Most Frenchmen now know that the _bordereau_ was a forgery and without any real value.
I was curious to see Esterhazy, and Oscar brought him to lunch one day at Durand's.

He was a little below middle height, extremely thin and as dark as any Italian, with an enormous hook nose and heavy jaw.

He looked to me like some foul bird of prey: greed and cunning in the restless brown eyes set close together, quick resolution in the out-thrust, bony jaws and hard chin; but manifestly he had no capacity, no mind: he was meagre in all ways.

For a long time he bored us by insisting that Dreyfus was a traitor, a Jew, and a German; to him a trinity of faults, whereas he, Esterhazy, was perfectly innocent and had been very badly treated.

At length Oscar leant across the table and said to him in French with, strange to say, a slight Irish accent, not noticeable when he spoke English: "The innocent," he said, "always suffer, M.le Commandant; it is their _metier_.