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By Root 1276 0

carry this secret to my grave,” he said, and left the room. Trained as a soldier, as loyal and obedient to the service as any other officer, with no ax to grind, no personal motive, nothing to gain in public notoriety as was to move later actors in the Affair, Picquart acted then and thereafter, at certain risk to his career, from purely abstract respect for justice. He was, if anything, anti-Semitic, and on one occasion, when asked to take Reinach, who was a reserve officer, on his staff during maneuvers, had objected, saying, “I can’t stand the Jew.” For Dreyfus he cared no more than for Reinach. It was the fact that the Army could knowingly condone punishment of an innocent man that he could not stomach. When he would not desist in his pressure he was transferred to an infantry regiment in Tunisia. Subject to Army discipline he could make no public disclosures, but he contrived a brief return to Paris on leave during which he disclosed the facts to a friend who was a lawyer, and left a sealed report to be given in the event of his death to the President of France. Subsequently, when his disclosure became known, he was recalled, arrested, tried and convicted of misconduct, discharged from the Army, later rearrested and imprisoned for a year.

Meanwhile his information had been given by his lawyer to Scheurer-Kestner, a personal friend, who instantly spoke out, asserting Dreyfus’ innocence to fellow Senators and demanding a judicial review. He bore down upon the Government, harassed the Ministers of War and Justice, repeatedly interviewed the Premier and President. They stalled, put him off and promised “inquiries.” National elections were due in May, 1898, only eight months off. A retrial would raise a howl by the mischief-making press and involve a public inquiry into Army affairs that, once started, could lead anywhere, with undesirable effects both on Russia, with whom France had recently concluded a military alliance, and on Germany. These matters of state, foreign and domestic, outweighed a question of justice for a solitary man on a distant rock; besides, to men who want to stay in office, the nature of justice is not so clear as to those outside. The ministers allowed themselves to be persuaded by the General Staff, on the strength of Major Henry’s forged letter, which they had no reason to suspect, that Dreyfus must be guilty after all and Esterhazy probably an accomplice, or some other sort of unfortunate complication not justifying the terrible disturbance of a retrial.

Scheurer-Kestner hammered in vain. He thereupon published a letter in Le Temps informing the public that documents existed “which demonstrate that the culprit is not Captain Dreyfus,” and demanding a formal inquiry by the Minister of War to “establish the guilt of another.”

At the same time, Figaro published letters from Esterhazy to a cast-off mistress, one in facsimile, written during the Boulangist era, which expressed disgust for his own country in startling terms. “If I were told that I would die tomorrow as a Captain of Uhlans sabering Frenchmen, I should be perfectly happy,” he had written, and added a wish to see Paris “under a red sun of battle taken by assault and handed over to be looted by 100,000 drunken soldiers.” These extraordinary effusions of venom and hate for France in the handwriting of the bordereau* on which Dreyfus’ guilt hung seemed to the Dreyfusards like a miracle. They thought their battle won. But they learned, as Reinach wrote, that “justice does not come down from heaven; it must be conquered.” The journals of the Right immediately denounced the letters as forgeries fabricated by the “Syndicate.” Esterhazy himself, a gambler in debt, a speculator on the Bourse, a fashionable and witty scoundrel, married to the daughter of a marquis, a man of sallow and cadaverous countenance with a crooked nose, a sweeping black Magyar moustache, the “hands of a brigand” and the air, wrote an observer, “of an elegant and treacherous gipsy or a great wild beast, alert and master of itself,” was now transformed by the Nationalist