“I said just now that Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart suddenly left the war department on November 16, 1896, on the eve of the Castelin interpellation in the chamber of deputies. His friends were unaware of his departure, and I in particular went several times, and during several weeks, to see him, and failed to find him. One of his friends wrote to the minister of war a letter which should be among the documents in the hands of M. Bertulus, and which, at any rate, constitutes one of the papers in the investigations made by General de Pellieux and Major Ravary. This letter was insignificant, but in it there was a brief allusion to a personage who, in the _salon_ of Mlle. de Comminges, had been nicknamed the ‘demigod.’ The letter contained this sentence: ‘Every day the demigod asks Mme. the Countess [that is Mlle. de Comminges] when he will be able to see the good God.’ In this circle, where Colonel Picquart was very popular, he was known as ‘the good God,’ and the name ‘demigod’ had been given to a certain Captain Lallement, who was the orderly of General des Garet, commanding the sixteenth army corps at Montpellier. This letter was intended for Colonel Picquart, but reached him only after it had been secretly opened and copied at the war department. The following month there came to the bureau of information a letter which was intercepted entirely, and of which no knowledge came to Colonel Picquart. This letter is surely the work of a forger. It is signed ‘Speranza.’ That was the beginning, in December, 1896, of the attempt to compromise Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. The existence of the second letter was concealed for more than a year, and he learned of it for the first time in the course of General de Pellieux’s investigation. But it was made the basis of all the conspiracies for the ruin of this officer. Be not astonished, then, that last November, when this matter came to public attention and enlisted the interest of parliament, new conspiracies came to light. In the evening of November 10, 1897, two telegrams started from Paris together. The first read thus: ‘Stop, demigod. Affair very serious. Speranza.’ From this telegram it seemed that the demigod must be a very important personage, probably a political personality, perhaps M. Scheurer-Kestner. The second telegram read: ‘We have proofs that the dispatch was manufactured by Georges. Blanche.’ This second telegram, which was evidently a part of the same conspiracy to which the first belonged, tended to destroy the authenticity, and consequently the force as evidence, of a certain dispatch on which rested the investigation opened by Colonel Picquart in the spring of 1896 concerning Major Esterhazy. Thus they endeavored to represent Colonel Picquart as the tool of a politician and the author of a forgery. I should add that it is certain that Colonel Picquart was not acquainted with M. Scheurer-Kestner, and that he had no communication with him, direct or indirect.