Matthew Dreyfus was the brother of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer wrongly convicted of spying.
The family of Dreyfus, faithful to the charge he had left them at the time of his conviction, did not cease in their efforts to discover the real culprit. Matthew Dreyfus undertook the direction of these researches; he worked with an untiring devotion and a fruitful imagination that was not always seconded by sound judgment. The primary elements of a thorough inquiry were lacking; the Staff Office, far from seconding his efforts, had him jealously watched; intriguers set traps for him; he felt that he was spied upon; at his first false step the new law of espionage - a very strict and extremely elastic one - would find an excuse for getting him out of the way. As for the politicians whom he tried to interest in his cause, most refused to become involved, or, intimidated by the minister of war, gave up the search after the very first investigation. The only threads he had to guide him were some of his brother's notes and a copy of the indictment that had been deposited abroad. He knew, further, from Dr. Gibert of Havre, to whom Félix Faure had confided the matter, that Dreyfus had been condemned on the evidence of a secret document, which had not been shown to the counsel for the defense. This information was corroborated by some remarks made by certain of the judges of 1894. One of them spoke of the case to an old lawyer named Salles, who repeated the conversation (on Oct. 29, 1896) to Demange. Before that Hanotaux had confided to Trarieux, and Trarieux to Demange, that the conclusive document contained the initial of Dreyfus' name (meaning the paper "canaille de D . . . "). Matthew Dreyfus started with the idea, plausible but false, that this document really had reference to the author of the bordereau, and that the initial was not fictitious; and from that idea arose his persistent search for an officer the initial letter of whose name was "D." He followed up several clues, none of which bore any result.
