The Attorney-General.--“So, M. Labori, you give the signal for these
bravos?”
M. Labori.--“It is true, I said ‘Bravo;’ but frankly, it was the cry of
my conscience.”
M. Albert Clemenceau.--“There is one point beyond dispute,--that we
are authorized to prove that M. Zola has accused the council of war of
having committed an illegality. Well, I ask you how it is possible for
us to prove this, if we do not begin by establishing that an illegality
has been committed.”
The court denied the motion of M. Labori, and the second witness was
called,--M. Leblois, a lawyer of the appellate court.
_Testimony of M. Leblois._
The Judge.--“M. Labori, what question do you desire me to put to the
witness?”
M. Labori.--“Will you ask M. Leblois at what date and under what
circumstances he came into possession of the facts now within his
knowledge concerning the Esterhazy case?”
The court interposing no objection, M. Leblois made the following
statement:
“I have been for many years the friend of Colonel Picquart. We made all
our studies together, and we have remained faithful to this friendship.
In 1890 Colonel Picquart was made professor in the School of War, and
since then I have seen him more or less frequently. Then he entered
the war department, to which he had already been attached for several
years, and finally, about the middle of 1895, if I am not mistaken,
he was appointed chief of the bureau of information. It would have
been natural at that time for him to consult me occasionally upon the
legal difficulties that he met, since I was his intimate friend and had
belonged to the magistracy for ten years. Nevertheless he spoke to me
of only two cases,--a case of criminal procedure that was under way at
Nancy, and a batch of documents relating to carrier pigeons, which was
nothing but a collection of ministerial decrees upon that question.
When, on November 16, 1896, Colonel Picquart was suddenly obliged to
quit the war department, he had never said a word to me, either of the
Dreyfus case or of the Esterhazy case, and I was absolutely unaware
that he was concerning himself with either of them. All who know
Colonel Picquart will not be astonished at this reserve.
“In June, 1897, I received a visit from Colonel Picquart, who had come
to pass a fortnight’s leave of absence in Paris. On June 3, he had
received at Sousse a threatening letter, which had been written to him
by one of his former subordinates, and thus he found himself under the
necessity of consulting a lawyer. For purposes of his defence he made
known to me some of the facts in the cases of Dreyfus and Esterhazy. I
say, gentlemen, some of the facts, for Colonel Picquart never revealed
to me any military secret, in that sense of the term secret in which it
is employed in military language. Colonel Picquart had become convinced
of the innocence of Captain Dreyfus, and he explained to me the facts
upon which his conviction rested. I had too much confidence in his
intelligence and honesty not to admit the materiality of the facts
that he made known to me, and from them I came to the same conclusion
that he had arrived at. I was profoundly disturbed by what I had just
learned, for I not only deplored the possibility of so grave an error,
and the submission to undeserved torture of a man who seemed to be
innocent, but I was anxious lest such revelations might agitate the
country; and so I determined to exercise the greatest prudence.
“First, I collected all the information that I could procure. I
consulted certain persons who had been familiar with other facts,
making my study more precise by reading documents published in 1896.
I gathered information as to the Dreyfus family, and as to Captain
Dreyfus, whom I did not know, and finally I studied the various
questions of law to which the case might give rise. In the course of
these inquiries I learned that M. Scheurer-Kestner had been concerning
himself with the Dreyfus case for a year, and had collected facts of
some interest. About the same time I met M. Scheurer-Kestner at a
dinner, and an interview was arranged between us for a subsequent day.
When he found that I was in possession of important information, he
urged me strongly to tell him more. He was so insistent, and showed
so keen anxiety, that I could not refrain from enlightening him more
completely. My original plan, the only one that seemed possible to
me, was to promptly put the government in possession of the facts
that I had learned through Colonel Picquart. M. Scheurer-Kestner,
vice-president of the senate, seemed to me the best person that I
could find through whom to approach the government. For these reasons
I thought it my duty to yield to M. Scheurer-Kestner’s solicitations,
and I gave him the desired enlightenment. Especially I spoke to him
of letters that General Gonse had written to Colonel Picquart. M.
Scheurer-Kestner begged me to show him these letters immediately,
and he accompanied me to my house to get them. From that moment he
was convinced of the innocence of Dreyfus, and his conviction has
never since been shaken. He will never abandon the cause that he has
undertaken.
“Meanwhile, the vacation season was approaching, and it seemed very
difficult to institute proceedings at that time. It seemed to me that
an affair of this sort should not be entered upon, unless there was a
possibility of pursuing it to the end. Furthermore, M. Scheurer-Kestner
deemed it necessary to have in his hands certain material proofs
which both he and I lacked,--proofs in the shape of examples of
Major Esterhazy’s handwriting, which was supposed to be identical
with that of the _bordereau_. Nevertheless, I thought it my duty to
submit to M. Scheurer-Kestner at that moment the idea of presenting
to the keeper of the seals a petition for the cancellation of the
verdict of 1894, because it seemed to me a settled fact that a secret
document had been communicated to the judges, and that consequently
the judgment was void. M. Scheurer-Kestner thought that it was too
early to take such a step in the absence of material proofs. He made
arrangements to get examples of Major Esterhazy’s handwriting as soon
as possible, and toward the end of July started on his vacation. In
the course of the following months he succeeded in procuring examples
of Major Esterhazy’s handwriting, and, on returning to Paris, he
entered into communication with the government. Concerning that, he
will testify himself. For my part, I have nothing more to say upon
this point. Nevertheless I add that, when M. Scheurer-Kestner made his
interpellation in the senate on November 7, 1897, it seemed to him that
this should be the end of his personal participation in the matter. In
fact, the declarations of the government pointed to an honest and full
investigation, and it did not seem to M. Scheurer-Kestner that there
was any occasion for him to interfere in the working-up of a criminal
case. So about Christmas time he thought himself entitled to take a few
days’ rest, of which he was in great need.
“At that moment I had been informed by Colonel Picquart of the
conspiracies against him,--conspiracies of extreme gravity, the
most serious and important point of which is found in two telegrams
addressed to him from Paris on November 10, 1897, and reaching him at
Sousse, the first on November 11, the second on November 12 in the
morning. These telegrams were forgeries. It seemed plain that they
could not have been drawn up, except upon information emanating from
the bureau of information, and this it would be easy to demonstrate;
but Colonel Picquart will demonstrate it better than I. As the jury
and the court will see, this was a new incident in an extremely
serious matter, since these telegrams were dated November 10, 1897.
Nevertheless it was a conspiracy which had long been in preparation,
for in December, 1896, false letters had been addressed to the minister
of war signed with the same name, ‘Speranza,’ that appeared at the
foot of the two telegrams of November 10, 1897. It seemed to me it was
my first duty to inform the government of this situation. But, having
with the government no easy and direct means of communication, I asked
M. Trarieux, senator and former keeper of the seals, whom I had met
several times at the house of a friend, and who, moreover, had taken
part in the senate discussion of M. Scheurer-Kestner’s interpellation,
to give me the benefit of his sanction by acting as an intermediary
between myself and the government. He will tell you what steps he took.
For my part I could do but one thing,--lodge, on behalf of my client,
a complaint with the government attorney, which complaint is under
examination by M. Bertulus, who has already taken the deposition of
Mlle. Blanche de Comminges.
“I said just now that Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart suddenly left
the war department on November 16, 1896, on the eve of the Castelin
interpellation in the chamber of deputies. His friends were unaware
of his departure, and I in particular went several times, and during
several weeks, to see him, and failed to find him. One of his
friends wrote to the minister of war a letter which should be among
the documents in the hands of M. Bertulus, and which, at any rate,
constitutes one of the papers in the investigations made by General
de Pellieux and Major Ravary. This letter was insignificant, but in
it there was a brief allusion to a personage who, in the _salon_ of
Mlle. de Comminges, had been nicknamed the ‘demigod.’ The letter
contained this sentence: ‘Every day the demigod asks Mme. the Countess
[that is Mlle. de Comminges] when he will be able to see the good
God.’ In this circle, where Colonel Picquart was very popular, he was
known as ‘the good God,’ and the name ‘demigod’ had been given to a
certain Captain Lallement, who was the orderly of General des Garet,
commanding the sixteenth army corps at Montpellier. This letter was
intended for Colonel Picquart, but reached him only after it had been
secretly opened and copied at the war department. The following month
there came to the bureau of information a letter which was intercepted
entirely, and of which no knowledge came to Colonel Picquart. This
letter is surely the work of a forger. It is signed ‘Speranza.’ That
was the beginning, in December, 1896, of the attempt to compromise
Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. The existence of the second letter was
concealed for more than a year, and he learned of it for the first time
in the course of General de Pellieux’s investigation. But it was made
the basis of all the conspiracies for the ruin of this officer. Be not
astonished, then, that last November, when this matter came to public
attention and enlisted the interest of parliament, new conspiracies
came to light. In the evening of November 10, 1897, two telegrams
started from Paris together. The first read thus: ‘Stop, demigod.
Affair very serious. Speranza.’ From this telegram it seemed that
the demigod must be a very important personage, probably a political
personality, perhaps M. Scheurer-Kestner. The second telegram read: ‘We
have proofs that the dispatch was manufactured by Georges. Blanche.’
This second telegram, which was evidently a part of the same conspiracy
to which the first belonged, tended to destroy the authenticity, and
consequently the force as evidence, of a certain dispatch on which
rested the investigation opened by Colonel Picquart in the spring of
1896 concerning Major Esterhazy. Thus they endeavored to represent
Colonel Picquart as the tool of a politician and the author of a
forgery. I should add that it is certain that Colonel Picquart was not
acquainted with M. Scheurer-Kestner, and that he had no communication
with him, direct or indirect. As for the charge of forgery brought
against Colonel Picquart, it has been completely abandoned, for,
although there were some insinuations to that effect in Major Ravary’s
report, Colonel Picquart recently appeared before a council of inquiry,
and among the things with which he was reproached there was not the
slightest allusion to the possibility of a forgery in the case of the
document in question.”
The Judge.--“What do you know about it?”
M. Leblois.--“_Monsieur le Président_, I know it in the most certain
and natural way, because I was myself a witness before the council of
inquiry.”
The Judge.--“Were you there throughout the hearing?”
M. Leblois.--“No, but I have knowledge of the facts with which the
colonel was reproached.”
The Judge.--“You say that you have knowledge of them, but you do not
know them of your own knowledge, since you were not there.”
M. Labori.--“Permit me to observe, _Monsieur le Président_, that
the witnesses should have the advantage of the right to give their
testimony without being interrupted, according to the terms of Article
315 of the code of criminal examination. I claim this right for M.
Leblois. As to the fact which he affirms, the question is not how he
knows it, but whether it is true.”
The Judge.--“Permit me, Maître Labori; I suppose that the court is
entitled to question witnesses.”