“I have been for many years the friend of Colonel Picquart. We made all our studies together, and we have remained faithful to this friendship. In 1890 Colonel Picquart was made professor in the School of War, and since then I have seen him more or less frequently. Then he entered the war department, to which he had already been attached for several years, and finally, about the middle of 1895, if I am not mistaken, he was appointed chief of the bureau of information. It would have been natural at that time for him to consult me occasionally upon the legal difficulties that he met, since I was his intimate friend and had belonged to the magistracy for ten years. Nevertheless he spoke to me of only two cases,--a case of criminal procedure that was under way at Nancy, and a batch of documents relating to carrier pigeons, which was nothing but a collection of ministerial decrees upon that question. When, on November 16, 1896, Colonel Picquart was suddenly obliged to quit the war department, he had never said a word to me, either of the Dreyfus case or of the Esterhazy case, and I was absolutely unaware that he was concerning himself with either of them. All who know Colonel Picquart will not be astonished at this reserve. “In June, 1897, I received a visit from Colonel Picquart, who had come to pass a fortnight’s leave of absence in Paris. On June 3, he had received at Sousse a threatening letter, which had been written to him by one of his former subordinates, and thus he found himself under the necessity of consulting a lawyer. For purposes of his defence he made known to me some of the facts in the cases of Dreyfus and Esterhazy. I say, gentlemen, some of the facts, for Colonel Picquart never revealed to me any military secret, in that sense of the term secret in which it is employed in military language. Colonel Picquart had become convinced of the innocence of Captain Dreyfus, and he explained to me the facts upon which his conviction rested. I had too much confidence in his intelligence and honesty not to admit the materiality of the facts that he made known to me, and from them I came to the same conclusion that he had arrived at. I was profoundly disturbed by what I had just learned, for I not only deplored the possibility of so grave an error, and the submission to undeserved torture of a man who seemed to be innocent, but I was anxious lest such revelations might agitate the country; and so I determined to exercise the greatest prudence.