The torn up bordereau found discarded in the waste paper basket of Attaché von Schwartzkoppen was, in fact, a fabrication which had been hand written and delivered by a French-born infantry officer of Hungarian descent, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The latter either hoped to extract money from the German Attaché or was, as proposed by Jean Doise, planting a deception in German hands to throw them off the secret 75mm field gun project. The latter explanation fits with the fact that Esterhazy, in spite of being exposed by Colonel Picquart as the real author of the bordereau, was acquitted by French military Justice in January 1898 and let go to retire in England with a pension. Furthermore, and as also proved by the archival records, Walsin-Esterhazy had once been working full-time as a lieutenant on the staff of military counter-intelligence. This episode took place during the early part of Esterhazy's career, before the Dreyfus Affair. In other words and in clear terms, there is verifiable evidence that Major Esterhazy was a past member of the Sandherr counter-intelligence network. Alfred Dreyfus was put on trial in 1894 and was accused of espionage, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison on Devil's Island. He was publicly cashiered: his rank marks and buttons were ripped off his uniform and his sabre was broken. In June 1899 the case was reopened, following the uncovering of exonerating evidence and of the fact that Dreyfus had been denied due process during the initial court-martial. France's Court of Cassation quashed his conviction and ordered a new court-martial. Despite the new evidence presented at his new military trial, Dreyfus was reconvicted in September and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was subsequently pardoned by President Émile Loubet and freed, but would not be formally exonerated until 12 July 1906, when the Court of Cassation annulled his second conviction. He was thereafter readmitted to the army and made a knight in the Légion d’Honneur. Dreyfus was recalled to active duty and served behind the lines of the Western Front during World War I as a Lieutenant-Colonel of Artillery though he did perform some frontline duties in 1917. He served his nation with distinction beyond his natural retirement age.

Caran d'Ache [Poiré, Emmanuel] (b Moscow, 1859; d Paris, 26 Feb 1909). French draftsman and illustrator. Born into a French family in Moscow, he was the grandson of a squadron leader in Napoleon’s Guides who had remained in Russia after being wounded in the Battle of Moscow. He left Russia in 1878 and enlisted in the French army in Paris. After designing uniforms for the army, he worked on the Chronique parisienne in 1880 and then on a number of other French as well as American, Italian and Russian magazines. He adopted as his pseudonym the Russian word for pencil (‘karandash’) and specialized in amusing military scenes, some of which were published in Nos soldats du siècle (1890). His ‘Lundis’ in Le Figaro, a series of satirical drawings that appeared each Monday from 1899, were particularly celebrated and many of his satirical plates on the Dreyfus affair appeared there. He also co-founded with Jean-Louis Forain the anti-Dreyfus weekly satirical journal Psst!, which ran from 1898 to 1899. In addition Caran d’Ache was a co-founder of the paper the Tout Paris and provided illustrations for a number of books, such as Albert Millaud’s La Comédie du jour sous la république athénienne (Paris, 1886) and Nikolai Dmitrievich Benardaki’s Prince Kozakokoff (Paris, 1893). He had made a fortune by 1900, becoming one of the celebrities of the ‘Belle Epoque’. In his work he created a completely linear style, schematized like shorthand, and developed his stories through a succession of pictures, usually grouped together under one title but without captions.