FRANCE. 



297 



was incorrect as to the stagiaires, as they were 

 detained that year to work upon the plans, but 

 they had the promise of the chief of staff that 

 they should go nevertheless if it were possible. 



As soon as the fact was revealed in 1893 by 

 the correspondence and oral disclosures of for- 

 eign agents that there was a traitor connected 

 with the general staff a watch was set on a great 

 number of persons having access to the War 

 Office, and this surveillance was gradually nar- 

 rowed to a limited number of individuals, then 

 directed after the bordereau reached the War 

 Office in September, 1894, to the artillery stagi- 

 aires, and finally concentrated on Dreyfus. 

 Major Du Paty de Clam, assisted by the chief 

 detective of the War Office, conducted the pre- 

 liminary inquiry, and when presumptive proof 

 was in his possession he called Dreyfus into a 

 room and before witnesses began to dictate to 

 him a pretended letter, beginning with insignifi- 

 cant words, and little by little introducing 

 phrases of the bordereau. When Dreyfus wrote 

 these his hand trembled more and more, and he 

 said it was so cold that he could not write, al- 

 though the temperature was really moderate. 

 Major Du Paty de Clam then placed him under 

 arrest. Dreyfus after his arrest increased the 

 suspicions of the officers who interrogated him 

 by his persistent denial of everything. He de- 

 nied all knowledge of army concentration, al- 

 though he had himself drawn on a map the zones 

 of concentration; he said he did not know that 

 there was a firing manual, although he had had 

 a copy in his possession. Even after his trans- 

 portation he refused to discuss the bordereau, 

 yet a duplicate of it was found sewed up in the 

 lining of his vest. On the occasion of his degra- 

 dation, as attested by Capt. Lebrun-Renault, the 

 gendarmery officer who guarded him, he made 

 this confession : " Original documents were not 

 delivered, .but only copies. The minister knows 

 I am innocent, and in three years my innocence 

 will be established. If I gave up documents to 

 the foreigner, it was to obtain more important 

 ones in return." 



Of the five experts who compared the bordereau 

 with the handwriting of Dreyfus, two did not 

 attribute it to him, while three did, though they 

 found the writing of the first page unnatural, 

 constrained, possibly disguised, and different 

 from the second page, which was written in a 

 flowing, natural hand, and was more like the 

 real writing of Dreyfus. 



Dreyfus was arrested on Oct. 15, 1894, and 

 kept for two weeks in the Cherche Midi prison 

 in ignorance of the charges against him. His 

 wife was cautioned not to tell of his arrest, nor 

 did it become known until it was divulged by a 

 newspaper. He was tried by court-martial, and 

 when the handwriting experts disagreed secret 

 documents were shown to the judges, but not to 

 the prisoner or his counsel. One of these was 

 a private letter from Lieut.-Col. Von Schwarz- 

 koppen, the German military attache, to Lieut.- 

 Col. Panizzardi, his colleague of the Italian em- 

 bassy, written two years before, which contained 

 the sentence, " Cette canaille de D. devient trop 

 exiyeante." It was afterward conceded by Drey- 

 fus's accusers that the " D." referred to another 

 person. Dreyfus was convicted, publicly degraded 

 on Jan. 5, 1895, and on Feb. 9 transported to 

 Devil's island, Cayenne, on a life sentence. His 

 appeal to the supreme military council was not 

 heard. In 1895 a card telegram (petit bleu] was 

 brought by spies, which was in Lieut.-Col. Von 

 Schwarzkoppen's handwriting, and was addressed 

 to Commandant Esterhazy, calling upon him to 



give more detailed information. Lieut.-Col. 

 Georges Picquart, who had succeeded Col. Sand- 

 herr as chief of the intelligence department, 

 looked up Esterhazy's record, which was bad, 

 procured letters written by him, and found the 

 handwriting so like the bordereau that he be- 

 came convinced that Esterhazy was the traitor 

 and Dreyfus an innocent man. He obtained per- 

 mission from his superiors to pursue his investi- 

 gations quietly, but found unexpected obstacles 

 placed in his way. His chiefs would not sanc- 

 tion any steps tending to bring into question the 

 justice of the Dreyfus verdict, for a revision of 

 which the relatives of the condemned man were 

 now agitating, and finally, on the ground that 

 Col. Picquart was so much engrossed and worked 

 up by these researches that he did not attend 

 properly to the business of the office, they re- 

 placed him with Lieut.-Col. Henry, and sent him 

 to organize the intelligence department in Tunis. 

 A broker employed by Esterhazy had recognized 

 the resemblance of his client's handwriting to 

 a facsimile of the bordereau printed in a news- 

 paper, and had communicated his suspicions to 

 M. Scheurer-Kestner, one of the vice-presidents 

 of the Senate. The latter went to Gen. Billot, 

 Minister of War, but was told that the matter 

 was a chose juge, which could not be reopened. 

 Mathieu Dreyfus, brother to the prisoner, wrote 

 an open letter to the minister accusing Ester- 

 hazy. The wife of Capt. Dreyfus renewed her 

 efforts to secure a retrial. Interpellations were 

 made in the Chamber. Gen. De Boisdeffre, chief 

 of the general staff, then asserted that the pris- 

 oner had been convicted on secret and irre- 

 fragable evidence submitted to the court. When 

 it thus became known that secret documents had 

 been put in evidence against Dreyfus without his 

 knowledge, the illegality of the proceeding caused 

 the agitation for a new trial to take a strong 

 hold on a wide section of the public. Gen. Mer- 

 cier, then Minister of War, justified the use of 

 secret evidence on the ground that if it were 

 made public it would lead to international com- 

 plications. He affirmed that the Government 

 possessed proofs that Dreyfus had been in cor- 

 respondence with the agent of a foreign govern- 

 ment for three years. The anti-Semitic press 

 denounced the efforts to secure a revision of the 

 trial as the work of an international syndicate 

 of Jewish capitalists. 



Major Esterhazy was ordered by his superiors 

 to demand an investigation; but the court-mar- 

 tial that tried him was precluded from examin- 

 ing into the authorship of the bordereau, as 

 Dreyfus had been judicially pronounced its au- 

 thor. Col. Picquart, who was recalled from 

 Tunis to testify, was virtually on trial himself, 

 and after the triumphant acquittal of Esterhazy 

 on Jan. 11, 1898, he was arrested on the charge 

 of forging the petit bleu, and, after that charge 

 was dropped, was held on the charge of showing 

 secret documents of the War Office to a lawyer. 

 He was tried by court-martial and sentenced to 

 be expelled from the army for revealing secret 

 documents to his lawyer, and was held by the 

 police to undergo a civil trial on this and on the 

 charge of forgery of the petit bleu. Esterhazy was 

 afterward placed on the retired list, and later still 

 orders were given to arrest him for treasonable 

 practices; but he escaped to England, and there 

 published all kinds of startling but conflicting 

 statements, denying what he had said before when 

 he wanted to 'invent a new story. One of his 

 avowals was that he was the writer of the 

 bordereau, fimile Zola, who had published a dia- 

 tribe against the general staff, was tried twice 



