“Since when?” asked Grevin, after a pause.

“Since the Consulate for life.”

“I hope there’s no proof of it?”

“Not that!” said Malin, clicking his thumb-nail against his teeth.

In few words the Councillor of State gave a clear and succinct account of the critical position in which Bonaparte was about to hold England, by threatening her with invasion from the camp at Boulogne; he explained to Grevin the bearings of that project, which was unobserved by France and Europe but suspected by Pitt; also the critical position in which England was about to put Bonaparte.  A powerful coalition, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, paid by English gold, was pledged to furnish seven hundred thousand men under arms.  At the same time a formidable conspiracy was throwing a network over the whole of France, including among its members montagnards, chouans, royalists, and their princes.

“Louis XVIII. held that as long as there were three Consuls anarchy was certain, and that he could at some opportune moment take his revenge for the 13th Vendemiaire and the 18th Fructidor,” said Malin, “but the Consulate for life has unmasked Bonaparte’s intentions—­he will soon be emperor.  The late sub-lieutenant means to create a dynasty!  This time his life is in actual danger; and the plot is far better laid than that of the Rue Saint-Nicaise.  Pichegru, Georges, Moreau, the Duc d’Enghien, Polignac and Riviere, the two friends of the Comte d’Artois are in it.”

“What an amalgamation!” cried Grevin.

“France is being silently invaded; no stone is left unturned; the thing will be carried with a rush.  A hundred picked men, commanded by Georges, are to attack the Consular guard and the Consul hand to hand.”

“Well then, denounce them.”

“For the last two months the Consul, his minister of police, the prefect and Fouche, hold some of the clues of this vast conspiracy; but they don’t know its full extent, and at this particular moment they are leaving nearly all the conspirators free, so as to discover more about it.”

“As to rights,” said the notary, “the Bourbons have much more right to conceive, plan, and execute a scheme against Bonaparte, than Bonaparte had on the 18th Brumaire against the Republic, whose product he was.  He murdered his mother on that occasion, but these royalists only seek to recover what was theirs.  I can understand that the princes and their adherents, seeing the lists of the emigres closed, mortgages suppressed, the Catholic faith restored, anti-revolutionary decrees accumulating, should begin to see that their return is becoming difficult, not to say impossible.  Bonaparte being the sole obstacle now in their way, they want to get rid of him—­nothing simpler.  Conspirators if defeated are brigands, if successful, heroes; and your perplexity seems to me very natural.”