The Dreyfus Affair (23 page)

On Christmas Day 1897, the chief warder noted that his prisoner seemed defeated, and that he looked much older. Dreyfus’s numerous appeals had been met with silence: ‘silence was always the only reply that I received’. The days, the weeks, the months passed with no news. The only intimation Dreyfus gained that something might be going on in Paris came from snatches of conversation exchanged between his guards. On 28 February 1898, Dreyfus wrote an appeal directly to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. There was no answer. Then, seven months later, on 27 October – three and a half years after arriving on Devil’s Island, and four years after his arrest – Dreyfus was told by the prison authorities that a response to his petitions was on its way. He wrote ecstatically to Lucie. ‘A few words to echo my immense affection for you, and an expression of all my love. I have just been told that I will receive a definitive reply to my request for a review. I await it with calmness and confidence, without any doubt that the response will lead to my rehabilitation.’
68

Less than a month later, Deniel himself, under orders from above, delivered a telegram to his prisoner.

Cayenne, 16 November 1898. From the Governor to the deportee Dreyfus via the senior commander of the Salvation Islands. You are hereby informed that the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation has declared admissible in the form stated an application for the review of your case, and rules that you should be informed of this and invited to present your defence.

Now that the possibility of a judicial error had been conceded by the courts, the treatment of Dreyfus improved. The letters from Lucie were no longer copies but were written in her own hand. On 28 November 1898, Dreyfus was authorised to leave the area enclosed by the palisades and take exercise from seven o’clock to eleven in the morning, and from two to five in the evening, ‘within the grounds of the fortified camp’.
69
He now ‘saw again, the full glare of the sun, the sea, which I had not seen for more than two years. I saw once more the stunted verdure of the island. My eyes could rest on something else than the four walls of the prison hut!’

Dreyfus would remain on Devil’s Island for another six months while the Appeal Court in Paris considered his appeal; but the knowledge that his case was being reviewed brought him ‘immense relief’.

I had never despaired, I had never lost faith in the future, convinced as I was from the first that the truth would be known, that it was impossible that a crime so odious, and to which I was so utter a stranger, could remain unpunished. But, as I knew nothing of events occurring in France, and, on the other hand, saw my situation becoming daily more terrible, persecuted ceaselessly and causelessly, obliged to struggle night and day against the elements, the climate, and against mankind, I had begun to doubt that I should myself ever live to see the end of this terrible drama . . . At last, the horizon cleared; I had glimpses of the end of my own and my loved ones’ martyrdom. It seemed to me that my heart was freed from an immense weight; I breathed more freely.
70

*
The full correspondence was only published in October 2005.

*
Because of its colourful name, the whole penitential system in French Guiana came to be called Devil’s Island in books published by escaped convicts such as René Belbenoit’s
Dry Guillotine
or Henri Charrière’s
Papillon
.

Part Three

The Affair

8

The First Dreyfusards

1: Mathieu Dreyfus

With the departure of Alfred Dreyfus from Paris, first to the Île de Ré and then to the penal settlements of French Guiana, his name ceased to appear in the press. Few outside his immediate family doubted his guilt; the great majority of Frenchmen and women felt a grim satisfaction that the traitor should be rotting on an island suitably named after the Devil, the ‘Prince of Lies’. The only regret expressed by
La Libre Parole
was that he had not paid for his crime with his life, and this leniency was ascribed to the influence on the government of the Jews.

It was taken for granted, by Édouard Drumont and those of a like mind, that ‘the Jews’ would continue to exercise their considerable influence to come to the aid of one of their own – either to effect an escape from Devil’s Island or to secure his rehabilitation by persuading public opinion that there had been a miscarriage of justice. The Jews had money, and money talks. Mathieu Dreyfus, who through contacts in Mulhouse secured an interview with his fellow citizen, Colonel Sandherr, told the chief of the Statistical Section that he would devote his ‘entire life and family fortune to discovering the truth’. Sandherr, now a sick man who had received Mathieu in his home, would later claim that this was an oblique offer of a bribe. If so, Sandherr did not take it up but merely assured Mathieu that his brother’s arrest came at the end of a ‘long and serious inquiry’.
1

Clearly, the most effective way to secure the release of Alfred Dreyfus would be to find the true traitor, and ‘it was widely rumoured that the Dreyfus family was trying to set up a “patsy” (
un homme de paille
, a straw man), another army officer who could be blamed for the treason of which Alfred Dreyfus was guilty’.
2
The Director of the Sûreté – the criminal investigation department of the police –
reported that Alfred’s mother-in-law, Mme Hadamard, had promised 100,000 francs to a former policeman, Soudari, if he would find the guilty man.

The police kept Mathieu Dreyfus and other members of the family under surveillance; it seemed possible that Mathieu had been complicit in his brother’s treason. They also wanted to know what they were doing to secure Alfred’s release. To avoid this surveillance, Mathieu and his wife Suzanne used the alias ‘Monsieur and Madame Mathieu’, and had Mathieu’s sister and brother-in-law, Henriette and Paul Valabrègue, sign leases and other official documents.
3
In the wake of the hysteria that arose around Alfred’s trial and degradation, life became difficult for the traitor’s immediate family, or indeed anyone with the name of Dreyfus. After the degradation ceremony, many of those called Dreyfus, who were no relation of the family, abandoned the name ‘which had become synonymous with treason’.
4
In January 1895, Alfred’s nephew was expelled from the lycée in Belfort, ‘for defending his uncle’s reputation and making insulting remarks about French officers; the expulsion, it was said, “is generally approved in Belfort”’. At the same time ‘another nephew abandoned a place at the École Polytechnique to go instead into the family firm’.
5
In some circles the family of the traitor were treated as social pariahs: ‘many honest people . . . wanted to have nothing to do with Mathieu, with Alfred’s in-laws, or with anyone who was known to have contact with them. Any association with these rich and secretive Jews was assumed to be dangerous to an honest person’s reputation.’
6

Mathieu Dreyfus was to devote not just his fortune but all of his time to Alfred’s rehabilitation. He gave up his position in the family firm in Mulhouse, leaving its direction to his brother Jacques, and moved to Paris. Lucie was happy to let Mathieu take charge. She had left the apartment on the avenue du Trocadéro and moved in with her parents. She told her children, Pierre and Jeanne, that their father had gone on a long journey, but she dressed in black as if a widow. The children were tutored at home, avoided playgrounds, and on trips to the country – the villa at Chatou belonging to their grandparents, or at Le Vésinet with the Lévy-Bruhls – were escorted by detectives hired by Mathieu.

Mathieu had to proceed with care. He was being watched, his mail was opened and attempts were made to suborn his servants by government agents. Since the theory was still current that the Germans had paid off Dreyfus by means of an insurance claim for a factory that was burned down in Mulhouse, it was possible that Mathieu might be charged as an accomplice. Edgar Demange, now emotionally as well as professionally engaged in the fate of his former client, warned Mathieu against keeping important documents in his home, to keep an eye on his servants and to avoid department stores where he might be arrested for shop-lifting after an item of merchandise had been surreptitiously slipped into his pocket.
7
And, when it became known that money was on offer for information that might exonerate Alfred Dreyfus, Mathieu was approached by a number of ‘tricksters and fortune hunters’, any one of whom might have been an
agent provocateur
from the Sûreté or the Statistical Section.

Outside the family, there were few who were prepared to jeopardise their careers or social standing by joining the campaign for Dreyfus’s rehabilitation. Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, the celebrated lawyer and champion of liberty, was a close friend of Edgar Demange and must have known from him of the weakness of the case against Dreyfus, but if he had not been prepared to court political unpopularity by taking the case himself, he was certainly not prepared to stick his neck out now.

More courageous was Forzinetti, the Governor of the Cherche-Midi military prison, who had been convinced from the start that Dreyfus was innocent and now joined the small group who assembled at the Hadamards’ apartment to discuss how the campaign for his rehabilitation should proceed. Forzinetti had taken from the prison the copy of d’Ormescheville’s indictment as annotated by Alfred and now gave it to Mathieu, enabling him to see more precisely how biased the military magistrate’s inquiry had been. Patin, the Governor of the civilian prison of La Santé where Dreyfus had been held after his degradation, also believed that Dreyfus was innocent and offered his support to the family.

Initial approaches to potentially sympathetic journalists and politicians drew a blank. Mathieu secured interviews with senators such as Jules Siegfried and Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, Vice-President of the Senate and, as the last representative of the conquered Alsace, a senator for life. Siegfried, a former minister, promised to ensure that Alfred was well treated, while Scheurer-Kestner, after considering the matter, told Mathieu that ‘the information I have received leads me to believe in his guilt’.
8
The same response came from another Mulhousian, a Monsieur Zurcher, who was a cousin of the new Minister of War, General Zurlinden: he told Mathieu that the Ministry had ‘copious and clear evidence’ of Alfred’s guilt. Mathieu even approached Ernest Judet, a nationalist journalist on
Le Petit Journal
, who on 13 January 1895 had attacked Edgar Demange, saying that his continuing insistence on the innocence of his client led to suspicions that he was complicit in his crime.
9
Judet seemed to take on board what Mathieu had said and, when he departed, shook him by the hand.
10

Mathieu followed every lead, however unpropitious. There was a doctor in Le Havre, a Protestant, Dr Joseph Gilbert, who thought Alfred was innocent. He took an interest in clairvoyance and invited Mathieu to Le Havre to consult a medium called Léonie. Spiritualism and clairvoyance were then in fashion, and this Norman peasant woman of around fifty impressed Mathieu with some of her inexplicable insights into his brother’s case. Mathieu travelled to and fro between Le Havre and Paris. Léonie revealed that the real traitor was an officer in the Ministry of War, that he worked through a German agent called Greber and that he was a former friend of Alfred’s who had turned against him when Alfred had refused to lend him money.
11

Mathieu had such faith that Léonie would discover the name of the traitor in a hypnotic trance that he brought her to Paris and put her up in a flat on the rue de l’Arcade belonging to his sister, Louise Cahn. Later he moved Léonie into his own home. He had been shown by Dr Gilbert how to induce these trances and thought that her second sight would enable her to ‘visit’ his brother on Devil’s Island. In 1897 she told him that ‘Monsieur Alfred can no longer see the ocean. They have built a stockade for him.’ However, though the séances obsessed the whole family, they did not come up with the name of Monsieur Alfred’s false friend.

Dr Joseph Gilbert, the physician from Le Havre who had introduced Mathieu to Léonie, had been the family doctor of Félix Faure, formerly deputy for Le Havre and now President of France. The two men remained friends, and Gilbert, at Mathieu’s prompting, asked to see Faure. The request was made on 20 February 1895, but it was only on the morning of 21 October that the President received the physician at the Élysée Palace. In the face of his old friend’s nagging questions about the Dreyfus case, and his insistence that the evidence of the
bordereau
was wholly inadequate as proof, Faure, exasperated, told him that there had been other evidence not shown to the defence. ‘Dreyfus is guilty. He is guilty, there can be no doubt on that score. Very well, my dear friend, to put your mind at rest, I will tell you that he was not condemned on the facts that came out during the hearing, but upon the production of a document which was not shown to him, nor to M. Demange, for reasons of state.’
12

With the President’s permission, Dr Gilbert repeated this dramatic revelation to Mathieu Dreyfus, who had been waiting for him at the Hôtel de l’Athénée. Mathieu was appalled. He was appalled not just by the fact that his brother had been condemned on the basis of secret evidence, but also by the insouciance of the French President at this transgression of the most fundamental rules of justice. Worse still, he was to discover that this insouciance was shared by a handful of officers and politicians to whom the fact of this irregularity had been leaked by some of the judges at the court martial. Lieutenant-Colonel Echeman had mentioned it to a journalist on
Le Gaulois
and Commandant Freystaetter to Captain Picard, Alfred’s fellow
stagiaire
at the École de Guerre, also marked down in his final exams by General de Bonnefond who had said that he ‘did not want Jews on the General Staff’. Picard had passed on the information to a friend, Léon Lévy. Another of the judges, Commandant Florentin, had told a fellow officer, a Captain Potier, about the secret dossier. All in all, around twenty officers knew of the illegality, Jews among them, but all seem to have accepted that it was justified by
raison d’état
.