Monsieur de Riviere counted on collecting five hundred men, one hundred of whom were young nobles, the officers of this sacred legion.  Monsieur de Polignac and Monsieur de Riviere, whose conduct as chiefs of this advance was most remarkable, afterwards preserved an impenetrable secrecy as to the names of those of their accomplices who were not discovered.  It may be said, therefore, now that the Restoration has made matters clearer, that Bonaparte never knew the extent of the danger he then ran, any more than England knew the peril she had escaped from the camp at Boulogne; and yet the police of France was never more intelligently or ably managed.

At the period when this history begins, a coward—­for cowards are always to be found in conspiracies which are not confined to a small number of equally strong men—­a sworn confederate, brought face to face with death, gave certain information, happily insufficient to cover the extent of the conspiracy, but precise enough to show the object of the enterprise.  The police had therefore, as Malin told Grevin, left the conspirators at liberty, though all the while watching them, hoping to discover the ramifications of the plot.  Nevertheless, the government found its hand to a certain extent forced by Georges Cadoudal, a man of action who took counsel of himself only, and who was hiding in Paris with twenty-five chouans for the purpose of attacking the First Consul.

Laurence combined both hatred and love within her breast.  To destroy Bonaparte and bring back the Bourbons was to recover Gondreville and make the fortune of her cousins.  The two sentiments, one the counterpart of the other, were sufficient, more especially at twenty-three years of age, to excite all the faculties of her soul and all the powers of her being.  So, for the last two months, she had seemed to the inhabitants of Cinq-Cygne more beautiful than at any other period of her life.  Her cheeks became rosy; hope gave pride to her brow; but when old d’Hauteserre read the Gazette at night and discussed the conservative course of the First Consul she lowered her eyes to conceal her passionate hopes of the coming fall of that enemy of the Bourbons.

No one at the chateau had the faintest idea that the young countess had met her cousins the night before.  The two sons of Monsieur and Madame d’Hauteserre had passed the preceding night in Laurence’s own room, under the same roof with their father and mother; and Laurence, after knowing them safely in bed had gone between one and two o’clock in the morning to a rendezvous with her cousins in the forest, where she hid them in the deserted hut of a wood-dealer’s agent.  The following day, certain of seeing them again, she showed no signs of her joy; nothing about her betrayed emotion; she was able to efface all traces of pleasure at having met them again; in fact, she was impassible.  Catherine, her pretty maid, daughter of her former nurse, and Gothard, both in the secret, modelled their behavior upon hers.  Catherine was nineteen years old.  At that age a girl is a fanatic and would let her throat be cut before betraying a thought of one she loves.  As for Gothard, merely to inhale the perfume which the countess used in her hair and among her clothes he would have born the rack without a word.