spy vs. spy: wilde for dreyfus

Remembering Dreyfus. The time was la belle epoque, and the stage was France. But the chief actors in the drama- the double agents, perfidious generals, conniving politicians, and anti-Semites posing as patriots- have remained on the political scene ever since…

…The suspect, a shady character named Maurice Weil, had earlier been cashiered from the army because of a financial scandal. He was currently involved in a typically unsavory bedroom imbroglio of the period. On the one hand, he was sharing his beautiful Viennese wife with Gen. Saussier, then in his randy sixties. On the other hand, Sandherr believed that he was somehow in touch with German intelligence and was selling secret information that his wife obtained from her elderly lover- who, of course, had access to the most sensitive military data.

Though Sandherr’s judgement in such matters was anything but reliable- he was approaching the terminal stage of syphilitic paralysis- for once he may have been right. Several historians and memorialists; including Maurice Paleologue, a well known French diplomat who at the time of the Dreyfus Affair was the Quai d’Orsay’s liaison man with the national police; have argued that Weil was an accomplice, perhaps a key figure, in an espionage conspiracy for which Dreyfus was wrongly convicted.

The Weil-Saussier trio was unquestionably a security hazard. For fear of antagonizing one of the most powerful officers in the French army, however, Gen. Mercier had ordered Sandherr to drop his investigation of Weil. The fact that the latter was a Jew made the situation seem all the more scandalous and dangerous to the rabid anti-Semites like Sandherr, who were always suspecting some vast, shadowy Jewish plot, and it even seemed risky to the more rational Mercier. One can imagine their feelings when another Jewish spy seemed to turn up in the general staff itself.

“I should have known!” Sandherr exclaimed when one section head on the staff, to whom he had shown the “bordereau,” thought he recognized the handwriting of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who had just completed his two year’ assignment as a general staff probationer and who was the first Jew ever to be admitted into the army’s holy of holies. On Mercier’s orders, a specimen of Dreyfus’s handwriting and the bordereau were submitted to another officer, an amateur graphologist, and as we now know, a full-time crackpot, Maj. Mercier du Paty de Clam. Du Paty, who fancied himself a spy chaser and a student of the occult, as well as a handwriting expert, was a titled, monocled, military fop, who looked and acted like a character in a Feydeau farce. His opinion was that the two handwriting samples were indeed suspiciously alike.

A professional handwriting expert from the Bank of France soon gave a contradictory verdict. The police investigation failed to turn up  any hint of a motive for treason; like other emigres from German-occupied Alsace, which he had left as a child, Dreyfus had always manifested a passionate French nationalism. He had no suspicious associations, nor was he in financial difficulty or living above his own means. Nevertheless, Mercier ordered his arrest. Held in solitary confinement, Dreyfus was completely bewildered by the whole Kafkaesque proceeding and nearly went insane. (to be continued)…