won the help of a skilled writer Bernard
Lazare; a daily paper succeeded in obtaining and publishing a facsimile
of the _bordereau_. But Picquart was sent away from Paris on a tour of
inspection, and when the matter came up in the Chamber, through an
interpellation, the Minister of War, General Billot, declared that the
judgment of 1894 was absolutely legal and just. Matters thus seemed
settled again.

But a prominent Alsatian member of Parliament, Scheurer-Kestner, one of
the Vice-Presidents of the Senate, was half-persuaded by Mathieu and
Bernard Lazare. When Picquart's friend and legal adviser, Leblois,
rather injudiciously, from a professional point of view, confided to him
his client's suspicions, he was thoroughly convinced and the two
separate currents of activity now coalesced. Yet the greater the
agitation in favor of Dreyfus, the greater grew the opposition. The
anti-Semites shrieked with rage against Judas, the "traitor." The upper
ranks of the army were honeycombed by Clerical influences. An enormous
proportion of the officers belonged to reactionary families and the
Chief of Staff himself, General de Boisdeffre, was under the thumb of
the Pere Du Lac, one of the most prominent Jesuits in France. The
Clericals and anti-Semites, therefore, joined forces, and, by calling
the Dreyfus agitation an attack on the honor of the army and a play into
the hands of Germany, they won over all the jingoes and former
Boulangists, who formed the new party of Nationalists. This was the
so-called alliance of "the sword and the holy-water sprinkler" (_le
sabre et le goupillon_). Above all, certain religious associations,
particularly the Assumptionists, under the name of religion, organized a
campaign of slander and abuse against all who ventured to speak for
Dreyfus. By a ludicrous counter-play the scoundrel Esterhazy had
defenders as an injured innocent, the more so that Henry and the clique
at the War Office found it to their interest to support him.

Matters reached a crisis when, on November 15, 1897, Mathieu Dreyfus
denounced Esterhazy to the Minister of War as author of the _bordereau_
and as guilty of the treason for which his brother had been condemned.
This was partly a tactical mistake, because, even if Esterhazy were
proved to have written the _bordereau_, it would still be necessary to
show him guilty of actual treason. It made it possible to swerve the
discussion from the conviction of Dreyfus as a _res adjudic