3-085-655 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Trial of Major Esterhazy by the first court-martial of the military government of Paris, 1898. '...the accused Major...marched forward...to confront his accuser, M. Mathieu Dreyfus. His sister-in-law, Madame Alfred Dreyfus, the wife of the officer already condemned for selling France's secrets of defence to Foreign Powers, sat in the court, and on her behalf M. Labori at once asked that she might be legally represented. Technically, he said, the old Dreyfus and the new Esterhazy trials were quite distinct; but as Major Esterhazy was now charged with having written the bordereau that was made the basis of her husband's guilt, she was, said her counsel, but "fulfilling her duties as a wife and mother" in asking to be there. The President, General de Luxer, however, ruled against her plea...New interests were aroused when the accused man went into the box and asserted his innocence, while admitting that the writing of the bordereau was so like his own that it must, in the case of some of the words, have been traced from it...Major Esterhazy was acquitted...'. Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongfully accused and convicted in 1894, but was eventually exonerated. Esterhazy fled to the United Kingdom, where he lived until his death in 1923. From "Illustrated London News", 1898.