“But let us go on, gentlemen. The question, here, then, is one of writing, pure and simple; that is the charge. Since then, a fact of great importance has come to light; writing identical with that of the bordereau has been discovered. We will not ask at this moment in whose hand this document has been written? The very subtle distinction of the experts has not escaped you. The writing of a document may be the writing of a certain person, and yet the document may not be of this person’s hand, because it may be forged or traced. There may be room for discussion as to whether the bordereau was forged, as to whether it was traced, but there is no room for discussion as to the identity of handwritings, and the proof is that Major Esterhazy admitted it from the first day, even before he was denounced. And it is an interesting fact in this case that, on the eve of every new development, from whatever direction, Major Esterhazy foretold it, and, even before the documents were published, he announced a plot woven by a certain Colonel X or Y, which was intended to ruin him, and in the course of which would be produced a writing frightfully like his own. Then, gentlemen, there is no doubt. I do not say that the bordereau is of the hand of Major Esterhazy. I will come to that later. I say the writing of the bordereau, is the writing of Major Esterhazy. Well, confining myself to that for the moment, there is a contradiction between this and the conclusions of the experts in 1894. We know very well that, if the bordereau is in a handwriting identical with that of Major Esterhazy, it is not the writing of Dreyfus. The hypothesis of a tracing by Dreyfus is inadmissible. If Dreyfus has imitated any handwriting, it is, M. Bertillon tells us, his own. Never has it been supposed that he imitated Major Esterhazy’s handwriting, and, if he had done so, it would have been with some design. And then, being accused, he would have denounced Major Esterhazy, or made it known, by some more or less ingenious method, that the writing was that of Major Esterhazy. Gentlemen, I am going now to make a remark which, so far as I know, has not been made before, and which seems to me to be of considerable interest. I read first from the report of the examination of 1894.
Every interrogatory to which the accused was submitted before the judicial officer of police is full of the persistent denials and protests of Captain Dreyfus regarding the crime charged. At first Captain Dreyfus said that he seemed to recognize vaguely in the incriminated document the writing of an officer employed in the staff offices. Later he withdrew this allegation, which, moreover, was bound to fall of itself, in view of the complete dissimilarity between the writing of the officer mentioned and that of the incriminated document.
“Consequently you see that it occurred to Dreyfus, crushed under the weight of this undecipherable enigma, to say: ‘The bordereau is not my work, but the writing resembles certain other handwritings.’ He designated some one. This some one was not the author of the bordereau. He did not designate Major Esterhazy. Now, if he had traced the handwriting of Major Esterhazy, he would have attributed to Major Esterhazy the authorship of the document. But he said nothing of the kind. Consequently, whatever may be the truth as to the hand that traced the bordereau, and as to the circumstances under which it was traced, one thing is certain,—that, given the handwriting of Major Esterhazy, the bordereau cannot be in the handwriting of Dreyfus, and that it could not have been traced by Dreyfus, since it has never been pretended that Dreyfus traced any handwriting but his own. So, concerning the bordereau, I am perfectly easy. Whatever its source, it did not come from Dreyfus.
“The council of war of 1894, which was not acquainted with Major Esterhazy’s handwriting, and to which it had not been submitted, did not have before it those elements of information that we have today. It had nothing before it but a simple question of handwriting; and you understand what I mean by those words, since I have shown you that they knew nothing of the bordereau,—that its origin had not been revealed to the judges. Well, never would any court have condemned a man on this handwriting alone.
“I have among my documents some very interesting and curious ones. First, a treatise on handwriting by M. Bertillon. It had been my intention, before I realized that my argument would assume such proportions, to read you the whole of this treatise, but, desiring to spare your time, I will read only the beginning.
When our criminologists are questioned regarding the way in which expert testimony is generally conducted in France, they either avoid the question, or take refuge in generalities. If you only knew, they say, how unimportant the matter is, and how little belief we have in the pretended science of the handwriting experts. This scepticism, however, does not prevent them from obeying the instructions of the law to take and follow the advice of appointed experts. Among the members of the bar this insufficiency of belief becomes atheism, and there is no end to the jokes and legends which you will hear at the Palace regarding the handwriting experts, who, if we may believe the lawyers, know less about their specialty than the first-comer. Let us add, moreover, that with the exception of the recent aid supplied by photography and the microscope, the art of the expert does not seem to have taken a forward step since Raveneau, the expert of the time of Louis XIV. Consequently it is not astonishing if public opinion, in spite of its proneness to allow itself to be imposed upon by specialists of all sorts, shares the incredulity concerning handwriting which has been consecrated by centuries.
And yet the comparison of handwritings, considered as one of the elements of proof by writing,—first of proofs according to the code,—cannot be systematically set aside. Expert examination of handwriting is a decisive weapon in the hands of the defence, where the presumption of innocence carries with it the right of acquittal, but, in the hands of the prosecution, where nothing less than certainty will suffice, it constitutes only an indispensable precaution, one of those numerous verifications to which every thesis must be submitted.
“I should like, gentlemen, to read the whole article. It appeared in ‘La Revue Scientifique’ of December 18, 1897, and I assure you that it had seemed to me of great value from the standpoint of my discussion, before I had witnessed these confrontations of experts, which, as a living picture, are more powerful than any reading. I had brought also an article by M. des Houx,—I have told you that I would borrow weapons only from our enemies,—an article entitled ‘The Graphologists,’ which is often read in the assize court, and which sums up in a delightfully humorous way some of the characteristics of the experts. This article, too, I should have liked to read you in full, but let this amusing bit suffice.
Once an expert was discussing before the presiding judge Bérard des Glasjeux the similarity in writing between an anonymous document and other documents introduced for comparison.
“The writing of the anonymous documents,” said he, “in no way resembles that of the other documents, but in one corner of the paper there is a marginal note in pencil. This is clearly in the hand of the accused. There is no doubt about it.”