The Moniteur was filled with addresses to the first consul, congratulating him on his escape from this danger; this incessant repetition of the same phrases, bursting from every corner of France, offers such a concord in slavery as is perhaps unexampled in the history of any other people.  You may in turning over the Moniteur, find, according to the different epochs, exercises upon liberty, upon despotism, upon philosophy, and upon religion, in which the departments and good cities of France strive to say the same thing in different terms; and one feels astonished that men so intelligent as the French, should attach themselves entirely to success in the style, and never once have had the desire of exhibiting ideas of their own; one might say that the emulation of words was all that they required.  These hymns of dictation, however, with the points of admiration which accompany them, announced that France was completely tranquil, and that the small number of the emissaries of perfidious Albion were seized.  One general, it is. true, amused himself with reporting, that the English had thrown bales of Levant cotton on the coast of Normandy, to give France the plague; but these inventions of grave buffoonery were only regarded as pieces of flattery addressed to the first consul; and the chiefs of the conspiracy, as well as their agents, being in the power of the government, there was reason for believing that calm was restored in France; but Bonaparte had not vet attained his object.

CHAPTER 15.

Assassination of the Duke d’Enghien.

I resided at Berlin on the Spree Quay, and my apartment was on the ground floor.  One morning I was awoke at eight o’clock, and told that Prince Louis-Ferdinand was on horseback under my windows, and wished me to come and speak to him.  Much astonished at this early visit, I hastened to get up and go to him.  He was a singularly graceful horseman, and his emotion heightened the nobleness of his countenance.  “Do you know,” said he to me, “that the Duke d’Enghien has been carried off from the Baden territory, delivered to a military commission, and shot within twenty four hours after his arrival in Paris?” “What nonsense!” I answered, “don’t you see that this can only be a report spread by the enemies of France?” In fact I confess that my hatred of Bonaparte, strong as it was, never went the length of making me believe in the possibility of his committing such an atrocity.  “As you doubt what I tell you,” replied Prince Louis, “I will send you the Moniteur, in which you will read the sentence.”  He left me at these words, and the expression of his countenance was the presage of revenge or death.  A quarter of an hour afterwards, I had in my hands this Moniteur of the 21st March, (30th Pluviose), which contained the sentence of death pronounced by the military commission sitting at Vincennes, against the person called Louis d’Enghien!  It is