In September, 1894, an officer named Henry, of the spy service of the French army, came into possession of a document pieced together from fragments stolen from a waste-paper basket in the German Embassy. This document, containing a _bordereau_ or memorandum of information largely about the French artillery offered to the German military attaché, Schwartzkoppen, was anonymous, but Henry undoubtedly recognized, sooner or later, the handwriting of a friend, Major Esterhazy, a soldier of fortune in the French army, of bad reputation and shady character. Unable to destroy the document, which had been seen by others, Henry tried to fasten it on somebody else. Indeed, many people believe that Henry was an accomplice of Esterhazy in German pay. By a strange coincidence it happened that the handwriting of the _bordereau_ somewhat resembled that of a brilliant young Jewish officer of the General Staff named Alfred Dreyfus. He belonged to a wealthy Alsatian family, and from antecedent probability would not seem to need to play a traitor's part, but he was intensely unpopular among his fellows because of many disagreeable traits of character. Moreover, anti-Semitism, formerly non-existent in France, was now rife. It had been largely fomented by the anti-Jewish agitator Edouard Drumont, with his book _la France juive_ (1886) and his newspaper the _Libre Parole_ (1892). Prejudice against the Jews as tricky financiers had been prepared and encouraged by the sensational failure of the great bank, the Union générale, a Catholic rival of the Rothschilds, in 1882, and by the Panama scandals with the doings of Jacques de Reinach, Cornelius Herz, and Arton. The _Libre Parole_ had worked against Jewish officers in the army, an activity which culminated in some sensational duels, particularly one between Captain Mayer and the marquis de Morès (1892), in which the Jew was killed.