But M. Bontoux was too ambitious, he did not possess the real financial faculty, his first successes turned such head as he possessed. The Jews, therefore, were able to work their will upon the whole of his projects and groups, and the devout Catholic investors of Paris, Vienna and other places had the intolerable mortification of seeing their savings swept into the coffers of the infidel. This had happened some years before the Dreyfus case. But losers have long memories, and here was a sore monetary grievance superadded to the previous religious hatred of the Hebrew. Dreyfus was a Jew. Nay, more, he came of financial Jews who had had their pickings out of the collapse of the Union Générale as well as out of the guano and other concessions malignantly obtained in the Catholic Republic of Peru. Monstrous that a man of that race and name should be an officer in the French Army at all! Still more outrageous that he should be placed by his ability and family influence in a position of military importance, and entrusted with serious military secrets! Something must be done. Now the persons forming the most powerful coterie in the higher circles of the French Army at this time were not only men who had been educated at the famous military academy of St. Cyr and imbued with an _esprit de corps_ cultivated from their school-days upwards, but they were officers who believed heartily, if not in the religion, at any rate in the beneficent secular persuasion of the Catholic Church. They were, as was clearly shown, greatly influenced by the Jesuits, who saw the enormous advantage of keeping in close touch with the chiefs of the army. Then there were the monarchists and Buonapartists, male and female, of every light and shade, who were eagerly on the look-out for any stroke that might discredit the new studious but scientific and unbelieving class of officers, whom the exigencies of modern warfare were making more and more essential to military efficiency. Their interest was to keep as far as possible the main higher organisation and patronage of the army and the General Staff a close borough and out of the hands of these new men.