‘Impossible,’ he repeated, in a tone of real regret; ‘_twice impossible!_’ And, as though anxious to convince me that his refusal was not unfriendly, he added--‘It is not a question of a Boulanger this time.’ Perceiving that I could not press him further without showing my own hand, I reluctantly allowed Garnier to depart. He had in reality told me more than he suspected. In the first place, he had convinced me that the Kaiser’s suspicions were not idle, by his reception of my hint that I was acting for a foreign Power. If the ferocious sentence on Dreyfus had been inspired by spite against an unpopular officer, or by a desire to find a scapegoat for bigger traitors; or if it had merely been an episode in the secret duel between the Church and the Freemasons, as the champions of Dreyfus were inclined to believe, there would have been no meaning in that regretful ‘Twice impossible!’ If Garnier had refused to sell his secret to a foreign Power, I knew him well enough to feel assured that it must be because that Power was in some way interested to defeat Garnier’s conspiracy. But the real clue had been placed in my hands by those concluding words--‘It is not a question of a Boulanger this time.’ Such a phrase constituted a riddle which few men in Europe were better able than myself to decipher. Boulanger was an adventurer, lifted on a wave of popular favour, who had seemed likely at one moment to overturn the republic and replace it by a military dictatorship with himself at the head. He had failed because he was a mere adventurer, who represented no principle, and who lacked that personal prestige with the Army which is only acquired by successful leadership in war. Nevertheless his career had revealed the weakness of the Republic, and proved that all that was necessary to bring about its downfall was an alliance between the military caste and some pretender with more substantial claims than those conferred by the shouts of the Paris mob. Every one who knows anything of France knows that the soldiers have long chafed under the ascendency of the lawyers, which is a necessary consequence of Republican institutions. But Garnier’s words, if I interpreted them rightly, showed that the lesson of Boulanger’s failure had been laid to heart, and that this time the military conspiracy which undoubtedly existed had found a really formidable figurehead. In short, it was a question not of a military dictator, but of a monarch; not of a Boulanger, but of a Bourbon or a Bonaparte. I found myself on the brink of a discovery of first-rate importance. For the success of such a military revolution as that indicated only two things seemed necessary, a candidate and an occasion. If my diagnosis were sound, a candidate had been found in Philippe d’Orléans, the representative of the ancient monarchy, or Victor Napoleon, the heir of the Bonapartes. The occasion was to be furnished, perhaps, by the long-delayed war of _la revanche_!