The first trial of Dreyfus was conducted by court-martial and behind closed doors. Some parts of the indictment were not communicated to the accused and his lawyer. The secrecy of the trial, the lack of fairness in its management, his own protestations of innocence, the anti-Jewish feeling, and the course of the government in the affair aroused a strong suspicion that Dreyfus, being a Jew, had been used as a scapegoat for some one else and had been unjustly convicted. Many eminent literary men of France, and even M. Scheurer-Kestner, a vice president of the Senate--none of them Jews--eventually advocated the revision of a sentence which failed to appeal to the sense of justice of the best element of France. It was asserted by some that Dreyfus had sold the plans of various strongly fortified places to the German government, and by others that the sale had been to the Italian government. It was also said that he had disclosed the plans for the mobilization of the French army in case of war, covering several departments, and especially the important fortress of Briançon, the Alpine Gibraltar near the Italian frontier. [=The Bordereau and the Dossier=] The _bordereau_, the paper on which the charges against Dreyfus were based, was a memorandum of treasonable revelations concerning French military affairs. The _dossier_ was the official envelope containing the papers relative to the case, which embraced facts alleged to be sufficient to prove the guilt of the accused officer. The bordereau was examined by five experts in handwriting, only three of whom testified that it could have been written by Dreyfus. The papers in the dossier were not shown to Dreyfus or his counsel, so that it was impossible to refute them. In fact, the court-martial was conducted in the most unfair manner, and many became convinced that some disgraceful mystery lay behind it, and that Dreyfus had been made a scapegoat to shield some one higher in office. [=The Accusation of Esterhazy=]