This was held in remembrance of the 1906 laws that had reintegrated and promoted both Dreyfus and Picquart at the end of the Dreyfus Affair.

One day he sent Madame Bastian's paper bag, particularly bulky on this occasion, to Picquart without looking at the contents.

On looking at them Picquart discovered that the writing was identical with that of the bordereau attributed to Dreyfus.

Meanwhile, Picquart was sent from Nancy to Marseille, and later on to Tunis, where he was attached to the Fourth Regiment of sharpshooters in garrison at Sousse.

Scheurer-Kestner was at this point of his inquiry when Leblois, who had met him at dinner one evening, conceived the idea of having recourse to him as the medium by which to save Dreyfus and, through Dreyfus, Picquart.

This braggadocio was taken so seriously that General Leclerc received an order at Tunis to question Picquart on having given to an outsider-the " veiled lady "-the " document of deliverance.

It was a dangerous region, where Morès had met his death ; General Leclerc was astonished at the order, and, having heard from Picquart the cause of his disgrace, forbade him to go farther than Gabes.

" Picquart kept his temper, but at the end of the trial sent his seconds to Henry, and fought a duel with him, in which Henry was slightly wounded.

) The next day Picquart was taken from the civil prison of La Santé and enrolled on the register at the Cherche-Midi, where he was put into the strictest solitary confinement.

( After the close of the inquiry, on March 3, 1899, the court decided that the Civil Court alone was concerned with the chief accusations against Picquart, and he was transferred from the military prison at Cherche-Midi to the civil prison of La Santé.

His most serious charge was that President Loew, at the end of a long and tiring sitting, had sent Picquart a glass of hot grog.

Of the three most notable champions of revision, Scheurer-Kestner had died ; Zola returned to France, where he died from an accident on 29 September 1902 ; Colonel Picquart, indignant at the amnesty, abandoned the appeal he had lodged against the decision of the board of inquiry — very much open to criticism — which had struck him from the lists, and left the army by way of protest.

On receiving them, and afterward an anonymous letter in the same style, Picquart sent a complaint to General Billot, and asked that inquiries be made regarding the author of these forgeries.

A calm listener, Major Picquart, thought the result was very doubtful unless help came from the secret dossier.

These instructions, confirmed by Boisdeffre, seemed absurd to Picquart, since the bordereau established an indissoluble bond between the two cases ; he should have understood from that moment that his superiors had determined not to permit the reopening of the Dreyfus affair.

The Staff Office blamed Picquart for these embarrassing facts coming into the open, and decided that his departure from the service should be arranged.

# A proposal to two officers to testify, should such action be necessary, that a paper, registered as belonging to the service, and emanating from a well-known person, had been seized in the mails-a reference to a remark made by Lauth to Picquart, that the " petit bleu " addressed to Esterhazy was lacking the regular stamp of the post-office.

He wrote in the same strain to the president of the republic, claiming that a lady, afterward mysteriously referred to as the " veiled lady ", had given him a photograph of a very important document which Picquart had acquired from an embassy and which seriously compromised persons of high diplomatic rank.

At the end of October Boisdeffre had ordered General Leclerc, commanding the corps of occupation in Tunis, to send Picquart to reconnoitre on the frontier of Tripoli, from which quarter pretended gatherings of the local tribes were reported.

" The obscure allusions and the names in these forgeries were derived from Picquart's private correspondence, which had been looked through, and were intended to produce the impression that Picquart was in some plot to release Dreyfus ; the " demigod ," it was pretended, referred to Scheurer-Kestner.

Major Picquart began his military career in 1872, graduating from the école spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr fifth in his year.

After the second court-martial-held as a consequence of the conclusions of the Supreme Court-Picquart resigned from the army but the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus in 1906 also absolved Picquart, who was, by an act of the Chamber of Deputies, promoted to brigadier-general.

While still a serving army officer, Picquart died on 18 January 1914 from injuries received in a fall from a horse.

Numerous petitions from " intellectuals " protested against these hasty measures and demanded that the judgment of Picquart should be delayed until the result of the inquiry in the Court of Cassation should have put in its true light the part he had played in all this affair.

When appointed chief of the army's intelligence section ( Deuxième Bureau, service de renseignement militaire ) in 1896, Picquart discovered that the memorandum ( the bordereau ) that had been used to convict Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been the work of Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.

But, contrary to instructions, Major Henry reconstituted the secret dossier, added to it Du Paty's explanatory note ( which last was destroyed by Mercier in 1897 ), and locked it in the iron chest where Picquart afterwards found it.

After the trial of Émile Zola, Picquart was himself accused of forging the note that had convinced him of Esterhazy's guilt.

Zurlinden, having become acquainted with his dossier, proposed to the council of ministers to arraign Picquart before a court martial on the charge of having falsified the note called " petit bleu.

Later, Colonel Picquart ( Henry O ' Neill ), the new chief of intelligence, discovers evidence implicating Major Walsin-Esterhazy ( Robert Barrat ) as the spy, but he is ordered by his superiors to remain silent, as this revelation would embarrass them.

* Henry O ' Neill as Colonel Picquart

Major Hubert-Joseph Henry forged documents that made it seem that Dreyfus was guilty and then had Picquart assigned to duty in Africa.

Picquart meanwhile was unaware that in his own office he was spied upon, opposed, and deceived by his fellow workers, Henry, Lauth, and Gribelin.

Major Henry, though under the nominal direction of Gonse, had become the real head of the Intelligence Office, where he quietly prepared a whole series of forgeries, designed, when the opportunity presented itself, to crush Picquart if he ever attempted to cause trouble.

Henry, after having consulted his superiors, answered, declaring that as far as " mysteries " were concerned he knew only that the following facts had been established against Picquart by an " inquiry ":

Picquart denied this statement, which the dates contradicted ; Henry thereupon replied: " Colonel Picquart has told a lie.

Picquart shared his impression ; but determined to avoid the indiscretions and blunders which had been committed in 1894, he decided to secretly investigate himself before spreading the news of the discovery.

Picquart now set to work in earnest to get samples of Esterhazy's handwriting, and he succeeded in obtaining two letters which the major had written.

Picquart recorded the history of his discovery in a codicil to his will, which he intended for the president of the republic ; in this way he was sure " not to take his secret with him to the grave.

This letter, to which Picquart replied by a brief protest, opened his eyes ; he understood the plot that was being hatched against him, the dangers which threatened him for having been too discerning.

This mass of deceptions, to which was added the romance of the " veiled lady " ( supposed to be a mistress of Picquart ) was taken seriously by Ravary.

On 17 February he had a prolonged discussion with Picquart as to whether Esterhazy could possibly have been acquainted with the documents of the bordereau, the real date of which was now acknowledged ( Aug. or Sept. and not April, 1894 ).

On the one hand, Colonel Picquart, having vainly sought military justice, had decided to lay a complaint before a civil court against the unknown authors of the forged " Speranza " letter and of the forged telegrams which he had received in Tunis.

On 21 September, the day on which the case of Picquart and Leblois was brought before the " tribunal correctionnel " the state attorney demanded the adjournment of the affair, first, on account of the Dreyfus revision, which might modify the charge against Picquart ; and secondly, on account of the new and serious accusation which had been brought against him.