On January 10, 1898, some three years after the secret trial and
conviction, by a council of war, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, then a
staff officer of the French army, of having sold French military
secrets to a foreign power, in consequence of which he was stripped
of his uniform in a degrading public ceremony and sent for life to
Devil’s Island, a French penal settlement situated off the coast
of French Guiana, where he is now confined under guard, a second
council of war convened in Paris for the trial of Major Marie Charles
Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, a French infantry officer temporarily
relieved from active service on account of poor health, the charge
against him--preferred by Mathieu Dreyfus, brother of Captain Alfred
Dreyfus--being that he was the real author of the _bordereau_, or
itemized memorandum, supposed to have been written by Captain Dreyfus,
and on the strength of which the latter was convicted.
The trial was conducted publicly until the most important witness,
Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, of the Fourth Algerian
Sharpshooters, was reached, when the council went into secret session,
remaining behind closed doors until the evening of January 11, when
the doors were thrown open and General de Luxer, the president of the
council, announced a unanimous vote in acquittal of the defendant.
Two days later--January 13--“L’Aurore,” a daily paper published in
Paris under the directorship of Ernest Vaughan and the editorship of
Georges Clemenceau, and having as its _gérant_, or legally responsible
editor, J. A. Perrenx, published the following letter from Emile Zola,
man of letters, to Félix Faure, president of France: