delivery in mid-August included the newly revised mobilization
plans of the artillery in return for 1,000 francs. Schwartzkoppen, who
chose not to apprise the ambassador of this arrangement, later justi-
fied it as serving the higher interest of the German army.
The following month, however, a torn-up memorandum (bor-
dereau) was found in Schwartzkoppen’s wastebasket by Marie Bas-
tian (code name auguste), an illiterate cleaning woman employed
by the Statistical Section, the primary counterespionage unit of
the French War Office. When the fragments of the document were
pieced together and submitted to a handwriting analysis, suspicion
fell on Alfred Dreyfus, who was hastily convicted of treason in a
secret court-martial. Schwartzkoppen claimed afterward that the
memorandum had never reached his hands, a dubious assertion in
light of his habitual negligence in dealing with personal and official
papers throughout his tenure in Paris. (Even some of the intimate
correspondence with his Italian counterpart, Alessandro Panizzardi,
which alluded to their stable of French informants and suggested a
homosexual liaison between the two men, was carelessly tossed in
the wastebasket and eventually reached the Statistical Section via
Bastian—or the voie ordinaire (usual channel) in official parlance.
In November, when the newspaper La Patrie announced that
letters from Dreyfus to Schwartzkoppen were in the possession of
the French government, the German ambassador flatly denied his
embassy’s involvement. Schwartzkoppen truthfully told him he had
never met Dreyfus, but no mention was made of Esterhazy, whose es-
pionage activity was continuing at an even faster pace. In early 1895,
however, their relationship sharply deteriorated, as Schwartzkoppen
complained that Esterhazy’s reports contained gross inaccuracies and
boasts of nonexistent connections.
Another key document retrieved from Schwartzkoppen’s waste-
basket reached the Statistical Section in March 1896—the so-called
petit bleu, a small special delivery letter on thin blue paper addressed
to Esterhazy. Despite the mystery surrounding its authorship—it
bore Schwartzkoppen’s code name c but was not in his handwriting
or that of his mistress—Esterhazy was clearly implicated. His fervent
appeals for assistance from the German officer went unheeded, as
did later requests by the defenders of Dreyfus for Schwartzkoppen’s
testimony. Still claiming their noninvolvement with Dreyfus, Berlin410 • SCHWARTZKOPPEN, MAXIMILIAN VON