“‘And this is the 13th,’ said the sagacious minister.  ’Well, if that is so, the destinies of France are in the scale at the very moment we are speaking.’”

(In fact, the battle of Marengo did begin at dawn of the 14th.)

“‘Four days of fatal uncertainty!’ said Lucien.

“‘Fatal?’ said the minister of foreign affairs, coldly and interrogatively.

“‘Four days,’ echoed Fouche.

“An eye-witness told me,” said de Marsay, continuing the narrative in his own person, “that the consuls, Cambaceres and Lebrun, knew nothing of this momentous news until after the six personages returned to the salon.  It was then four in the morning.  Fouche left first.  That man of dark and mysterious genius, extraordinary, profound, and little understood, but who undoubtedly had the gifts of a Philip the Second, a Tiberius and a Borgia, went at once to work with an infernal and secret activity.  His conduct at the time of the affair at Walcheren was that of a consummate soldier, a great politician, a far-seeing administrator.  He was the only real minister that Napoleon ever had.  And you all know how he then alarmed him.

“Fouche, Massena and the Prince,” continued de Marsay, reflectively, “are the three greatest men, the wisest heads in diplomacy, war, and government, that I have ever known.  If Napoleon had frankly allied them with his work there would no longer be a Europe, only a vast French Empire.  Fouche did not finally detach himself from Napoleon until he saw Sieyes and the Prince de Talleyrand shoved aside.

“He now went to work, and in three days (all the while hiding the hand that stirred the ashes of the Montagne) he had organized that general agitation which then arose all over France and revived the republicanism of 1793.  As it is necessary that I should explain this obscure corner of our history, I must tell you that this agitation, starting from Fouche’s own hand (which held the wires of the former Montagne), produced republican plots against the life of the First Consul, which was in peril from this cause long after the victory of Marengo.  It was Fouche’s sense of the evil he had thus brought about which led him to warn Napoleon, who held a contrary opinion, that republicans were more concerned than royalists in the various conspiracies.

“Fouche was an admirable judge of men; he relied on Sieyes because of his thwarted ambition, on Talleyrand because he was a great seigneur, on Carnot for his perfect honesty; but the man he dreaded was the one whom you have seen here this evening.  I will now tell how he entangled that man in his meshes.

“Malin was only Malin in those days,—­a secret agent and correspondent of Louis XVIII.  Fouche now compelled him to reduce to writing all the proclamations of the proposed revolutionary government, its warrants and edicts against the factions of the 18th Brumaire.  An accomplice against his own will, Malin was required to have these documents secretly printed, and the copies held ready in his own house for distribution if Bonaparte were defeated.  The printer was subsequently imprisoned and detained two months; he died in 1816, and always believed he had been employed by a Montagnard conspiracy.