of them would count on an army of forty thousand men!” And when Lefebre was brought before the prefect to repeat this accusation, and gave the general’s names, Savoye-Rollin was so petrified with astonishment that he dared not insert them in the official report of the inquiry; furthermore, he refused to write them with his own hand, and compelled the lawyer himself to put on paper this blasphemy before which official pens recoiled.

“Lefebre insists,” wrote Savoye-Rollin to Real, “that Le Chevalier would never tell him the names of all the conspirators.  Lefebre has, however, given two names, one of which is so important and seems so improbable, that I cannot even admit a suspicion of it.  Out of respect for the august alliance which he has contracted, I have not put his name in the report of the inquiry; it is added to my letter, in a declaration written and signed by the prisoner.”  And in his letter there is a note containing these lines over Lefebre’s signature:  “I declare to Monsieur le Prefect de la Seine Inferieur that the two generals whom I did not name in my interrogation to-day and who were pointed out to me by M. le Chevalier, are the Generals Bernadotte and Massena.”

Bernadotte and Massena!  At the ministry of police they pretended to laugh heartily at this foolish notion; but perhaps some who knew the “true inwardness” of certain old rivalries—­Fouche above all—­thought it less absurd and impossible than they admitted it to be.  This fiend of a man, with his way of searching to the bottom of his prisoners’ consciences, was just the one to find out that in France Bonaparte was the sole partisan of the Empire.  In any case these were not ideas to be circulated freely, and from that day Real promised himself that if Pasque and Beffara succeeded in finding Le Chevalier, he should never divulge them before any tribunal.

The two agents had established a system of surveillance on all the roads of Normandy, but without much hope:  Le Chevalier, who had escaped so many spies and got out of so many snares during the past eight years, was considered to bear, as it were, a charmed life.  He was taken, however, and as his escape had seemed to be the result of the detective’s schemes, so in the manner in which he again fell into the hands of Real’s agents was Licquet’s handiwork again recognised.  The latter, indeed, was the only one who knew enough to make the capture possible.  In his long conversation with Mme. Acquet, he had learned that in leaving Caen in the preceding May, Le Chevalier had confided his five-year-old son to his servant Marie Humon, with orders to take him to his friend the Sieur Guilbot at Evreux.  At the beginning of August the child had been taken to Paris and placed with Mme. Thiboust, Le Chevalier’s sister-in-law.