“As a descendant of St. Louis, I shall endeavour to imitate his example by respecting myself even in captivity.  As successor to Francis I., I shall at least aspire to say with him:  ’We have lost everything but our honour."’

To this declaration the Comte d’Artois, his son, the Duc de Berri, Louis Philippe of Orleans, his two sons, and the two Condes gave their ardent assent; and the same loyal response came from the young Conde, the Duc d’Enghien, dated Ettenheim, March 22nd, 1803.  Little did men think when they read this last defiance to Napoleon that within a year its author would be flung into a grave in the moat of the Castle of Vincennes.

Scarcely had the echoes of the Bourbon retorts died away than the outbreak of war between England and France raised the hopes of the French royalist exiles in London; and their nimble fancy pictured the French army and nation as ready to fling themselves at the feet of Louis XVIII.  The future monarch did not share these illusions.  In the chilly solitudes of Warsaw he discerned matters in their true light, and prepared to wait until the vaulting ambition of Napoleon should league Europe against him.  Indeed, when the plans of the forward wing in London were explained to him, with a view of enlisting his support, he deftly waved aside the embarrassing overtures by quoting the lines: 

                               “Et pour etre approuves
  De semblables projets veulent etre acheves,”

a cautious reply which led his brother, then at Edinburgh, scornfully to contemn his feebleness as unworthy of any further confidences.[281] In truth, the Comte d’Artois, destined one day to be Charles X. of France, was not fashioned by nature for a Fabian policy of delay:  not even the misfortunes of exile could instill into the watertight compartments of his brain the most elementary notions of prudence.  Daring, however, attracts daring; and this prince had gathered around him in our land the most desperate of the French royalists, whose hopes, hatreds, schemes, and unending requests for British money may be scanned by the curious in some thirty large volumes of letters bequeathed by their factotum the Comte de Puisaye, to the British Museum.  Unfortunately this correspondence throws little light on the details of the plot which is fitly called by the name of Georges Cadoudal.

This daring Breton was, in fact, the only man of action on whom the Bourbon princes could firmly rely for an enterprise that demanded a cool head, cunning in the choice of means, and a remorseless hand.  Pichegru it is true, lived near London, but saw little of the emigres, except the venerable Conde.  Dumouriez also was in the great city, but his name was too generally scorned in France for his treachery in 1793 to warrant his being used.  But there were plenty of swashbucklers who could prepare the ground in France, or, if fortune favoured, might strike the