The Dreyfus Affair (29 page)

‘Yes,’ said Scheurer-Kestner, the burden of his promise finally lifted. ‘He’s the one.’

More than a year had passed since Georges Picquart had told General Gonse of the clear evidence he had uncovered that Alfred Dreyfus was innocent. The determination of the army’s High Command to ignore this evidence, Picquart’s reluctance to jeopardise his career by openly defying his superiors and the sense of honour of both the lawyer Leblois and the statesman Scheurer-Kestner that prevented them from disclosing what they had been told meant that the Dreyfus family and their friends had been denied the means with which to prise open a case which most in France considered closed. There were no recriminations. On 12 November, the day after Mathieu had learned the name of the man who had committed the crime for which his brother had been condemned, a council of war was held by the high command of the Dreyfusard campaign: Mathieu Dreyfus, Edgar Demange, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner and Louis Leblois, with the editor of
Le Figaro
, Emmanuel Arène,
in attendance. Arène suggested that, rather than an immediate and outright denunciation of Esterhazy, public opinion should be prepared for such a dramatic revelation. Under the byline Vixi, Arène published a story on 14 November announcing that ‘a well-known officer, frequently seen around Paris, who has a title, is married and is quite well connected’, had been revealed as the true author of the
bordereau
.

The article provoked a furious reaction the next day in
La Libre Parole
under the byline Dixi. The officer identified in
Le Figaro
was wholly innocent, the stooge that the Jews had long been seeking to carry the can for Dreyfus’s crimes. Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart was their tool in this infamous conspiracy.

The time had come to drop the innuendo and name names. Counselled by Demange, Mathieu composed a letter to Jean-Baptiste Billot, the Minister of War.

Monsieur le Ministre
,

The sole basis for the charge brought in 1894 against my unfortunate brother is an unsigned, undated letter showing that confidential military documents were delivered to the agent of a foreign military power.

I have the honour of informing you that the author of that document is M. le Comte Walsin-Esterhazy, an Infantry Commandant, withdrawn from active duty last spring for reason of temporary infirmities.

Commandant Esterhazy’s handwriting is identical to that of the document in question. It will be quite easy for you to produce a specimen of the handwriting of the officer.

I am prepared, moreover, to indicate to you where you may find letters of his, whose authenticity cannot be contested and which date from before my brother’s arrest.

I cannot doubt,
Monsieur le Ministre
, that knowing the author of the treason for which my brother was convicted, you will act swiftly to see that justice is done.

On receipt of this letter, Billot asked General Saussier to investigate the charges made against Esterhazy. The government ‘owes it to justice,’ he told the Chamber of Deputies, ‘to the honour of the accused, to insist that the author of the denunciations produce his justification’: the accused whose honour was in question was, of course, Esterhazy, not Dreyfus. To chair the inquiry, Saussier appointed the military commander of the Department of the Seine, General Georges de Pellieux. Pellieux started proceedings on 26 November. On the same day, Georges Picquart was recalled to Paris.

*
Gonse would later deny that this exchange had taken place.

*
In fact, he was Crémieu-Foa’s second.

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Commandant Esterhazy

1: Early Years

The Comte Marie-Charles-Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was descended from one of the most illustrious families in Europe – the Hungarian Esterhazys. When the Russian Tsar Alexander I and the Prussian King Frederick William made their ceremonial entry into the city with Emperor Francis of Austria for the Congress of Vienna, the guard of honour ‘resplendent in its lavishly embroidered hussar uniforms’ was commanded by a Prince Esterhazy, ‘whose jewelled aigrette and pearl-adorned boots were the source of universal admiration’.
1

Charles Walsin-Esterhazy was a very remote descendant of this scion of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, and he was equally far from being able to afford a jewelled aigrette or pair of pearl-adorned boots. The name Esterhazy had come to him from his paternal great-grandmother, Anne-Marie Esterhazy, who had given birth to an illegitimate son in 1767. She was the granddaughter of a Comte Antoine Esterhazy who had fled to France after the abortive rising of Rakosy in the seventeenth century and had taken service under King Louis XIV. She gave her son her family name of Esterhazy but appended to it the name of a romantic hero then in fashion – Walsin.

In due course Anne-Marie Esterhazy’s son married a Mlle Cartier and went to live in Nîmes. Two of their three sons joined the French Army and both reached, under Napoleon III, the rank of general. The younger of the two distinguished himself during the Crimean war, notably in the battle of Eupatoria. He married Zélie Dequeux de Beauval, by whom he had a daughter and a son, the son being Charles-Marie-Ferdinand, born on 26 December 1847.

The younger General died in July 1857, and his widow, in her turn, in December 1865. Soon after her death, the orphaned Charles took on the title of count to which he had no right and dropped the first part of his family name to call himself Esterhazy, though others continued to use Walsin. He was only a sixteenth part Hungarian and did not speak the language, and his knowledge of German came from his studies at the Lycée Condorcet. In March 1863, at the age of sixteen, he left the Lycée Condorcet and there follows a four-year gap in his
curriculum vitae
: he may have been recovering from tuberculosis in the country with relatives, or travelling abroad with his mother’s brother, Beauval, who was a French consul. At some point he passed his baccalaureate and applied for the military academy of Saint-Cyr, but was turned down.

Thwarted in this attempt to take the fast track to a commission, Esterhazy enlisted in May 1869 in the Pontifical Legion formed to protect the Pope in Rome from the Italian nationalists under Cavour. He resigned that commission in March 1870 and, thanks to the pulling of strings by his Esterhazy and Beauval uncles, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the French Foreign Legion. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, before he had had a chance to serve in Africa, he was transferred to the 1st Regiment of Zouaves in the Army of the Loire. Chaotic conditions led to fast promotion – first to lieutenant, then captain, but after France’s defeat there was a revision of grades which reduced him back to the rank of second lieutenant.

Esterhazy saw this demotion as a grave injustice and it left him with a lasting grudge against the army High Command. He was still only a lieutenant when serving with the 54th Regiment of the Line garrisoned at Beauvais in 1875. His talents, such as they were, seemed more suited to the intellectual aspects of the military life. He was an assiduous researcher and fluent writer, and worked for a time for the
Journal des Réunions des Officiers
in its office on the rue de Bellechasse in Paris. In February 1877, he was posted to the Service des Renseignements as a German translator. In 1880, he was transferred to active service with the 135th Regiment of the Line stationed at Cholet.

Esterhazy was also a diligent networker, and sought to further his career less by heroics than by exploiting the contacts he made during the different stages of his career. Through the
Journal des Réunions des Officiers
he met Maurice Weil, and was thereby introduced to a circle of writers on military affairs, mostly retired officers, who published a small magazine called
L’Épée et la Plume
. A high civil servant, Gaston Grenier, whose father had been a friend of Esterhazy’s, was himself a friend of Esterhazy’s superior officer, Commandant Paul Saglio, whose wife was a Crémieu-Foa. It was Saglio who introduced Esterhazy to his brothers-in-law, Captain André Crémieu-Foa, and Ernest, a stockbroker.

Esterhazy had no money and this, together with the sense that he had not been promoted to a rank that his talents and pedigree deserved, led to an angry, rancorous attitude towards France and the French. Photographs of Esterhazy show him balding, with a wide moustache, and an expression of irascible indignation on his face. He was contemptuous of the army he served, described it as no more than ‘a beautiful theatrical set behind which there was nothing’. He had more respect for the German Army, admiring its discipline and Junker tradition. Esterhazy was aware of the inner complexities and contradictions of his character: he was, he wrote to Mme de Boulancy, his mistress in the 1880s, ‘a being of a species completely different’ from her friends, capable of ‘great things given the opportunity’, or of great crimes. He was a Raskolnikov, an outsider like Dostoevsky’s anti-hero, ‘exasperated, embittered, furious’, with spasms of loathing for the country that had failed to give him his due. ‘If someone were to come to tell me this evening that I would be killed tomorrow as an Uhlan captain running through Frenchmen with my sabre, I would certainly be perfectly happy . . . Paris taken by storm and given over to the pillage of 100,000 drunken soldiers! That is a celebration I dream of!’
2

Having cheated Mme de Boulancy out of what money she had, Esterhazy left her and, it being not uncommon at the time to trade a title and pedigree for a dowry, looked to marry an heiress. He applied to the agencies who arranged such marriages, hoping to find ‘a young girl with five million’,
3
but in fact settled for one with 200,000 francs. This was Anne de Nettancourt-Vaubécourt, the daughter of the Marquis de Nettancourt-Vaubécourt, a member of the ancient nobility of Lorraine. The marquis had no money but his bourgeois wife, from whom he was separated, provided the dowry. It is possible that her parents’ separation was sufficiently
mal vu
to make it difficult to find a husband for Anne which is why the family settled for Esterhazy. The marriage took place on 6 February 1886, and was regarded by the groom from the outset as a disaster.

On their honeymoon in Venice, Esterhazy was stupefied when, ‘with a bored air’, Anne told him that she disliked the city ‘because there was no sound of traffic’.
4
Sex was a success – ‘Esterhazy recognised that his wife felt a strong sensual attraction towards him’ – but that did not compensate in his mind for her other failings, particularly her extravagance when they returned to Paris and set up house. ‘Concerning financial matters, my wife never for a moment realized, never even tried to understand, that when people as poor as we marry . . . they have to be thrifty and not buy themselves dresses, coats, and hats at the slightest whim, not travel first class, not pay their maids 60 francs a month.’
5
It was very much a case of the pot calling the kettle black: the real drain on Esterhazy’s finances came from his own extravagances and speculation on the Paris stock exchange. The birth of two daughters bound him closer to his family because, for all his other failings, ‘Esterhazy felt great affection for his children’ and they for him. But this family feeling did not deter him from taking up with a young girl he met while on army manoeuvres in Touraine in 1893, and continuing to see her when she moved to Paris to give singing lessons; nor from using and losing his wife’s money on his financial speculations.

There was one source of income that Esterhazy had yet to exploit and that was his Jewish friends. Soon after the duel in which he had acted as second to Captain André Crémieu-Foa (
see here
), he wrote three similar begging letters – one to Maurice Weil, another to Baron Alphonse de Rothschild and the third to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who had been his schoolmate at the Lycée Condorcet. He told them that he was destitute and that his poverty had now led to the ill-health of his wife and children. It was humiliating for him, a French officer, to beg for help but ‘I will go to such lengths rather than see my family die of hunger.’

Esterhazy’s misfortunes, he said, sprang directly from his perceived friendship with the Jews. ‘I did not hesitate’, he wrote to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, using the familiar
tu
, ‘when Captain Crémieu-Foa could find no Christian officer to act as his second,’
6
but he had paid dearly for this generous impulse. Accusing him of being ‘Jewified’, his own family had refused to help, and as evidence of this fact Esterhazy enclosed a copy of a letter from his uncle, the diplomat Beauval: ‘For me as a Christian, who believes that God punishes and compensates, I see in your misfortunes a blow from his hand. You have defended the Jews and you are brought down by money. It is the hand of God.’
7

The letter from Beauval had been forged by Esterhazy, but it had the desired effect. Edmond de Rothschild instructed his bank to draw 2,000 francs from an account he kept for charitable donations to ‘the poor’ and send it to Esterhazy. Maurice Weil forwarded his letter from Esterhazy to the Chief Rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, who elicited further donations from the Jewish community.
8

At the same time as Esterhazy was making the most of his pro-Semitic credentials, he was also making contacts with the anti-Semites of
La Libre Parole
. Indeed, on the day after the duel between Drumont and Crémieu-Foa, he had left his card at Drumont’s home, and soon afterwards started a friendly correspondence with Morès. ‘My dear Captain,’ Morès wrote to him, ‘your note pleased us both. I won’t hide from you that I am happy that this affair is over and please accept an assurance of my very best wishes, etc.’
9
Esterhazy began to feed information to the military correspondent of
La Libre Parole
,
Commandant Octave Biot, picked up from his contacts on the
Bulletin
,
La
Revue du Cercle Militaire
and
L’Épée et la Plume
. He acted as an intermediary between the ‘Israelites’ and
La Libre Parole
,
persuading Drumont to abandon his campaign against the incompetent, doddery General Édon, whose wife was Saussier’s standby mistress. ‘It is thanks to me’, he wrote to the Deputy Jules Roche, ‘that this scandal never saw the light of day.’
10