy's real writing, proved that this hypothesis was wrong ; and that the bordereau was homogeneous throughout with other specimens of his style. But that so skilled a graphologist as M. Crepieux-Jamin saw a superficial resemblance explains the error of Bertillon, Du Paty de Clam, and of Dreyfus' judges. Now let us read the chapter in which M. Cr(^pieux- Jamin traces out from their handwritings alone the characters of the two men, Dreyfus and Esterhazy: — " It results," he says, " from the preceding inves- tigation, that the differentiation of the two handwrit- ings obliges us to attribute them graphologically to two distinct personalities." 132 THE DREYFUS CASE " That of Dreyfus reveals an intelligence quick, clear in analysis, capable of rising to actual talent in any one given direction. " His character is at once one of extreme sensi- bility and extreme reserve, most difficult to fix analy- tically. There is something about him that is hard and proud, and which alienates our sympathy and affection. He is endowed with remarkable energy and perseverance. " The other writing, that of the document of which the authorship is in question, reveals to us an in- telligence perhaps not less cultivated than that of Dreyfus, but a false and illogical mind — quite the contrary in this respect of Dreyfus. " His restlessness is extreme. It is a nature false, lying, profoundly repugnant. " His energy is feeble, inconstant, and his feelings are at the mercy of the caprices of his imagination and mediocre judgment. " One easily understands that such a person wrote the document in question, so incoherent that it is impossible to tell whether the project of a manual of firing has been handed over, or promised, or copied. Dreyfus would have been clearer. " Between the two men there is a fundamental difference. Dreyfus is but moderately sociable, but he is a character. The author of the document X (the bordereau) is above all extremely cunning, dangerous, and devoid of character." CHAPTER VIII THE MACHINATIONS AGAINST PICQUART PiCQUART, we saw, left Paris on the i6tli November 1896, having actually left the Intelligence Bureau two days earlier. The following is General Gonse's account why he was sent away, given in his evidence at the Zola trial, February 12, 1898 : — " Colonel Picquart had not completely followed all the instructions I had given him. I knew, too, that he was, so to speak, hypnotised by this Dreyfus- Esterhazy question. " I had always told him not to follow this track under such conditions as he indicated to me. He did not thoroughly perform his duties, being absorbed by this affair, and as the chief of the dat major (Boisdeftre) has told you, they sent him on a mis- sion to try and rectify his judgment. Such was the drift also of the representations which I made to him at that time ; for he was an officer who had done his duty very well until then, and who is capable of doing it very well, if he chooses, in the future." It is distressing to read such words as these. We feel in the presence of a man who has another set of moral categories than our own. " To rectify one's judgment," that is, to stifle one's conscience — to re- nounce the will to redress a great injury discovered 134 THE DREYFUS CASE by oneself. " To do one's duty " is to fall back into line with those who desire to conceal the truth. " Colonel Picquart is still capable of doing his duty if he chooses ; " in other words, Gonse still hopes that he will make his compact with crime, and re- gain his status among the higher officers of the French army. Such is the demoralisation, the utter abnegation of soul and conscience, which a Jesuit training produces among French officers. The mission of Colonel Picquart was at first vague and mysterious in its character. At first he was sent up and down France, north and south, east and west ; but always as far as possible from Paris. After two months of this he was sent to Tunis, which he reached on January 13, 1897. At that date he wrote to Gonse asking if he might be per- manently attached to a regiment, and not hence- forth required to serve in the 6tat major. Gonse wrote him an affectionate reply to the effect that he must continue his mission for the present, but that when it was over his services might be required again. All this time the War Office was really deliberating about how best to get rid of so awkward a witness to the truth, so that he might never be seen again. It was determined at last to dispatch him without an escort to the same disturbed region of the Tripolitan frontier where De Mor^s had been murdered by the natives. The following is from the shorthand report of the Zola trial, February 1 1 , 1898: — MACHINATIONS AGAINST PICQUART 135 " Labori : Was this mission important ? " Picquart : It was not indispensable, I think. . . . I should not like to criticise my superiors from that point of view ; but, as a matter of fact, I find that it was not necessary to send any one. " Labori : Anyhow, Colonel Picquart himself has always understood quite well the object of his mission ? " Picquart : No, though I did my best to under- stand it. . . . " Labori : Why does Colonel Picquart think that his presence at Paris was not desired ? " Picquart : I do not know. . . . " Labori : If I rightly understood the deposition of Colonel Picquart, he told us that at a given moment his mission was to end at Gab^s ? " Picquart : What I said was that just at the ti7ne when the Dreyfus business began afresh, I received orders to place myself on the frontier of Tripoli. It was General Leclerc who told me that he would not allow me to go any farther than Gab6s. " Labori : Had Colonel Picquart received orders to go any farther than Gabes ? " Picquart : General Leclerc had received orders to send me along the frontier of Tripoli. " Labori : General Leclerc had received orders to send you to the frontier of Tripoli. With what troops ? " Picquart : Nothing was specified. " Labori : But what were the reasons which General Leclerc gave you for not allowing you to go any farther ? Did it not seem to you very odd ? " Picquart : He asked for fresh instructions. 136 THE DREYFUS CASE "Labori: Why? " Picquart : Because there was no urgency. " Labori : Is the point to which they were send- ing Colonel Picquart a dangerous one ? " Picquart : It is not one of the . . . safest points." The next day Gonse went into the box and be- trayed an excessive anxiety to repel the suspicion which Picquart's answers had roused : — " I have said that we had always acted with the greatest regard for Colonel Picquart's welfare. . . . It has been said that he was sent to the confines of Tripoli with an end in view which I will not describe. That is all a pure romance. We are not in the habit of sending our officers to be killed for nothing at all. This part of his mission was due to the situation created by the Macedonian war, which had excited the Mussulmans everywhere, and particu- larly in Tripoli, where certain events had taken place." General Gonse's explanation provoked a rejoinder from Colonel Picquart, who said : — " When General Leclerc received the order to send me to the frontier of Tripoli, he had had reason for some time before to find such a mission very odd. But then I had to explain myself, for the General said to me : ' You really must give me some explanations. What is at the bottom of all this ? ' That shows that my mission was by no means so natural as they pretend. " I should not have entered into these details if MACHINATIONS AGAINST PICQUART 137 General Gonse himself had not done so. I did not say that they wished to get me killed. . . . " Gonse : They said it yesterday. " Picquart : I do not think that any one actually said so. "The Judge: It was the meaning of Colonel Picquart's answer. " Picquart : General Leclerc talked to me about the pretext given for my going along the frontier, and which was I hardly know what . . . some horse- men or other that they were exercising on the frontier . . . and he said to me : ' That is all over. It has been contradicted. It is all nonsense, and I will not have you go farther than Gabes.' " It is evident from the above that the French War Office had planned to set this officer, whose only crime was that he had a conscience, in the forefront of the hottest battle, where it was hoped that the sword of the Bedouin, which " devoureth one as well as another," would do away with him. It was hoped that the demonstration of Dreyfus' inno- cence and of Esterhazy's guilt would die with him. In the course of the year 1897 the conviction steadily made its way into the minds of men of reflection that the Dreyfus trial was an error of justice, and worse, and the publication of M. Bernard Lazare's book, with the facsimiles it contained, about June, proved to every one who read it, and was not infected by the anti-Semitic rabies, that at any rate Dreyfus could not have written the bordereau. In proportion as the movement in favour of truth 138 THE DREYFUS CASE gained ground, the War Office men set their teeth. They had failed to get Picquart put out of the way, so they resolved to ruin him in another way. It was the petit Ueu or telegram-card of May 1896 which had put Picquart on the track of the real traitor, and which, taken in conjunction Avith the bordereau and his scarred and scabrous private life, conclusively proved Esterhazy to be the real traitor. What was to be done ? Esterhazy, as we have seen, was warned in October 1896. Six months later the plan of campaign was matured against Picquart. He was to be accused of having forged the petit Ueu in order to incriminate Esterhazy, whose name, it was hoped, would not ever transpire. Picquart himself knew what was brewing, and that Henry was the leading spirit in the conspiracy. Towards May 1897 he had occasion to return to the War Office some letters which concerned that bureau, but which, having been addressed to him by mis- take by agents who did not know of his dismissal, had been forwarded to him at Soussa. Picquart, in returning these to Henry, wrote thus ^ from Soussa on May 18, 1897 : — " I should be glad if you would once for all tell people who come and ask for me at the War Office that I have been relieved of my duties. I have nothing in that to be ashamed of, but I am ashamed of the mystery which surrounds and the lies which are told about my departure." ^ Proofs Verbal of Zola Trial, I. p. 155. MACHINATIONS AGAINST PICQUART 139 For all this time the War Office was concealing, as far as it could, why Picquart was gone, or even that he was gone. The last thing they desired was that it should be connected in any one's mind with the Dreyfus affair. At the beginning of June, Picquart received in reply a threatening and abusive letter from Henry. It accused him of vamping up mysteries himself, and formulated three charges. First, of opening private letters for obscure motives foreign to his official duties. This referred to the seizure by Picquart, with the assent of his chiefs, of Esterhazy's letters in the post. Secondly, of trying to suborn two officers in the Intelligence Department to say that a document belonging to that department was written by a particular person. This charge was, as we shall see, more clearly formulated in the Zola trial in February 1898, when Lauth accused his former superior of trying to induce him to swear against his better knowledge that the petit hl&u was in the handwriting of Schwartzkoppen. Thirdly, of opening a secret dossier, and of using it indiscreetly, to the prejudice of the service. Henry's letter was couched in abusive terms, which it was inconceivable he should have used to Picquart, who was his superior in rank, unless he was assured beforehand of the support of his hierarchical superiors. Picquart saw that he was surrounded by machinations. One point in the intrigue against him already begun should be I40 THE DREYFUS CASE noticed here ; chronologically it belongs to December 1896, but it only came to Picquart's knowledge a year later. Colonel Picquart was a favourite in the salon of a Mademoiselle de Comminges, a lady aged fifty-five. In that charmed circle he was known under the sobriquet of le Bon Dicu ; a friend of his, Commandant de Lallemand, as le Demi-Dieu. About November 20, 1896, the secretary of Made- moiselle de Comminges wrote to Picquart a playful letter, in which he spoke of demi-dicu, of a Cagli- ostro, and of a number of other things intelligible to any one familiar with the polite and harmless slang of the particular salon, but fraught with mystery to any enemy of Picquart's who knew nothing about it. As soon as Picquart's back was turned at the War Office, November 18, 1896, Henry, his successor, began to open in his cabinet noir all private letters which came addressed to Picquart, and among others this one from the secretary of Mademoiselle de Comminges. He took a copy of it, then carefully closed it again and sent it on to Picquart, who never noticed that it had been tampered with. Henry had probably long before this been co- operating with Du Paty de Clam, and he now took him into his confidence about this harmless letter, mysterious only to conspirators like themselves. They thought that it might be turned to account against Picquart, so they communicated with Ester- hazy, and the entire group of traitors wrote the MACHINATIONS AGAINST PICQUART 141 following letter and addressed it to Picquart at the War Office in Paris : — " Your brusque departure has filled us with dis- may. The work is compromised. Speak and the demi-dieu will act. — Yours, Speranza." The name Speranza will meet us later on as the regular pseudonym under which Du Paty de Clam, with Esterhazy's connivance, writes to him or to Picquart. The immediate purport of this first forged letter, which of course was not forwarded to Picquart, but lodged in one of Henry's pigeon-holes, was this : The conspirators hoped to appeal to it later on, whenever they should desire to prove to people who desired to be taken in that Picquart was already, in December 1896, in league with the "Syndicate of Treason," as the Dreyfusards were already called. The demi-dieu could then be interpreted as the head of the said syndicate. Thus these criminal, but somewhat silly, intrigues, along with the more elaborate forgeries described in chapter vii., had already for six months occupied the new chief and staff of the Intelligence Department, when in June 1897 Picquart resolved to take steps to protect himself. He was now provisionally attached as colonel to an Algerian cavalry regiment. He had a right to visit Paris, and he did so. There he went to Maitre Leblois, a friend of his youth, and, like himself, a native of Strasbourg, and now a member of the Paris Bar. He laid before him Henry's 142 THE DREYFUS CASE threatening letter, all but the thu-d charge m it, acquainted him with the cause of the machinations against himself, namely, his discovery of the true authorship of the bordereau, and left in his hands the series of fourteen letters which had passed be- tween himself and Gonse relating to the matter in question. Maitre Leblois was only to use these letters when it should be necessary to do so in Picquart's defence. Till now Picquart had kept the secret to himself, always hoping that outside pressure would perhaps constrain the War Office to do justice. That hope must have died in him before he resolved in self- defence to consult his legal friend Leblois. But this action of his led to a very important development of the case, for Leblois, in September 1897, acquainted Scheurer-Kestner, President of the Senate and the most distinguished Alsatian in France, with all that he had learned from Picquart, Kestner belongs to the oldest and most distinguished family in Stras- bourg, and is a man who, with the highest scientific culture, combines a singular nobility of character. He had long entertained suspicions that Dreyfus' condemnation was an error of justice, and now that he was left without a doubt, he at once took the course that real patriotism and genuine regard for the French army dictated, and which was outlined in his deposition on February 8, 1898, at the Zola trial. After repeating to the jury the second letter of Piquart to Gonse, he continued as follows : — MACHINATIONS AGAINST PICQUART 143 " Gentlemen, after I had read this letter my con- viction was formed. I was convinced that there had been an error. I saw General Gonse, Picquart's superior, sharing his ideas and looking upon revision as possible. What could I but do ? It was my first duty to communicate with the Government, with the Minister of War. It was my first duty to take to him the documents, and show him that the hand- writing of the bordereau was that of Esterhazy and not of Dreyfus. That is what I did. I went to General Billot and had a very long conversation with him. I laid before him the documents I had, but did not at once mention the correspondence which had passed between General Gonse and Col- onel Picquart. I thought it better not to do so. However, I lost no time in offering to communi- cate to the Government this correspondence, and naturally I was authorised to make a copy of it and send it to them. "Unhappily, things had gone too far. Perhaps the Government was in another mood than it had been at first. I do not know. Anyhow, my com- munication was refused. It seemed to me that it concerned the honour of the Government, the honour of the Republic, the honour of the democracy, the honour of the army, that the initial step in the redress of such a wrong should be taken from above and not from below. That is why I addressed my- self to the Government. ... I almost went on my knees to the Minister of War during my visit to him. I prayed him to demonstrate to me Dreyfus' guilt, and offered to proclaim it on the housetops. . . . He simply repeated, ' He is guilty.' ' Prove to me,' I 144 THE DREYFUS CASE said, ' that he 4s.' ' I cannot prove it to you/ was his only answer." Scheurer-Kestner also had many interviews with M. Meline, the President of the French Cabinet, but equally in vain. In his concluding depositions he returned to his interview with Billot, the Minister of War :— " My conversation with General Billot, who is my old friend of twenty-five years' standing, lasted a long time. " Yes ; I besought him to give all his attention to an affair which otherwise threatened to become ex- tremely grave. ' It is your duty,' I said to him, ' to take the first step. Make a personal inquiry ; trust the matter to no one but yourself. In certain bureaux there are dossiers ; have them brought to you. Do not leave things to intermediaries ; examine them yourself personally and loyally. And if you promise to make such an examination, why then I promise you to keep silence until I know the result of it.' " When I left him. General Billot begged me to keep absolute silence. I complied, but under one condition. ' You need two days,' I said, ' to conduct this inquiry. I will give you fifteen days, and during those fifteen days I will not stir.' " What ensued ? During those very fifteen days the ministerial journals dragged me in the mud, denounced me as a dishonest man, as a miscreant ; overwhelmed me with insults, and called me ' a German and a Prussian.' " GENERAL BILLOT. Page 144. MACHINATIONS AGAINST PICQUART 145 " As they call me an Italian," here interjected M. Zola, who was sitting in court. In point of fact. Billot set on several officers of his entourage to write inflammatory and defamatory articles about M. Scheurer-Kestner. To deal with this hornet's nest of the 4tat major there was needed some one who could strike heavier and more telling blows than so tranquil and elevated a personality as he would condescend to deal. He had laid his hand on them, and had got it badly stung by his lifelong friend Billot, who, like Mercier before him, and Cavaignac, Zurlinden, and Chanoine after him, seems to have divested himself, on entering the Ministry of War, of every feeling of honour, humanity, and justice, and, I might add, of all prudence, foresight, and intelligence as well. It needed the trumpet-blast of Zola's unsparing elo- quence to open the eyes of any considerable section of Frenchmen to the cancer-growth eating into the heart of their military and civil institutions. K CHAPTER IX THE AWAKENING The discovery of the real authorship of the border- eau was made a second time, and quite independently of Picquart, towards the end of October 1897, by M. de Castro, Esterhazy's stockbroker, who, at the first Zola trial on February 8, 1898, made the fol- lowing deposition : — " I was established at that time as a stockbroker, near the Paris Bourse, and I had had occasion to do some business for the Commandant Esterhazy. He was continually in correspondence with the firm, and I knew his handwriting very well ; so well, in fact, that when in the morning I had a heavy post- bag to overhaul, I recognised his writing before opening his letter. "Towards the end of October 1897, I was on the boulevard, when a newsvendor passed by me hawk- ing the facsimile of the famous bordereau attributed to ex-Captain Dreyfus. I was startled when I saw this handwriting, for I seemed to see in it a letter of the Commandant Esterhazy. I went home in great perturbation. On the morning of the next day but one, I went with my brother-in-law and looked out some of the Commandant Esterhazy's letters in the letter - book. I even made some 146 THE AWAKENING 147 comparisons of the respective writings, and, as a result, I found a complete resemblance, I will say a striking identity, between them. " I spoke to some friends of this strange coin- cidence, and my friends advised me to take some of the letters to M. Scheurer-Kestner, who was interesting himself in the Dreyfus affair. Mean- while those friends probably talked about it to M. Mathieu Dreyfus, who came one day and asked me to show him these letters. I offered to give him some, but he refused them and said, ' Pray take them to M. Scheurer-Kestner,' I went to him one morning (November 7, 1897), and said, ' Monsieur le President, I am come to lay before you some very curious documents. You will see for yourself the resemblance which there is between the writing of these letters and the famous bordereau.' " M. Scheurer-Kestner took these letters, and considered them for a time ; then he went out into his bureau, and came back saying, ' Here are some letters which are probably by the same hand, and from the same source.' I recognised at once in them the handwriting of Commandant Esterhazy." Maitre Labori here asked : " At that moment had the name of the Commandant Esterhazy been already mentioned as possibly being that of the author of the bordereau ? Had M. de Castro any idea that M. Esterhazy was already suspected by others of having written it ? " M. de Castro : " No, absolutely no idea. . . Eight or ten days later." ... Labori : " Has the witness not received threaten- ing letters ? " 148 THE DREYFUS CASE M. de Castro : " No, not letters. ... I received one day a telegram-card, and if M. le President (i.e. the judge) likes, I will lay it before the court." The Judge : " No ; but say what was written on the card." M. de Castro : " It is a threat : ' If it is you that have given up the letters of which the newspaper Paris indicates the initials J. D. C, you shall pay dear for your infamy.' . . . This is in a disguised handwriting." At the date which my narrative has reached, beginning of November 1897, the French public and the world in general had never heard Ester- hazy's name mentioned as that of the real traitor. The chief men in the War Office indeed had through Picquart's discovery learned the truth in May 1896. Picquart had told Leblois in June 1897. Scheurer- Kestner learned it from Leblois in September of the same year. De Castro discovered it independently at the end of October, and through him Mathieu Dreyfus learned it. But as yet it had made its way into no journal. Scheurer-Kestner's interest in Drejrfus had been first awakened by finding during a visit to Alsace- Lorraine in 1896, that every one in the annexed provinces refused to believe in the poor man's guilt. On October 29, 1897, when he found that Billot and his minions in the War Office rejected his patriotic overtures with insults and contumely, he sent a letter to the Matin, in which he said, " I am convinced of Dreyfus' innocence, and more than ever I am THE AWAKENING 149 resolved to pursue his rehabilitation." This utter- ance produced a profound impression ; and it was absurd to say that its author had been bought by the " S3riidicate of treason," since he was known to be rich. Nor was he a Jew, but a Protestant. President of the Senate, he occupied the most august political position in France. Nor could his motive be ambition. On the contrary, his cham- pionship of the falsely - condemned Jew, of the " traitor " so indispensable to the Jesuits and their military pupils, could but make him unpopular. And so it has. He has lost his presidency of the Senate thereby, and has become one of the targets at which Drumont and the rest of the journalists in the pay of the War Office sling their daily filth. M. Gabriel Monod, professor of the ^ficole des Hautes Etudes, the founder of critical historical study in the France of to-day, followed in M. Kestner's steps, and publicly declared that he shared his convic- tions. On November 14, 1897, M. Scheurer-Kestner once more spoke in a letter to the Temps, in which he gave an outline of his overtures to the Minister of War, but still withheld Esterhazy's name, for Leblois had communicated this to him in confidence. On November 15, 1897, the first great blow fell like a thunderbolt on the guilty t^tat major. On that day M. Mathieu Dreyfus, by the advice of M. Scheurer-Kestner, sent to the papers the following letter, addressed to Billot, the Minister of War : — T50 THE DREYFUS CASE " The only ground for the accusation made in 1894 against my unfortunate brother is a lettre missive, unsigned, undated, but proving that military documents had been betrayed to the agent of a foreign Power. " I have the honour to inform you that the author of this document is M. le Comte Walsin- Esterhazy, major of infantry, withdrawn from active service owing to temporary infirmities last spring. " The handwriting of Major Walsin-Esterhazy is identical with that of this document. " It will be very easy for you, M. le Ministre, to procure the writing of this officer. " I am ready, moreover, to indicate to you where you can find letters of his, of incontestable authen- ticity, and of a date anterior to my brother's arrest. " I cannot doubt, M. le Ministre, that now you know the author of the treason for which my brother was condemned, you will promptly do justice." This indictment was like a spark falling into a magazine of powder. For days and weeks the ministerial anti-Semite papers rained maledictions on the imaginary S3mdicate of treason. Yet many of the more serious journals noted as ominous the fact that on the very eve of Mathieu Dreyfus' letter, the German attache had taken a hurried farewell of M. Faure, the President of the Kepublic, and had some- what precipitately gone back for good to Berlin. It was impossible not to connect the two events. The excitement became still greater when the Figaro, THE AWAKENING 151 under the editorship of M. Rodays, took up the cause of Dreyfus, and published the letters of Esterhazy to his cousin, Madame de Boulancy, and the narrative of Major Forzinetti relative to the arrest and imprisonment of Dreyfus in 1894. These I have already given Avhere in my narrative they belong. Forzinetti was cashiered in December 1897 by the French authorities, and execrated by the clerical press. Yet for a time it looked as if a revision of the unjust sentence were in sight. The Minister of War, Billot, invited the Governor of Paris to open a judicial inquiry about Esterhazy. Many thought that the victory was won, and the Figaro actually delegated one of its staff to bear the good news of his vindication and release to the victim on the Devil's Island. I must here depart for a little from the main cur- rent of events to narrate some minor incidents which took place in the closing weeks of the year 1897. M. Rochefort, the editor of a journal called V Intransigeant, was a member of the Paris Commune in 1 87 1. Though his innate cowardice caused him to run away in the moment of danger, it did not save him from transportation, under the Government of MacMahon, to New Caledonia. He escaped thence with the help of English boatmen and came to Lon- don, where, being a good connoisseur of art, he made some money by purchasing old English paintings and re-selling them in Paris. WTien an amnesty was granted some years ago to the offenders of 1 8 7 1 , 152 THE DREYFUS CASE Rocliefort went back to Paris and resumed the con- trol of his paper, which is written in a very slashing manner, and is said to bring in to its proprietor nearly half-a-million francs a year. It was necessary for the War Office to make quite sure of this journal; so, early in November 1897, General Boisdeffre, the head of the 6tat major, sent one of his aides-de-camp, an officer named M. Pauffin de Saint-Morel, to communicate to Rochefort the most crucial of the proofs of Dreyfus' guilt which the secret dossier contained. Subsequently attention was called to the impropriety of Boisdeifre's action, and as a matter of mere form a nominal punishment was inflicted on De Saint-Morel, who gave out that he had gone to Rochefort on his own initiative, and affected to be very penitent. The substance of De Saint-Morel's communica- tions as from the War Office to Rochefort appeared in the latter's journal on December 13. It is so amusing that I shrink from withholding it, the more so because the huzzas with which it was received by the clerical and military journals cast a curious light on the psychological condition of their readers. On December 1 3, then, under the title " The Truth about the Traitor," Rochefort began thus in his best oracular style : — " Yes ; Dreyfus Avas condemned by judges who were shown a secret document — nay, several such. " Why deny it ? " Why not have said so, have cried it aloud on GENERAL DE BOISDEFFRE. Page 152. THE AWAKENING 153 the house-tops, instead of keeping silent ? Why not have glorified in it as in an action to be proud of, instead of concealing it as a fault ? " For fear of any revision that must folloAV ? " What matter ? Here goes ! . . . " What the Government has not been willing or has not dared to do, we will do it. . . . " It is hardly necessary to say that the informa- tion we now publish has not been furnished us by the Commissary appointed to examine the case of Esterhazy. . . . " Let it suffice us to affirm that it comes from the best source, that it may be regarded as absolutely authentic, and that, by consequence, once it is known, the noisy protests of the Dreyfus band will be objectless. " They say that part of the public is in doubt. That doubt will disappear. The partisans of the traitor base some hope on the investigation (i.e. of Esterhazy) now in progress ; that hope will vanish. " Dreyfus and William II. " Dreyfus had long been exasperated at the anti- Semitic campaign conducted by several journals. " He was very ambitious, and reflected that, being a Jew, he could never reach the tip-top position in the military hierarchy to which he aspired. " And he considered that, this being so, it would be better for him to recognise as final the results of the war of 1870, to go and fix his home in Alsace, where he had a stake, and, in short, to take up the German nationality. 154 THE DREYFUS CASE " It was then that he began to think of sending in his resignation and of leaving the army. " But before doing so he wrote direct to the Emperor of Germany^ in order to acquaint him with the sym- pathy he felt for his person and for the nation of which he is the head; and to ask him also if he would allow him to enter the German army, retain- ing his officer's grade. " William II. sent a message to Captain Dreyfus through the Embassy, that it was better for him to serve his real country — to wit, Germany — without quitting the post which circumstances had allotted him, and that he should he regarded ly the German 6tat major as an officer on a special mission in France. " It was also promised him that in case of war he should at once assume his proper rank in the German army. " Dreyfus accepted these conditions. " And his treason then began, and continued up to the day of the arrest of the traitor. "The Emperor's Letter. " This preamble was necessary in explanation of that which follows. " One of the famous secret pieces is a letter of the Emperor of Germany himself. " It was stolen, photographed, and replaced where it was taken from. " In this letter, addressed to M. de Milnster, William II. mentioned Captain Dreyfus hy his full name, com- mented on certain bits of information already given, 1 These italics and those below are Rochefort's. THE AWAKENING 155 and charged the particular agent of the Embassy who was in communication with Dreyfus to in- dicate to the traitor the other informations which he must collect, as being wanted by the German Stat major, " Such is the origin of the principal ' secret piece.' " Rochefort then relates how he had long before received substantially the same story from a mili- tary personage, better qualified than most to be admirably well informed ; and he goes on to relate another legendary story which he says he got from a foreign military attache to whom Sell war tzkoppen had often talked about the Dreyfus case. " Here is the resume," continues Rochefort, " of what I learned. " Some days before Dreyfus' arrest, the Count de Mlinster, the German Ambassador, had gone to M. Charles Dupuy, the prime minister, and used the following words to him : — " ' They have stolen from the bureau of the Embassy a parcel of documents, eight letters which were addressed to me. " ' This is a real violation of territory in time of peace. " ' I regret to inform you that if these letters are not at once restored to me, I shall lea.ve Pa7'is in twenty- fonr hours! " The documents were returned there and then to the Count de Mlinster. " Only they had been j)hotoyra.phed. 156 THE DREYFUS CASE " And it was the photographs of these which were shown to the judges in the court-martial. " Of these eight letters, seven emanated from Dreyfus. . . . The eighth was clearly the imperial missive addressed by William II. to M. de Miinster, in which Captain Drey f is was mentioned hy name." The gist of the above rigmarole is evidently Boisdeffre's communication. It was the method of counterworking Mathieu Dreyfus' denunciation which first suggested itself to the head of the War Office. However it displeased the Government, which first put out a formal denial of it, and then, when Rochefort stood to his guns, threatened to prosecute him. In commenting on the ministerial dimenti Rochefort uttered a real hon mot. " Every one knows," he said, " and the Ministers best of all, that to govern is to lie " {gouverner c'est mentir). No saying could more pithily sum up the policy of the Government of Meline and Billot. Whether the ultra-secret dossier of Dreyfus really contains the seven forged letters of the victim to WiUiam II. and an eighth of William II, to De Miinster mentioning Dreyfus by name, is not certain ; but it is probable for two reasons. Firstly, M. Cl(^men- ceauhas affirmed in October 1898 that M. Hanotaux gave 27,000 francs for a photograph of a letter to De Miinster, in which the Emperor entitles himself Kaiser von Deutschlands. This is unlikely, although M. Clemenceau, as a rule, knows what he is talking about. For M. Hanotaux would know that the THE AWAKENING 157 Emperor would style himself der Deutsche Kaiser. He also, long ago, assured two of the leading literary men in France that he not merely believed, but knew Dreyfus to be innocent, and, in view of the turbulent obstinacy with which the generals would oppose revision, regarded his sentence as le plus grand malheur, the greatest calamity, which has during this century befallen France. The person to whom M. Hanotaux specially made this remark is my informant. For all this conviction, M. Hanotaux has been more severe upon Dreyfusards than any other French Minister, and has cashiered three French consuls and expelled one Dutch one for overtly expressing their sympathy with M. Zola. A second reason for believing Kochefort when he claims official authority for this fable is that at the Zola trial on February 12, 1898, Colonel Henry made the following deposition, which deserves to be quoted, though it must be received with caution, since on most points where his evidence could be tested he was found to have perjured himself : — " In 1 894 — I beg to call your attention to these dates, gentlemen of the jury — in the month of November, one day. Colonel Sandherr came into my bureau and said : ' You must really look out in your secret dossiers everything that has to do with matters of espionage.' " ' Since when ? ' I asked. " ' Since you have been here. Have you arranged them ? ' 158 THE DREYFUS CASE " I said to him : ' Oh ! that will not take long. I have been here a year, since 1893.' " ' Well, look out all you have ; you must make a dossier out of it.' " I looked out what I had, and I found, I think, ciglit or nine pieces — I do not remember the exact number — of which one was very important, and had an extra-confidential character — extra-secret, if you like to call it so. " I made an inventory of these pieces. I took a copy of some, and I gave the whole to Colonel Sandherr. " This was, as I told you, gentlemen, just now, in November 1894. " The Colonel took them, and kept them about a month. On the 15th or i6th of December 1894, the Colonel came to me and said : ' There is your dossier.' " Henry then went on to say that the most im- portant of these pieces was photographed by Sand- herr, When the latter returned the dossier, three days before the Dreyfus court-martial opened, Henry asked him : " ' But how is it that you do not want this dossier any more ? ' " He answered : ' I have a more important dossier that that, and I will show you a letter out of it.' " He showed me a letter, but made me swear never to speak of it. I swore. He showed me a letter more important than those in the dossier. THE AWAKENING 159 He said : ' I have along with that some documents, but I keep them by me, and I shall use them if need be.' " I never again heard of this second dossier ; the Colonel never intrusted it to me. " There, I give you the history of the dossier. As to the other, I do not know what became of it ; I have never seen it. Colonel Sandherr never spoke of it to me but once, December 16, 1894." It would at first sight appear that the first secret dossier compiled by Henry the forger, in which were eight pieces, of which one was extra-confidential, was identical with the one communicated by De Saint-Morel in behalf of Boisdeffre to Rochefort. The hypothesis that both Rochefort and Henry were lying, in itself likely enough, is untenable in view of the evidently undesigned coincidence between their stories, and of the morbid anxiety of Meline's Gov- ernment to deny Rochefort's tale. But it is also to be remarked that Colonel Picquart, who, on account of the professional secret, did not allow himself to say much about it, yet admitted on February 18 that the first of these dossiers existed, and that it contained the piece, "Cctte canaille de D.," which in his evidence Henry first affirmed and then denied to be part of this dossier. Picquart added that it would be as well to verify the authenticity of these pieces, and he instanced the particular letter of 1896, which has since been proved to be Henry's forgery. i6o THE DREYFUS CASE Yet there meets us here a puzzHng contradiction. How could Henry's dossier of eight or nine pieces contain seven letters of Dreyfus and the Emperor's as its eighth, and along with these the "Canaille de D." letter ? Yet Picquart seems to imply on February 1 8, and Henry on February 12 — though the latter was not consistent with himself — expressly says, that the dossier of eight or nine pieces contained the " Canaille de D." document. May we infer that this, like Henry's forged correspondence, was a later accretion ? De Saint- Morel deposed at the Zola trial that he communicated to Rochefort " what was said out loud, and without any mystery around him, in the etat major." That is likely enough, I have stated in a former chapter what is known for certain of the secret dossier shown to Dreyfus' judges. How to reconcile the accounts of Henry, Rochefort, and Picquart, I know not. One thing is certain, and that is, that the last of the trio is alone trust- worthy ; that he has seen and had in his hands for months all the secret dossier of Dreyfus, and that he declares that what there is of it that is not palpable forgery does not concern Dreyfus, nor in any way inculpate him. Nor did Picquart's evidence coun- tenance the existence, alleged by Henry, of an ultra- secret dossier retained by Sandherr for use at Drey- fus' trial, and never seen by any one else. Lastly there is a good deal of reason to suppose that the forged letters of Dreyfus to William II., along with THE AWAKENING i6i William's to De Miinster, actually exist, and are forgeries of Henry himself, fabricated " to order," for Sandherr's use. One other incident which took place at the end of the year 1897 must be briefly mentioned. I have already mentioned Lemercier-Picard, who executed for Henry the material part of his forgeries. It was almost certainly at the instigation of the party of forgers within the War Oflfice that Picard, in the course of December 1897, concocted the following letter, supposed to be addressed to Esterhazy's mis- tress by a German officer Avith the Christian naine of Otto : — " i^th December 1894. " Madame, — Your demands (voire exigence) pass all limits. You keep no account of the sums paid out, much more considerable than those which had been promised you ; and yet you have not handed over the whole of the documents enumerated in your bordereau. " Let me have the piece in question, and what you ask shall be given you. " Please tell Walsin that I shall be with Stern- berg on Tuesday evening. Otto." This forgery was, as my reader will see, suggested by the bordereau, the petit-Ueu, and the secret docu- ment : " Cette canaille de D . . . devient trop exigeant." Lemercier-Picard was to take it to the Deputy Joseph Reinach, one of the most ardent and strenu- ous of the upholders of Dreyfus' innocence ; and it L i62 THE DREYFUS CASE was expected that he would welcome it as a new proof of Esterhazy's guilt, pay money for it, and publish it ; then the War Office was to turn round and denounce the Dreyfusards for fabricating proofs of Esterhazy's guilt. For the cry of the military and Jesuit faction was that the " syndicate of treason " was tr3dng to substitute an innocent man, Esterhazy, for the guilty man, Dreyfus. But the plot failed. Reinach detected the letter at sight as Lemercier - Picard's own forgery, and kicked him downstairs. Thus foiled in his first attempt, the chartered forger of the Stat major re- resolved to make a little money, after all, out of his handiwork. So he photographed it, wrote the word copid in the corner in a hand as much like Reinach's as he could, and took the copy to Rochefort, repre- senting to him that it was a forgery which, for the modest sum of 10,000 francs, Reinach and the Dreyfusards had persuaded him to commit, in order that they might have some evidence against Esterhazy. The whole idea was redolent of Colonel Henry, with whom Lemercier-Picard had been so long associated. However, it was the ex-policeman's owji happy thought to play off on Rochefort a trick learned in the Intelligence Bureau under Henry, and intended for the Dreyfusards. It succeeded admirably. Rochefort gorged the bait with the most naive credulity, gave Picard THE AWAKENING 163 several hundred francs for the " tip," and beginning on December 25, 1897, wrote a series of five articles denouncing " cct 6cha'p'p6 dc Ghetto." I may add that Lemercier-Picard persuaded the Marquis de Rochefort that the original had been in cipher, no doubt after the model of the " Canaille de D " document ; and great stress was laid on the word copid in the corner. " All to whom I have shown the letter," wrote Rochefort, " and who are familiar with Reinach's writing, have said to me without the least hesitation : ' The word was certainly written by him.' " The end of it was that in January 1898 Reinach sued Rochefort for criminal libel, and the editor paid for his credulity by going to prison. That a mob of Drumont's young men escorted him in triumph to and from the gaol can hardly have made up to him for the deception to which he had fallen a victim. Shortly afterwards Lemercier-Picard was found strangled in his lodgings. He knew too much and the War Office was tired of him. He had not only tricked Rochefort, but had revealed all the forgeries of the War Office to Schwartzkoppen, with the result that the German and Italian ambassadors had gone to M. Hanotaux, the then French Minister of Foreign Affairs, had told him exactly what forged correspond- ences between their attaches lay in the lockers of the Mat major, and had exacted a solemn promise from him that these forgeries should be kept for 164 THE DREYFUS CASE military consumption only, and not be published for the delectation of juries and Chambers of Deputies. There was thus an obvious reason why Lemercier- Picard should disappear, and, like the last Prince de Cond^ he was strangled, and nothing said about it. CHAPTER X ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY DE CLAM Mathieu Dreyfus' denunciation of Esterhazy as the author of the bordereau greatly embarrassed the ctat major under General Billot and the subservient Government of M. Meline ; it was evident that the forecast made in Picquart's letters to Gonse was coming true. It has been observed by moralists that an error of justice, unless it is admitted and set right at once when it is proved, is apt to fester. Fresh lie upon lie must be told in order to back up the original one, and what was an error perhaps at first speedily becomes a crime, and involves its defenders in new crimes from which they would at the beginning have recoiled with horror. Meanwhile, if there exist, as there does in France, a certain liberty of the press, the truth, just because it has a thousand footholds in reality where the lies have none, must in the end triumph, and one day the top-heavy fabric of fraud and cowardice falls by its own weight. But in the last weeks of 1897 the men of the Uat major had on their side the people who shouted loudest, and the French middle class were ready to believe that a syndicate of Jews, eager to vindicate a Jewish traitor, was vilifying the army, merely because 165 i66 THE DREYFUS CASE a patriotic minority, with something of Picquart's foresight, had begun to denounce the irregularities and errors of the court-martial of 1 894, and demand a judicial revision of it. However, the War Office was not long in making up its mind what line to take. To own to a mistake had become impossible after their treatment of Colonel Picquart. They resolved therefore to have the sanctity of the chose jug6c upheld anew in the Chamber. To do that they could rely on Billot and Meline, who was being kept in power by the re- actionary and clerical party in the Chamber. At the same time they would go through the form of trying Esterhazy for treason, and would acquit him to order. His court-martial would also give them an oppor- tunity of assailing Colonel Picquart, over whose de- fence of himself, as soon as he should present him- self in the witness-box, a veil could be drawn by invoking the secrecy of the huis clos, or closed doors. I will take these points in order. On November 18, General Billot being inter- pellated in the Chamber, allowed that he had had a confidential interview with M. Scheurer-Kestner. " He showed me," said Billot, " documents which he did not leave with me, and which I had no right to receive at his hands." He then proceeded to declare that the Government had invited M. Scheurer- Kestner " to lay his case before it according to the forms prescribed by law." This was a mere quibble. After the revelations made by the Eclair in 1896, ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY 167 and more than a year later by M. Kestner and Mathieu Dreyfus, the responsibihty lay with the Government itself. Outsiders had done all they could. The Government alone, through the action of the Keeper of the Seals, could initiate a revision of the case by the Supreme Court of Appeal. On December 5, 1897, M. Castelin put a question in the Chamber of Deputies, which was turned into a formal interpellation by the Count de Mun, the royalist and clerical party leader, and M. Sembat, a socialist 6Uve of the Jesuit College Stanislas. In reply to them, M. Mcline declared that there was no such thing as an affaire Dreyfus ; and General Billot got up and added that " on his soul and conscience he believed that Dreyfus was justly condemned." On December 7 there was a fresh interpellation in the Senate, and then both the Minister of War and the Premier declared that they had resolved that the Government should not take the initiative in re- vision, "in order not to invalidate the authority of the chosejitgde." It was evident that nothing could be done with a Government so hopelessly servile to the military and clerical faction. There was nothing that M. Scheurer- Kestner and his friends could do except appeal, as Voltaire did in the case of Jean Galas, to public opinion. The other party set them the example, for the adventure of M. Pauffin de Saint-Morel, related in my last chapter, proves that the heads of the War Office, who had made a per- sonal matter of the condemnation of Dreyfus, had i68 THE DREYFUS CASE lost no time in opening through the press of Roche- fort and Drumont in the field of public opinion their campaign of calumnies and lies. Being sure of the civil authorities, the Minister of War invited the Governor of the Paris garrison to open a judicial inquiry about Esterhazy, and the conduct of this inquiry was intrusted to General de Pellieux, It was the intention of the generals to keep Picquart safe out in Tunisia until Esterhazy's somewhat impaired virginity of character was re- stored to him, for they knew that Picquart's evidence would sorely hamper the operation. In this aim they were disappointed ; for the journals which demanded that Picquart should be summoned were too many and too important to be neglected. It must be remembered that the Temps, the DShats, and the Figaro were at that time inclined to revision, and that the great wave of military terrorism had not yet led their editors to " rat." The first essential, however, was to reassure Ester- hazy. We have seen in the " Lettre d'lm diplomate " into what perturbation he was thrown on October i6, 1897, by the news of Scheurer-Kestner's impending action ; and how in despair he went to Schwartz- koppen, and threatened to blow his brains out unless he went to Dreyfus' family and pretended to them that he had in his hands proofs of the ex-captain's guilt. At one time he actually ran away from France and went to Lugano, whence Du Paty and his other friends in the dtat major had some difficulty ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY 169 in coaxing him to return — a thing very necessary for them to do, since his flight meant his guilt, and his guilt their exposure. All this took place before De Castro made his discovery, and at a time when Scheurer-Kestner alone had begun to move in the matter. In this connection I must reproduce part of M. Mathieu Dreyfus' deposition made at Ester- hazy's court-martial, "Towards the end of October 1897, at a time when as yet no accusation weighed on him, and when as yet his name had not been uttered in any quarter, a deep anxiety preyed on Esterhazy. " Why, at such an early date, this emotion, this anxiety ? " The reason was that in the newspaper offices there was a rumour, accredited by the note in the Matin of October 10, that M, Scheurer-Kestner was convinced of my brother's innocence, and that he knew the real author of the bordereau. " The real culprit was the only person who could feel himself threatened and exposed by such rumours. They could strike terror into no one but him, and he was struck with terror, as the following facts prove. "On October 20 and 26, Esterhazy wrote two letters ... to M, Autant, landlord of a house, No. 49 Rue de Douai, in which he had a room where his mistress, Madame Pays, lived. In these letters Esterhazy asked M. Autant to transfer the lease of the room into Madame Pays' name. The transfer was not made quickly enough, and Madame Pays went to M. Autant to urge him to make haste, because Esterhazy, she said, was under the necessity I70 THE DREYFUS CASE of disappearing or committing suicide within forty- eight hours." Of course, Madame Pays' object was to have the lease made out in her name before the catastrophe occurred, otherwise Esterhazy's relations could turn her out and seize the furniture. It was soon after this, according to Madame Pays, that Esterhazy ran away, or took a holiday, as she put it in her deposi- tion. The same witness — Mathieu Dreyfus — proved that on October 24 Esterhazy wrote, and had sent from Lyons to M. Hadamard, Alfred Dreyfus' father- in-law, a letter threatening himself and M. Hada- mard with death : " One step more," it said, " and death is on you both," It was not enough to write threatening letters to those persons alone, but, emulating his friend Henry, Esterhazy was bold enough to write in the same strain to Picquart, whose deposition respecting this letter and the accompanying circumstances follow. Referring to his sudden recall to Paris in November 1897 in order to give evidence, or rather to be him- self transformed into the accused at the Esterhazy court-martial, he deposed as follows : — " I had already received orders to go to the south, when they summoned me to Tunis, where they put to me questions which struck me as rather singular. They asked me firstly, whether I had not allowed a secret document to be stolen from me by a woman. It was easy for me to answer that I had never taken ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY 171 documents to my house, and that there was no pos- sibiHty of a woman taking such a document from me." This was about the 8 th of November. Within a day or two, on the i oth or 1 1 th, Picquart received, all on the same day : i st, a letter from Esterhazy ; 2nd, a telegram signed Speranza ; 3rd, a telegram signed Blanche. Here is Picquart's account of the letter : — " Major Esterhazy's letter ran substantially as follows : — ' I have lately received a letter in which you are formally accused of having suborned non- commissioned officers to procure you writing of mine. I have verified the statement, and it is true. . . . They have also informed me of the fol- lowing circumstance, viz., that you had carried off documents belonging to your department in order to form a dossier out of them against me. This statement about the dossier is true, and at this moment I have a document belonging to it in my possession.' . . . Then followed a long, pompous phrase like this : ' I cannot believe that a higher officer in the French army has gone so far as to practise. . .' &c. 'An explanation is incumbent on you.' " At the same time I received a telegram signed Speranza which ran : ' Stop demi-diert. Everything is found out. Matter very grave.' " Both the letter and the telegram were addressed to Tunis : wrongly, for Picquart was then at Soussa, and in the address of both his name was misspelled 172 THE DREYFUS CASE Fiquart. It was evident, therefore, that the telegram had been addressed, if not written, by Esterhazy. On the same day, as I have said, Picqiiart received a second telegram, in the address of which his name was rightly spelled, and which was rightly dispatched to him at Soussa, where he was in garrison. This telegram was signed Blanche, the Christian name of Mademoiselle de Comminges. The sender of it was, it is clear, cognisant of Picqiiart's inquiry into Esterhazy, for it referred to the petit hleu which had set him on his trail, but which was at that date only Icnown outside the War OfSce to Leblois and Scheurer-Kestner. It ran thus : — " They know that George is the author of the petit Ueii. He nuist take precautions. — Blanche." These two telegrams obviously proceeded from the same person, Du Paty de Clam, co-operating with Esterhazy. For it was he who on November 20, 1896, a year earlier, had written a letter, signing it Spcranza, to Picquart at the War Office. This letter, the first of the series, had not been sent on to Picquart, who only saw it late in November 1897, when General de Pellieux, who was conduct- ing the preliminary examination of Esterhazy, taxed him with it. If there was ever any doubt that Esterhazy was partly responsible for these telegrams, it is removed by the fact that, in a series of three articles which he wrote in the Libre Parole and signed Bh:iy on ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY 173 November 15, 16, and 17, he alluded to them and to Picquart's having received them. Now, Picquart's letter to Billot complaining of these anonymous telegrams sent to him by some one in- side the War Office, only left Tunis November 15, and reached Paris November 19, Therefore the only person in Paris who could write about them in Drumont's paper as early as November 15 must have been their author or his accomplice. Now it was Esterhazy who so wrote. My reader must be impatient to know what was the purport of these puerile telegrams and tricks. They formed, in effect, part of a mass of silly machi- nations devised by the half-witted criminal Du Paty in order to ruin Picquart and shield Esterhazy. In the first letter ^ signed Speranza, of November 20, 1896, demi-dieu (the sobriquet so stupidly picked out of the letter of Mademoiselle de Com- minges' secretary), figured to Du Paty's diseased fancy the head of a " syndicate of treason " formed to rescue Dreyfus. Picquart accordingly was entreated to speak and divulge his discovery, in order that the dcmi-dieu might take action. A year passes, and Scheurer-Kestner takes up the case from Leblois, and tells Billot about it, who repeats what he has been told to Du Paty. The latter promptly jumps to the conclusion that demi-dieu in the secretary's letter of November 20, 1896, had meant Scheurer-Kestner. Hence the * See above p. 140. 174 THE DREYFUS CASE telegrams now dispatched to Tunis, " Stop demi- dieu," that is to say, " Stop Scheurer-Kestner." In the last telegram, signed Blanche, the idiotic insinuation is conveyed that Picquart had forged the 2>^tit hhu. It gives one a very poor idea of the wits of the trio of criminals, Esterhazy, Du Paty, and Henry, that they hoped by these puerile tricks to hoax and mystify Picquart, and somehow or other entangle him in the meshes of the false accusations prepared against him. These accusations were as follows : — I. That Picquart had himself forged the petit Ueu in order to ruin Esterhazy. II. That he had, before he left the ^tat major, communicated Dreyfus' secret dossier to Leblois, who had handed it on to Scheurer-Kestner, who was consequently the demi-die^t alluded to in the Speranza forgery of November 20, 1896. III. That Picquart had in 1896 stolen out of the secret dossier the "canaille de D " letter, and kept it by him until the autumn of 1897, when his mistress overheard him talking about it in his sleep, and vowing ruin on Esterhazy. Seized with remorse, and overcome with pity for the innocent Esterhazy, whom her lover sought to substitute for the trai- tor Dreyfus, Picquart's mistress had abstracted the secret document, and after writing to Esterhazy and appointing a trysting-place, gave it into his hands as a document libdratcur or pledge that the War ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY 175 Office would protect him from the machinations of the " syndicate of treason." My reader will now see the drift of the question put to Picquart at Tunis, also of the statement in Esterhazy's letter to him, to the effect that he has in his possession one of the secret documents out of the dossier which Picquart had prepared against him. It is now time to introduce an actor in this drama without whose evidence the outlines of this joint intrigue of Esterhazy and Du Paty could not have been so clearly drawn. This is Count Christian Esterhazy, a first cousin of the traitor. This young man's father was a much respected citizen of Bordeaux, a gentleman of irreproachable life and a distinguished officer. He died in 1896. Shortly after his death his son Christian, still a mere boy, who had inherited a slender fortune, received a letter from Walsin- Esterhazy, whom he had never seen but once. It began by explaining how cordial had been his relations with his father: — " He was in reality my only relation, and we have for long, long years fought both of us, side by side, for the honour and in defence of the name we bear ; a name Avhich has — for, my poor child, I grieve to have to say it — caused us, and myself especially, who have lived more than your father in the Parisian world, many sorrows and many sufferings. Your father did what he could, and I have made great efforts to place you in a better position than we 176 THE DREYFUS CASE ourselves began with ; and I think that by many means, and by my marriage among others, we have greatly improved it. I have no son; therefore all that I do henceforth will be for you — you may count upon that. But be as your father was to me. Write to me often. I was in constant correspond- ence with him, and we always walked together in the closest union." After this prelude, Walsin proceeds to examine his cousin's financial outlook : — " The death of your poor father will have for you, from a worldly point of view, the most painful con- sequences." " These," says Walsin, " must be remedied," and he accordingly begs his young cousin to keep the following " tip " strictly to himself : — " I was, at the Bonaparte Lycee, the friend and playmate of Edmond de Rothschild, with whom I have always been on the best of terms. Some years ago, in connection with matters affecting the Libre Parole and the Jews, being very intimate with Drumont and Mores, I came forward as the second in a duel of Cremieu-Foa ; and before the Court of Assize I made, as an expert in duelling matters, such a deposition regarding the duel of Captain Mayer and De Mores as was of real service to the Jews. Edmond de Rothschild was very grateful to me, and since that time has helped me most efficiently. This source of help I on three occasions enabled your father to avail himself of, and to any one but to him I have never even whispered a word ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY 177 about it, not even to my wife. Now with all my heart 1 place at your disposal the advantages which my relation to Rothschild confers on me, only on one condition, that I may rely on your entire discre- tion." He then examines the different investments open to his cousin, such as Priorities, Turkish customs, Ottoman Bank, Egyptian debt, and continues thus : — " One must be a fool or a rogue to advise others to buy Turkish stock just now. You tell me about speculations which are coming off, or are about to come off. I should advise you never to speculate, for all speculations may turn out badly." Then he propounds his own " tip " : — " I am just now, when I leave my country place, going to invest, through the kindness of my friend, a certain amount in an operation as safe as it is free from anxiety. It is he {i.e. De Rothschild) who is conducting it, I will tell him that I will increase my holding . . . and I guarantee you a minimum of 25 per cent, interest, payable monthly. I do not mean, of course, 2 5 per cent, per month, but a good 2 per cent, and a fraction over." Christian Esterhazy and his poor widowed mother fell into the trap, and advanced 20,000 francs, and after that successive sums up to 38,500. On November 10, 1896, Walsin wrote to his cousin thus : — " My dear friend, I have been this very morning to the friend of my childhood — you can tell your mother his name, your father knew it — M lyS THE DREYFUS CASE and I told him I would put 5000 francs more into it. I found no diflficulty in doing so, and the matter is settled." My reader will like to hear the end of this amus- ing history, though it anticipates the main narrative. In January 1898, Christian Esterhazy, who had meanwhile come to Paris, began to feel misgivings about his investments, although his cousin had paid him the instalments of interest, and he asked to be allowed to draw hisrcapital out again. On January 26, 1898, Walsin answered him thus : — " I cannot, in obedience to the express advice of Tezenas, Jeanmaire, and others, set foot in certain houses before the end of the trial. To do so would draw upon me the most ill-natured suspicions. I will do what you want as soon as it is all over. In any case, and until then, you need entertain no anxiety." Tezenas and Jeanmaire were Esterhazy's counsel in his mock court-martial. His excuse, that he could not pay back his cousin's money because he would compromise himself by entering Rothschild's bank, is in his best style. So were the remarks which followed, intended to allay Christian's fears : — " I am waiting impatiently for the end of the Zola trial — which is a great error — in order to know which side to take. If it turns out well, we have decided to claim 500,000 francs from Matthieu {i.e. Mathieu Dreyfus), 200,000 from Zola, 200,000 from the Fi(jaro. If I only got a third of this it would ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY 179 do very well, and we could seriously think of our plan of emigrating. In that case you would do well to learn some other language at once." Christian's doubts were not allayed, and in another letter Esterhazy wrote : — " I do not understand why you are so absurd. I am very busy with the Picquart business, with the actions for damages that I shall bring against Mathieu Dreyfus and the English (!)... It is not usual for people to withdraw at sight sums put out at interest." All this is inimitable. The end of it was, that Christian Esterhazy and his mother went to Roths- child's bank in Paris and made inquiries. They learned at once that Commandant Esterhazy had never had any account there, still less deposited with them capital of any kind. They promptly brought an action for swindling and obtaining money under false pretences against the Commandant. The latter has indeed emigrated, and seems to have begun his actions against " the English." Whether we shall extradite him or not remains to be seen. A youth of such engaging simplicity as his cousin was just what Walsin-Esterhazy in November 1897 stood in need of. Here was some one who would make a good go-between in the negotiations which pended between himself and the 6tat major, which on its side appointed Du Paty to arrange with the traitor for his acquittal. It would compromise i8o THE DREYFUS CASE them if Du Paty were seen negotiating in person direct with Walsin ; but Christian Esterhazy was unknown in Paris. The latter had gone there to see about his money ; but Walsin had easily talked him over and allayed his fears. On November 17, 1897, he made up his mind to remain in Paris instead of going back to Bordeaux. On that day he repaired to his cousin's house in the Rue de la Bienfaisance, and was wel- comed, as he says in his letters, like a son. He remained there five or six days. One morning the Commandant said to him, " You know of my rela- tions with Madame Pays. I would like to introduce you to her." So they went to 49 Rue de Douai, the extra-conjugal establishment. The interview was simple and cordial, and they became friends. The conversation, at first trivial, soon took another turn, and they began to talk of Du Paty de Clam. Madame Pays related how many services she had rendered to the Colonel, and of how she saw him almost daily. She was, she said, the go-between of the Commandant and the Colonel ; but she was afraid of being caught. Mathieu Dreyfus, Colonel Picquart, and the " syndicate of treason " had a clever police of their own, who marked her comings in and goings forth. The little cousin from Bordeaux must help her, and take her place sometimes, since her mission was to rescue his innocent cousin from the machina- tions set on foot against him. No one knew him, and he would not rouse the suspicions of the spies. ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY i8i He could, therefore, wait, without attracting notice, in sechided places — at omnibus bureaux and elsewhere, to give and receive letters. Walsin also represented to him how the honour of the family was at stake ; and Christian accepted the mission. That very day Du Paty had two interviews with him, the first merely to fix a rendezvous for the second. At 6 P.M., the hour fixed, Christian was there, and Du Paty expounded to him the plots of the " syndicate of treason." " The Commandant," said Du Paty, " has compromised himself, which is a pity for him, for his enemies exploit his acts of imprudence. They are powerful Jews, and that is why, in order to combat them, one must take precautions, and meet at rendezvous which elude their watchfulness. For the rest, one need have no apprehension as to the results of the duel between Esterhazy and the party of traitors." " I gave him," says Christian, " the note confided to me by the Captain. The Colonel went and read it under a gas jet. Then he came back and gave me a closed note for my cousin. This first interview lasted about half-an-hour. . . . After that I saw Colonel Du Paty de Clam again nearly every evening, and these interviews only stopped when the court- martial began. At each interview there was an exchange of notes. " Of my conversations with the Colonel I remember the following details. He assured me that General Billot and Meline, the premier, had at first been favourable to the cause of Dreyfus. They had, 1 82 THE DREYFUS CASE however, changed their attitude, and were now resolved to oppose, tooth and nail, any revision of the trial of 1894. " The most dangerous adversary, he said, was Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. It was necessary to unmask him, to expose his suspicious conduct. But it was necessary to play a close game with him ; and that was why he (Du Paty), Madame Pays, and Esterhazy had spread a net to catch him in the famous telegrams." Count Christian then related the vexation of his cousin at the experts in his court-martial refusing to swear that his letters to Madame de Bou- lancy were not in his handwriting. In this matter the 6tat major would not help him. " Then," he says, " I took to Du Paty this ultimatum : If the Commandant is not acquitted of all the charges, he will commit suicide ; but before he does so he will publish all the little notes from Du Paty de Clam exchanged through me. Then the public will know all about the part Colonel Du Paty de Clam has played, and will have complete evidence to go upon," " Colonel Du Paty turned pale with rage. ' This,' he cried, ' is a case of black-mail ; and this is the way in which I am rewarded for having wished to protect Esterhazy against the dangers which threaten him ! I shall fall a victim, I who am innocent, to my own good-nature ! Well, I shall go straight to the Minister of War and to my superiors, and shall tell them in full all about my intercourse with Esterhazy.' ESTERHAZY AND DU PATY 183 " We left one another," says Count Christian, " after those words, and I have not seen him since. My interview had lasted two hours." In answer to a question as to what he knew about the false telegrams signed Blanche and Sper- anza, Christian Esterhazy had the following deposi- tion to make before the Judge Bertulus, who was examining magistrate in the action for forgery brought early in this year by Picquart against Esterhazy, Madame Pays, and De Clam : — • " The Commandant has often talked about them to me, as also Du Paty. They told me they hoped to compromise Picquart and to startle him from his lair, and therefore concocted these subterfuges. Two telegrams were sent him at the advice of Du Paty. The first, signed Speranza, was dictated by the Colonel and written by Madame Pays, and taken to the post by Commandant Esterhazy. The same day, however, Du Paty told the latter that he feared the telegram already sent might miss its destination owing to the misspelling of the name Picquart as Piquart in the address, a mistake he had noticed too late when he looked in the army list. They had left out the c. It was necessary to go on with their plan, so they resolved to send a second tele- gram. Colonel Du Paty wrote or dictated this, I forget which. It was signed Blanche." The story of the Veiled Lady, as also related by Count Christian, must be told in my next chapter. It is only important to add here that the facts of his intercourse with Du Paty, as above narrated by 1 84 THE DREYFUS CASE Christian Esterhazy, have been endorsed by Com- mandant Esterhazy himself in a memorandum addressed to the Procureur-Gen^ral of the Court of Appeal, in which he tries to exculpate himself from the charge of swindling brought against him by his cousin. In this memorandum the Commandant dwells on the relations that were between himself and his young cousin in the following terms : — " He arrived in Paris, and since Colonel Du Paty de Clam always said to me that in the 4tat major they would prefer to have from time to time a second intermediary, so as to prevent Madame Pays from being caught, I welcomed him with joy." This is ample confirmation of Christian Ester- hazy's narrative, which he repeated on oath before the magistrate Bertulus, and proof positive that the dtat major was all along in collusion with Esterhazy, the accused of high treason, in order to secure his acquittal. CHAPTER XI THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON We have seen that the press, and in particular an article by Clemenceau, obliged the War Office to recall Colonel Picquart in November 1897 to attend the Esterhazy court-martial. Before he arrived, however. General de Pellieux, who was conducting the preliminary inquiry, on the pretext of searching for contraband matches, broke into Picquart's rooms in Paris, and sacked them. On the other hand Esterhazy, the accused of high treason, was neither arrested nor his house searched — a singular contrast with the treatment meted out to Dreyfus in 1894. Thus left scot-free, Esterhazy lounged about the boulevards, sat in Drumont's editorial office, or ar- ranged with Du Paty the protocols of his acquittal. The first question which Picquart asked when, on reaching Paris, he was brought under surveillance before De Pellieux, was why the latter did not arrest Esterhazy. " The witnesses against him," he said, " will not rise up out of the earth till he is locked up." At the Zola trial, when De Pellieux was asked why he had not at once searched Ester- hazy's house, he replied with cynical effrontery that it was absolutely useless, because Picquart had done i86 THE DREYFUS CASE it eight montlis before. We have seen that in the autumn of 1896 Esterhazy had been warned, and that Picquart's agent only entered his room, already to let, as any one else might have done. Out of respect for the cliose jugSe, De Pellieux at first refused to admit the bordereau as evidence against Esterhazy, though it was just the charge of being its author made by Mathieu Dreyfus that had forced the dat major to prosecute for high treason. " To do so," said De Pellieux in his de- position at the fourth audience of the Zola trial, " seemed to me tantamount to reopening the affaire Dreyfus. If the bordereau were to he attributed to any one else, revision would be forced wpon us." It is not surprising, under the circumstances, to learn from De Pellieux' depositions at the fifth audience of the Zola trial, that, when he did consent to admit it as evidence, he found himself " in presence of a veri- table strike of experts," and that, in order to get any at all, he required a special mandate from the Ministry of Justice. De Pellieux in court ascribed this " strike of experts " to their general respect for the cJwse jugee. A draft letter of Esterhazy, how- ever, seized by Judge Bertulus in his lodgings in July 1898, helps to explain the reluctance of ex- perts to come forward. It was to have been ad- dressed to De Pellieux, and dates from the period, November 1896, when that officer was arranging the preliminaries of his court-martial. It begins thus : — THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 187 " What am I to do next, since the experts refuse to come to such conchisions as you hoped for ? " We may infer that De PeUieux wanted them to find, as Bertillon had done in 1894, that the bor- dereau was in Dreyfus' handwriting, for the letter continues, though rather obscurely, thus : — • " Ought I, as Tezenas wished me to do from the very first, and as I have a right to do — ought I to ask for the expertise with the name of Dreyfus, and talk afresh of the cUcalque ? " Clearly Esterhazy, Tezenas, his counsel, and De PeUieux regarded experts in handwriting as men hired to say what they were wanted to say. But the new set of experts, though they were willing to allow that Dreyfus had in the bordereau traced Esterhazy's handwriting letter by letter, yet shrank from affirming the conclusions of Bertillon. Esterhazy then proceeds to blame three experts, two of whom finally offered themselves, for their refusal to acquit him of writing the Uhlan letter to Madame de Boulancy : — " How is it that neither Charavay nor Varinard, whom you know, have found in my favour as regards the Boulancy letter, manifestly falsified ? Belhomme is an idiot ; you have only to look at him," However, Esterhazy still has some hope. The ingenious Bertillon, though he is not available any more for the bordereau, might yet help them in this fresh particular. Accordingly he writes — : 1 88 THE DREYFUS CASE " Shall I get Bertillon to make a contre-expertise for the B. {i.e. Boulancy) letters ? All these people mean to assassinate me. However, can they not prove to Ravary and the experts that I could not have written the very words of the chief letter to the woman Boulancy ? " Evidently the Uhlan letter was felt to be very compromising, and yet the experts stuck to it that it was his. The next paragraph is so loosely written that its meaning is not clear : — " If the experts find that the writing {i.e. of the Uhlan letter) is mine, it is impossible for me, and in the interests of my defence, not to attempt to prove that it is Dreyfus that is author of the bordereau." Evidently the person who wrote the above, and the person to whom he wrote, did not believe for a moment that Dreyfus wrote the bordereau : — " Understand, therefore, that if you are really masters of the instruction and of the experts, I can but trust absolutely to you ; but if you are not, then I shall be absolutely obliged to prove that the bor- dereau was traced by Dreyfus upon my writing." His faith in De Pellieux' ability to pull him through is touching. That it was well grounded is proved by another draft of a letter found at the same time in Esterhazy's rooms, and as clearly as the other addressed to De Pellieux on January i8, the day after he had been acquitted " to order : " — THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 189 " My General, — I was just about to write to you to express to you ill enough — for I cannot find words to say what I feel — all my deep gratitude, all the infinite acknowledgment I have in my heart for you. If I have not succumbed in this monstrous campaign, it is to you, and to you alone, that I owe it. When I found this letter "... Here the rough draft breaks off. Taken with the other letter, it amply proves that Esterhazy's acquittal was a " put up job," engineered mainly by General de Pellieux. Let us now return to this court-martial. It began January 10, 1898, and General de Luxer presided over it ; the Commandant Kavary was rwp- porteur, and in that capacity laid a report before it embodying the results of his own and De Pellieux' preliminary inquiries. Maitre Tezenas, assisted by Maitre Jeanmaire, defended Esterhazy. M. Valle- calle, whom we met at Dreyfus' degradation, read out the accusation of high treason and betraying secrets to a foreign Power, couched in the same terms as the accusation against ]!)reyfLis, and equally signed by General Saussier. De Pellieux, I should add, had in his report declared in favour of a non lieu, that is, in favour of ch'opping the prosecution altogether ; but it had been found possible to arrange an acquittal, and accordingly, to satisfy public opinion, it had been proceeded with. The court began by rejecting Madame Dreyfus' claim, urged by Maitre Labori in a powerful speech, to be a party in the case, and 190 THE DREYFUS CASE also a similar claim on the part of Mathieu Dreyfus. The court, it was ruled, had not to concern itself with the affaire Dreyfus, for that had been settled in a legal way by the former court-martial. Having settled these preliminaries, the report of the Commandant Ravary was read, a document in every way the pendant of D'Ormescheville's act of accusation of Dreyfus. The prosecution was nomi- nally of Esterhazy, but all his life and deeds were veiled in it by a benevolent sophistry, and Picquart was transformed into the real accused. In the Zola trial M. Ravary, convicted by Zola's counsel, Labori, of the grossest irregularities in his conduct of the preliminaries of Esterhazy's court-martial, defended himself by saying, " Military justice does not proceed like your justice." No one who studies his ra])])ort will deny the truth of his remark. French military justice is happily quite sui generis. It would be a calamity for any country whose justice, military or civil, at all resembled it. Let us now analyse Ravary's report : — "The 15th November last, after a newspaper campaign as violent as it was regrettable, the Minister of War received a letter denouncing Com- mandant Walsin-Esterhazy." Note that all the violence was on the part of the Lihre Parole, L' Intransigeant, Petit Journal, and sundry other journals subsidised by the dtat major. THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 191 " After the inquiry had begun a new accusation was added, brought by Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, summoned from Tunisia to give evidence at the instance of MM. Scheurer-Kestner and Mathieu Dreyfus." Here is a candid admission that the etat major desired to suffocate Picquart's evidence by detaining him in Tunisia, just as they are now (November 1898) keeping him au secret m prison on a false accusation that he may not give evidence before the Court of Cassation. " This higher officer revealed the existence of a telegram-card received when he was attached to the Ministry, and which, according to him, demonstrated the guilt of Commandant Esterhazy." On the contrary. Colonel Picquart has from the first insisted that the telegram- card was a mere clue which set him on the track of Esterhazy. It was, considering its provenance, suspicious only. " We shall see further on of what this ' conclu- sive ' piece consisted, and what degree of confidence it is capable of inspiring." Here the keynote is sounded of all the War Office machinations against Picquart. He has lain in prison several months on the frivolous charge of having forged this telegram-card or petit bleu, except for the bringing of which to the Intelligence Department by Schwartzkoppen's porter in May 192 THE DREYFUS CASE 1896 he would never have had his attention drawn to Esterhazy. " At length the inquiry, pursued with remarkable celerity and impartiality, resulted in the giving of that order to prosecute {informer) which the accused man Esterhazy demanded so energetically." Ravary writes thus, although he knew that Ester- hazy had meditated suicide, and then ran away from France at the mere rumour that Scheurer-Kestner knew the name of the author of the bordereau. So impartial had De Pellieux been in his " inquiry," that, although the authorship of the bordereau was the only offence alleged against Esterhazy, he yet left it out of account and pronounced for a non lieu, without even submitting it to experts, by way of testing Mathieu Dreyfus' allegation. This sounds incredible, but here is De Pellieux' deposition at the fifth audience of the Zola trial : — " Labori : Yes or no. When General de Pellieux said ' There is no proof,' had the bordereau been laid before experts ? " De Pelheux : No. " Labori : Thank you." As to the evidence of M. Autant regarding Esterhazy's design in October 1897 to commit suicide, we can judge of how De Pellieux treated it from the following singular colloquy before the court-martial : — " The Commissary of the Government said : You GENERAL DE PELLIEUX. Page 192. THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 193 do not appear to me to be at all kindly disposed (i.e. to Esterhazy) ? " M. Autant : Is it to be ill-disposed to him to tell tlie truth ? Am I not as worthy of credence as Madame (Pays) ? " The Commissary : I do not say that, but / ih not understand why you make such a deposition." As to the evidence which Picquart had to give against the accused, we know how Ravary in his preliminary hearing of the witnesses took it ; for Picquart has told us at the Zola trial, on February II, 1898 : — " In the little preliminary investigations made by me (in 1896) I lit upon a certain number of grave matters. They received no attention (i.e. from Ravary and De Pellieux). All they said to me was this : ' But we know Esterhazy better than you do.' And in the report all my evidence is ignored." Ravary next reviews in a perfunctory and ironical way the evidence of Mathieu Dreyfus and Picquart, insinuating wherever he can that it is false, as in the following passage : — " With the assent of his chiefs, so he says, he procured the writing of Commandant Esterhazy, in order to officially compare it." As if the letters of Gonse were not in existence to prove the truth of Picquart's allegation. And now we come to Esterhazy's defence of himself. It is a string of pearls : — N 194 THE DREYFUS CASE "Being called upon to answer the accusation levelled at him, Commandant Esterhazy began by explaining the circumstances under which he be- came aware of the machinations directed against him, " In last October, when in the country, he received a letter signed Speranza, which gave him minute details about a plot against him which was insti- gated by a colonel named Piquart, and the name was written Piquart without a c." My readers have already noticed (see p. 183) that this was Esterhazy's habitual misspelling of the name. Picquart had drawn the attention of De Pellieux to this coincidence, but he and Ravary deemed it beneath the dignity of military justice to take note of such a clue. " Terrified by this grave communication, the Commandant went straight to Paris and immedi- ately laid the matter before the Minister of War, to whom he addressed the letter put in." The words " grave communication " are excellent to describe a missive written with the aid of Du Paty, and addressed to Esterhazy by himself. De PelUeux and Ravary both knew that the letter was one of " Esterhazy's to himself," for Picquart had proved it to them. We pass on : — " A little time afterwards he got a telegram pray- ing him to be at 11.30 p.m. behind the palisade of the Alexandre III. bridge, on the Invalidcs side THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 195 A person, it said, wished to give him very inter- estinsf information which concerned him. " The Commandant went to the place mentioned, and found in a carriage a lady, who began by making him swear to respect her incognito. He pledged his honour ; whereupon the unkno\vn lady {H7iconnue), whom the press has designated the ' veiled lady,' detailed to him at great length the manceuvres of those whom she called ' the gang.' " After that there followed three later interviews, all held under the same veil of discretion, sometimes behind the Church of the Sacre-Cceur, sometimes at Montsouris. " In the course of the second visit, the unknoAvn lady gave a sealed letter to her interlocutor, and said : ' Take the document contained in this enve- lope ; it proves your innocence, and if the torchon burns, hesitate not to use it.' " On the 1 4th November, the accused, being ad- vised to that effect, did not hesitate to part with the document UMrateur by sending it to the Minister of War, intrusting loyally to his chief the care of defending his threatened honour." This is the place to add a later paragraph from Ravary's report, because it suggests the official account devised by Du Paty of his veiled lady, who was to be, as we saw above (p. 174), identified with Picquart's mistress. I need hardly assure my readers that these insinuations against Picquart's character are baseless. The paragraph is the fol- lowing : — 196 THE DREYFUS CASE "One evening (i.e. in 1896) Lieutenant-Colonel Henry, on his return to Paris, had entered M. Pic- quart's room rather suddenly. There he saw Maitre Leblois . . . sitting close to the desk, and turning over and studying {compulsant) with Picquart the secret dossier. A photograph bearing the words, ' Cette canaille de D . . .' had got out of the dossier, and was spread out on the desk. " If one considers that this is the same document which was sent to the Minister of War by the accused, one is inevitably led to ask oneself, if the correlation which unites the two circumstances is not the result of their indiscretion ? " If one considers that it is the same document which Du Paty sent to the Eclair on September 14, 1896, after duly falsifying it, as an irrefutable proof of Dreyfus' guilt, one inevitably understands why he sent it to Esterhazy in November 1 897 as a docu- nunt HMratcur, by way of assuring that criminal of what paternal solicitude on the part of the ^tat major he was the object. Having executed this childish manoeuvre, Du Paty's next step was to suggest to his superiors in the War Office that it was Picquart who had in October 1896 stolen this document out of Henry's secret dossier of Dreyfus, and that his mistress, out of pity for the innocent Esterhazy, had sent it to him. His superiors readily joined in this silly plot, and, as we saw above (p. 1 70), had telegraphed out to the authorities at Tunis to put the question to Picquart whether a woman had not stolen such a document from him. The name THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 197 Sp&ranza had suggested itself to Du Paty because it was that of a circus girl with whom he had had an intrigue at Rouen. Before the court-martial Esterhazy was questioned by General de Luxer about this veiled lady, and the romance would not be complete without giving some of his answers. Of course De Luxer was not so rude as to press him with any awkward questions about adventures so romantic ; and indeed, had he wished to do so. General de Pellieux, who, as delegate of the Governor of Paris, sat just behind him and interfered as he liked,^ though quite irregularly, in the trial, would not have allowed him to ask them. Here are some of Esterhazy's replies : — " Two days earlier I got a telegram fixing a ren- dezvous behind the iwnt Alexandre III., on the Square of the Livalides. I went, and found there the lady of whom they have talked so much, but whom I did not know. She was covered with a thick veil. I could not see her face, and at her request I gave my word of honour not to try to recognise her. . . . " De Luxer : ' It is very singular that you had four rendezvous with the mysterious lady, and that you could not try to find out whence came the information she gave you.' " Esterhazy : ' Her information was accurate ; I had proof of that.' " De Luxer : ' You did not try to find out what ^ In the fourth audience of the Zola trial De Pellieux admitted this. 198 THE DREYFUS CASE interest she had in discovering to you the manoeuvres of your enemies ? ' " Esterhazy : ' She seemed to be animated by an imperious need to defend an unfortunate man against false imputations.' " De Luxer : ' Why not reproduce in full daylight these allegations ? Why hide oneself, if one has anything to say in the interest of truth ? ' " Esterhazy : ' I shall not even try henceforth to find out whence she derived her information, for I have sworn not to speculate about it.' " Was ever such a comedy witnessed in any court of law since civilisation began as in this court- martial, which was presided over by General de Luxer, watched over by General de Pellieux, and in which six colonels and three majors were judges, while two majors more took part as the prosecutors ? It was colossal. And now that my reader has watched the performance, as it were, from the public pit, I would beg him to follow me a moment behind the scenes, so that he may see the stage arrange- ments from the other side ; and here once more Count Christian Esterhazy unlocks for us the green- room door. " It was myself," avows Count Christian Esterhazy, " who wrote the letters of the veiled lady, in whom certain members of the etat major believed or pre- tended to believe. It is I that fabricated, just as they were wanted, the two letters about a rendezvous, in which promise was made of a precious document THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 199 by means of which Commandant Esterhazy was to defy his enemies. " The following were the circumstances under which I did it : — " I was at the time in the Rue de Douai at Madame Pays' house. General de Pellieux was just then busy with his inquiry, and he had begged my cousin to send him the letters of the veiled lady. The commandant, who had made up this story to ex- plain how he came by the secret document, an swered M. de Pellieux that he would let him have them on the morrow, when he appeared before him. He wanted them himself at the time. The com- mandant thereupon told me to write out in printing letters a missive which he would dictate. He dic- tated me two such. The text of the second was nearly as follows: — ' This evening, at six, Rue Saint- Eleuthere, at the corner of the old church of Mont Martre. Take care not to be followed.' The other was in the same terms, but appointing a rendezvous at the 'pont Alexandre III. These missives were meant for General de Pellieux' eye. " Esterhazy showed them to the general, who recommended him to go to the rendezvous in the Rue Saint-Eleuthere. But Esterhazy got out of the muddle, which he had not foreseen, by persuading the general that it was a useless step to take, since, being dogged as he was by Mathieu Dreyfus' de- tectives, the ' veiled lady' would not venture to show herself." " And what about the document libSrateur ? " was the next question put to Christian Esterhazy. "Ah, that goes back a little earlier. I was not 200 THE DREYFUS CASE yet in Paris at that time. It was the 14th Novem- ber,^ after making his deposition to the military council, that Commandant Esterhazy sent this document back to the Ministry of War. Du Paty de Clam had supplied him with it. I got my in- formation about it from the commandant himself as follows : — " ' The colonel, so my cousin told me, fixed a rendezvous with Madame Pays and himself at the Invalides. The moment was come, so he judged, for arming him with this proof, which was to make his innocence clear to all.' " Esterhazy, reassured as to the complicity of Du Paty de Clam, breathed afresh and plucked up courage. He wrote to various high personages in the army, asking for their protection, and sent a note to the President of the Republic beseeching him to help him. " In due time Colonel Du Paty showed himself as good as his word. The interview took place in the evening, at a fairly late hour. The three people were there, and the colonel held out a sealed packet to Esterhazy. He told him what was in it, but 1 My reader will notice a discrepancy between Ciiristian Ester- liazy's date and the lettrc cVun diplomate (see above, p. 24), which assigns October 16, 1897. In his communication to Count Casella, Colonel Panizzardi seems to put Esterhazy's visit, revolver in hand, to Schwartzkoppen at the earlier date, for he says, " Just imagine 1 When Esterhazy began to suspect that he would be caught, even before the denunciation of Mathieu Dreyfus, he dared to present himself before M. de Schwartzkoppen," &c. However, in his court- martial, Esterhazy swore that he returned the secret piece on November 14. He must, then, have had it in his possession for a month, and Christian Esterhazy errs in supposing that he received and returned it the same evening. Most probably his cousin did not relate the whole episode to him accurately. THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 201 forbade laim to open it, and invited him to take it back at once to the Ministry of War. " That is what Esterhazy did. He took farewell of the colonel and of Madame Pays, and went in a carriage to the Rue Saint-Dominique. It was too late. The door was shut, the concierge was gone to bed. The commandant threw the document into the letter-box of the Ministry, and it was given back to the officers the nest morning. Then he went back to the Rue de Douai. " The commandant did not know the exact text of this document, for at the interrogatory of General de Pellieux he could not say what was its opening sentence." Such was Christian Esterhazy's deposition before M. Bertulus, whose duty it has been to sift the ch- cumstances in the civil suit for forgery brought by Colonel Picquart against Esterhazy and his accom- plices. It was not published until August 5, 1898, in the Siecle. It only remains to give the text of the receipt for the document liherateur sent by the War Offi.ce to Esterhazy. The history of the pantomime would not be complete without it : — " Commandant, — The Minister of War acknow- ledges to you the receipt of the document which you have returned to him November 14, a docu- ment which was given to you, so you say, by an unknown woman, and which must be, you add, the photograph of a document belonging to the Ministry of War." 202 THE DREYFUS CASE This is from General Billot. Note how carefully he abstains from verifying Esterhazy's statement that it was only a copy, and not the original of a docu- ment so immeasurably private in character that it could only be shown by Mercier to Dreyfus' judges when secrecy within secrecy had been established. Du Paty chose this document rather than another, not because it really bore on Esterhazy's trial or in any way proved that he was not the author of the bordereau, but in order that Esterhazy might be able to say in case of need to Billot : " You must acquit me, for if you do not I will expose the secret evi- dence illegally used against Dreyfus by Mercier." Thus Esterhazy Avas induced and enabled by the etat major to blackmail Billot and every succeeding Minister of War. And now we must with regret take leave of the veiled lady and return to M. Ravary's text. " On the next day but one after the return of the document liberateur, M. Mathieu Dreyfus published his letters of denunciation in certain journals, and it was only during the judicial inquiry that Com- mandant Esterhazy became aware of all the charges brought against him by his enemies. " He repels them all with the greatest energy, and refutes them thus : — " The bordereau laid to his charge is not his work ; he had never seen it before it was shown him by the officer of judiciary police {i.e. De Pellieux). THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 203 " He admits that in the handwriting of this docu- ment there are to be met with words which so strikingly resemble his own writing that you would say it was traced. But the general effect is essen- tially different. His writing is very fanciful, and that explains how it is that in his handwriting the same letter is not uniformly shaped in the same way. "Indeed, he adds, even if the identity were still greater, that would still prove nothing, and it is easy for him to prove that it was impossible for him to procure the documents enumerated." The letter of Esterhazy to De Pellieux, of which the draft was given above (p. 187), proves that it was at Esterhazy's own suggestion that the experts Couard, Varinard, and Belhomme found that the bordereau was traced by Dreyfus from writing of Esterhazy's. In this way they satisfied the War Office men, who required a report to the effect that it was not the work of the real traitor ; they also respected the cliose jug^e, and they went as near as they could to fulfilling the dictates of their own graphological art, which, now that specimens of Esterhazy's writing were in everybody's hands, made the finding of Bertillon absurd and impossible. However, Ravary would gladly forget the " striking resemblance " admitted by Esterhazy, and in adduc- ing the report of the experts takes care to truncate it: — "On November 26, 1897, the experts deposited 204 THE DREYFUS CASE their finding in our hands. Their conclusions v/ere the following : — " The bordereau of which he is accused is not the work of the Commandant Walsin-Esterhazy. We affirm on our honour and conscience the present de- claration. " These conclusions, categorical as they are, per- emptorily invalidate the accusation brought by M. Mathieu Dreyfus." Esterhazy's assertion that his writing was fanciful, in the sense that he did not uniformly trace the same letters in the same way, was made in order to discount Mathieu Dreyfus' evidence that after November lO, 1896, he changed his handwriting, especially the capital letters M, N, A, which he thenceforth was careful to make in the German style. Esterhazy's own lame account of the " striking resemblance " of the bordereau to his own writing was accepted by his judges no less than by the experts as the most natural thing in the world. It was in vain that Mathieu Dreyfus pointed out that his brother had never seen or had any of Esterhazy's handwriting ; that the bordereau could not have been traced letter by letter, since it was written in a natural running and rapid hand, without any of the signs of halting and hesitation, without inequalities in the height of letters or other tell-tale character- istics of traced writing. In vain he pointed out that, if his brother had traced the other's handwriting, it THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 205 could only be in order that he might say when dis- covered, " It is not I that wrote this bordereau ; it is the Commandant Esterhazy." In vain he brought five of the highest authorities in the world to testify that the bordereau was in Esterhazy's undisguised and natural writing. What did all that signify to the generals, and colonels, and majors who were the judges ? Had they not been instructed not to trench on the Dreyfus verdict by the Commissary of the Government in these words ? — " I am here to speak in the name of the law. The court-martial has not to go back upon the case of the ex- Captain Dreyfus, who has been justly and legally condemned." In short, the Dreyfus verdict was like a theological dogma, which, having been pronounced ex cathedra by an infallible Pope or Council, requires all subse- quent criticism and history to be conformed to itself, instead of being made to conform itself to them. If Esterhazy had written the bordereau, then Dreyfus would be innocent. But Dreyfus was guilty, there- fore Esterhazy could not have written it. Du Paty de Clam had, indeed, made up one of his little romances to explain how Dreyfus might have procured specimens of Esterhazy's handwriting, and the traitor having been coached up in it de- posed to it before the court-martial. The following was the tenor of this new romance, as related by Esterhazy in his court-martial : — 2o6 THE DREYFUS CASE " My writing," he said, " has, I am sorry to say got into the hands of a great many members of the money-lending profession ; what is more, I was a second in the Crcniieu-Foa duel. . . . But that was not all. I remembered, when the bordereau was published by the Matin, that in February 1893 I received at Rouen, where I then was, a letter from an officer in the itat major, in which he said that he was charged to write a monograph on the use of the light cavalry in the Crimean campaign, and that knowing my father had led a brigade at Eupatoria he asked me to send him the documents I might have bearing on that epoch. I wrote a little work of seven or eight pages in folio, and sent it to my correspondent, Captain Brault, Rue de Chateaudun, " Do Luxer : What number ? " Esterhazy : I forget." Esterhazy then narrated to his judges how, as he had received no answer, he went to the itat major to ask about the matter, and was told that Brault had left it, and was in garrison at Toulouse. He wrote to him there to ask if he had received the " little work," and got the reply that Brault knew nothing about it, nor had over asked for the Eupatoria in- formation. " None of my friends or acquaintances live in the Rue de Chateaudun," wrote Brault. What was the purport of this string of lies ? Simply this ; M. Hadamard, the father of Madame Alfred Dreyfus, lived then as now at 52 Rue de Chateaudun, at which address we saw Esterhazy had just before sent him a threatening letter. Esterhazy THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 207 wished his judges to believe that Captain Dre3rfus had written, under Brault's name, to him in 1893 merely in order to get hold of specimens of his handwriting. General de Luxer took care to bring this suggestion into prominence by asking the ques- tion : — " This information (about Eupatoria) was asked for from you by a third person, who got you to address him ' Rue de Chateaudun.' That is it, is it not ? " Esterhazy answered : " Yes, my General," The traitor got up an entire correspondence with Brault, who was naturally much mystified about it. The astonishing thing is that after taking so much trouble over the matter, Esterhazy gave himself away in one of his letters to Brault, written October 29, 1897 ; for he writes in it thus : — " My dear Comrade, — Permit me to appeal to your recollections for some information of the greatest interest to me. In February i8g6, I sent you at your own request a notice about the part played at Eupatoria by the Fourth Hussars." . . . Now, Esterhazy should have written 1893; for any monograph of his sent as late as 1896 would not have served Dreyfus as a model from which to trace the bordereau ; for at that date he was already in Guiana. Had Esterhazy's slip anything to do with the hypothesis of Bertillon, broached to Pic- quart in May 1 896 (see above, p. 104), that the Jews 2o8 THE DREYFUS CASE had then for a year paist been trying to imitate the bordereau, and now had succeeded to the point of identity ? However this may be, Du Paty's hand can be clearly traced in this pretty figment. For why should Dreyfus be made to choose the name of Brault as a pseudonym under which to mask his suggested attempt to get a specimen of Esterhazy's writing ? In 1894 Dreyfus, asked by Du Paty if he knew any handwriting similar to that of the bor- dereau, mentioned Brault's. Specimens of Brault's writing were fetched, and Dreyfus at once declared that he had been mistaken. It was this incident of the Dreyfus trial, known to Du Paty in November 1897, but not to Esterhazy, which suggested the introduction of his name into this apocryph, which is very similar in character to the romance of the veiled lady. The rest of the report of Ravary is occupied with the abominable charges against Colonel Picquart, in support of which, at the subsequent trial of Zola, the military witnesses one after another steeped them- selves to the lips in perjury and lies, which yet, after all their efforts, crumbled, and failed to form a coherent system. This is the text : — " There remains the accusation brought by Lieut.-Col. Picquart, and based on the telegram card. " As regards Esterhazy, this accusation does not deserve to be taken seriously. Not only is the authenticity of this card far from being proved, but THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 209 the naivete of its being addressed as it is gives tlie best measure of its value." It is remarkable how critical these judges were of a document incriminating Esterhazy, at the same time that they gorged Henry's grotesque for- geries. "Proceeding still further in his refutation, the accused alleges and affirms that the document is false, and that the accuser is the author of it." Esterhazy could hardly assume any other position about the petit bleu, which started Picquart on his track; but who would have thought that the etat major and three Ministers of War in succession would have seriously adopted Esterhazy 's charge, and in- terned Picquart au secret for nearly four months, while they were forging evidence in support of it, and suborning witnesses against him ? As if the moral murder of Dreyfus, and the acquittal " to order " of the real traitor were not guilt enough, they seem to revel in crime. Ravary continues : — " Count Esterhazy protests with all his might against the unqualifiable methods pursued by Lieut.- Col. Picquart, who, without any mandate, and for long months, gave himself up to odious investi- gations into his private life, has cast suspicions on his honourable character, and has committed mon- strous illegalities by violating his correspondence, and by venturing even to search his apartment during his absence." 2IO THE DREYFUS CASE All this is just as if a pickpocket, caught com- mitting his peculiar crime, were to protest against the " unqualifiable " action of the policeman who arrests him. Ravary forgets that Picquart's house had been ransacked just before without any writ of high treason being out against him, and he equally ignores the fact that Picquart acted with the ap- proval of his superiors, as Gonse's letters prove. We pass on to the last paragraph dealing with the bor- dereau : — " The result of the inquiry (of De Pellieux about the bordereau) was far from being favourable to the accusation. Not only do the depositions of the wit- nesses present numerous contradictions with the statements of Picquart, but they reveal, moreover, deeds of extreme gravity committed by that officer in the conduct of his department. " Thus, when he had been put in possession of the papers, among which must have been found the fragments of the telegram card, he kept them for more than a month before handing them on to Commandant Lauth, whose regular business it was to judge of the importance of papers brought from that particular quarter." One wonders what Picquart was head of the bureau for, except to keep by him, if he thought it neces- sary, for a month fragments of such a paper, and to judge himself of its importance. However, at the Zola trial on February 8, 1898, Lauth contradicted the deposition he had made before De Pellieux, and THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 211 reduced the time during which Picquart kept the petit hlcu after it was first brought to him to six or eight days. " Later on, when the card had been reconstituted under his orders, Picquart invited Lauth to photo- graph it, expressly recommending him to efface in the negatives all traces of its being torn. This ' correc- tion ' of it would, said Picquart, enable him to give the document a greater look of authenticity, and to tell his chiefs, if need be, that he had intercepted it in the post." We must infer that in the bureaux of the etat major, if a spy's letter is brought torn up into tiny pieces, and doubt is cast on its authenticity by reason of its being so torn, the credit of the docu- ment will be restored by the effacing in a photo- graph made of it (not in the original, mark that !) the lines of tear, as if the " chiefs " could not demand to see the original itself. Ravary argues also as if the photographic copies themselves went through the post. In any case his accusation of Picquart does not presuppose much intelligence on the part of the chiefs. But the most crushing rejoinder to Lauth's charge was, that the bordereau itself, before Picquart joined the Intelligence Bureau, had been brought in in bits, gummed together and photo- graphed, the photographs being so manipulated as to obliterate in them the lines of tear. The photo- graphs so manipulated were the only copies of it shown to Gobert, Bertillon, and other experts, none 212 THE DREYFUS CASE of whom were ever allowed to see the orisrinal. It was also a copy thus " corrected " that Du Paty com- municated to the Matin. The force of sycophancy therefore could no further go than it does in the above paragraph, and in those of similar import which follow. In the Zola trial, Lauth and the War Office archivist, Gribelin, went further, and pretended that Picquart had tried to get the latter to go to the post-office with the iMit bleu, and to get a postage stamp affixed with a postmark on it of an earlier date. These witnesses swore : ( i ) that the petit bleu reached the etat major in about sixty little bits, of which the biggest was no bigger than a third of an inch square ; (2) that Lauth himself gummed it together with transparent slips of adhesive paper laid along and upon the lines of tear; (3) that Lauth placed these strips on the address side ; (4) that Picquart, after the card had been thus recon- structed, asked Gribelin to get the post-office authorities to stamp and postmark it in the way described, that it might look as if it had gone through the post. Their joint perjury became manifest when Zola's counsel pointed out that by their own admission the stamp would have had to be affixed on top of and outside the strips of adhesive paper (!) ; that there would also have lacked in the stamp any lines of tear to correspond with those of the part of the letter-card on which it was super- posed, the largest intact bit of the card being only THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 213 one third of the stamp in size ; lastly, that Picquart had no interest to make out that it had gone through the post, for had it been intercepted at Esterhazy's house instead of on German territory, it would have roused no suspicion against him. " In the course of the same interview Picquart asked Lauth if he would not be willing to certify that the writing of the telegram-card was that of a high foreign personage. This strange demand was received with lively protests by his subordinate." In point of fact, Picquart has never declared that the petit Ueu was in Schwartzkoppen's own hand- writing. It merely was suspect to him by reason of its provenance. Had it come from anywhere save the German Embassy, he would have attached no value to it. Picquart also swore that he never made any such proposition to Lauth, who remained on terms of friendly intimacy with him for months afterwards. " Every one in the bureau knew that by Picquart's orders the correspondence of Esterhazy had been for months long seized in the post." Here again General Gonse's letters prove that Picquart had his full assent, if for a few weeks he intercepted Esterhazy's correspondence. " They also knew equally well that he had employed an agent to ransack, without any legal mandate, the accused's house during his absence. " At last, when his superiors, informed of these 2 14 THE DREYFUS CASE disgraceful proceedings, and frightened at the scandal that might ensue, had advised him to put an end to them, Picquart allowed himself to be carried away by his feelings and exclaimed : ' Ah, they do not want to go forward up there, but I will make them.' " Once more the above charge is refuted by Gonse's letters, and by the fact that Gonse continued to write to Picquart for some five months in the most affectionate way, which he could not have done if the above were true. What really happened has been related by Picquart. On September 3, 1896, he went and laid before Gonse the results of his inquiry into the Dreyfus-Esterhazy affair. " The General," he says, " listened to my reasons without combating them, but only made a face and said : ' Then they must have made a mistake.' Then he enjoined me not to meddle with the matter. . . . On his return to Paris, September 15, 1898, he was still more emphatic, and I think I ought to write down the very words of the conversation which I had with him on the subject, and which will never be effaced from my memory : — " The General : What does it matter to you, if this Jew is in the He du Diable ? " But if he is innocent ? " What! would you go back upon that trial ? It would be an awful story. Generals Mercier and Saussier were involved in it. " My General, he is innocent, and that is sufficient reason for going back upon it. But, from another THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 215 point of view, you know that the family is hard at work and looking everywhere for the true culprit. Supposing they find him, how will we look then ? " Oh, if you say nothing, no one will know any- thing about it. ^ " My General, what you say is abominable. I do not know what I shall do, but in any case I will not carry this secret with me into my tomb. " And then I left the room hastily. From that moment I had made up my mind." Let us return to Ravary's text : — " The information {i.e. preliminary hearing) has revealed yet other special facts, which lead one to believe that Colonel Picquart may well have been the soul of the scandalous campaign which has just been got up, but in which he seems to have been clever enough to lie low himself, while he left others to deal the first blows. " In the month of August 1896, taking advantage of the absence of Colonel Henry, M. Picquart had opened that officer's safe and took possession of a dossier in which were secret documents. During two months he kept it, although of custom he should have every evening put back important documents in their place." We have already seen that Picquart was head ot the bureau, and in authority over Henry. There was nothing but the dead hand of Sandherr to keep the particular safe shut. Then follow the para- graphs in Ravary's report already cited (p. 196), in which Picquart is accused of having, in the autumn 2i6 THE DREYFUS CASE of 1896, shown to Leblois the secret dossier. This allegation rested on Henry's evidence. He swore over and over again that he saw Picqiiart and Leblois examining it together " in the course " of October 1896, not later, in Picquart's room at the War Office. But it was proved that Leblois that autumn was not in Paris until November 7. He also swore before Ravary that the piece " ceMe canaille de D. . ." had been taken out of the envelope and was spread on the desk before them. In the Zola trial he swore that it was not taken out, but that a corner only of the photograph of it protruded. Picquart denied the incident altogether ; whereupon Henry, the forger, called him a liar publicly, and the presiding judge refused to intervene to protect the witness Picquart. Obviously Henry was per- juring himself throughout, and the entire story was fabricated by him and Du Paty by way of proving that Picquart had started Leblois and Scheurer- Kestner on their campaign nearly a year earlier than he did, and had revealed to the former the secret document. This, it was pretended, was a heinous misdemeanour for Picquart to commit ; but when Du Paty de Clam was proved to have given the same document to Esterhazy, the War Office did not complain. Picquart, in fact, never com- mitted any such indiscretion at all. Ravary's report then blames Picquart for com- municating Gonse's letters to Leblois, and it cer- tainly has had awkward results for Gonse, since THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 217 they convict him of being a renegade from the truth. Then comes the final assault on Picquart : — " Such is the ensemUe of the facts revealed by the witnesses, formerly chiefs and official colleagues of Colonel Picquart. It seems so serious that, in spite of the authority which should attach to the word of honour of a higher officer, one does well to ask if it is possible to accord to the basis of his accusation, to the telegram-card, of which the origin is, to say the least, mysterious, authenticity enough to support a charge of high treason ; the more so because the character- istic attempts made to impart to this document a character of prima facie genuineness prove to excess that it had none at all in itself. It is not our busi- ness to conduct the trial of Colonel Picquart. To the military authority will belong the duty of examining and appreciating his actions and of visiting upon them the consequences they merit." The above reveals clearly the line towards Pic- quart which the ^tat major had already resolved to pursue. They had arranged with Esterhazy that the officer whose merit it had been to detect his treason should be accused of having himself forged the petit hleu or telegram- card which led to the traitor's detection. This charge of forgery levelled at Picquart is the crowning infamy of the 6tat major, and of the all too numerous French officers who passively endorse, where they do not applaud, every wicked, every cowardly act which wanton complicity in treason forces on their superiors. 2i8 THE DREYFUS CASE This accusation rests on nothing but the evidence of Major Lauth and of Gribelin, which I have analysed, and on that of Henry, who swore that, although documents intercepted at a certain Embassy were always brought first to himself, the petit Ueu had never been so brought to him. It is, therefore, mainly on the word of this perjured forger that Colonel Picquart has been kept in a dungeon for over four months. At the Zola trial, in order to rebut Henry's perjury, the defence demanded that the detective who intercepted the i^ctit Ueu, along with similar documents, should be produced and put in the box. The War Office, backed up by the judge, absolutely refused. After this outburst against Picquart, Ravary pro- ceeds to say a few unctuous words of Esterhazy's private life : — " Certainly the private life of Commandant Ester- hazy cannot be held up as a model before our young officers. But these errors, even the most repre- hensible of them, furnish no ground for suppos- ing that he could have been guilty of the greatest crime that a Frenchman could commit." Not a word of the letters to Madame de Boul- ancy. Emphasis is laid, however, on the false testi- monials to Esterhazy's character as an officer, which for the occasion and to order his superiors had produced. On this point I give M. Clemenceau's question to the traitor put at the Zola trial : — THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 219 " Commandant Esterhazy has indicated many- times in the letters (to Madame de Boulancy)' which I have just had the honour to read to you' that he was exasperated, and that his exasperation explains his use of such strong terms. Is it not the case that he has always enjoyed the most excellent testimonials from his chiefs ? " Esterhazy refused to answer any questions asked by Zola's counsel, who continued : — " Monsieur le President, will you permit me to read out these testimonials ? " This is the character assigned by the chef de corps to Esterhazy : — " ' One of the most distinguished of our higher officers and very capable. Does his duty with most absolute devotion. By virtue of his knowledge, his experience, his energy of character and the lofti- ness of his sentiments, he may aspire to reach the highest grades of the military hierarchy ; must be promoted before his age becomes an obstacle.' " This is laid on " pretty thick," and shows how the head of a French corps d'arm6e can lie " to order," when a traitor's character needs to be sheered up. The words " very capable " {trh capable) remind one of Colonel von Schwartzkoppen's tribute to the character of his spy. For on January i, 1898, Count Casella asked him this question : — " Have you known Commandant Esterhazy ? He has himself avowed his relations with you. Would 220 THE DREYFUS CASE it be indiscreet to ask what is your personal opinion about him ? " " I think him capable of anything " (capable de tout), replied the Colonel. Several other French testimonials were then recited by Maitre Cl^menceau, ending with the following note for the year 1896: — " Conduct very good, morality excellent, character cool and energetic, excellent education, lively in- telligence, safe judgment." Except for the good conduct and excellent morality, one is inclined to allow to Esterhazy the other qualities here attributed to him. A swindler may well possess them ; and Esterhazy's fellow-officers, so far as they have come in all this painful business under the eye of Europe, have done their best to verify his safe judgment of them as expressed in his letters to Madame de Boulancy. The next question put by Cl^menceau was very apt : — " M. le President, will you ask the witness whether he was not somewhat taken by surprise at his court- martial when they read out to him these excel- lent testimonials ? " The reading of Ravary's report, which concluded in favour of a non-lieu — i.e. of there being no case to go before a court — was after all succeeded by the formal trial of Esterhazy. I have laid before my reader the more important episodes of it. The accused had been carefully coached up by his THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 221 accusers in the answers he must give to their ques- tions ; yet this did not save him from a few sHps, passed over, of course, by the judges. I give an example. The bordereau was written early in April 1894. Esterhazy, of course, knew its real date better than did his judges. But he also supposed, and wrongly, that it had been brought to the Intelligence Depart- ment immediately after he had written it ; whereas it was, in fact, only given into the hands of Gonse by Henry at the end of September 1894. Now Esterhazy 's line of defence was based on his mis- taken supposition ; for he tried to prove that he only acquired the items of information enumerated in the bordereau at dates later than the April of 1894, — later, that is, than the date at which he sup- posed the French authorities got hold of it ; his argument being that he could not sell items to Schwartzkoppen three or four months before he procured them. I pick out of his cross-examina- tion in the court-martial a single answer out of many illustrative of this flaw in the harmony which Du Paty had sought to pre-establish between the accused and his accusers : — " M. Mathieu Dreyfus," argued Esterhazy, " main- tains that the bordereau was written in March or April 1894. Ko^v it was only in the month of August that I was at the firing-school {t^cole a feu). I could not therefore have betrayed the document in question (viz., the note on the hydraulic brake). 222 THE DREYFUS CASE " De Luxer asked : Yes, but could you not always ask artillery officers for information ? " Esterhazy : I was only at the manoeuvres in June. How could I have given information about it in April ? " Questioned in a similar way about the other items of the bordereau, Esterhazy admitted that he had known them also or come by them in the year 1894, but in each case at dates later than April, the date at which he was conscious of having written the bordereau, and at which he therefore supposed that it had fallen into the hands of the authorities. Had he known that it only fell into their hands at the end of September 1894, he must have chosen quite another set of subterfuges. How much he had miscalculated in his court-martial was made clear at the Zola trial, at the eighth audience of which General de Pellieux said : " The bordereau does not belong to the month of April ; I appeal to General Gonse." And the latter, thus appealed to, attested that the Ministry of War only received it at the end of Scptemher 1894. Had Esterhazy known as much as that, he would have sworn that he only came by his knowledge of its various items later than that date. It illustrates the perfunctory character of Ester- hazy's court-martial, and probably of French court- martials in general, that not one of his judges had the wit to ask him this question : — How do you know that the bordereau was THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 223 written in April 1894? Why do you accept Mathieu Dreyfus' conjectural ^ date and make it the base of your defence ? We Iniow, on the con- trary, that it belongs to the month of September, for at the end of that month, and not before, did the War Office, according to General Gonse, receive it from the agent who intercepted it. Probably if they had noticed so obvious a flaw in his defence, they would not have been so rude as to ask him embarrassing questions about it. One would like to know what the bordereau was doing between early April and end of September 1894. Perhaps this is a secret which died with Colonel Henry, By the time of the Zola trial the generals seem to have scented the flaw in Esterhazy's first line of defence. Colonel Picquart may have pointed it out in his evidence at the court-martial, so dis- creetly kept by the huis clos from the public gaze. However this may be, they then chose for him another line of defence. This was to argue that 1 Mathieu Dreyfus in his evidence said : " The bordereau must have been written (a dH ctrc ecrit) in the spring of 1894, not far from the end of March. For had it been written much later, the betrayal of the project of a firing manual would have been without value. Its author says that he is just off to the manoeuvres. Esterhazy took part in the spring manceuvres of 1894. There is then a per- fect concordance." Thus Mathieu's only reason for dating the bordereau in April was that at that date Esterhazy was asking for certain information and doing certain things. Why did Ester- hazy accept Mathieu's chronological conclusion, yet deny all Mathieu's premises ? Obviously because, as author of the bor- dereau, he knew Mathieu's date to be the true one. Yet no one else knew it. 224 THE DREYFUS CASE an officer in his position could under no circum- stances have procured such information, nor have written such a bordereau. One after another they took their oaths to that. Yet Esterhazy a month before had admitted that he had possessed all the items of information, only contending that it was at a later date than the month of April, to which he said the bordereau belonged, that he had ac- quhed them. Here the profane naturally ask why — if in 1898 the Generals Gonse and De Boisdeffre were convinced that Esterhazy could not have written the bordereau — had they in 1896 supposed him to be its author, and under that supposition authorised Picquart to procure from Esterhazy 's colonel specimens of his handwriting to be compared with the bordereau ? Why up to the middle of September 1896 did they go on encouraging Picquart in his researches ? If he could not under any circumstances have written it, why in 1896 did they entertain the hypothesis ? When Picquart entered the box as a witness, the Commissary of the Government at once demanded that the rest of Esterhazy's court-martial be heard in camera, and the court granted the demand. They had said all they could overtly to blacken his character, and had held him up as a forger. It did not suit their plans that the public should know what he had to say in defence of himself and to the discredit of Esterhazy. The latter was triumphantly and unanimously THE APOTHEOSIS OF TREASON 225 acquitted of high treason on January 11, 1898. He was the hero of the hour, and when he left the court " without a stain on his character," aged generals, their eyes filled with tears of joy, acclaimed him as the victim of the Jews. " Hats off, gentle- men," they said to the surging mob of anti-Semites, " Hats off, before the martyr of the Jews ! " The streets rang with shouts of " Vive I'armc^e ! Vive la France ! Vive Esterhazy ! " The cousin of the French pretender, the Prince Henri d'Orleans, rushed at the acquitted of treason, threw his arms round him, and embraced him warmly. General de Pellieux arranged with Esterhazy the exact wording of the paragraph in which the official news agency was to announce the circumstances of his acquittal, and on the morrow wrote to him a fresh letter beginning, " Mon cher Commandant," and authorising him to prosecute the journals which attributed the " Uhlan " letter to him, an authorisation of which, I hardly need say, Esterhazy has never availed himself. On the same day Colonel Picquart was arrested by the mOitary authorities, and thrown into a cell in the fortress of Mont Valerien. CHAPTER XII THE ZOLA TRIAL The military party imagined that by their acquittal of Esterhazy, not indeed of the charge of ^vi'iting the bordereau, but of treason, they had given the death-blow to the cause of revision. It had the opposite effect, for numbers of people were so shocked at the scandal that they now for the first time openly declared themselves in favour of a re-trial of Dreyfus. The people — and they are not too nume- rous in France — who form their own opinions, instead of taking them ready-made from their pet journals, and who reflect quietly instead of shouting, began to protest all over the country against the conspnacy formed to hide the truth. Among those who thus came forward and openly protested were ten mem- bers of the Institute, two professors of the College de France, ten members of the teaching staff of the Ecole Normale or of the Sorbonne, eight professors of the Faculty of Medicine — all these in Paris. Of the provincial faculties, twenty-two professors and sixty- seven cigHgds or assistant professors in letters, science, and philosophy. Among those who signed their names to the protest were many who held their posts at the pleasure of the Government, and who, EMILE ZOLA. Pa^e 226. THE ZOLA TRIAL 227 therefore, risked losing their daily bread by their action. It was then that Zola came forward, and in a letter to the Aurore newspaper, as bold as it was eloquent, spoke for all and to all. I had been no admirer of Zola in his earlier books. Though never prurient, like Paul Bourget's, his works are yet often marred by indecencies, and this fault prevents such a book as his " Germinal " from rising to the highest level of art ever touched by the novel. In his latest works, however, he had purged himself of earlier impurities, and in his three novels, " La Debacle," " Lourdes," and " Rome," he lays his hand on the besetting vices, more especially on the super- stition of his countrymen. As the author of these four works of extraordinary genius, he was well qualified to denounce to his countrymen in trumpet tones the mystery of iniquity being perpetrated in their midst by a band of military and Jesuit con- spirators. Many not wholly unfriendly to the cause of right have blamed Zola for the excessive vigour of his denunciations. I think wrongly. The only hope for the cause was to bring the affair into a civil Court of Assize, to get the officers Gonse, Boisdeffre, and De Pellieux into the box and cross- examine them ; above all, to provide Colonel Picquart with an opportunity of saying iirhi et orhi what he knew. Madame Dreyfus had more than once ap- pealed to the Keeper of the Seals to set the Supreme Court in motion, but her petitions were rejected 228 THE DREYFUS CASE with contumely. Sclieurer-Kestner, the last repre- sentative of Alsace-Lorraine before those provinces were torn from France, had appealed to Billot, trust- ing to his life-long acquaintance with him, and to the august position he enjoyed as vice-president of the Senate. He had reaped nothing but insult and injury by his pleadings for justice and truth. Zola was determined not to plead, but to wither with fierce denunciation the nest of criminals at the War Office. The time was past for gentler methods, and he penned that most terrible of all philippics, his letter beginning J'accuse. In this, after a long and masterly review of the entire case, Zola summed up his accusations as follows : — " I accuse Lieutenant- Colonel Du Paty de Clam of having been the diabolical contriver of the judi- cial error, unconscious I would fain believe ; and of having afterwards defended his nefarious work for three years by machinations as ridiculous as they are guilty. " I accuse General Mercier of having made him- self the accomplice, through his mere weakness of character, in one of the greatest iniquities of the century. " I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands the certain proofs of Dreyfus' innocence and of having stifled them ; of having incurred the guilt of a betrayal of humanity, of a betrayal of justice, in order to serve political ends and to save an 4tat iiiajor that was compromised. " I accuse Generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse of THE ZOLA TRIAL 229 having made themselves accompHces in the same crime — the one, no doubt, led on by clerical passion, the other perhaps by that esprit de corps which makes of the War Office bureaux an ark holy and not to be touched. " I accuse General de Pellieux and Commandant Ravary of having turned their inquuy into a work of villainy, by which I mean that the inquiry was conducted with the most monstrous partiality ; and that of this partiality the report of Ravary is an imperishable monument, brazen in its audacity. " I accuse the three handwriting experts — MM. Belhomme, Varinard, and Couard — of having drawn up lying and fraudulent reports ; unless, indeed, a medical examination shows them to be the victims of a diseased eyesight and judgment. " I accuse the War Office of having carried on in the press, particularly in the Eclair and the Echo de Paris, an abominable campaign intended to lead astray opinion and hide its misdoings. " Lastly, I accuse the first court-martial of having violated right by condemning an accused man on a document which was kept secret, and I accuse the second court-martial of having shielded this illegality ' to order,' committing in its turn the judicial crime of acquitting a man they knew to be guilty," This letter was published on January 13, 1898, being addressed to the President of the Republic. M. M^line, the Premier, in answer to a question in the Chamber of Deputies, hastened to declare that a prosecution of M. Emile Zola was already ordered. He had forgotten that his action exposed the Mat 230 THE DREYFUS CASE major to cross-examination in the witness-box of a civil court, and also risked the virtual revision in that court by a civil jury of the sentence on Dreyfus. The action was, therefore, as Esterhazy says in his letter to his cousin (see above, p. 1 78), a great tactical error. However, the Government sought to dimi- nish the risk by limiting the indictment to the following passage in Zola's letter : — "A court-martial has just dared 'by order' to acquit an Esterhazy, in supreme and insolent de- fiance of all truth, of all justice. And it is finished. France has this blot on her scutcheon. History will record that it was under your presidency that such a social crime could be committed. " They have given this iniquitous verdict, and it will for ever weigh upon our courts - martial, for ever from now tarnish all their decisions. The first court-martial may have been lacking in intelli- gence ; the second has been forced into crime. "... I accuse the second court-martial of hav- ing shielded," &c. The indictment of Zola was signed, not by the aggrieved members of Esterliazy's court - martial, but by the Minister of War, Billot. M. Delegorgue was the presiding judge, and, in spite of his ill-con- cealed determination to please the Government by stifling all evidence of a character to compromise the War Office, a great deal of light was shed on the affair, especially by the evidence of Colonel Picquart. He was the one witness who Icaew everything from THE ZOLA TRIAL 231 the underside, the single mihtary witness, with the exception of Forzinetti, who was honest and zealous for right. Forzinetti, as I have said, had already- been dismissed because of his revelations in the Figaro; and when the trial began on February 7, 1898, Picquart had already been arrested and arraigned upon the frivolous charge of having com- municated to Leblois documents concerning the national defence ; as if by any interpretation Gonse's letters could be so described. At the same time, to impose on public opinion, an inquiry had been opened at the War Office into the abstraction by the " veiled lady " of the secret document, and its transfer into Esterhazy's hands. Needless to say this second inquiry is not yet concluded. The court of inquhy had, of course, condemned Picquart in camera, but had left it to the Minister of War, Billot, to fix his penalty. Billot was adjourning his decision till when ? Till the trial of Zola was over. For it was still hoped, though faintly, by his (Picquart's) superiors, that at the eleventh hour he would vote with them and perjure himself. There- fore the nature of his penalty was left undecided hanging over him. If he were honest, they were prepared to be severe; if he were willing to stifle his conscience like themselves, his penalty would be nominal, and he would be promoted. They hoped to intimidate him. They also reflected that by leaving him still in the army till the trial was over he, being an honourable man, unlike themselves 232 THE DREYFUS CASE would not be able to say all he knew or would like to say, because he would feel himself bound by the professional secret. And this was actually so. For example, in his evidence on February 1 1 , he was asked about one of the documents in Dre^^fus' secret dossier, which really applied to Esterhazy, and answered thus : — " / would very much like to say something on this point ; but I consider that I cannot do so, unless I am freed from the obligation to professional secrecy by the Minister of War. If he will free me from it, I will speak ; if he will not, I shall not." The other military witnesses showed no such a sense of their responsibility. Whenever an oppor- tunity offered of traducing Dre3rfus or Picquart, they freely broke through all reserve in order to use it. On the other hand, whenever they were asked awk- ward questions, they parried them by invoking the professional secret. Even hint at the circumstances under which Dreyfus had been condemned they might not, but they might make any number of little speeches aflfirming their indestructible faith in his guilt. Zola's advocates claimed to bring evidence to prove the whole of his letter J' accuse, on the groimd of the connexity of its matter with the few clauses cited in the indictment. But the accusers argued that, as the Dreyfus case was a chose jug6e, no evidence relat- ing to it must be heard nor questions asked about it. This claim the presiding judge granted — though THE ZOLA TRIAL 233 it violated the legal rights of the defence — and enforced in the most one-sided way ; for the military witnesses were allowed by him to break through the ruling at will, at the same time that he applied it to disallow any question of an import compromising to the 6tat major. In one case a witness — General de Pellieux — even refused to answer a question because it referred to the affaire Esterhazy, and the judge allowed his objection. One supreme example from among many I must give in illustration of the par- tiality with which the judge interpreted the sanctity of the chose jugee. At one stage of the trial the prosecution was flagging. The ridiculous explana- tions offered by the official experts in favour of their various and contradictory reports about the bordereau, and in particular the antics of M. Bertillon, had amused the jury, but had not convinced them. On the other hand, the leading palasographers and judges of handwriting in France, M. Crepieux-Jamin, and MM. Meyer, Giry, Havet, all three members of the French Institute, had sworn that the handwriting was in their opinion Esterhazy's, and had adduced in proof of their convictions reasons more serious, if less sibylline, than M. Bertillon's. Then M. de Castro's recognition of the bordereau as Esterhazy's struck them as important. Over and above that, a procession of the noblest and most distinguished republicans in France — MM. Hubbard, De Pressense, Ranc, Scheurer-Kestner, Thevenet, Jaures, Trarieux, above all, the old man eloquent, Grimaux, the savant 234 THE DREYFUS CASE — had passed before tliem, all appealing to them with the earnestness of profound conviction to do justice, and by their verdict make their light to shine before all men. The military faction felt that things were going ill with them, and that they would lose the verdict unless they could overawe the jury by some evidence extraordinary and irrefutable of Dreyfus' guilt. Then on February i6, General de Pellieux, who without any legal right had interfered throughout Esterhazy's trial whenever the argument strayed momentarily from the path of acquittal, stepped valiantly into the breach and demanded of the jury a vote of confidence in the Mat major. " What would you have ? " he cried. " What is to become of your army in the day of danger, which is nearer perhaps than you dream of ? What would you have your unhappy soldiers do, led under fire by officers whom others have striven to discredit in their eyes ? ... It is to a mere butchery that they are leading your sons, gentlemen of the jury. But M. Zola will have gained a fresh battle, will write another cUhdde, will carry the French language all over the universe, all over a Europe from which France in that day will have been struck out." And then, as if he himself, and perhaps the Mat major, felt nervous about the result, and inclined to hedge, De Pellieux went on to say this :— " Revision — I shall not be contradicted by my comrades — revision matters little to us; it is a \ THE ZOLA TRIAL 235 matter of indifference, of pure indifference. We would have been deliglited for the court-martial of 1894 to have acquitted Dreyfus; for it would have proved that there was no traitor in the French army, and we mourn for that. But, gentle- men, what the court-martial of 1898 could not allow nor would allow, the gulf it would not cross, was this, that an innocent man should be substi- tuted for Dreyfus, guilty or not guilty!' This outburst, perhaps honest, was felt to be in- discreet ; for it admitted the possibility of Drejrfus being innocent, of revision. In the course of that night the War Office, if it had really wavered in face of the odds against them, plucked up fresh courage ; and on De Pellieux was imposed the task of effacing the impression his words had made. Without any cause, unprovoked by anything in the arguments of the defence, De Pellieux came forward the next afternoon to the bar of the court, and, with the utmost gravity, as if overborne by his sense of responsibility, produced Henry's celebrated forgery, the letter supposed to have been written in Novem- ber 1896 by one attache to the other, mentioning Dreyfus by name. To emphasise its importance he added : " General de Boisdeffre will confirm my words. Let him be called ! . . . Commandant Delcasse, go quick and fetch General de Boisdeffre ! In a carriage ! Quick ! " General de Boisdeffre arrives breathless, but the court has risen ; it is too late. The judge, subsequently taxed on the point, 236 THE DREYFUS CASE declared that General de Pellieux had taken him by surprise with his secret document. If so, why after a night's interval did he allow De Boisdeffre to step forward and endorse De Pellieux' revelation ? He knew that De Boisdefifre had come to the bar to do so, and did not try to stop him. Then when Labori, Zola's counsel, demanded as of right to be allowed to cross-examine the two generals about the extraordinary secret document they had adduced against the unfortunate Dreyfus, the judge brusquely forbade him to put any questions. Never did a judge more cynically abuse his position. And then, after being allowed to back up De Pellieux, De Boisdefifre, as if that were not enough, was allowed to clank his sword and overawe the jury thus : — " And now, gentlemen, permit me in conclusion to say one thing. You are the jury ; you are the nation. If the nation has no confidence in the chiefs of the army, in those who are responsible for the national defence, they are ready to leave to others this heavy task. You have only to speak. I shall not say another word." And, having fired off this terrific threat of a general strike of the itat major at the heads of the tinkers and tailors of the jury, the gorgeously-clad general officers theatrically quitted the scene. After that the jury could not waver ; their verdict of guilty was torn from them at the point of the sword. THE ZOLA TRIAL 237 Among the military witnesses in this trial, Picquart enjoyed a splendid isolation. Assailed by them with the basest charges and calumnies, recklessly advanced, with never an attempt to substantiate them, he yet retained his self-control, unmoved by their noise and fury ; always courteous towards his equals and respectful to his superiors. All that he could properly say he said with perfect simplicity and clearness, choosing his words with care, and sometimes pausing a moment for one which exactly fitted his conviction ; no insinuations, no innuendoes, no rhetorical fireworks to dazzle the jury; above all, no ascription of bad faith to his fellow-officers, not even to the puffy, red-faced, vulgar forger, Henry, who was their guide and Cory~pha3us in malice and perjury. Where he thought he had no right to speak because of the tie of professional secrecy, he kept silent, even under the grossest provocation of his unscrupulous opponents. One recognised in him the ideal head of an army intelligence department — the mind slow to suspect, clear to unravel, just to condemn, swift to strike. All the insight, all the balance, all the " prudence " was there for which, before " the devil entered into him," General Gonse had nothing but encomiums. Some who marked the contrast be- tween him and all the other officers, out of whom the truth had literally to be dragged, and who, judged by their manner, had everything to conceal, wondered how a man of Picquart's conscience and 238 THE DREYFUS CASE intelligence had ever achieved such high promo- tion among them. How penetrating, for example, was his detection, on February 18, of the Henry forgery, which the day before De Pellieux had brandished before the astonished jury : — " There are," he said, " among the pieces (in the secret dossier of Drejrfus) some whose genuineness it would be well to verify. There is one in particular, which reached the Ministry at a well-determined moment — at the moment, namely, when the Com- mandant Esterhazy needed to be defended, when it had become necessary to prove that the author of the bordereau was another than he. Well, it came just at the right time, this new proof, as far as I can see. They have never shown it me, but they have talked to me about it ; at the same time they would never tell me where it came from. However, I find that this document, if we regard the moment when it appeared, and, above all, the terms in which it is couched, and which are utterly improbable — well, this document may with good reason be put down as a forgery." Maitre Labori asked : " Is the piece alluded to by Colonel Picquart that which was talked about yester- day?" Picquart answered : " Yes ; it is the one of which General de Pellieux spoke. If he had not mentioned it yesterday, I should not have mentioned it to-day. It is a forgery." However, this forgery carried conviction to the THE ZOLA TRIAL 239 minds of the jury, as it did subsequently to an assemblage of 570 French members of Parliament. May we not add, to the inhabitants of 36,000 com- munes, on whose walls it was placarded ? Truly Picquart was like a sober man in the midst of a nation of drunkards. He was conscious of the risk he ran in thus deferring to the dictates of his conscience rather than to the prejudices of his caste, to what the French call esprit de corps, a phrase of which the Anglo-Saxon tongue has not the equivalent. In words as impressive as they were impassioned, he acquainted the court with the perils which, for him, encompassed the path of honour and humanity : — " You have seen here," he said, " men like Colonel Henry, Commandant Lauth, M. Gribelin, levelling at me the most abominable accusations. Well, ofentle- men, do you know the reason of all this ? You will understand it when I tell you that those who worked up a case which preceded this one, an affair closely bound up with Esterhazy's, were probably the very men who to-day stand before me. They are de- fending their work, that work which the lamented Colonel Sandherr in dying left as a legacy to the honour of the bureau. " Well, as for myself, I thought otherwise. I had my doubts. I thought that one ought not to shut oneself up in a blind faith. So I investigated. " For months now I have been subjected to every sort of outrage. At this moment the situation I am in is a terrible one. To-morrow I shall perhaps be 240 THE DREYFUS CASE hounded out of the army, to which I have given twenty-five years of my life. I have lost my future, my very livelihood, and all for having done that which I believed to be, that which ought to have been, my duty." And his forecast was not wrong. The moment the trial was over. General Billot decided on the sentence, which, with futile cowardice, and in the hope of terrorising his noble victim, he had kept open as long as it lasted — Picquart was expelled from the French army. There remain three witnesses remarkable either for their depositions at the Zola trial or for the manner in which they made them. The first of these was M. Casimir Perier, who was President of the Republic at the time of the Dreyfus court-martial. He succeeded the murdered Carnot, and, after a short term of ofiice, resigned early in the spring of 1895, to be succeeded by M. Felix Faure. The reason of his abrupt resignation was known to be connected with the Dreyfus verdict; and it is credibly narrated that, when he learned subsequently to that ofiicer's degradation that the sentence had been illegally arrived at by the use of secret evidence, he demanded to see that evidence. The Premier, Dupuy, brought him the D. . . . letter or letters, and he did not find them very convinc- ing. " Who is D. . . . ? " he asked. " May it not as well stand for Dupuy or Delcasse as for Dreyfus ? " However this be, he clearly, when he entered the THE ZOLA TRIAL 241 court, had something on his conscience which he would have liked to utter, but dared not. For when, after struggling through the crowd which pressed to see an ex-President give evidence, he emerged in the witness-box before M. Delegorgue, the latter said, " M. Casimir Perier, raise your right hand and take oath," he replied, " I cannot take oath to tell the whole truth, because I cannot tell it." And these words he repeated pointedly when Zola's counsel asked him about the use of secret evidence at Dreyfus' trial, and the judge brusquely disallowed the question. One cannot but feel that Casimir Perier acted rather ignobly. When he discovered, early in 1895, that a great illegality had been com- mitted, why did he run away from the responsi- bility of rectifying it ? Why resign his position, which surely gave him the means of putting pres- sure on his Ministers ? He might, had he been a man of strong character, have saved his country from falling into the abyss. He is the " grand muet," the great dumb man of the Zola as of the Dreyfus trial. All the female witnesses for the defence fell ill and sent doctors' certificates. The military ones, all except Picquart, refused at first to attend a civil court at all, on the ground either that they had taken part in the Dreyfus trial, or that the unhappy cause of the national defence was committed to their hands, and that they could not compromise the safety of France by Q 242 THE DREYFUS CASE appearing. However, it soon dawned upon them that unless they presented themselves and over- awed the jury, Zola would be triumphantly acquitted ; and it was also a fresh opportunity of revealing to the public the low opinion which the corps of French higher officers had of the honest Colonel Picquart. Accordingly they came, and Colonel Du Paty de Clam among the first. With cadenced step this witness entered the court, hon- oured it with a military salute, made a half-turn towards the jury, saluted them in the same way, and then came stiffly to " attention " before the members of the bar. A titter ran round the court, amidst which Du Paty took the oath. He knew from the conclusions which Labori had had to for- mulate two days before in order to compel him to attend, that that counsel would interrogate him about the use to which he had put the letters of another Mademoiselle de Comminges, addressed to him in 1892. He had kept at least one of these letters, and, under compulsion of his superior officers, had restored it to her for a sum of 500 francs. I have shown how one of the letters, written by the secretary of Madlle. Blanche de Comminges, suggested the false telegrams and other ridiculous machinations of Du Paty, who, there- fore, saw in " the youth " of her namesake a romantic excuse for holding his tongue before a French jury, and in his hurry to get the better of Maitre Labori, gave himself away in exactly the THE ZOLA TRIAL 243 manner that any counsel would most desire. Here is the dialogue : — " The Judge : What is your question, Maitre Labori ? " Colonel Du Paty : Before any is asked, I must be allowed to say a few words. " M, le President, I am called here to depose as to the affaire Edcrhazij. I am ready to answer all questions except those which concern the profes- sional secret. " But I must, with the deepest sorrow, point out that they have touched in this place on questions affecting my private life. That does not afflict me personally, for I have always acted as a man of chivalry (ew galant Jiomme). I have the esteem of my chiefs. That is enough for me. " But what I cannot allow is that they should have been allowed to assail the honour of a young gi7'l, ever till now respected {toiijours respoctee). " I ask the court, in the name of French honour, to spare me in this trial such questions as these. To all others I will reply." After this singular outburst, therefore, of Du Paty's, Zola's counsel merely had to say quietly : — " Mademoiselle Blanche de Comminges is a yoicjig girl fifty-five years of age. She is a friend of Colonel Picquart, and her name was used in the telegrams which Colonel Picquart regards as forgeries, and the author of which he is now prosecuting." Solvuntur tabulce risiL After this the witness 244 THE DREYFUS CASE deemed it well to hold his tongue. Asked whether he had had a correspondence with one or two rela- tives of Mademoiselle de Comminges (who had in- sisted on his returning the letters he had stolen), he replied : — " This is the point, M. le President, on which I ask to be allowed to keep silence. I can reveal nothing. It affects the honour of a family, the memory of one deceased. I will not do it. " It is private ground, it is my domain, and no one has a right to trench upon it." Of course the presiding judge refused to force the witness to answer. " Here," said Maitre Labori very justly, " is a trial at assize such as I never witnessed before. They use all means in it to prevent light being thrown on any single point." " They are your witnesses," was the taunt with which the judge thought fit to reply. " Pardon me," answered Labori, " they are simply witnesses in the case. M. Du Paty de Clam is called because we wished for a discussion both open and complete. And no matter what the question we ask, the witnesses, in default of one good reason for not answering, are allowed to give two bad ones. . . . First they invoke the professional secret. When that fails them they invoke the reason of State. And then, when they have neither professional secret nor secret of State nor huis dos (closed doors) to invoke, they invoke the ' private ' secret." THE ZOLA TRIAL 245 In the case of Esterhazy himself, the judge allowed the self-imposed reticence of military wit- nesses to pass all bounds. As soon as he entered the witness-box he declaimed violently for a few minutes against the " wretch " Mathieu Dreyfus, who had denounced him as the author of the bor- dereau, and then he used these words : — " I am ready to answer any question which it may please the court to address to me, and I am ready to answer all questions which the jurors like to put, for you, gentlemen, have an absolute right to ask me them. As for those people there, I shall not answer them " {quant a ces gens-la, je ne leu7- r^ponds pas). Ces gens-ld, meant Maitres Labori and Cl^men- ceau, Zola's advocates. Having made his little speech, Esterhazy turned his back upon them, and with an affected nonchalance listened in silence to the series of scathing questions which the counsel addressed to him. The dreadful record of his falsehoods, his insults to the army whose uniform he wore, his forgeries, was unrolled in the form of questions, not one of which would the judge compel him to answer, nor force him even for a moment to relax his attitude of insolent defiance of the just rights of the defence. When at last Maitre Clemenceau began to formulate his questions with regard to Esterhazy's intercourse with Schwartz- koppen, the judge utterly refused to put one of them. 246 THE DREYFUS CASE " How is it," asked Clemenceau, " that one cannot speak in a court of justice of an action performed by a French officer ? " " Because," rephed the judge, " there is something more important than that, the honour and security of the country." Tumultuous applause from the scarlet-clad officers who thronged the court and its approaches greeted this interpretation from the bench of what the honour and security of France require. When it was over Clemenceau remarked : — " Monsieur le President, I gather from your words that the honour of the country permits an officer to commit such deeds, but does not permit of their being mentioned." J^ ^ 3 71^E^^I^^H|IB( »1 ^3 ^v «|^HH^^|9P^ P- MAITRE LABORI. Pa^^ 246. CHAPTER XIII THE REIGN OF TERROR Zola was condemned. For days and days the mili- tary and clerical papers had put on their front sheets the names of the jm'ors with their addresses ; had menaced them with a thousand terrors if they did not give such a verdict as the honour of the army and the security of France demanded. The anti- Semitic roughs of Drumont, and the leading Jesuit, the Pere du Lac, were organised and ready to wreak vengeance on them if they did their duty. For the last six days of the trial the defendant and his coun- sel and supporters left the court at the peril of their lives. Men were knocked down and trampled upon in the precincts of the court simply for crying, " Vive la R^publique." For that to the mind of the military Hotspurs was a seditious cry. Half-way through the trial one of the jurors fell ill from sheer fright and had to be replaced. What wonder if they found Zola guilty by a majority of seven to five, and if only half of them found in favour of there being extenuating circumstances. The prose- cution argued that Zola was guilty, unless he could produce the actual written order in obedience 248 THE DREYFUS CASE to which Esterhazy's judges had acquitted him. They gladly availed themselves of the sophistry, but one of the seven who condemned him confided the next day to an editor of the Tem;ps that by his verdict he only meant that Zola had failed to pro- duce the written order ; that he found it difficult to screw himself up to such a barren verdict, because he could not forget all that he had heard on the larger issues ; that he imagined and hoped that the revisionists would, now that the truth had been revealed, win their end by legal means. But in the military journals, and even in the Chamber, the verdict, along with the savage penalty of a year's imprisonment, besides the fine, inflicted on Zola by the judge, Delegorgue, was acclaimed as a new and final consecration of the verdict of 1894. Meline, the Premier, and accompUce of Billot, de- clared from the tribune that he would, if any " bad " citizens dared to continue the agitation in favour of revision, set in motion the just laws provided to check such extravagances. And if just laws were not enough to restrain the attacks on the " honour " of the army and the sanctity of the chose jugee, why then, with the help of his reactionary majority, he would forge unjust laws to keep them quiet. There is no doubt that if the eyes of the politicians had not been fixed on the speedily approaching dis- solution and general election, the Chamber would have passed a law making it penal to plead for Dreyfus either in a journal or in a public speech. THE REIGN OF TERROR 249 M^line's faithful majority voted amidst acclama- tions that his speech, in which he threatened the Dreyfusards with special legislation, should be pla- carded on the walls of all the communes in France. One member only of the Parliament, Maurice Le- bon, had the courage to revolt ; he threw up politi- cal life in disgust, and published the following letter to his electors :- — " My Dear Fellow-Citizens, — The moment is come for me to acquaint you with my intentions with regard to the elections which in a few weeks will take place. " I have witnessed with sorrow the events which in the last few months have occurred. I blame all violations of the law, and I am of opinion that a great party like the Republican cannot with impu- nity suffer the higher principles of right and jus- tice to be violated, and that by doing so it loses all raison d'Stre. " I am in open disagreement on this point with my friends in the Government, in the Parliament, and in the press. I do not mean to make you judges of my differences with them, and it would not be straightforward for me to conceal the fact from you. " I shall not, therefore, be a candidate at the next parliamentary election." The elections came. M. Jaures, the eloquent Socialist leader, and Monsieur Joseph Reinach, the friend and biographer of Gambetta, were well-nigh the only candidates who spoke to their constituents 250 THE DREYFUS CASE of tlie great crimes which had been committed, and they both lost their seats in consequence. For five months after the condemnation of Zola it seemed as if the conscience of France were non- existent, or at least dormant. It was but a small minority of, for the most part, cultivated people that continued to think and write about it. And this minority had been fiercely attacked by M. M^line on February 24 in the Chamber, in the following words : — " This must be put a stop to, in the interest even of those who have so recklessly kindled this flame. . . . And this, alas ! is what this dite intellectuelle does not see, for it shuts its eyes and stops its ears. In the silence of their studies they seem to have no misgivings as to the violent passions that they are letting loose, pleasuring themselves by envenoming the wound that we are endeavouring so hard to cicatrise." Nor were the politicians, by nature time-servers, the only men who were anxious to hush up and compromise with crime. In the very ranks of the " intellectuals " themselves were not a few who were mesmerised by such phrases as " the honour of the army, the security of the country, are at stake." Foremost among these was Brunetiere, the editor of the Revue des Deux Moncles, who did not shrink from declaring his opinion that the agita- tion was the mere outcome of the wounded vanity of a few intellectuals {la vaniU exasperSe de quelques THE REIGN OF TERROR 251 intellecfuels). He has made it his boast that he has not admitted in his journal any articles plead- ing for revision, but he has himself, in an article which appeared in March, entitled "Aprds le prods" offered incense to the Mat major in long dull para- graphs stuffed with cant and perfidy. In this article he declared that of all aristocracies, one of pure intelligence is least adapted to the needs of a modern republic. And it is a curious indication of the psychological results which the worship of force combined with senile distrust of the human reason may generate, that Brunetiere, who was once a virile thinker, or at least on the way to become one, has lately proclaimed in a letter to the SUcle that he is no longer so sure as he used to be of the innocence of Jean Galas ! The Latin Church in France, as might be ex- pected, staked its all upon the guilt of Dreyfus and the innocence of Esterhazy. Its leader inside the Chamber is the Count de Mun ; outside, the Jesuit Pere du Lac. From its bishops and priests it was vain to expect any pleadings for mercy and justice. With one accord the cry has gone up from them all over France, " Away with this man and release unto us Barabbas." The crimes of the Mat major are only to be paralleled in the early Italian republics ; they transport us back into the moral atmosphere of the Borgias. But the French clergy have sprinkled upon them their holy water and given them their blessing. After all, is not Mother 252 THE DREYFUS CASE Church in France an Itahan product of the Borgian epoch ? What else could we expect ? One of the most odious incidents of the Zola trial was the petty vengeance taken on his witnesses. Thus Grimaux, after Pasteur the most distinguished biologist in France, was deprived of the professor- ship he held in the military Ecole Polytechnique ; and if other distinguished savants, like Gabriel Monod and Paul Meyer, were not treated similarly, it was only due to the fact that their hierarchical superiors, through whom alone the Government could proceed against them, were as keen Dreyfusards as themselves. Public servants, liable to be so treated, and two or three officers who expressed open sympathy with Zola, were ruthlessly cashiered. Even insurance offices and banks turned out clerks and managers who were known to be on the side of truth and justice. All observers saw how easy it would be in modern France for a reign of terror and proscription to be established. Zola was not discouraged by the verdict, but appealed to the Cour de Cassation, or Supreme Court of Appeal. The grounds of appeal were many. Firstly, there was the fact that the French Government, in its hurry to put down Zola, had made Billot sign the indictment, instead of the officers of the court-martial, who alone were com- petent to sue in the case. This was a merely technical flaw; not so the other grounds, which exposed actual unfairness on the part of the judge. THE REIGN OF TERROR 253 For example, De Pellieux had been allowed to pro- duce in evidence Henry's forgery, after the court had excluded such evidence by its ruling, and then the same ruling was put in force against Zola's counsel when they asked to be allowed to cross- examine on the evidence so irregularly adduced. Again, Madame Dreyfus and many others had not been allowed to say what they thought of Zola's good faith. Then there was a " connexity " between the actual words charged against Zola in the indictment and all the rest of his letter J\iccuse. For example, he was sued for having said : " I accuse the second court-martial of having shielded that illegality {i.e. the Dreyfus verdict) to order." This phrase could only be judicially discussed in connection with the phrase which preceded and explained it in Zola's letter, to wit, this : " I accuse the first court-martial of having violated the law by condemning an accused man on the evidence of a document kept secret, and I accuse the second," &c. The authority of the chose jug6e, it was urged, did not preclude questions being asked in a subsequent trial relative to the manner in which and the evidence on which the judges in a former case had arrived at their verdict, supposing such questions Avere, in a subsequent trial, vital to the interests of the defence. The Zola trial had bristled with illegalities and informalities. The Cour de Cassation selected the first I have mentioned as a valid ground for quashing 254 THE DREYFUS CASE it, and held that General Billot, the Minister of War, had no locus standi. The indictment having been illegal and informal, all the subsequent pro- ceedings and sentence were null and void. M. Manau, however, the Procureur-General, in laying the case before the Supreme Court, dwelt on the " scandalous scenes " which had disgraced M. Delegorgue's court. Then, after pointing out that his own court had solely to decide whether Zola's condemnation had been legal — not whether it was just or no — he continued in these memorable words : — " If the law has been in any way violated, if the rights of the defence have not been respected, the verdict must be quashed, and then the proces Zola will begin afresh. God forbid, in case it does, that there should begin afresh with it all its scandals, its abominable scenes, unworthy of the France of the nineteenth century, and which are an outrage offered to the memory and the work of the illus- trious forerunners of the great Revolution of 1789, and in particular of the great emancipator of human thought, of the apostle of tolerance. I have named Voltaire." Lower down he glances at what is now about to occur eight months later, in these words : — •' It has been maintained that Drej^us was con- demned in consequence of the production of secret pieces of evidence, which, it is alleged, were un- known to the defence. THE REIGN OF TERROR 255 " If that were true, there can be no doubt that the decision of his court-martial would be pro- nounced radically null and void." Then he remarks that the Minister of Justice can alone, under the French code, formally order the Procureur-General of the Cour de Cassation to de- nounce to the criminal section thereof judicial acts, decrees, or judgments contrary to law ; and he added : — " Now in the present case no such order has been given to the Procureur -General. No jurisdiction other than the Cour de Cassation can legally take cognisance of such an issue." And it is well to cite the admirable words which M. Manau Avent on to address to his fellow-magis- trates : — " Under the reserves laid down by us with respect to the right to revision, the domain of which is wisely limited and regulated by law, is it not per- mitted to every one to have his own opinion and pronounce it, as much in regard to Dreyfus' guilt as to Esterhazy's innocence, and contrarily as much in regard to Esterhazy's guilt as to Dreyfus' inno- cence, without being exposed to insults, calumnies, and even to the most atrocious threats ? What ! in this country of France, so noble, so generous, is one not to be allowed to hold a different opinion to one's neighbour about matters Avhich stir the public conscience to its depths, without being 256 THE DREYFUS CASE subjected to insult, without being held up as a mercenary or as a traitor ? " So much for Drumont and his confrerie. M. Manau continued : — " So it would seem that a long life of honour and probity is not to safeguard the noblest against scorn and insult, not even our Trarieux, our Scheurer- Kestners, our Rancs, nay, not even those whom they have called, with an irony which they imagine to be clever, ' the intellectuals,' and whom we call, we, the men of intelligence that are the honour of our land." " We protest," continued M. Manau, " for our part, against such manners as these. And although their own consciences suffice to acquit them, we con- sider that the duty is imposed on us of addressing a testimony of our profound esteem to the honour- able men who, merely because they have had to take part in the regrettable campaign at which we were present, have yet not ceased to deserve the respect of their friends and enemies. Let us bear in mind on this point that lesson of old - world wisdom, ' Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites ! ' " And in raising these protests, we do not leave out of account MM. Zola and Perreux. We choose to see in them men who have only allowed them- selves to be drawn on too far in the expression of their thoughts and wishes — men who have not understood that, though it was within their right to freely defend in the press, in petitions, or even in books, the grounds of their belief that a judicial THE REIGN OF TERROR 257 error, or even an unconscious illegality, had been committed, so following the example of most of those who hold the same belief; yet it was not within their right to accuse magistrates of having given a judgment by order. We, in short, see in them men whom the jury has declared guilty of the oflfence of defamation, and whom the com-t has punished. " But we refuse to regard as mercenaries and traitors men whose whole lives long have been dignified by indefatigable hard work. " One must be just to everybody." It was on April 2, 1898, that the Zola trial was quashed, thus imposing on the military party the necessity of prosecuting Zola afresh, unless it wished to own itself beaten. The first trial had done them irretrievable damage, for it had enabled Colonel Picquart to go into the witness-box and unbare to all the world the iniquitous plot which had its centre in the War Office. Now in that trial the defence had renounced, so satisfying the express wishes of Colonel Paniz- zardi, the depositions of Count Casella. This ofentleman is an Italian, well known in Paris, where he was a teacher of fencing, as one of the best swords- men in Europe. In his own country too he enjoys a considerable reputation, as having victoriously sus- tained the honour of the Italian army in a duel with the best swordsman that the French could find among themselves. A better man in one respect could not be found to draw the confidences of E 258 THE DREYFUS CASE Schwartzkoppen and Panizzardi, and communicate them to the Dreyfiisard press ; for French officers and journaHsts could obviously not insult with impunity one so handy with his rapier. In the middle of December, Casella went to Panizzardi and asked him point-blank if he had not in his possession French military documents sold by Esterhazy. Panizzardi answered that he had not, but said that his friend Schwartzkoppen had often expressed surprise that the Dreyfus family had not appealed to him to throw light on the matter ; and, in the end, he suggested to Casella to go to Berlin and interview the ex-attache there. Casella went on December 22, and, after being kept waiting some days while Schwartzkoppen was apparently obtaining his Emperor's leave to be interviewed, he gained his end, and obtained a declaration from Schwartzkoppen that Dreyfus had not been his spy, that the bordereau was not the work of Dreyfus, that he knew him to be innocent, but that he regarded Esterhazy as a man capable of anything. Asked further why his Government did not name the traitor, the German continued thus : — "We cannot accuse, and the French Govern- ment cannot through diplomatic channels ask us if Esterhazy be guilty or not. We can only do what we have already done, without being asked to do it, namely, declare the truth, which is, that we never held any relations with the ex-captain. But if the French are determined, in spite of THE REIGN OF TERROR 259 everything, that Dreyfus shall be a traitor, we cannot help it. It is not our business." Casella returned to Paris the bearer of a confiden- tial letter from Schwartzkoppen to his Italian friend. This the latter partly read out loud for Casella to hear. The second or third sentence ran thus : — " How can this rogue Esterhazy get out of this business ? How can he go on living in France even if he is acquitted ? " On January 1 3 , the day on which Zola's letter J'accuse appeared, Casella had another interview with the Italian attache, and asked him point-blank whether Zola told the truth in it. " Yes, Zola tells the truth," answered Panizzardi ; and then he proceeded to relate to his interviewer the story of the panic-stricken Esterhazy's visit, revolver in hand, to Schwartzkoppen, already given in the Letire d'un Biplomate (see above, p. 24). This is the gist of the deposition which Casella had offered to make at the Zola trial. It was sub- sequently published on April 7, 1898, under his signature, in the Siicle. On April 16, the Jo7ir, a War Office organ, declared that Colonel Panizzardi had denied to one of its own reporters the whole story of his interview with Casella, as told by the latter. The same evening Panizzardi wired to the SUcle from Berne that " he had refused to speak at all to the representative of the Jour about the con- versations he had had Avith M. Casella ; " and to 26o THE DREYFUS CASE Casella he wired at the same time and to the same effect. Thus he practically acknowledged the ac- curacy of all that Casella had reported. I have dwelt on this communication of Casella because of its intrinsic value, and because of the influence it had on the development of the Dreyfus case. On April 7, 1 898, the officers who composed Esterhazy's court-martial were called together afresh at the Invalides to decide whether they would prose- cute Zola anew ; and it was an open secret that they were loath to do so, for fear of letting in further light upon the case. Judge Delegorgue had, in spite of his disjunctive talent, not succeeded in so enforc- ing the ruling of the court about the chose jug6e as to prevent certain witnesses, notably Picquart, from speaking. It was felt, however, by the party of revision, that the only hope was to keep the matter before the public gaze and maintain a brisk agitation. Therefore, by way of goading the ^tat major into a renewal of the contest, they arranged that the Si^cU should publish Casella's revelations on the very morning on which the issue was to be decided. And they succeeded. The officers met at 9 a.m., and after being closeted together for three hours, came out heated, angry, and depressed, without having decided anything. Then at mid-day, it is related. General de Pellieux hurried up, the Siede in his hand, and read it out loud to them. They were locked up again, and after three hours more of deliberation decided to prosecute afresh. Thus it THE REIGN OF TERROR 261 took six hours for them to make up their minds, and, except for the " draw," so skilfully arranged, they would no doubt have thought discretion the better part of valour. However, by way of limiting discussion in the new trial as much as possible, they selected not fifteen lines of Zola's letter, as before, on which to base their action for defama- tion, but three only, namely, the following : — " A court-martial has just dared to acquit to order an Esterhazy, in supreme and insolent defiance of all justice, of all truth." The accusation here levelled at the first court- martial of 1894 was far graver than that levelled at the second of 1898. Nevertheless, the Minister of War had not convoked the members of the first one and enjoined them to prosecute Zola. It was clear that the Government knew that about the conduct of the first court-martial which made them hesitate to let it be canvassed in a law court. It was also noticed that Zola and M. Perrenx of the Aurore were this time cited to appear before a jury at Versailles, and not at Paris. The Government was clearly afraid of another Paris jury, for the last had been far from unanimous. On the other hand, a Ver- sailles jury could be relied upon to be less demo- cratic in feeling, and to contain a sprinkling of retired ofiicers. The President of the Court of Assize, held at Ver- sailles in Seine-et-Oise, was M. Perivier, and the new 262 THE DREYFUS CASE trial opened on May 23, 1898. Zola's counsel, Maitre Labori, began by taking exception to the competence of a Versailles court to take cognisance of an offence committed by a journal printed and published in Paris. On this point he appealed to the Cour de Cassation, and the trial had to be post- poned until this demurrer could be decided upon. The Government prosecutor, or Procureur-General, who appeared for the members of the second court- martial, used language in court, in addressing the defence, as virulent as it was undignified : — " Ah ! you ask for a Parisian jury ? You are easy to please ! But whatever the jury you ask for, you will everywhere find it the same ; because, do you hear ? the country has had enough of this scandalous agitation, which will bring no good to yourselves or to any one else. . . . Condemned by the jury of the Seine, fleeing from before the jury of Versailles, MM. Zola and Perrenx will not themselves be judged to-day, but their cause is judged." Maitre Labori was able to point out in reply that if the Cour de Cassation had not quashed the first trial on a technical flaw in procedure, they would anyhow have quashed it on account of the produc- tion as evidence by De Pellieux and Boisdeffre, \nth the judge's consent, of a secret and forged docu- ment inculpating Dreyfus by name, but about which, after it had been so produced, he, as Zola's counsel, had not been allowed to cross-examine THE REIGN OF TERROR 263 them. M. Perivier, however, cut short Labori with the graceful remark : — " There is nothing above the law — nothing nothing, not even Zola. Make up your mind to that." The demurrer was disallowed by the higher court on June 16, and therefore the trial opened once more on July 18 at Versailles. The great object of the defence was to spin out the matter and keep it as long as possible before the public, so they now raised two fresh demurrers. Firstly, they ob- jected that the court-martial, as such, not being a civil personality holding property, could not sue. This plea was disallowed by the court. They next claimed, on the ground of the connexity of the three lines of Zola's letter selected in the indictment with the rest of his letter, to be allowed to prove the letter in its entu-ety. This plea was disallowed, whereupon the defendants left the court, leaving judgment to go by default. Zola then quitted his country, whither he can return any time within five years and demand a fresh trial. He felt, to use his own words, that " La verite est en marche." He had done as much as he could for the present, and his country needed a little time to assimilate the evidence of Colonel Picquart and others, which his first trial had given to the world. Once more at this trial the Procureur-General, who is a Government officer, distinguished himself 264 THE DREYFUS CASE by the violence of tlae language he addressed to the court which the defendants had just quitted : — " M. Zola has defamed others, because he is gifted with immeasurable pride, because he fancies himself, as being the Messiah of the ideal, and as represent- ing the genius of France, to have the power of driving deep into the rebellious conscience of the nation a distrust of the court-martial's verdict. He threatens, he has threatened. . . . There you have Zola's true motive— pride put at the service of hideous machinations. The country has already treated him once as he deserved. It must so treat him a second time, until he is definitely brought to justice. For France has been calumniated before Europe. They have dared to say that she was deaf to the voice of innocence and truth, that she had put herself outside the law of nations. They have vowed her to the worst catastroptes. They have dared to try to reopen in this country, so tolerant and so generous, the era of religious discords. They have dared to hint that the army is hostile to the Republic. These are things which must not go unpunished." For the Uhlan Esterhazy those days at Versailles were red-letter ones. He had the satisfaction of knowing that the patriotic officer, who had been hounded out of an army of whose honour he, the traitor, was now acclaimed as the imper- sonation, was on those days hustled and insulted in the public streets. On May the 23 rd Picquart was recognised at the railway station of Versailles. THE REIGN OF TERROR 265 He had been cited as a witness, and was there in performance of his duty. He would have been torn to pieces by the well-dressed gentry of Ver- sailles had the police not protected him. That evening the Uhlan published the following letter addressed to Colonel Picquart in the favourite organ of the War OfSce, the Jour : — " In consequence of your refusal to fight, dictated by nothing but the fear you had of a serious en- counter, I have in vain looked for you for several days — you know it, and you have fled like the coward you are. " When I found myself cited in the same case with yourself, I hoped at last to get hold of you. " I came to-day to Versailles, I waited for you at the door of the court ; and every one loiew what I had come there to do. " Perhaps your cowardice will not go on for ever. If so, tell me where and on what day you will dare to meet me at last face to face, in order to receive the chastisement I have promised you. " As for myself, I shall walk up and down for three days in succession, beginning from to-morrow at seven o'clock, the streets . . . and . . . " Commandant Esterhazy." In those days this brave Uhlan was dreaming of a general massacre of the Jews who had given him money, just as formerly he had dreamed of a general massacre led by himself in Prussian uni- form of the inhabitants of Paris. On the next day 266 THE DREYFUS CASE the following dignified note from Colonel Picquart appeared in the press : — " It is true that I received a letter in which M. Esterhazy pretends that he looked for me in vain at Versailles on May 23, and informs me that he will wait for me three days in succession in the Rue de Lisbonne and Rue de Naples, at 7 in the evening. " I am astonished that M. Esterhazy did not meet me at Versailles when he was looking for me, for I went to that town very openly on the day of Zola's trial. " As for the threats contained in his letter, I am quite resolved, in case I come to blows with him, to make full use of the right which every citizen has to defend himself as the law allows. " But I shall not forget that it is my duty to respect Esterhazy's life. This man belongs to the justice of the land, and I should be to blame if I deprived that justice of him." A few weeks later, Esterhazy, maddened with absinth, rushed out of a drinking-shop and attacked Picquart with a club from behind. He thought he had taken him off his guard ; but that officer was too quick for him, and with a few well- aimed strokes of his cane sent Esterhazy head foremost into the gutter, into which his hat had preceded him. CHAPTER XIV HENRY THE FORGER For a second time in the history of the Dreyfus case the impulse to an important development — it may be said to its final denouement — was destined to arise out of an imimportant communication in the English press. As early as February 1898, I had begun to take an interest in the sombre drama which was unrolling itself in Paris, and in the last days of that month associated myself with a scheme just set on foot of publishing in the English press some facsimiles of secret military documents purchased by Von Schwartzkoppen from Esterhazy, and in the latter's handwriting. The project unhappily fell through at the last moment, because the conditions of secrecy, under which alone we could work, were menaced by the rash- ness of outsiders. However, in June I contributed, under the sobriquet of Huguenot, to the National Review, edited by Mr. Maxse, a sketch of the case as it presented itself to my mind, after a study of the shorthand report of the Zola trial, of the reports of D'Ormescheville and Ravary, reinforced by private information. This article came into 267 268 THE DREYFUS CASE the hands of M. Joseph Reinach, who has already figured in my pages (above i6i), and he translated the following paragraphs of it with comments in a leading article in the French Sicde, entitled, " The Teachings of History : " — " The affection of the French for their army is as ardent and romantic as that of a woman for her lover. But what if by a sudden revelation it were brought home to the masses who now parade the streets, crying, ' Vive l' Amide ! niort aux Jnifs ! ' that their confidence has been betrayed, that the swaggering officers whom they cheered so madly at the trial of M. Zola are the real traitors to France, and that Dreyfus is the victim of their base conspiracy ? For the Emperor William holds in his hands a weapon with which, when the occa- sion arises, he can smite the enthe etat major, and destroy the confidence of the French people in their army for at least a generation. The series of secret documents sold by Esterhazy does not stop in Octo- ber 1894, the date of Dreyfus' arrest, but extends on into the year 1896. It included many important documents of later origin than October 1894, all in the handwriting of the bordereau. Dreyfus cannot have written these, for he was already in prison. . . . " Now the Emperor William, by communicating to the French or European press in facsimile any one of these documents of origin later than 1894, can, whenever he likes, tear across the web of lies with which the French War Office is now striving to hide its misdeeds. Perhaps the ddnoiUmcnt will HENRY THE FORGER 269 come in this way ; for the Emperor has, it appears, already authorised Schwarztkoppen, at the close of the last year, to communicate to Count Casella, for publication in the Sikle, on 8th April last, many hints of the truth. , . . " How long will it be before William II. draws tight the noose into which all the leading French generals and colonels, and nearly all the leading politicians of every party, save the Socialists, have so obligingly adjusted their necks ? " In the next day's Jour, M. Castelin announced that he would interpellate the Government in refer- ence to M. Reinach's article. This was the same deputy whose interpellation in November 1896 had already given rise to so momentous a turn of events. His fresh interpellation was to take effect in a yet more striking manner. But I must first relate what happened to M. Reinach, who was a captain in the territorial army of France, and over whom the Minister of War claimed a certain jurisdiction, though he had not been for many years in active service. The military party had long been watching for a chance to strike him, and his article in the SiMe seemed to their eyes a sufficiently good one. Castelin had given it by his threatened interpella- tion the requisite publicity. Accordingly they taxed him with having written himself my article in the National Review, with having spiced it with inaccu- racies by way of making it appear to be the work of an English journalist, and with having then 270 THE DREYFUS CASE translated it back into the Sikle with comments of his own, pretending that it represented EngHsh opinion. One of Billot's last actions, before he gave place to Cavaignac, was to cite Captain Reinach before a court-martial, which met at the £cole Militaire on June 24, 1898, the scene of Dreyfus' degradation in 1895. General Kirgener, Baron de Planta, Colonel Meneust, and three other officers composed it, and unanimously reported in favour of the expulsion from the army of Captain Reinach for " a grave offence against discipline." Thus you may not in France, even if you have passed out of active service ten years before, criticise the Mat major. Cavaiofnac, Billot's successor, of course confirmed the verdict. Shortly before the court-martial a common friend urged me to write a formal letter to Joseph Reinach, which he could read out before his court-martial, declaring that I was the sole author of the article in the National Review, sundry paragraphs of Avhich were cited verbally in the indictment drawn up by Billot against M. Reinach. I had wished to preserve my anonymity, but I could not refuse this request; and, as I had been so much honoured by a French Minister of War, I thought it was a good opportunity of emphasising the opinions expressed in my article ; and accordingly I concluded my letter by reasserting the risk run by the 6tat major of seeing reproduced in a foreign press copies of documents written by Esterhazy and sold to Schwartzkoppen. The sword HENRY THE FORGER 271 of Damocles, I said, still hangs over the head of the 4tat major. I had the satisfaction of seeing my letter repro- duced in extenso in nearly two hundred daily French papers, and it had, I understand, much to do with the decline of Esterhazy's popularity. It is singular how the French will pay attention to the ipse dixit of an unknown Englishman, when they are deaf to their own greatest writers and leaders of thought. It was curious to read the effusions of the mili- tary and religious papers which my letter evoked. Rochefort immediately transformed himself into a philologist, and discovered that I was a German-Jew who had " trucked " his real name of Kcenigsberg for that of Conybeare. My crowning offence in his eyes was to have edited the lives (sic) of the Thera- peutoe of Philo the Jew. He clearly regards Thera- pcutce as the Yiddish equivalent of Dreyfusard — not a bad equation. The following paragraphs from the Journal du Centre of Chateauroux for June 28, 1898, present a fair specimen of the style of the French clerical press. The article was entitled " Immanent Justice," and began thus : — " When Iscariot had taken the thirty pence, the price of the Just One's blood, he went and hung himself in a field, his belly burst asunder, and his bowels gushed forth upon the ground. " It was the Immanent Justice of things which thus manifested itself . . . 272 THE DREYFUS CASE " Justice Immanent ! " And yesterday, Dreyfus, grandson of Judas, first cousin of Deutz, heir of Bazaine, after taking German marks in payment for the strips of flesh which he tore from off our country in order to sell, was seen condemned, degraded ; button by button, galloon by galloon were torn from the noble uniform of the French officer. And now he is choking, the death-rattle in his throat, in a cage, too small to contain his offence, yet too large in proportion to the punishment his crime deserves. " Justice Immanent ! "The Greeks called it AnankS ; the Musulmans, Fate ; Gambetta, Immanent Justice. The Christians proclaim therein the Finger of God. . . . " To think that this monstrous Israelite should come forward and threaten the ctat major of the French army, which is made of the blood and bone of our country, threaten its members with revelations such that they all ought to flee and hide themselves like the most abject criminals ! " Then " the text in which once more the action of immanent justice reveals itself" is given. It is the verdict of the glorious five officers who deprived Joseph Reinach of his rank in the terri- torial army. The council of the Legion of Honour is then exhorted to deprive the Jew of his decora- tion ; and Joseph Reinach, along with Zola and De Pressense, have lost their badge of honour, which was left to Esterhazy as late as November 1898. The sacramental diatribe ended thus: — PAUL CAVAIGNAC. Pag^e 272. HENRY THE FORGER 273 " And for others also Immanent Justice lies in wait ; for all the insulters of the army, for all the hirelings of the foreigner, for all the detractors of our military chiefs, for all who heap calumny on France, all the rastas Italian, German, and English, who, like accomplished traitors, enriching them- selves off the largesses of our country, take shelter under our national flag, the better to be able, when the day and hour are announced, to betray it to the hereditary enemy. " It is thine, Immanent Justice, to overtake and punish them, that they may be spared the committing of fresh crimes, France the useless shedding of blood, the hearts of patriots new tor- tures, French mothers fresh tears ! " M. Castelin's long-threatened interpellation came on at last on July 7, 1898. By this time the elections were over, and of the newly-constituted Chamber M. Paul Deschanel was President in place of M. Brisson, who, by a shake of the political kaleidoscope, had succeeded to M. Meline. General Billot was also gone, and a civilian (M. Cavaignac, the historian of Prussia) had taken his place. This new Minister of War had as early as January i 3 , 1898, threatened to be the enfant terrible of the ^tat major. In the debate which then took place both M. de Mun and M. Jaures had spoken. The former had invited Billot to defend, for the fourth time in one year, the sanctity and fitness of the cTwse jiig6e. The latter had warned the Government that by shielding the illegalities committed they 274 THE DREYP^US CASE were betraying the Republic to tbe generals. Then M. Godefroy Cavaignac rose, and undertook, as a " progressive Republican," to defend the army, which, he complained, it had so far been left to the Royalist Right to defend. He taxed the Government of M. Meline with their weakness and hesitation. They could, he declared, with a single word arrest, nay, prevent, the agitation. Why did they not produce the confession of guilt made by Dreyfus on the morning of his degradation ? Why not publish the incriminating documents with which the ctat major had already supplied Billot ? Meline, of course, answered, for he knew what he was about, that Cavaignac desired a revision of the Dreyfus sentence to be begun from the tribune. " The Government has refused," he said, "and wiU always refuse to take such action. If M. Cavaignac were in the Government, he would act as we do." In the new Chamber assembled on July 7, 1898, no trace was left of the minority of 122 who on January 1 3 had voted for M. Jaures' motion " con- demning the feebleness shown by the civil power in the presence of a military oligarchy, and exhort- ing the Government to re-enter the path of Republi- can traditions." But M. Cavaignac, the darling of the army, was none the less under the obligation of producing before all those proofs of Dreyfus' guilt which in January he had in vain urged Billot to make public. HENRY THE FORGER 275 " What is the situation ? " he began in tragic tones. " The honest people who composed the court- martial judged according to their conscience and without passion." Thus the legality of the Dreyfus verdict was ostentatiously thrown overboard. Presently he proceeded to allay the misgivings of the " Intel- lectuals," " of those who," he said, " represent a notable portion of French thought, and have it for their special mission to defend the intellectual and moral patrimony of France." And he gently reminded these " Intellectuals " that their " good faith," their 'bo7ine foi, might get them into trouble. " There is no denying," he said, " that just now national feeling has been so deeply provoked that it would even welcome repressive measures by way of assuring respect for the army." However, M, Cavaignac did not desire that at present. He knew what the country expected of him — a declaration which would put an end to the agitation for revision. He would make the declaration, because he had an absolute certitude of Dreyfus' guilt. But first he begged the Chamber not to con- nect what he had to say to them with what was said abroad. " We are," he said, amidst lively and unanimous applause, " masters in our own house, and will deal with our own affairs as we see fit." This, of course, was in answer to the repeated 276 THE DREYFUS CASE official declarations of" the German, Italian, and Austrian Governments that Dreyfus was innocent as far as they were concerned. " If," he went on, " we have to respect, in dealing with others, the obligations of international courtesy, it is also the duty of others to respect them in dealing with us." All this was the prelude to the production of the two genuine letters of Panizzardi, which I have translated above on page 125, and of the one forged by Henry. " These pieces," he said, " admit of no doubt as to their genuineness, nor as to the identity of those who write them. This is so whether we consider their origin, or their number, or their appearance, or their marks of authen- ticity. . . . The two first are letters which passed between certain persons who have been talked about and a person designated by his initial, D." The certain persons were, of course, Schwartz- koppen and Panizzardi. Cavaignac then appealed to Henry's forgery in proof of his conviction that in the first two letters D. meant Dreyfus ; and he spoke of the third or forged letter as being itself " framed " in a long correspondence between the two attaches. Cavaignac ignored the letter with the postscript, " Cette canaille de D devient trop exigeant," because Colonel Henry, in one of his numerous perjuries at the Zola trial,^ had denied ^ Proces Verbal, I. 375. Perhaps Henry was anxious to discount the communication in the Eclair of 1896. HENRY THE FORGER 277 that it formed part of, or had to do with, the Drey- fus dossier. In conclusion he paraded the so-called confes- sion of Dreyfus, namely, the words reported in the Temps of January 5, 1895, to have been used by him on the morning of his degradation to two officers who were guarding him. The words were these : — " I am innocent. If I have given documents to the foreigners, it was only as a bait to tempt them into giving up more important ones. In three years the truth will be known, and the Minister of War himself will take up my cause." This is the only contemporary record of this famous confession, which Lebrun-Renault, on Janu- ary 6, after it appeared in the Tcmfs, wrote down, not in the official book kept for such mementoes, but on a loose leaf of his pocket-book. " This leaf," said Cavaignac, " has always remained in his posses- sion." Notwithstanding, in November 1 897, Lebrun- Renault had to write it down afresh from memory only ; but a Captain Attel heard it from him in a Paris brothel in January 1895, and he told it to Captain Anthoine, who repeated it to Com- mandant De Mitry, who repeated it to Billot and Cavaignac. " Now," said Cavaignac to the entranced French Parliament, " either human testimony has no longer any value, or it results from these deci- sive testimonies, agreeing one with the other an 278 THE DREYFUS CASE anterior to all impressions since produced, that Dreyfus used the words, ^ If I have given docu- ments' " Surely it also follows on the same testimony that Dreyfus said " I am innocent " — a queer confession of guilt. We may be sure that, if he ever tried to get whales for his sprats out of the Germans, he did so by order of his superiors. But, taking the evidence as it stands, it only proves that Dreyfus spoke hypothetically and said : " I am innocent {i.e. of the charge of giving away documents) ; but if I had given any, it would only have been in order to get better ones in return." The officer Lebrun-Renault has assured Forzinetti that Dreyfus never confessed his guilt to him, and he gave the same assurance to M. Casimir Perier and to M. Dupuy, who was French Premier in January 1895. If Dreyfus only used the words in question, this assurance was true. Those who discern in them a confession of guilt of course honour exceedingly Lebrun-Renault as the recipient thereof. The French Chamber greeted M. Cavaignac's declarations with frenzied applause. MM. Drumont and Morinaud were the most demonstrative in an assembly which, as a whole, was carried away by enthusiasm for the cJiose jugSe. M. Mirman, an ex- soldier, demanded that the speech which had buried the Dreyfus affair should be placarded on the walls of 36,000 communes at the public expense; and 572 deputies voted for the motion. Of the two HENRY THE FORGER 279 deputies who voted against it, M. Meline, who pro- bably knew all about Colonel Henry, was one. M. Brisson, the new Premier, abstained. In this crisis a foAV of the soberer papers, that had till now mostly ranged themselves against Dreyfus' cause, had a sort of shivering fit in spite of the general jubilation, notably the Temps, the PMppel, and the AiUoriU of M. Paul de Cassagnac. Had Cavaignac after all buried the affair ? Were his documents above suspicion, notably the third one, in which Dreyfus was named ? Was it not a moral miracle if Dreyfus, in view of his repeated protesta- tions of innocence to Du Paty, to his court-martial, to his wife, to those present at his degradation, had after all really confessed his guilt ? Until the War Office was desperately put to it, late in 1897, for proofs of Dreyfus' guilt, it had been common ground between both parties that Dreyfiis had made no confession of guilt, and for nearly three years the military and clerical press had execrated him for making none. The public perplexity was increased when, two days later, Picquart, in an open letter addressed to the Premier, M. Brisson, declared it to be his duty to inform him that he was in a position to prove, before any competent jurisdiction, that the two letters dated 1894 could not apply to Dreyfus, and that the one dated 1 896 bore all the characteristics of a forgery. On July 12; 1898, Maitre Demange, Dreyfus' 28o THE DREYFUS CASE counsel in 1894, followed up Picquart's letter with one of liis own to the Keeper of the Seals, in which he declared that none of the documents read out by Cavaignac had been communicated to himself or to his client at the court-martial. He also sent with his letter a memorandum written on December 31, 1894, by Dreyfus, which probably contains the very words which, when he subsequently used them to Lebrun-Renault, the latter misheard, and trans- formed into the vaunted confession of guilt. These words I italicise : — Note of Captain Dreyfus. " Commandant Du Paty de Clam came to-day, Monday, 31st December 1894, at 5.30 p.m., after the rejection of my appeal, to ask me, on the part of the Minister of War (Mercier), if I had not perhaps been the victim of my own imprudence, if I had not wished simply to set a traf . . . and then found myself drawn into and caught in the wheels. " I answered that I had never had relations with any agent or attache . . . that I had not given myself to any decoying ; that I loas innocent. " He then told me, that as for himself, his con- viction of my guilt was based, first on the examina- tion of the writing of the incriminating document, and on the character of the pieces enumerated therein ; next, on information which showed that the leakage of documents corresponded with my stay in the (^tat major ; lastly, that a secret agent had said that a Dreyfus was a spy . . . though HENRY THE FORGER 281 without affirming that this Dreyfus was an officer. I asked Du Paty to be confronted with this agent ; he answered me that it was impossible. ... In short, he said, you have been condemned because a certain chie indicated that the guilty party was an officer, and the letter seized came in time to confirm the clue. The guilty one was yourself. " The Commandant added that since my arrest the leakage had dried up in the Ministry ; that perhaps . . . had let the letter lie about on pur- pose to catch me, in order not to satisfy my requirements." Who " let the letter (i.e. the bordereau) lie about," and what does the phrase mean ? Surely that Henry received it in April from Schwartz- koppen's porter, and for reasons of his own kept it quiet till September, and then let his superiors think that it had only just come in to the bureau ? If so, Du Paty also knew the real date of the bordereau. The note continues thus : — " He then spoke of M. Bertillon's remarkable expertise, according to which I had traced my own writing along with my brother's, so as to be able, in case I were caught with the letter on me, to argue that a plot had been got up against me ! ! ! " Then he gave me to understand that my wife and my family were my accomplices — all the theory of Bertillon, in short. Just then, as I knew what I wished, and was resolved not to let him insult my family any more, I stopped him by saying, ' That is enough. I have but one word to say to 282 THE DREYFUS CASE you. It is that I am innocent, and that your duty is to pursue your inquiries.' " ' If you are really innocent,' he then exclaimed, 'you undergo the most awful martyrdom of all the ages.' ' I am that martyr,' I replied, ' and I hope the future will show you that I am.' . . . " After Commandant Du Paty went away, I wrote the following letter to the Minister of War : — " ' I have, by your orders, received the visit of Commandant Du Paty, to whom I declared once more that I was innocent, and that I had never even committed an imprudence. " ' I am condemned. I have no favour to ask. " ' But in the name of my honour, which I hope will one day be restored to me, it is my duty to entreat you to pursue your inquiries. " ' When I am gone, let them ever inquire. It is the only favour I beg of you. {Signed) ' Alfred Dreyfus.' " By way of counteracting the effect of the pla- carding all over France of Cavaignac's speech, a committee was formed to placard up these letters of Picquart and Demange. The SiMe opened a subscription list in its columns, and within ten days nearly 22,000 francs were subscribed. Though in places the colporteurs of the Petit Journal were set on to tear down these placards, and though at Belfort and other garrison towns generals forbade their soldiers, assembled on parade, to read these " filthy placards dishonouring the army," they must have caused many to reflect, especially when HENRY THE FORGER 283 events took the startling turn which within a month they did. Meanwhile the first consequence for Picquart was that he was arrested on July 13, 1898, on the charge of communicating to Leblois documents relating to the national defence, as if Gonse's letters would ever do to load guns with. This was the charge which had already merited to Picquart expulsion from the army. To sue him afresh for the same offence in a civil court, as Cavaignac now did, was illegal, and merely vindictive. The French bar, backsliding from its old tradition of opposing a barrier to tyranny, had already suspended Leblois for the imaginary offence of receiving Picquart's confidences as a friend without being profession- ally consulted by him ! A similar action was the suspension in the course of the summer by M. Bourgeois, the new Minister of Public Instruction, of Dr. P. Stapfer, Dean of the Bordeaux Univer- sity, for a public reference made on July 24, 1898, to the Drejrfus case at the funeral of M. Couat, rector of that university. It looked for a time as if, under the austere Republican premier, M. Brisson, a reign of proscription and suppression of honest opinion was to begin, unexampled since the early days of the third empire. But on August 30, 1898, the blow fell on the Mat major which cool observers had anticipated. Colonel Henry, interrogated by the Minister of War, Cavaignac, after swearing some twelve times that 284 THE DREYFUS CASE he had not, ended by admitting that he had, fabri- cated that famous letter between the two attaches, with which Generals de Pellieux and de BoisdefFre had wrung from the jury a verdict against Zola in February 1898, and Cavaignac an unanimous vote from the Chamber five months later. Henry was at once arrested and taken to a cell in Mont Valerien, where, after a long interview with an officer, whose name has not transpired, he was found the next afternoon dead, his throat cut from right to left and from left to right, the razor be- side him. An official com7mmiqu^ of the French War Office was issued that evening declaring that the unhappy man had committed suicide. It also alleged that after he had made his great speech of July 7, 1898, and allowed it to be placarded in 36,000 communes, Cavaignac began to entertain suspicions about the forged letter, an officer on his staff, named General Eoget, having noticed that the cross-ruling of its paper differed from that of the other two letters mentioning a D., and which, as I have said, are in Panizzardi's handwriting. Their suspicions aroused, said the communique, they compared the papers of the respective letters against a strong light, and Cavaignac rapidly formed the conviction as early as the middle of August that Henry had forged. He waited two weeks longer before he took action. Another suspicious circumstance was that to the letter itself, which, as De Pellieux deposed at Zola's HENRY THE FORGER 285 trial, came to the Intelligence Department at the moment of Castelin's interpellation in November 1896, was affixed no note either saying what agent had brought it to the War Office, or giving the precise date at which it was brought. These details were of course true, but why had not Cavaignac chosen to notice them earlier, when, on the morrow of his great speech, he received the demonstrations of Picquart and Trarieux, the ex- Minister of Justice, that it must be a forgery ? For days before July the 7th he had let the military papers relate how he was studying the Dreyfus dossier night and day in order to understand and know it thoroughly. Why, moreover, should he now at the eleventh hour pitch upon Henry as the culprit, and show so clearly, as his published in- terrogatory of him proves, that he knew from some a priori source that Henry, and no one else, had forged it ? The shorthand report of the examination by Cavaignac of Henry, which preceded his arrest, was read out at the first session of the criminal chamber of the Cour de Cassation met to revise the Dreyfus verdict on October 27, 1898. Lieut.-Col. Henry was introduced at 2.30 p.m. by General Gonse, under-chief of the Med major. The Minister Cavaignac began by warning Henry that an examination of the two documents brought to the Intelligence Bureau — the one {i.e. Panizzardi's letter) in June 1894, the other October 31, 1896 286 THE DREYFUS CASE {i.e. Henry's forgery) — proved that the one contained words belonging to the other, and reciprocally, and that they must therefore have been both of them seriously altered. He adjured Henry to say what he knew about these documents, and warned him that, in view of the material character of the facts, the absence of explanation of them would be as grave in its consequences to him as an insufficient explanation. After this preamble the following interrogatory ensued : — " Cavaignac : When and how did you reconstitute the piece of June 1894 ? When and how that of 1896 ? "Henry: I received the first in June 1894. It was I that reconstituted it, as I did most of the pieces having the same origin, when they were written in French. I dated it to the time when I received it. As to the piece of 1896, I received it on the eve of All-Hallow's day, and I reconstituted it myself. I put the date on it myself. " Cavaignac : Did you never ungum and then put together again the piece of 1894?- " Henry : No, never. Why should I have done so ? It was a piece of no importance. It had been ranged with the dossier of 1894. I am quite sure I never ungummed it. What is more, I never ungum ^ pieces. ^ Henry seems to speak with a sense that he had ungummed the petit-bleu reconstituted by Lauth in order to scratch out the address HENRY THE FORGER 287 " Cavaignac : Do you ever keep bits of paper Avithout putting tliem together ? " Henry : Sometimes, for a certain time — time enough to make out a Httle what the papers are. But I do not remember having kept bits of paper unarrangecl for more than eight or ten days. "Cavaignac: Did you have the piece of 1896 in your hands subsequently to your giving it to General Gonse ? " Henry : No, I did not. " Cavaignac : How then do you explain the fact that the piece of 1894 has in it bits belonging to that of 1896 and vice versa? " Henry : I cannot explain it, and it seems im- possible that it should be so. In fact, the 1896 piece never left the hands of General Gonse. As for the 1894 piece, which, as you know, is in the archives, I looked it out some days after I sent the other to General Gonse. At the moment they did not know where it was, and I was set to look for it. " Cavaignac : Was the date which the piece bore written on it, or on the register of it ? " Henry : There was no register of it, but a dossier (i.e. portfolio) in which bits of no importance were brought together. " Cavaignac : What you say is impossible. There on it: "Commandant Esterhazy," &c. He had then re-written the same address over the erasure, and put it together afresh, by way of suggesting that it had originally borne another address, but that Eicquart had obliterated this, and written the address to Esterhazy, in order to incriminate the latter. This is the perfidious charge on which Picquart was arrested in September, and has been incarcerated ever since (November 15) in the Cherche-Midi prison. 288 THE DREYFUS CASE is material proof that certain fragments have been interchanged. How do you explain that ? " Henry : How ? Why, if it is the case, I must myself have intercalated one in the other. For all that, I could not say that I fabricated a piece which I did not ! I should have had to fabricate the envelope as well. How could that be ? " Cavaignac : The fact of intercalation is certain. " Henry ; I put together the papers in the state in which I received them. " Cavaignac : I may remind you that nothing is more serious for you than the absence of all ex- planation. Tell me what passed. What did you do? " Henry : What would you have me say ? " Cavaignac : I want you to give me an explana- tion. " Henry : I cannot. . . . " Cavaignac : What did you do ? " Henry : I did not fabricate the papers. " Cavaignac : Come, let us look. You put the fragments of one inside the other. " Henry (after a moment's hesitation) : Well, yes, because the two fitted together perfectly. What led me to do it was this. I received the first piece in June 1894, and I reconstituted it then. When the piece of 1896 came, there were some words in it which I did not altogether understand. So I cut out some portions of the first piece to put them into the second. " Cavaignac: You forged the piece of 1896 { " Henry : No, I did not. " Cavaignac : What did you do ? GENERAL ZURLINDEN. Page 28 HENRY THE FORGER 289 "Henry: I added to the 1896 piece some words wliich were in the other. I arranged the phrases, ' II faiit pas que on sache jamais ; ' but the leading phrase was left untouched, and the name of Dreyfus was in it all right. " Cavaignac : You are not telling me the truth. " Henry : I am. It was only the phrases at the end that I arranged. " Cavaignac : Was it not yourself that con- ceived the idea of arranging the phrases in such ways ? " Henry : No one ever spoke to me about it. I did it to make the document more cogent. " Cavaignac : You are not telling me all. You forged the entire piece. " Henry : I forged nothing. Dreyfus' name was there all right in the piece of 1896. I could not take it out of the piece of 1894, since it was not there. I had not three pieces to work with — never more than the two. I swear that that is how it was all done. " Cavaignac : Your explanation is inconsistent with the facts themselves. Tell me all. " Henry : I have told you all. I only added this one phrase. " Cavaignac : Then this is your explanation : You forged the last phrase, ' II faut pas que on sache jamais' ? " Henry : I cannot say that I made up the phrase. When I found the paper of 1896 I was very much stirred by it. There was on it, ' I have seen that a deputy is going to interpellate about Dreyfus.' Then, after a certain phrase I could not find the T 290 THE DREYFUS CASE sequel. I then got out of the 1894 piece some words which completed the sense. " Cavaignac : It is not true ; you forged the piece. " Henry : I swear I did not. I added the phrase, but I did not forge the piece. " Cavaignac : What you say is impossible ; so own to the whole truth. . . . " Cavaignac : You made up the second piece, taking your idea of it from the first. " Henry : I swear I did not. The other pieces which we got at that time quite prove the authen- ticity of the next letter. ' It is a bother that we have not had the end of the letter of ' (Here the name of a foreign officer.) " I swear that the beginning of the letter in blue chalk is quite authentic. " Cavaignac : The beginning was invented as well. So tell the whole truth. " Henry : No, I only put in the last phrase : ' II faut pas.' ... I wrote it without tracing it. " Cavaignac : Come now, since the pieces speak for themselves, you had better confess. . . . What suggested it to you ? " Henry : My chiefs were very anxious, and I wanted to reassure them and restore tranquillity in their minds. I said to myself: Let us add a phrase. Supposing we went to war, situated as we are now ! " Cavaignac : That is the idea which led you to forge the letter ? " Henry : I did not forge it. How could I have imitated a signature like that ? It was the HENRY THE FORGER 291 beginning of it which gave me the idea of adding the end. " Cavaignac : ' II faut pas que on sache jamais personne.' Is that your language ? " Henry : Yes, because I knew how he wrote. "Cavaignac: You did not date in 1894 the piece which bore that date ? "Henry: Yes, I dated it in 1894. I do not think I dated it afterwards. I beheved I had dated it in 1894, I think. I do not remember. " Cavaignac : You were alone in doing that ? " Henry : Yes ; Gribelin knew nothing about it. " Cavaignac : No one knew it, no one at all ? " Henry : I did it in the interests of my country. I was wrong. " Cavaignac : Now, tell the truth, the whole truth. Tell me what passed. " Henry : I swear I had the beginning of it. I added the end to make it more cogent. " Cavaignac : Was the 1896 piece signed ? " Henry : I do not think I made up the signature. " Cavaignac : And the envelopes ? " Henry : I swear I did not make them up. How could I ? " Cavaignac : It is very unlikely that you added only the phrase at the end. " Henry : I swear it. The beginning suggested it to me, and subsequently people were reassured." There was here a pause, during which Henry retired. The Minister Cavaignac then recalled him, and continued his questions. " Cavaignac : Let us see. One of the pieces has 292 THE DREYFUS CASE cross-lines of pale violet, the other of bluish-grey, which shows that portions of it were regiimmed. But your explanation is impossible. The intercala- tions do not answer to what you say. " Henry : What portions do you say were inter- calated ? " Cavaignac : I do not wish you to ask me ques- tions, but to answer mine. You forged the whole letter ? " Henry : I swear I did not. I must have had the names which are in that of 1896 to do so. Why should I have taken a fragment of the 1894 piece to insert it in the other ? " Cavaignac : You will not tell the truth ? " Henry : I can tell you nothing else. I cannot say that I wrote the whole of it. As to the first letter, I found it ; the second I intercalated, and only added the end. " Cavaignac : All you could have received was the heading and the signature. " Henry : I received the first part. " Cavaignac : You received nothing at all. " Henry : I had the first part, the heading and the signature. " Cavaignac : Impossible ! You aggravate your situation by these concealments. " Henry : I did what I did for the good of the country. " Cavaignac : That is not what I asked. What you did was based on the documents themselves. Tell everything. " Henry : I cannot say I did what I did not. When I got the first part . . . HENRY THE FORGER 293 " Cavaignac : Impossible ! I tell you it is written on the piece. You had better tell all, " Henry : Then you are convinced it is I. " Cavaignac : Say what is the case. ... So then, this is what happened: You received in 1896 an envelope with a letter inside it, a letter of no im- portance. You suppressed the letter and forged another instead of it. " Henry : Yes." In the course of the interview General Roget also elicited from Henry the statement that Colonel Sandherr had laiown Esterhazy in Tunisia. Henry also volunteered this statement : — " It was to myself that the bordereau was brought, seized in 1894. It came in the ordinary way, along with documents of which you know, and of which the authenticity is undeniable. Every other version of the story is contrary to the truth, and materially impossible." We may infer that the bordereau in 1894 was not really brought to Henry, but to some one else. If it had come first into his hands, he would, if it be true that he was Esterhazy's accomplice in treason, have probably destroyed it ; and it is probable that he only did not so destroy it because some one else received it and invoiced it. It is impossible to read the report furnished by the War Office of Cavaignac's interview with Henry on August 30 without feeling that he had positive information from some source or other that Henry 294 THE DREYFUS CASE was the man. In a few days a semi-official para- graph in the ItaUan paper, the Corriere di Napoli, supplied the key. In this it was declared that Count Tornielli, in December 1897, warned M. Hanotaux that the ^tat major had got hold of several forgeries, among others of the Henry docu- ment. I have already related how Lemercier-Picard had sold this secret to Schwartzkoppen. Torni- elli gave his word of honour at the same time to Hanotaux that his attache, Panizzardi, had had no relations with Dreyfus ; and Hanotaux not only pledged his word that the document should not be produced as genuine, but instructed M. Meline, then Premier, Billot, and De Boisdefifre in that sense. When, on February 17, 1898, it was produced by De Pellieux, in order to get a verdict against Zola, Hanotaux demanded, but in vain, that the prosecution of Zola should be abandoned, General de Boisdeffre dismissed from the Stat major, and the Dreyfus case revised. Cavaignac had been duly informed of all these incidents ; nevertheless, he could not resist, on July 7, 1898, the pleasure of repeating in the Chamber General de Pellieux' success in the Court of Assize; and accordingly paraded the forgery afresh in insolent defiance of Count Tornielli. This was insufferable, and without delay the Italian Gov- ernment, backed by the German, gave the French the choice of either denouncing the forgery them- selves or of having it exposed against them. The HENRY THE FORGER 295 French chose the former course. Cavaignac arrested Henry in the Avay described, extorted from him the admission ; and, when he threatened to name his accomplices, they cut his throat. Those who in Paris are best quahfied to know, assure me that Henry did not commit suicide. Nor do the miscreant's cries on the way to the cell, as officially reported by the French autho- rities themselves, encourage us to take any other view. They were these : — " It is a shame ! . . . What do they want of me then ? ... It is madness on their part. . . . My conscience reproaches me with nothing. . . . What I did I am ready to do again. ... It was for the good of the country and of the army. I have always done my duty. ... In all my life I never met with such a pack of wretches. . . . They are to blame for my misfortune. . . ." These are the cries of a man who had forged " to order," and are in terrible agreement with the sinister hint which De Boisdeffre gave to Picquart on his appointment on July i, 1895, to the In- telligence Department : " You must look after the affaire Dreyfus ; there is not much in the dossier." ^ This was an invitation to forafe in order to rivet the poor man's chains on him. In the Zola trial Henry said exactly what he said the day of his arrest, " We only did our duty as we understood ^ " Occupez-vous de I'affaire Dreyfus ; il n'y a pas grand' chose dans le dossier" (Proems Zola, twelfth audience). 296 THE DREYFUS CASE it." We must not, therefore, attach too much weight to the declaration which De Boisdeffre, the friend of the Jesuit Pfere du Lac, made in his letter of resignation, that " his absolute confidence in Colonel Henry had led to his being deceived, and had caused him to declare genuine a docu- ment which was not so, and to present it as such to Cavaignac." It hardly admits of doubt that Henry had forged it " to order " for De Boisdeffre himself. Perhaps it was the knowledge of this which has led the Royalist and Catholic press to take the line that Henry fell a martyr to the cause of duty and patriotism. Thus, in the Gazette de France of September 6th, M. Charles Maurras writes thus : — " We wait for justice to pay to Henry the public honours he deserves. MeanAvhile the French have vowed a home-worship {cultc domestique) to this brave soldier, this heroic servant of the great interests of the State." A few lines below Henry is called " a grand man of honour ; " and, in agreement with M. Judet of the Petit Journal, his forgery is asserted to be, as it were, a bank-note with a credit value representing a bullion reserve of documents of absolute authen- ticity. Similarly M. Drumont has declared the for- gery to be " the popular version of the genuine proofs of Dreyfus' guilt." HENRY THE FORGER 297 " Heniy," continues M. Maurras, " divulged him- self to none. . . . He readily consented to run tlie risk himself, but alone. In his self-imposed task of policing the relations of nations, our energetic pleleian could only have shocked the more delicate feelings of the high-bred gentlemen of the Mat major (? Du Paty de Clam). . . . Henry sacrificed himself, with death before his eyes, to the task of deceiving for the public good the chiefs he loved, and whose complete confidence he enjoyed, M. de BoisdefFre, M, Gonse, perhaps -others as well. ... It would have been hard for him in such a matter to have pushed further his intellectual and moral scruples." This elegant Catholic thinker, having so clearly hinted that Henry had aristocratic accomplices, next turns upon the journalists who do not share his admiration for fraud and forgery. " They are," he says, " held back by the scruples of our mischievous half-Protestant education!' In such lines as the above, read with enthu- siasm by the Catholic gentry of France in the year of our Lord 1898, we get a glimpse of the awful moral abyss into which confessional and Jesuit training has plunged thousands of French families. We are not surprised after this to learn that in Paris there has been circulated during September an appeal for subscriptions for a Henry memorial. It is signed by M. Charles Leroux, y6 Rue Blanche, 298 THE DREYFUS CASE and is endorsed by M. Renaudin, Mayor of Pogny, where Henry was born. The text of it is as fol- lows : — " Colonel Henry's Devotion to his Country. " Public subscription for a monument to be raised to him. "When an officer is reduced to committing a pretended forgery in order to restore peace to his country and rid it of a traitor, that soldier is to be mourned. " If he pays for his attempt with his life, he is a martjrr. " If he voluntarily takes his life, "HE IS A HERO." We must suppose that he would become a saint in the eyes of high French Catholic society in case he had his throat cut for him. I think my reader will allow that the Jesuits have not changed much since Pascal addressed to them his " Provincial Letters." It must be admitted, however, that the view that the arrest and confession of Hemy was due to re- presentations made by the Itahan Government rests on imperfect evidence. It is probable that the revelations made by Esterhazy himself on August 26 and 27, 1898, at a court-martial before which he had been called to explain the intrigues he had conducted in conjunction with Du Paty at the time of his mock court-martial in January, may have HENRY THE FORGER 299 at least accelerated the denouement. M. Bertuliis, the examininof magistrate in the civil action for forgery, brought on July 25 th by Picquart against Du Paty and Madame Pays, had unmasked these intrigues in his report ; and, although the grand jury (chamhre des mises en accusation) had tried to prevent the case from going for trial, yet the War Office was driven by the denunciations of Du Paty, repeated day after day in the Siecle, to take some action, M. Tezenas, Esterhazy's counsel in the court-martial of January, refused to defend him in that of August. He was aware of the collusion there had been in the last weeks of the year 1897 between the War Office and his client, and did not wish to compromise himself any further, even for the sake of Esterhazy. Thus abandoned, even by his own counsel, Esterhazy, on August 27, seems to have hit out wildly, and to have hinted at the part that Henry had played, though without confessing what is probably the full truth, that Henry was his accomplice in treason. This in itself, however, would not explain the tragic end of Henry, for Gonse and De Boisdeffre, Avho employed him to forge, must have known long before most of Avhat Esterhazy had to reveal. Some foreign influence must therefore have worked in order to force on the final exposure. CHAPTER XV REVISION AT LAST The agitation caused in France by the confession and suicide, real or alleged, of Henry was enormous. It carried conviction to many wlio were wavering, and stirred the consciences of thousands of Republi- cans who hitherto had pretended to themselves that no responsibility lay on them. They had avoided the subject in addressing their constituencies before the general election, and very many of them had with complacent ferocity asked, what did the welfare of a single Jew matter ? Some had even expressed regret that he had not died or been shot at the very first, and so got out of the way. The tragic death of Henry roused them out of their lethargy ; and, in response to inquiries dispatched from Paris by the Premier, Brisson, a majority of them declared that they were at last in favour of revision. It might have been expected that M. Cavaignac would also change his mind. But his moral tem- perament is that of certain third-rate theologians, who, having once expressed an opinion, however crude, make it a point of honour never to go back upon it. Accordingly Cavaignac declared himself REVISION AT LAST 301 more convinced than ever of Dreyfus' guilt, more than ever oj)posed to revision ; and argued that, as he had so frankly exposed the forged proof, he must surely be believed when he affirmed that more than enough remained in the secret dossier to convict Dreyfus. M. Brisson, however, and M. Sarrien, the Keeper of the Seals, had resolved to have revision, and for a few days it seemed an open question which party in the Cabinet should go. Ultimately, on September 5, 1898, M. Cavaig- nac resigned, and General Zurlinden, a Catholic and an Alsatian, succeeded him on September 6. Friends of justice hoped that, in view of his ante- cedents, this new Minister of War would at once set himself to liquidate the entire matter, but he was evidently appalled by the d6hdde of the whole administration of the army which revision would entail, and, yielding to the sinister influences of those who surrounded him, set himself to oppose revision more vigorously than any of his predeces- sors. However, he was obliged to throw a sop to the wolves, and his first act was to dismiss from the army Du Paty de Clam, a partial act of jus- tice, from which, by reason of his consanguinity with the offender, Cavaignac had shrunk. About the 9th of September, Esterhazy, who had been re- tired from the army along with Du Paty, slipped away from Paris, and is said to have crossed the Belgian frontier on foot. Thence he has come to London, where, according to Messrs. Lewis and 302 THE DREYFUS CASE Lewis, he has confessed to three persons that he wrote the bordereau, and this confession is perhaps the gros 'petard or big bomb which he meant to reserve for his promised memoirs. It is doubtful whether he will respond to the invitation ad- dressed to him by the Cour de Cassation to come forward and tell it the whole truth. M. Drumont and the Jesuits, who continue to subsidise him, will probably see that it is worth his while not to do so much as that. On September 17, 1898, the French Cabinet decided to send for considera- tion before a commission of six members of the Ministry of Justice Madame Dreyfus' petition for revision, which had already been addressed to M. Sarrien on September 5. Thereupon General Zurlinden resigned, protesting, of course, his belief in Dreyfus'* guilt. M. Tillaye, Minister of Public Works, went with him, and the military and Jesuit sheets redoubled their vaticinations about the foreign perils which revision involved ; as if France was mistress within her own house to do wrong, but not to do right. They argued that one Minister of War after another would not resign after looking at the dossier secret unless it contained irrefutable proofs of Dreyfus' treason with the Germans — proofs, moreover, of such a kind that war would ensue as the result of then- publication. But all this was futile, and on Sep- tember 26, 1898, the case was sent irrevocably to the Cour de Cassation to be dealt with. REVISION AT LAST 303 M. Brisson and M. Sarrien, his Keeper of the Seals, had the good sense, when they had once decided on revision, to resort to Colonel Picquart for information. He still lay in the prison in which he had been locked up early in July, but access to him was not yet cut off by the military party, as it was a few days later; and he sent a full exposition in two letters of all he knew about the case, and this was read aloud by Conseiller Bard on October 28, 1898, in the first audience of the Cour de Cassation hearing the appeal. Colonel Picquart's letters are dated September 1 4 and 1 5 , 1898, and in various ways supplement the account of my preceding pages. It is convenient here to supply these details, which I pick out in the order in which Picquart's letters contain them, adding in brackets the context of my book where they severally belong. 1. The documents enumerated in the bordereau are not those of which Dreyfus had particular know- ledge at the time when it was written (cp. p. 52). 2. The writer of the bordereau uses these words : " Unless, indeed, you would like me to have it copied in extenso." Therefore he had secretaries. Now Esterhazy had secretaries, but not Dreyfus (cp. p. 52). 3. When they fovmd nothing against Dreyfus except the bordereau, they hunted among the old papers of the Intelligence Bureau and formed a secret dossier to be laid privately before the judges. This dossier, formed by Henry, was in two parts. 304 THE DREYFUS CASE The first, shown to the judges, contained four pieces along with a commentary on them drawn up accord- ing to Sandherr by Du Paty. The second part con- tained mere rubbish (cp. p. 8i). 4. The four pieces (cp. pp. 83 foil.) shown to the judges were the following : — {a.) A draft of a letter written by Schwartz- koppen,^ probably to his superiors. He was accus- tomed to make such rough drafts, and then throw them in his waste-paper basket. It is not written in French, and belongs to the end of 1893 or 1894. Its sense is as follows : — " Doubts ... what to do ? Let him show his officer's brevet. What has he to fear ? What can he furnish ? It is not worth while having to do with a mere regimental officer " {officier de troupe). The obvious meaning of this, says Picquart, is, that the writer of this draft had received overtures from some one who said he was an officer in a regi- ment. Even if he be an officer, as he pretends, still he is not of much use to Schwartzkoppen, as he is not attached to the general staff. Du Paty's com- mentary, however, turns the sense upside down, for it runs thus : — " Schwartzkoppen does not care for a mere regimental officer, so he chooses one in the 4tat major, and finds him in the Ministry." Such a com- mentary, remarked the judge (Bard) of the French ^ Conseiller Bard used the letters A and B where I fill in from my own private knowledge the names of Schwartzkoppen and Panizzardi. REVISION AT LAST 305 supreme court, indicates the perfidious spirit in which Du Paty went to work. (b.) The drift of the second piece was this : — " I would like to have certain information about a matter of recruiting. I shall ask Davignon, but he will tell me nothing. So do ask your friend. But Davignon must not know of your doing so, for it must not be that they know that we are working together." The above is in Panizzardi's handwriting, and the words in it, " II ne faut pas que Davignon le sache, parce qu'il ne faut pas qu'on sache," were imitated in Henry's grotesque forgery. The matter about which Panizzardi wished to find out was so trivial, that Schwartzkoppen could learn it openly from any of his French officer friends at the weekly receptions which were held in the second bureau of the War Office, and at which foreign attaches pub- licly discussed such matters. The meaning is, that Davignon, who is Panizzardi's friend, cannot be relied on for information ; but Schwartzkoppen has a friend, who will be good-natured enough to tell him. (In passing, I may note that Schwartzkoppen, who never shook hands with Esterhazy, alluded to him not as mon ami, but as mon Jiomme. The use of the word ami indicates that it is not a spy that is referred to at all, but a respectable ofiicer, like Panizzardi's own friend, Davignon.) ^.) The third piece also was written by Paniz- zardi in 1894. It begins: — "I have seen that u 3o6 THE DREYFUS CASE caTmille de D . . . He has given me for you twelve plans," &c. This was one of the two genuine letters of Panizzardi read out on July 7, 1898, in the French Chamber by Cavaignac ; and Picquart pointed out that Dreyfus could not have gone to the first bureau, which he had quitted a year before, and have abstracted so large a bundle of maps, without their being at once missed and himself detected. On the other hand, they might have been abstracted from the Geographical Bureau. (