Chapter 28

WARNINGS TO ROYALISTS AND REPUBLICANS[28]

[Footnote 28: References: Pasquier: Mémoirs; Fauriel: Les derniers jours du Consulat; Desmarest: Témoignages Historiques; Méhée de la Touche: Alliance des Jacobins de France avec le Ministère Anglais; Cadoudal: La conspiration de Georges Cadoudal; Lecestre: Lettres inédites; Tratchefski: Recueil de la Société d'Histoire de Russie; Pingaud: Les dernières années de Moreau (Revue de Paris, 15 Dec., 1899); Huot de Penanster: Une conspiration en l'an XI et XII; Caudrillier: Le complot de l'an XII (Revue Historique, 1901-1902); Rose: Napoleon, I, 406 (quotes the original papers in British archives); Paget Papers; Castlereagh: Letters and Despatches; Pellew: Life of Lord Sidmouth, Earl of St. Vincent; Welschinger: Le duc d'Enghien; Boulay de la Meurthe: Les dernières années du duc d'Enghien; Sorel: Lectures Historiques.]

Moreau and the Republicans -- Royalist Conspiracies -- Moreau's Fall -- The Passion for Plotting -- Royalist Dissensions -- The Duc d'Enghien -- His Plans and Conduct -- The Activity of the French Police -- Appearances against Enghien -- The Expedition to Seize Him -- His Imprisonment -- Arrival at Paris -- Bonaparte at Malmaison -- The Commission to Try Enghien -- Bonaparte's Decision -- Pleas for Clemency -- The Trial of Enghien -- The Execution -- The First Consul's Explanations -- Disastrous Effects of the Deed -- Revulsion of Feeling.

[Sidenote: 1803--04]

But there were still a very few sturdy men who felt that one side of the Revolution was falling into atrophy at the expense of that which Bonaparte so ably represented. In spite of his disfavor, they made themselves heard; and Carnot even dared to remonstrate in the tribunate against the adulation of this second young Augustus who was using the forms of a commonwealth to found an empire. In the senate also this little sect had a remnant, some eight members in all. Their power lay not in themselves, nor in their strict republican principles, but in the latent sympathies of many influential officers of the army. During the second campaign in Italy Moreau had smothered his discontent when the Army of the Rhine was weakened at a critical moment by the transfer of twenty-five thousand men into Italy in order to assure the glories of Marengo. An official journal falsely declared that his soldiers had been paid from the public coffers. Such was the state of public morality that the charge was considered injurious, as in fact it was intended to be. Moreau in reply boasted that he had received but eighteen million francs from Paris, that he had levied forty-four millions on Germany, and that of the total there was a surplus of seven millions which had been distributed among the soldiers and officers. This paper was pigeonholed in the ministry of war, and the newspapers were forbidden to print the copies sent to them. The writer's feelings may be imagined. If he and the others who were discontented had shown the craft which Bonaparte did, their opposition would have been dangerous; but they were so carefully watched that their every movement was known beforehand and thwarted. Still further, they were, by the wiles of their enemies, insensibly led to the commission of foolish deeds and the utterance of rash words, which put them within reach of the law. In this particular network of conspiracies, Fouché was not the principal, although he was a valued consultant.

This system was admirably illustrated in the fall of Moreau, who was not a wary man, and had permitted royalist agents to hold communication with him. One of these, the Abbé David, was seized, but no damaging evidence was obtained. Thereupon recourse was had to the services of Méhée de la Touche, a base creature who, after participation in the September massacres of 1792, and an underground career of espionage during the Terror, had opposed Bonaparte on the eighteenth of Brumaire. He was at the moment in exile for participation in the plot of Nivôse, and eagerly accepted his new employment. After many adventures, he finally won the confidence not only of the French royalists in England, but of Pelham and other members of the British government. He described to the consular government the dissensions between the Bourbon leaders and the agents of Great Britain, telling how Georges Cadoudal, the Chouan leader, had been landed in France on August twenty-first, 1803, from an English ship commanded by Captain Wright, and unfolding a plan whereby the royalists could be encouraged to bring the conspiracy of which Georges was the agent to a head. His scheme was adopted, and after writing from Altona to Louis XVIII, now in Warsaw, offering his services, he visited Munich, and probably Stuttgart, where he told the story of a Jacobin rising which was soon to occur in France, and obtained from the English resident ministers money and instructions for organizing it. The official denials of the period made by the British government as to its participation in the Cadoudal conspiracy were long accepted as true and incorporated in the standard histories. Since the opening within a few years of the British archives to investigators the proof of the contrary is patent. The connected list of despatches, letters, and reports presents conclusive and damaging evidence that whether or not the ministers were privy to the plot for assassinating the First Consul, the French conspirators were in British pay.

In order to implicate Moreau in the Cadoudal conspiracy of which they had learned, the Paris police employed another person of the same stripe, Lajolais by name, who had been an officer in the Army of the Rhine, and who, as such, succeeded in meeting Moreau and extorting from him a few words of pity for Pichegru. Thereupon the police, by means still baser, got together two committees, one of royalists and one of old-time Jacobins, and had each select Moreau as its leader. This was possible, because the Bourbon pretender had, in accordance with Méhée's letter, issued a proclamation promising constitutional government and the sale of the public lands in case of his restoration. Lajolais then started for London, where he persuaded Pichegru that France was weary of Bonaparte, that Moreau was ready, and that the time was ripe for overthrowing the Consulate. As a consequence, the dupe and the decoy, with the chief military leaders of the emigrants, landed from Captain Wright's ship on January fourteenth, 1804, at Biville, near Dieppe. Artois and his son were to follow in a few days. By further misrepresentations Moreau and Pichegru were brought together on the sidewalk of a street near the church of the Madeleine, and in Lajolais' presence they exchanged a few noncommittal sentences. Within a few days a police agent, approaching Moreau as an ambassador from Pichegru, was told that if the latter would lead a movement,--and in that case the consuls and government must be disposed of,--his friends would be protected by influence which could be secured in the senate. Moreau steadily refused either to meet Georges Cadoudal or be implicated in the plot for seizing Bonaparte, of which the Chouan was the leader.

About the middle of February everything was ready and Moreau was arrested. On examination he weakly protested too much, and, being convicted from his own papers of inconsistency, was imprisoned. A few weeks later Pichegru was discovered by the aid of an informer, and he too was thrown into prison. Finally on March ninth Georges himself was seized in the streets of Paris after a desperate and bloody resistance. Soon the most popular picture in the shop windows of the city was a colored print representing the fifty "scoundrels" who had been found to be implicated in the conspiracy against the First Consul, and among the faces was an unmistakable likeness of Moreau. After a long trial, Georges and his accomplices were condemned and shot. Pichegru was found dead in his cell: although royalists confined in that adjoining afterward declared that they had heard a scuffle during the fatal night, there is no reasonable doubt that the prisoner committed suicide. The suspicions cast upon Moreau had utterly destroyed his popularity, and numerous addresses were sent in both from the army and by civilians denouncing him. Just before his trial he made the terrible mistake of sending to Bonaparte an exculpatory letter. This he did, instigated by his silly, ambitious wife, who seems in turn to have received the suggestion from Mme. Récamier. Rumor said that the notion originated with Fouché. The fact and nature of the appeal suggested guilt, but the first decision of the court was for acquittal. Popular feeling, however, ran so high that the First Consul compelled a reconsideration of the verdict, and the prisoner was sentenced to imprisonment for two years. Bonaparte, furious at this leniency, commuted the penalty to banishment. Moreau withdrew to America, where he remained until 1813, when he returned to take up arms against Napoleon before Dresden and was killed.

"I have incurred no real danger," wrote Bonaparte to Melzi on March sixth, 1804, "for the police had their eyes on all these machinations." The verdict of history implicates that ubiquitous agency in fostering by its spies and agents many of those same machinations, but leaves no doubt of the desperate character of the ringleaders in them. What England really, and the Bourbons ostensibly, wanted was a Jacobin insurrection; many of their infuriated agents would certainly not have hesitated at assassination. The general opinion in France was not wrong in condemning the extreme measures taken by the Bourbons to gain their ends, and for the moment royalists of all three factions were silent, feeling that their cause had received a blow from which it might never recover. As to the moderate republican party, it was temporarily extinguished by the fate of Moreau. Skilful as a general and sincere as a democrat, his career had been short-sighted and contradictory. Friendship had led him to conceal his knowledge of Pichegru's dealings with the royalists of 1797. Ambition led him to assist at Brumaire, but he would not accept the consequences. Indecision led him into a trap, but even then he might have escaped, but for the letter he wrote by the advice of a proud and foolish wife.

The closing scenes of this drama of plot and counterplot, of assassination and murder, of falsehood, treachery, and execution, formed a fitting dénouement to the piece. That age had seen and condoned acts of revenge which in quieter times would have been considered unpardonable. Nelson had sanctioned the judicial assassination of Caraccioli, the Neapolitan admiral, whose crime was that in the interest of the Parthenopean Republic he had fought the English fleet. Austria's skirts were not clean of the murders perpetrated at Rastadt. A little later the Bourbons, with the assent of the allied sovereigns, ordered the execution of Ney for deserting them to support his former chief at Waterloo. Bonaparte, relying on a conviction that every one regarded him as a harried and innocent man acting in self-defense, and apparently unconscious of how utterly the royalist agitation had been discredited by Cadoudal, determined so to stun the already prostrate Bourbons as to render them harmless for years to come.

Neither Artois nor his son Berry had entered France; the self-styled Louis XVIII was in distant Warsaw. Both these pretenders were more eloquent than courageous. Even the royalists of Paris were doubtful about the leadership of either one, and the partizans of constitutional monarchy had for some time been disposed to rally about a third Bourbon, the Duc d'Enghien, heir apparent to the glories of the house rendered so illustrious by Louis XIV's famous general known as "the Great Condé." The young duke was both fearless and clever. Burning to take arms in honorable warfare for the cause of his house, he had consulted both English and emigrant agents as to how that could best be accomplished; but he was innocent of conspiring for assassination.

For some time he had lived in close proximity to the French frontier at Ettenheim, a manor-house in Baden, some sixteen miles from Strasburg, where Cardinal Rohan had resided with his niece since his resignation of the bishopric of Strasburg after the Concordat. The duke had for some time been secretly married to this lady, the Princess Charlotte of Rohan-Rochefort, and for that reason, though repeatedly warned of his danger, would not take refuge in England. Before the treaty of Amiens he had been the friend of the Swiss reactionaries and the patron of the royalists in Alsace; after the rupture he was active in strengthening their attachment to the Bourbon cause. In response to the manifesto of the self-styled king, his relative at Warsaw, issued in March, 1803, he declared that he was still faithful. When war began he sought permission to enter the English service and repel the expected invasion by Bonaparte; but England would not permit a Bourbon to draw sword on her soil.

At this crisis the publication of the Warsaw manifesto, and of the duke's response, made his continued residence at Ettenheim a subject of still greater inquietude to his friends; but he remained, and spent much energy in forming plans to invade France through Alsace. As the probabilities of war on the Continent grew stronger, he again applied to the English court for a commission, this time through Stuart, the British envoy to Vienna. He now desired employment on the mainland, either in an allied army or with the first English troops which should disembark on the Continent. Meantime the activity of the English residents at the minor German courts intensified his purpose to raise a regiment of men from the anti-Bonaparte elements of central Europe, to be officered by the scattered veterans who had fought under the second Condé but had been dismissed from the Austrian service after the treaty of Lunéville. The news of Moreau's arrest and of Cadoudal's conspiracy came like a thunderbolt, and the duke, though conscious of no guilt, made ready to withdraw to Freiburg in the Breisgau; but in order to mask his uneasiness he instituted a hunt and other festivities which lasted a whole week.

Bonaparte's first intention had been to seize Charles of Artois on his arrival in France; but a thorough supervision of the shore made it evident that the prince's caution had again got the better of his courage. Disappointed in this quarter, the police agents began to develop an intense activity on the German frontier. They professed to have discovered in Offenburg, with which the Duc d'Enghien was in constant communication, the existence of a body of emigrants who were not there. They reported that the young prince sometimes came down to Strasburg to attend the theater; they represented two harmless visitors at Ettenheim to be officers of the Prince of Condé arrived from England; still worse, they declared an emigrant friend of the duke who lived near by--the aged Marquis of Thuméry, whose name in German mouths had a remote resemblance to that of Dumouriez--to be that dangerous general himself. This occurred a few days before March ninth, and almost simultaneously Bonaparte received from an agent in Naples an extract from one of Dumouriez's letters to Nelson, urging a concerted plan not merely of defense, but of offense. No one then doubted that Dumouriez himself was on the Rhine, busy with Enghien in perfecting this very plan.

Rumors of every sort became rife. It was known that the old intriguer General Willot was again in the South. Men declared that Berry was coming to Brittany, that Charles of Artois was perhaps already in Paris, that Enghien and Dumouriez were on the eastern frontier. It was a perfect investment of plots. When Georges was captured he asserted that he was the associate of princes, and then relapsed into a profound silence which he did not again break. His servant deposed that he had seen his master in communication with a distinguished-looking youth in the suburb of Chaillot. The police remembered that in January the Duc d'Enghien had solicited from the French ambassador at Vienna a passport to cross France, and, recalling the festivities at Ettenheim, believed they were but a pretext to cover the host's absence in Paris at a time which would coincide with the mysterious interview asserted to have taken place between Georges and the unknown stranger. This was the chain of evidence which convinced Bonaparte of Enghien's participation in the plot for his assassination. True, he had not been in actual danger, for the police had been alert; but did that alter the enormity of the Bourbon intrigues against his life? It was only too natural that the terror, hate, and fury accumulated in the mind of the First Consul should concentrate on an object within his reach.

Réal, Fouché, and Talleyrand were all consulted. As yet their personal interests were bound up with their ruler's welfare, and alike they urged prompt and ruthless action to end the schemes and complots of the time. The two former needed no credentials of faithfulness. Talleyrand gave his in writing on March eighth; he had so dallied with royalists that his position must be definite now. Later efforts to discredit the note as a forgery have failed. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that all three intended by the seizure and execution of a Bourbon so to "marry," as the phrase ran, the First Consul to the terrorist side of the Revolution that he could never retreat from the position of radicalism to which they felt he had not been sufficiently committed, even yet. On March tenth the council heard and, as a body, approved Bonaparte's plan, although Lebrun was evasive and Cambacérès demurred. That night one column of a double expedition was despatched to the Rhine; it was commanded by Ordener and destined for Ettenheim. The other, under Caulaincourt, set out next day for Offenburg with a diplomatic note to the court of Baden. The latter commander was utterly ignorant of what his colleague had in hand, being instructed merely to disperse the reported company of emigrants and demand the extradition of a notorious intriguer, the Baronne de Reich. Ordener was to seize the Duc d'Enghien. The two columns proceeded by way of Strasburg without delay. Finding the baronne already a prisoner, and the police report unfounded, the generals then carried out the minute instructions of their chief as to the other part of their task.

On the twelfth, Enghien had been warned of his danger; but he was not to be intimidated, and on the thirteenth he sent a messenger to observe how immediate the danger was. On the fourteenth a French spy was despatched from Strasburg; he was recognized as such at Ettenheim, and was pursued, but escaped to report everything favorable. Still the rash young duke refused to move. On the morning of the fifteenth he awoke to find the house surrounded by French troops. Every avenue of escape being closed, he surrendered, and all his papers were seized. With his household and friends he was hurried to the citadel of Strasburg, where he was detained for two days. Couriers were promptly despatched to Paris, and the court at Karlsruhe received a formal notification of what had been done, signed by Talleyrand. Bonaparte learned by the despatches received on the seventeenth from both his expeditions that Dumouriez was not on the Rhine, and on the nineteenth he himself examined the duke's papers, which had been inventoried in their owner's presence, and then forwarded to Malmaison.

On the night of the seventeenth there arrived in Strasburg orders, written while Bonaparte still believed the reports concerning Dumouriez to be true, which directed the immediate removal of the prisoners--that is, of Enghien and Dumouriez--to Paris. In pursuance of these the duke was awakened at midnight, placed in a post-chaise, and driven rapidly toward his destination. He arrived at eleven in the morning of the twentieth, and was immediately taken to Vincennes. His seizure had created the deepest sorrow and consternation in Baden, and Massias, the French minister at Karlsruhe, not only despatched a letter direct to Paris declaring that the duke's conduct had always been "innocent and moderate," but went in person to notify the prefect at Strasburg that there was neither an assembly of emigrants nor a conspiracy at Ettenheim. Talleyrand was afterward charged by Napoleon with having suppressed Massias's despatch; and it is not known whether the prefect sent a report to the same effect or not.

On the twelfth, the First Consul had withdrawn to the seclusion of Malmaison. It was evident that under the surface there were tumultuous feelings, but in his expression there was an icy calm. At times he recited scraps of verse on the theme of clemency, but his chief occupation was consulting with the police agent Réal and with Savary, his aide-de-camp. It was arranged that the castle of Vincennes should be the prison, that the court should be military, composed of colonels from the Paris garrison, and that the main charge against the duke should be that he had borne arms against his country. He was to be asked whether the plot for assassination was known to him, and if, in case it had succeeded, he were not himself to have entered Alsace.

The court-martial was modeled on those pitiless tribunals created by the Revolution. The statute declaring that any Frenchman taking up arms against his country was a traitor and worthy of death had never been repealed. The Consulate restored the activity of these military commissions in order to tame refractory conscripts and condignly to punish tamperers, conspirators, and spies. These courts had been accustomed to take their cue as to severity or leniency from the government for the time being, whatever it was. There was therefore but little difficulty in constituting such a body expressly for the punishment of any offender. In this instance none of the members except the president and judge-advocate knew the station of the accused. Préval, who had been chosen to preside, refused when he heard the name of the prisoner, on the plea that both he and his father had served in the royalist regiment named d'Enghien, and that he had therefore tender memories incompatible with the service required of him. General Hulin, an old-time Jacobin, made no excuses, and, understanding perfectly what was expected, was invited to report the verdict direct to the First Consul.

During these days Bonaparte had also constantly before him both the papers of the English minister at Munich and the inflammatory, untruthful reports of his police agents. He studied these, and reviewed the measures taken to guard the eastern frontier against the emigrants and their hostile sympathizers, who were making demonstrations in Swabia. Until the evening of the seventeenth he believed that Dumouriez had been at Ettenheim; but though informed of his mistake, the resolution already taken became iron, and the papers of the duke were read on the nineteenth with an evident determination to construe them into evidence of his guilt. They afforded no proofs of direct complicity with Georges, but they contained two phrases which, wrested from the true sense of the correspondence, were of awful significance--one in which the duke qualified the French people as "his most cruel foe," the other in which he declared that during his "two years' residence on the frontier he had established communications with the French troops on the Rhine." These were included in the interrogatories for the trial and intrusted to Réal for his use. If the duke were tampering with the loyalty of the troops, what need of proof that he was in any sense a participator in the plot?

Mme. Bonaparte learned with intense sorrow of the (p.~308) determination taken by her husband. In the main his measures and his convictions had been kept a secret, but she confided both to Mme. de Rémusat, and the First Consul himself had told them to Joseph. On the twentieth the decree for the duke's trial and the questions to be put were dictated by the First Consul from the Tuileries, and in the early afternoon he returned to Malmaison, where at three o'clock Joseph found him strolling in the park, conversing with Talleyrand, who limped along at his side. "I'm afraid of that cripple," was Josephine's greeting to her brother-in-law. "Interrupt this long talk if you can." The mediation of the elder brother was kindly and skilful, and for a time the First Consul seemed softened by the memories of their boyhood, among which came and went the figure of the Prince of Condé. But other feelings prevailed: the brothers had differed about Lucien's marriage, and also about the question of descent if the consular power should become hereditary; the old coolness finally settled down and chilled the last hopes in the tenderhearted advocates for clemency. To Josephine's tearful entreaties her husband replied: "Go away; you're a child; you don't understand public duties." By five it was known that the duke had arrived at Vincennes, and at once Savary was despatched to the city for orders from Murat, the military commandant. On his arrival at Murat's office, from which Talleyrand was in the very act of departing, he was informed that the court-martial was already convened, and that it would be his duty to guard the prisoner and execute whatever sentence was passed.

The scenes of that fateful and doleful night defy description. The castle of Vincennes was beset with guards when finally, at about an hour before midnight, the various members of the court assembled. Their looks were dark and troubled as they wondered who the mysterious culprit might be. None knew but Hulin, the president; the judge-advocate; and Savary, the destined executioner. In a neighboring room was the duke, pale and exhausted by his long journey, munching a slender meal, which he shared with his dog, and explaining to his jailer his dreary forebodings at the prospect of a long imprisonment. He thought it would be ameliorated if only he could gratify his passion for hunting, and surely they two, as prisoner and keeper, might range the forest in company. But at last he fell asleep from sheer fatigue. The jailer could not well encourage the expectations of his new prisoner, for he had that very morning supervised the digging of a grave in the castle moat. At midnight the duke was awakened and confronted with the judge-advocate. Réal was unaccountably absent, and the interrogatory so carefully prepared by Bonaparte was not at hand. To the rude questions formulated by Hulin, with the aid of a memorandum from Murat, the prisoner, in spite of repeated hints from the members of the court-martial as to the consequences, would only reply that he had a pension from England, and had applied to her ministers for military service; that he hoped to fight for his cause with troops raised in Germany from among the disaffected and the emigrants; that he had already fought against France. But he stoutly denied any relations with Dumouriez or Pichegru and all knowledge of the plot to assassinate the First Consul. He was then called to the bar in the dimly lighted sitting-room where the commission sat. To the papers containing questions and answers he was ironically permitted to affix a demand for an audience with the First Consul. "My name, my station, my mode of thought, and the horror of my situation," he said, "inspire me with hope that he will not refuse my request." The tribunal followed its instincts: its members, knowing well the familiar statutes under which such bodies had acted since the days of the Convention, but not having at hand the words or forms of a verdict as prescribed by the pitiless laws concerning those who had borne arms against France, left in the record a blank to be filled out later, and pronounced their judgment that the "regular sentence" be executed at once. They were actually engaged in composing a petition for clemency to the First Consul when Savary burst into the room, demanding what had been done, and what they were then doing. Snatching the pen from Hulin's hand, he exclaimed, "The rest is my affair," and left the room.

It was now two in the morning of the twenty-first. "Follow me," said the taciturn Harel to Enghien, "and summon all your courage." A few paces through the moat, a turn of a corner, and the flare of torches displayed a file of troops not far from an open grave. As the adjutant began to read the sentence, the victim faltered for a moment and exclaimed, "Oh, God! what have I done?" But immediately he regained the mastery of himself. Calmly clipping a lock of his hair, and drawing a ring from his finger, he asked that they might be sent to the Princess Charlotte. A volley--and in an instant he was dead. Savary put spurs to his horse to carry the news to Malmaison. At the gate of Paris he met the carriage of Réal, who seemed almost overpowered by what he heard in reply to his eager questions, and terrified by his own remissness. If it really were such, it must be attributed to a misunderstanding and not to lack of zeal.

Bonaparte believed to the end that his victim was a guilty conspirator. For a time he had recourse to some unworthy subterfuges tending to show that the execution was the result of a blunder; but later he justified his conduct as based on reasons of state, and claimed that the act was one of self-defense. "I was assailed," he was reported to have said--"I was assailed on all hands by the enemies whom the Bourbons raised up against me. Threatened with air-guns, infernal machines, and deadly stratagems of every kind, I had no tribunal on earth to which I could appeal for protection; therefore I had a right to protect myself, and by putting to death one of those whose followers threatened my life I was entitled to strike a salutary terror into others." When on his death-bed, his maladroit attendant read from an English review a bitter arraignment of him as guilty of the duke's murder. The dying man rose, and, catching up his will, wrote in his own hand: "I had the Duc d'Enghien seized and tried because it was necessary to the safety, the interest, and the honor of the French people, when by his own confession the Comte d'Artois was supporting sixty assassins in Paris. Under similar circumstances I would again do likewise." Nevertheless he occasionally endeavored to unload the entire responsibility on Talleyrand. To Lord Ebrington, to O'Meara, to Las Cases, to Montholon, he asseverated that Talleyrand had checked his impulses to clemency.

The perpetrator of this bloody crime represented the Revolution too well to suit the new society. A shudder crossed the world on receipt of the news. But the only European monarch that dared to protest was the Czar, who broke off diplomatic relations and put his court into mourning. But he could go no further; for he could find no one on the Continent to join with him in declaring war. Prussia remained neutral and her king silent. Austria withdrew her troops from Swabia, and sent a courier to say at Paris that she could understand certain political necessities. In the autumn, however, when they had gained time to observe France and mark Bonaparte's policy, Russia and Austria began to draw together. Dynastic politics therefore rendered the public expression of popular opinion impossible; but in France, as in the length and breadth of Europe, the masses were aroused. Was the age of violence not passed? Were they merely to exchange one tyranny for another more bloody? The same men who years before had looked on in a dumb stupor, and with consenting approval, at the events of the Terror in Paris were now alert and alarmed at the possibility of its renewal. The First Consul was mortified and angry. Many of those nearest to him had opposed his course from the outset, and he felt deeply their ill-disguised disapproval. His only remedy was arbitrary prohibition of all discussion, and to this he had recourse. Intending to fix the blame of conspiracy and assassination on England and the Bourbons, he found himself regarded as little else than a murderer. A Richelieu could execute a Montmorency with impunity, but not so could a Bonaparte murder a Condé. Long afterward he dictated to Méneval, "The merited death of the Duc d'Enghien hurt Napoleon in public opinion, and politically was of no service to him." But the masses are proverbially fickle, and easily diverted. Three days after the execution Talleyrand gave a successful ball.

The Parisian world was in fact very fickle. Society had been much exercised over the execution of Enghien, but rumors of coming war furnished more interesting topics of conversation. The giddy majority had a few passing emotions, gossiped about one theme and the other alternately, and then went on with its amusements. The grave men who sincerely desired their country's welfare were profoundly moved, and whispered serious forebodings to each other. The world at large was sensitive to both currents of thought, but in the main the masses considered the coming coronation ceremonies, the splendors of empire, and the prospects for unbounded glory opened by Napoleon's unhampered control vastly more entertaining as a subject of flippant speculation than anything else.