The rest of the day was one nobody would forget. The summonses were served that morning as scheduled, on Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps, Henri Cottu, Marius Fontane (former secretary general of the Compagnie Universelle), and Gustave Eiffel. At the Palais Bourbon the word spread that Delahaye would speak in the afternoon, and when another deputy, seeing Delahaye walk by, stopped him to urge restraint, Delahaye responded, “Do not leave the sitting, there will be a big explosion.”
At five o’clock, when Delahaye rose from his place and started down to the speaker’s stand, all seats in the semicircular red-plush tiers of the Chamber were taken. Premier Loubet and his ministers were seated down front; the two levels of the public galleries were solid with spectators. Newspaper reporters and the Chamber’s veteran silver-chained, frock-coated ushers could recall no moment quite like this one.
Delahaye mounted the eight steps to the rostrum, just below and in front of the president of the Chamber, Charles Floquet. Delahaye, Deputy for Chinon and a member of the extreme right, was known as a “good hater.” He was spare and athletic, with sleek black hair and an upswept handlebar mustache nearly the size of a sickle blade. He seldom ever smiled and there was a decided squint in his right eye. It was a face, wrote his fellow deputy and fellow Boulangist Maurice Barres, that bespoke “inflexible cruelty.” Whether Delahaye and Drumont were working together is not entirely clear, but Barres, among others, would claim they were.
“I would stake here my honor against yours,” Delahaye began. He would give no names, but behind the canal company there had been an “evil genius”: the directors duped the public, the evil genius duped the directors.
“Name him, name him!” several voices shouted from the packed chamber.
“If you want names, you will vote an inquiry,” Delahaye answered. He charged that 3,000,000 francs had been distributed in the Chamber, that 150 deputies had been bought. He had seen the list. At once there was a violent uproar. “The names! The names!”
There were only two kinds of deputies, Delahaye exclaimed, those who took the money and those who did not. Floquet, who was also a former premier, was now on his feet directly behind Delahaye. “You cannot come into this house and accuse the entire body,” he thundered down at the Deputy. Again there were angry cries for names.
“Vote the inquiry,” Delahaye shouted.
When he started for his seat the great room was in wild disorder. He was hissed at; deputies banged their desks to add to the uproar. The Premier next ascended the steps to the tribune but for several minutes was unable to speak against the noise. Such irresponsible charges, he cried, stemmed solely from uncontrolled political passions–that is, the old Boulangist faction was trying to destroy the Republic. Assuredly, light must be shed on so grave a matter; of course his government would hide nothing.
The Chamber voted the inquiry. A committee of thirty-three members was named and the debate raged on. At another sitting of the Chamber, two days later, one honored member became so excited he collapsed and had to be carried out. Men wept as accusations were hurled from the tribune. Fist fights broke out in the aisles.
Much of the country and the foreign press could scarcely believe what was happening. George Smalley, star reporter of the Battle of Antietam, who was now London correspondent for the New York Tribune, cabled his home office that as fraught with recklessness and venality as the Panama business must have been, “we can with difficulty be induced to believe that it has utterly debauched public life in France.”
There were wild rumors concerning de Reinach, the evil genius of Delahaye’s speech, whose body had been taken from Paris and buried immediately after the required twenty-four-hour delay. It was said that he had taken poison. (Le Gaulois, the smart society paper, described his final agony in such exquisite detail that it was as if someone from the paper had actually been in the bedroom.) It was said that he had been poisoned by someone, that he had been murdered in his sleep. It was said that he was alive and out of the country. The coffin was empty, exclaimed one deputy in a speech.
A family physician had attributed the death to “cerebral congestion”; a regular certificate of death had been signed by a city doctor. Still the Chamber rang with cries for an autopsy. The critical issue had been found; the line had been drawn. And the Ministry of Justice held fast. The baron’s body, Louis Ricard announced, could be exhumed only if there was a clear suspicion of murder, and having no such suspicion, he refused to step beyond the law.
But it was too late; it was, as Philippe Bunau-Varilla would write, “the beginning of a convulsion.” On November 28 the Chamber voted overwhelmingly to proceed with an inquiry into Jacques de Reinach’s death. And with that the Loubet government fell.
The week following, the president of the Republic, Sadi Carnot, called upon Alexandre Ribot, Loubet’s foreign minister, to form a new government.
II
No one ever got to the bottom of the Panama Affair and no one ever will. The Chamber’s own committee of inquiry, the much-publicized Committee of Thirty-three, held 63 sessions; it received 158 depositions, compiled more than 1,000 individual dossiers. Its final report fills three ponderous volumes. But time and again the fact-finding stopped short of facts that might prove too embarrassing or destructive. Old colleagues were protected. Barres, by no means an impartial observer, but a keen judge of human nature, wrote, “The committee fell into the mistakes of all inexperienced courts of inquiry. They were unduly affected by the skillful emotional show of a lot of sly old sinners who appeared before them.”
De Reinach’s lips were permanently sealed of course. His death, the pivotal event in the unfolding story, would also remain one of the most puzzling of several unsolved mysteries.
The coffin was exhumed four days after the new government took office. A large party of physicians, police, and newspaper people went out to the baron’s country place at Nivillers and stood about in a snow-covered cemetery to witness the unearthing. The body was in the coffin, but the autopsy proved nothing since by then the vital organs had so decomposed that the cause of death was impossible to determine.
No sooner had the mutilated remains been returned to the grave than the fundamental design of the scandal–as then perceived–was drastically altered by the introduction of an entirely new character of even more sinister cast. To the astonishment of everyone, de Reinach was now revealed to have been but nominally the villain of the piece. At once the affair became more complex, more fascinating, and far more sensational politically, because now it implicated the most formidable figure in French public life, Georges Clemenceau.
The new character in the plot had been involved since the time when the Türr Syndicate had been organized. He was Cornelius Herz –known to his associates as “Le Docteur”–and to the decided satisfaction of Edouard Drumont and the rapidly growing numbers who saw things as Drumont did, he was both a foreigner and a Jew. He was unknown to the public and to most of the press when his name first turned up. The papers could report only that he was an American who somehow or other had been awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor and who had a standing in the electrical industry.
The rest of his story came later, pieced together by reporters in Paris and San Francisco, and seldom had a more perfect charlatan been discovered. The man was shrewd, daring, utterly charming when it suited his purpose. Though he had attained his initial fortune and social acceptance as a physician and “man of science,” the best evidence was that he had neither a medical degree nor little, if any, substantive scientific knowledge.
Herz was born at Besançon, in eastern France, in 1845, which made him forty-seven at the time his name leaped into print. His parents were German Jews who, when he was three years old, emigrated to New York, where the father became a packing-box manufacturer. At thirteen Cornelius entered the College of the City of New York; in 1864 he was graduated at the bottom of his class. Presently he returned to France to study medicine, and by the time of the Franco-Prussian War he had
acquired enough background–or said he had–to qualify as an assistant surgeon in the French Army.
After the war he went to Chicago, where his parents had relocated. Later he turned up on the staff of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, but in a few months he was on the move again. Officials of the hospital had begun investigating his background and found, in the words of their report, that he had “very ingeniously avoided taking the examination for house physician and surgeon,” and that “his supposed graduation from the University of Paris was fictitious.” Whenever asked for his diploma, Herz said it had been destroyed in the Chicago fire.
He arrived in San Francisco with one volume of medical terminology (a twenty-six-year-old edition of John Mayne’s Dispensatory and Therapeutical Remembrancer), a few hundred dollars, and a dark-haired American wife, Bianca Saroni. Presenting himself as a specialist in diseases of the brain, he opened an office filled with electrical gadgetry. “He was a man of the world, apparently well equipped for his profession,” the San Francisco Evening Bulletin would later report, “yet with a sanguine, sky-scraping temperament that made him soar above men and to seek wonderful and world-stripping achievements. A dozen valuable inventions were his–a hundred marvelous scientific processes were to be worked out by his genius.”
His practice grew rapidly until 1877 when, with his wife and two infant daughters, he suddenly departed for France. As later disclosed, he had gone off with several checks from a retired brewer, a former patient, amounting to $80,000, notes the brewer had made out to Herz when Herz had him under hypnosis. In New York, as his ship was about to sail, Herz cashed a check from another patient, this for $30,000, which supposedly he was to invest in a French electrical scheme. A San Francisco electrician had been taken for $13,000; a physician who had been in a partnership with Herz was out $20,000.
In Paris he became known as the successful young American with large plans. Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were personal friends, he said. Some of Edison’s ideas were actually his own. He founded a respected scientific and industrial review, La Lumiere Électrique. He established telephone service between Paris and Versailles, invested in a variety of speculative, quasi-scientific ventures, including the Türr-Wyse scheme. Within an amazingly short time he seemed to know everybody who counted–Charles de Freycinet (four times premier), Hebrard of Le Temps (who introduced him to Clemenceau), Emily Crawford, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Boulanger, President Jules Grevy.
De Freycinet had been the one who had arranged for him to receive the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. The decoration, as de Freycinet was to explain subsequently, and to the satisfaction of very few, had been conferred at the request of the scientific community.
In Emily Crawford’s phrase, Herz understood “the inner lines” of French politics and by far his most valuable friendship was with Clemenceau, with whom he had much in common. Clemenceau too had begun his career as a physician; Clemenceau had lived in the United States and married an American girl. It was a friendship that Herz knew how to advertise and that Clemenceau would later find expedient to forget. Herz supplied the money to launch Clemenceau’s newspaper, La Justice, and put still more into the paper as time went on, perhaps as much as 2,000,000 francs. At one point Clemenceau even appointed Herz the guardian of his children in the event of his death.
Clemenceau, the impassioned republican, the fiery voice of “revanche” editor, atheist, teetotaler, the most aggressive orator in the Chamber of Deputies, occupied a unique position: he was feared by everybody–on the left, extreme left (his own Radical party), center, right, extreme right. Harsh, even ruthless, brilliant, he made other politicians seem dull-witted, flabby in spirit. He was the “Tiger,” and with his taut physique, his bristling eyebrows and yellowish complexion, he looked the part.
As for Herz, he was the most ordinary-looking of men. “Everything is ranged against me,” he is said to have once remarked, “even my own appearance.” Anyone trying to remember him at the scene of a crime would have had trouble thinking of a single distinguishing feature. There was a full mustache, a mustache of the kind then being worn by most every male Parisian past the age of twenty. There was a round face, a generally bland expression, a thinning hairline. He was short, a bit overweight; he could have been any of a dozen men on any busy street in the city. Only the eyes, it is said, suggested the energy and cunning within.
The first public mention of Herz in connection with the Panama scandal came as a result of an appearance before the Deputies committee by a banker who had once been an employee of the firm of Kohn, de Reinach. Anthony Thierree said that in July 1888 de Reinach had deposited with him a single check issued by the canal company for 3,390,000 francs. In return de Reinach had asked for twenty-six separate checks of differing amounts equivalent to the same sum. The checks were made out to “Bearer.” It had seemed a perfectly normal transaction. Though the banker first claimed to have no records of the checks, the stubs were soon confiscated from the bank’s vault and on all but one were the plainly written initials or first several letters in the names of prominent recipients, as well as the amounts of the individual checks.
The stubs were the first solid evidence in the case and they caused a sensation. The checks were to be traced through banks all over Europe. The sums made out to various government officials and legislators ranged from 20,000 to 195,000 francs (from $4,000 to $39,000). The recipients included such personages as Senator Albert Grevy, brother of the former president; Senator Leon Renault, one of the most esteemed legal minds in France; and a deceased Minister of Agriculture. The single illegible stub was for 80,000 francs and the identity of the recipient became another of those tantalizing mysteries that would sell enormous numbers of newspapers and keep the rumors flying in the marble corridors of the Palais Bourbon.
But the largest amount–two checks for an even 1,000,000 francs each, or $400,000–had gone without any explanation to Cornelius Herz, who, it was now learned, had removed himself to London.
A few days after the committee obtained the check stubs, a lawyer for Herz, a dandified and rather notorious former Paris prefect of police, Louis Andrieux, produced for the committee a photograph of a note containing a list of names, a photograph obtained from Herz. The names were the same as those on the stubs, but the note referred to still another check for more than 1,000,000 francs that had been broken down by the unsavory Leopold-Emile Arton and delivered to 104 members of the Chamber of Deputies. The two largest payoffs, the photograph further disclosed, a check for 250,000 francs and another for 300,000 francs had gone to none other than Charles Floquet and to Deputy Charles Sans-Leroy, the man whose last-minute vote had cleared the lottery bill for action in the Chamber.
The note appeared to corroborate everything that Jules Delahaye had charged in his momentous attack. Overnight the public fastened on to one expression, one tangible, understandable image–the check-taker, the chequard. A new word had been added to the French language. “That fatal word became the topic of every song, gibe, anecdote, and demonstration,” wrote a contemporary chronicler. “All along the boulevards itinerant vendors sold songs and broadsheets, ‘Who Hasn’t Had His Little Check,’. . . Comedians, cabaret singers, and everyone else found the chéque a mine of inexhaustible satire.”
As the committee pressed on with its investigation, and later, when the actual trials got under way with witnesses testifying under oath, the picture of what had been going on began to change dramatically. Bit by bit Herz emerged, like some crucial but long-concealed figure discovered beneath the surface of a familiar painting. For all those absorbed in the scandal–for just about all of France–it would be impossible thereafter to think of Panama and not think of Cornelius Herz.
There was testimony to the effect that Charles de Freycinet had extracted campaign contributions from the Panama company. A deputy who had served with Charles Sans-Leroy on the lottery-bill committee said he too had been offered money–100,000 francs–to vote for the bill, by a professed emissary of Ch
arles de Lesseps, and that when he refused, the offer had been tripled. Charles de Lesseps denied any knowledge of such an offer, but when it was charged that former Minister of Public Works Baihaut (“the man with the beautiful wife”) had been paid 1,000,000 francs to give the lottery bill his support, Charles de Lesseps made no denial.
Adrien Hebrard admitted that he had entered into a secret partnership with Gustave Eiffel, in Eiffel’s bid for the Panama contract. Eiffel, moreover, had paid Hebrard 2,000,000 francs and had paid de Reinach nearly the same amount for their influence.
Then Andrieux, Herz’s lawyer, dropped the astounding news that Drumont’s inside source in the weeks following the “Micros” articles had been none other than de Reinach. Indeed, had it not been for de Reinach, Drumont’s despised Jew, the paper would have run short of material. The bargain had been that Drumont would keep de Reinach out of the columns of the paper so long as de Reinach kept Drumont supplied with incriminating Panama details. Andrieux knew because he had been the go-between.
Drumont, called to appear as a witness, happened to be in jail–he had at last been convicted on a libel charge–and he refused to appear unless his sentence was suspended, a proposition the courts refused.
But the thing that was most perplexing to the investigators was the gathering evidence that de Reinach, supposedly the arch crook in the plot, had been keeping nothing for himself. He who was bleeding the canal company of millions–to “subsidize” the press ostensibly, but in fact to pay off a great many others as well–he who was getting regular kickbacks from several other Panama contractors besides Eiffel, was in turn being bled by someone else. And the someone was Herz.
Herz and the baron had known each other since Herz first arrived in Paris from San Francisco. De Reinach had been instrumental in obtaining government contracts for various Herz enterprises. It was de Reinach who had brought Herz into the arrangement with Istvan Türr and Lieutenant Wyse. But at no time thereafter, not once in all the years the canal was being attempted, had Herz lifted a finger to help the Compagnie Universelle. He had never performed a single identifiable service for the company–legal or illegal–to warrant compensation; yet, as near as could be figured, he had received millions of francs through de Reinach, possibly as much as 10,000,000 francs, or $2,000,000. In addition, the company had made at least one direct payment to Herz of 600,000 francs.
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