Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, in the memoir written eight years after the event and only published after his death, said that he was both astonished and shocked by Esterhazy’s offer. ‘A French staff officer on the active list unashamedly proposing to betray his country, and coolly asking a brother officer to arrange it for him!’ To establish his credentials, Esterhazy took from his breast-pocket a document which Schwartzkoppen claims to have returned to him unread saying it was out of the question that he should be party to treason, and advising him to leave and forget the whole thing.
Schwartzkoppen’s description of his disgust at Esterhazy’s proposition may be an accurate description of his true feelings, or it may have been a precaution in case Esterhazy had been sent to entrap him. It should also be seen in the light of his assurances to his Ambassador, Graf Münster von Derneburg, that he would not indulge in anything as dishonourable as espionage. However, Schwartzkoppen had a direct line to German Army intelligence and he reported Esterhazy’s offer to Major Müller, chief of the Nachrichtenbureau in Berlin. Müller told him to open negotiations with the officer who, on a subsequent unannounced visit on 27 July, introduced himself as Major the Comte Walsin-Esterhazy, battalion commander of the 74th Infantry Regiment stationed in Rouen. On 3 August, Schwartzkoppen went to Germany to see Major Müller, then on holiday at Michelstadt in the Odenwald, who suggested that he treat with Esterhazy, see what information was to be got from him and pay him according to results.
Schwartzkoppen returned to Paris on 6 August and saw Esterhazy at the Embassy on 13 and 15 August. On the first of these two visits, Schwartzkoppen returned the mobilisation instructions that Esterhazy had left with him, saying that they were valueless, but on the second visit Esterhazy produced a document outlining the General Instructions for the artillery on mobilisation which Schwartzkoppen realised would be of considerable interest to the German General Staff, and so he made his first payment to Esterhazy of 1,000 francs.
In his memoirs, Schwartzkoppen wanted to convey both the extreme reluctance with which he, a Prussian officer, took advantage of the treason of a French officer and the danger this posed, should the transaction be exposed, not just to his honour but to his position as military attaché in Paris. He also wanted to exculpate himself from the charge of negligence and so insisted that he had never received the list of documents offered by Esterhazy, the infamous bordereau. In his view it had been filched from the porter’s lodge at the German Embassy, presumably by Mme Bastian. He claimed that he learned of its existence only when he saw it reproduced in Le Matin in 1896.
Qui s’excuse, s’accuse. It is difficult to understand why Mme Bastian, as Schwartzkoppen suggested, should have torn up the bordereau ‘to make it appear that it had come out of my waste-paper basket’.12 Schwartzkoppen was an able and intelligent officer but, with his complex love-life involving the Italian military attaché Panizzardi and the wife of the Dutch Counsellor, Hermance de Weede, it seems probable that he did indeed throw the compromising document into his waste-paper basket, and that both the bordereau and the petit bleu did reach the Statistical Section by the ‘ordinary route’.
In his memoirs, Schwartzkoppen acknowledged that the final sentence of the bordereau – ‘I am off on manoeuvres’ – which the Statistical Section had such difficulty in linking to Dreyfus, referred to Esterhazy’s leaving for artillery exercise in Châlons. The documents listed in the bordereau were indeed provided by Esterhazy, and from 13 October onwards he made fortnightly visits to the German Embassy, bringing secret documents, some with commentaries, including one which revealed the contempt Esterhazy felt for the French Army – ‘a fine bit of stage scenery, charming and deceptive; one imagines that there is something behind; one pricks it; there is nothing!’13
Reassured that Esterhazy was what he seemed, and not a French agent sent to entrap him, Schwartzkoppen still had to guard against being duped. Esterhazy had initially asked for a monthly retainer of 2,000 francs but Schwartzkoppen, on Müller’s instructions, paid only what he thought a particular item was worth. It was difficult to see how the battalion commander of an infantry regiment stationed in Rouen, even if sent on training sessions to the French military base at Châlons, could have access to any particularly valuable information; yet it was precisely because of the secret nature of the documents itemised in the bordereau that Colonel Sandherr and his colleagues at the Statistical Section felt sure that its author must be on the General Staff. What they failed to appreciate was just how much of this supposedly secret information was in fact in the public domain. As Marcel Thomas has established, the documents promised by the bordereau ‘were not of capital importance’ and Esterhazy could have had access to them without belonging to the General Staff.14
There was, then, an element of double bluff in the traffic of secret documents between Esterhazy and Schwartzkoppen. As Thomas points out, Esterhazy’s real talent was as a journalist, and the material he supplied to Schwartzkoppen was much the same as he provided for Commandant Biot, the military correspondent of La Libre Parole. Esterhazy’s talent lay not in furnishing secret documents which he was in fact in no position to obtain, but in collating details gleaned from technical journals and matching them with stories he had picked up from other journalists or fellow officers whom he met through Weil, or who belonged to the circle around L’Épée et la Plume, on proposed reforms to the army, plans for changes in the military hierarchy and the founding of a separate army in North Africa.
No doubt Esterhazy would have been quite prepared to sell vital secrets to the Germans, but, in Thomas’s view, because he had no access to these vital secrets, ‘it is less certain that he was a traitor in the juridical sense of the term’.15 It is therefore possible that, when he came to be named as a traitor, his outrage was not wholly feigned.
Nor, it would seem, was Schwartzkoppen duped by Esterhazy because it was clear from the start – despite Esterhazy’s boast of useful contacts in the High Command – that he was not himself in a position to get hold of secret documents of major importance. However, the information he did provide was useful to Schwartzkoppen as pieces of a jigsaw which, when pieced together with what he learned from other sources – from other agents; from studying specialist military magazines or articles in the press for which he employed a secretary to assist him; from the weekly briefings of Colonel de Sancy, the War Ministry’s liaison officer with foreign military attachés; and even from snatches of conversation with friends and acquaintances among French officers such as Major du Paty de Clam – formed a comprehensive picture of France’s military capability.16
When Dreyfus was arrested in October 1894 and subsequently tried, condemned, degraded and deported, it does not seem to have occurred to Schwartzkoppen that it was a case of mistaken identity, and that Dreyfus was paying for Esterhazy’s crime. The court martial was held in camera and so, though there were stories in the press that the evidence against Dreyfus emanated from the German Embassy, no one outside the court saw the bordereau. Schwartzkoppen was therefore able to assure his Ambassador, Graf Münster von Derneburg, with complete sincerity, that he had never had any contact with any Captain Dreyfus and that the allegations made against the German Embassy in the French press were false.
On 25 December 1894, Münster had issued a statement to that effect: ‘The German Embassy has never had the slightest dealing, whether direct or indirect, with Captain Dreyfus. No document originating with him has been stolen from the Embassy, and no demand was made for the trial to be held behind closed doors.’ Schwartzkoppen had gone to Berlin and on 27 December was summoned to a meeting with the Imperial Chancellor, Prince Hohenlohe, the Chief of the Army’s General Staff, and the Kaiser himself at which he repeated how baffled he was by the whole affair. However, the attacks on Germany in the French press increased in virulence and on 6 January Münster held a meeting at his request with the French President, Casimir-Perier, at which they arrived at a formula for a joint statement which, if it did not deny the fact
that evidence of treason had emanated from the German Embassy, exonerated that Embassy from any responsibility for what may have arrived through the post (see p. 116–7 above).
Nor does it seem to have occurred to Esterhazy that Dreyfus had been mistaken for him. Throughout the period when the French were being driven to hysteria by the nationalist press as a result of the discovery of a spy in the French officer corps, Esterhazy continued his delivery of secret information to Schwartzkoppen. He cashed in on the hysteria, writing an article for La Libre Parole, in July 1895, denouncing German espionage.17 The material he provided for Schwartzkoppen was often just gossip he had picked up in military circles – for example, that the new Minister of War, Godefroy Cavaignac, intended to replace General Saussier, and was planning to form an autonomous army in Algeria with its own High Command.
Schwartzkoppen used this information in a report he sent to his superiors in Berlin in January 1896 which was intercepted and studied by Georges Picquart. But by this time Schwartzkoppen had decided that Esterhazy was no longer providing value for money. A final test was to ask Esterhazy for information on a matter of genuine interest to the Nachrichtenbureau, the design of a new rifle that was to replace the old Lebel rifle of 1886. Esterhazy plagiarised an article written by a Colonel Ortus of the circle around L’Épée et la Plume on ‘The Rifle of the Future’ but also made inquiries at the army base in Châlons and had a subordinate make sketches of its design which he delivered to Schwartzkoppen. This was ‘the matter in hand’ mentioned in the petit bleu, and the reason the letter was never sent was that Schwartzkoppen had decided that ‘further explanations’ would be pointless and so had returned the drawings to Esterhazy with a note instead. In March 1896, Schwartzkoppen’s relations with Esterhazy finally came to an end.18
3: The Powerful Protectors
The loss of the fees paid by Schwartzkoppen was not as catastrophic for Esterhazy as it would have been the year before: he had developed some other sources of income to supplement his army pay. Under the alias of Rohan-Chabot, he went into partnership with a madame in a brothel at 43, rue du Rocher, supplying 1,500 names of potential clients and investing 2,000 francs.19 He was also paid for the research he did for the Deputy, Jules Roche, and his friend Biot on La Libre Parole. Another friend on La Libre Parole, Ponchon de Saint-André, who wrote under the byline Boisandré, commissioned Esterhazy’s article denouncing German espionage. Esterhazy had also taken over from Boisandré as his mistress a young demi-mondaine, Marguerite Pays, whom he had met on a train in 1895. Devoted to Esterhazy, she too was a source of funds, provided by other lovers. Both she and Esterhazy remained on good terms with Boisandré, who was dazzled by Esterhazy’s gift of the gab. ‘This circle . . . on the fringes of gallantry, journalism and politics was, between 1895 and 1897, the world in which Esterhazy swam like a fish in water.’20
Esterhazy received a fortuitous windfall in October 1896 on the death of a cousin, Paul Esterhazy. The heirs of Paul Esterhazy were the deceased’s widow, his daughters and a son Christian who were persuaded to accept the advice of their worldly cousin Charles on what to do with their money. Christian sent Esterhazy 40,000 francs on the understanding that it would be invested by the Rothschilds, Esterhazy’s friends. By the end of 1897, the entire sum had been dissipated, either spent by Esterhazy himself or lost in speculations on the Bourse.21
Esterhazy also had high hopes, as he had told Schwartzkoppen, that the influence of his friend Maurice Weil on General Saussier, and that of the Deputy Jules Roche, would secure him a post in the cabinet of the Minister of War. However on 11 November 1896, the day after Le Matin had published a photograph of the bordereau, Maurice Weil received the anonymous letter signed ‘Commandant Pierre’ warning him that he was to be named by the Deputy Castelin, together with Esterhazy, as an accomplice in the Dreyfus Affair. Weil told Esterhazy about what was said in the letter, and he also told a member of the Armed Services Commission who in turn passed it on to the Minister of War, Jean-Baptiste Billot. In the event, Castelin did not mention Weil or Esterhazy in the National Assembly: his questions to Billot were innocuous, and the crisis passed (see here).
However, Weil was shaken by both the anonymous letter and the picture of the bordereau. He had had many letters from Esterhazy and so must have recognised the similarity of his handwriting. Certainly, from that moment on he began to distance himself from Esterhazy and finally broke off relations altogether. This put Esterhazy into a rage. He persuaded his friends on La Libre Parole and L’Intransigeant to mount a campaign against Saussier and Billot, and even threatened, should his reasonable expectations of promotion not be met, to leave the army and ‘tell a story that will create a scandal throughout the world’.22
After the scare of Castelin’s questioning of Billot in the Chamber of Deputies in November 1896, the immediate danger that Esterhazy might be named as the traitor had receded but, because the handwriting of the bordereau was in the public domain, it could only be a matter of time before someone other than Picquart made the connection, as was to be the case with the South American stockbroker Jacques de Castro. Therefore Commandant Henry continued to manufacture evidence against both Picquart and Dreyfus: the Statistical Section became, in the words of Hannah Arendt, ‘a common fake factory’.23 He tampered with the petit bleu to make it seem that Picquart had altered its contents; and, encouraged by the success of his first forgery, a letter was sent to Dreyfus on Devil’s Island from a certain ‘Weiss’ with a cryptic message written in invisible ink between the lines.24 This was intercepted by the prison authorities and stimulated their suspicions that Dreyfus’s friends were planning an escape. Henry also forged a letter to Picquart from the private secretary of his friend the Comtesse de Comminges that seemed to suggest that he was in cahoots with the Dreyfusards. This was ‘inadvertently opened’ at the War Ministry and shown to Billot to convince him that Picquart’s mission abroad should be extended. Faked telegrams were sent to Picquart to compromise him, and Picquart himself indulged in subterfuge in his correspondence – not to conceal any contacts with the Dreyfusards but to protect the reputation of a married woman, the wife of a diplomat, Pauline Monnier, with whom, before leaving Paris, he had embarked upon an affair.25
With Picquart out of the way and the Minister of War, Billot, reassured of Dreyfus’s guilt by the letter forged by Henry, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre felt they had matters under control. It was only in the summer of 1897, when Auguste Scheurer-Kestner began lobbying ministers and the President himself, that they again became alarmed. Esterhazy was being named as the real traitor and all the precautions taken to protect him would prove futile if Esterhazy himself was to panic and do something rash.
On 16 October 1897, after consulting Boisdeffre, Gonse called in the chief architect of the original case against Dreyfus, the monocled, moustachioed Major du Paty de Clam, to take charge. It was difficult to know how to proceed. Esterhazy was under surveillance and so any meeting would be noted by the police. A letter from an identifiable correspondent, even if not intercepted, would be compromising, so du Paty, with Henry’s help, composed an anonymous letter to Esterhazy warning him that the Dreyfus family in collusion with Colonel Picquart intended to make him the scapegoat for Dreyfus’s crime. ‘You are hereby forewarned of what these scoundrels plan to do to ruin you. It is now up to you to defend your name and the honour of your children. Act quickly, for the family is about to act to assure your doom.’26 The letter, signed ‘Espérance’, was sent to Esterhazy at his country house, the Château de Dommartin near Sainte-Ménehould in the Marne.
On reading the letter, Esterhazy was appalled. He immediately left for Paris and for three days lay low in the flat of his mistress, Marguerite Pays. ‘I am dishonoured,’ he told her. ‘I will have to leave the country. I will have to kill myself.’ He felt isolated and abandoned, not knowing as yet of his guardian angels in the Statistical Section and on the General Staff. On 22 October, the archivist from the Statistical Section, Félix Gribe
lin, called at the flat of Marguerite Pays wearing blue-tinted spectacles and a fake beard. He left a note inviting Esterhazy to meet with ‘powerful protectors who wanted to save him and to whom he would well advised to listen’ at the corner of the Vanne reservoir in the Parc Montsouris.
Before keeping the rendezvous, Esterhazy went first to the Crédit Lyonnais Bank, then to the offices of the newspaper La Patrie and finally to the German Embassy to see Schwartzkoppen. The two men had not met for more than a year. Once alone with his former paymaster, and the door closed, Esterhazy told him that their traffic in military secrets had been discovered, and that if something was not done, Schwartzkoppen would be disgraced and Esterhazy sent to replace Dreyfus on Devil’s Island. Esterhazy’s solution: Schwartzkoppen must write to Lucie Dreyfus to confirm her husband’s guilt. Schwartzkoppen’s response: ‘Major, I think you are quite mad!’
Esterhazy sobbed, raved and at one point threatened Schwartzkoppen with a pistol, but eventually calmed down and was persuaded to leave. After calling on a senator on the rue de Médicis, a ‘friend’ of Marguerite Pays, he went to keep his appointment in the Parc Montsouris to the south of the city. He waited at the designated spot on the corner of the Vanne reservoir. Eventually a carriage drew up and two men got out. One was Gribelin wearing his blue-tinted spectacles and false beard. The other, also with a false black beard, was Commandant du Paty de Clam. A third man, Commandant Henry, who might have been recognised by Esterhazy, remained in the carriage.