by means of which, in case of alarm, the tenants could descend to the ground floor and go out by an unoccupied shop whose door opened under the porch of the house.  Spain took a sort of pride in his strange talent; he was very proud of a hiding-place he had made in the lodging of a friend, the tailor Michelot, in the Rue de Bussy, which Michelot himself did not suspect.  The tailor was obliged to be absent often, and four of the conspirators had successively lodged there.  When he was away his lodgers “limbered up” in this apartment, but as soon as they heard his step on the stairs, they reentered their cell, and the worthy Michelot, who vaguely surmised that there was some mystery about his house, only solved the enigma when he was cited to appear before the tribunal as an accomplice in the royalist plot of which he had never even heard the name.

Georges started for his first journey to Biville from the Rue Careme-Prenant.  On January 23d he returned finally to Paris, bringing with him Pichegru, Jules de Polignac and the Marquis de Riviere, whom he had gone to the farm of La Poterie to receive.  He lodged Pichegru with an employe of the finance department, named Verdet, who had given the Chouans the second floor of his house in the Rue du Puits-de-l’Hermite.  They stayed there three days.  On the 27th, Georges took the general to the house at Chaillot “where they only slept a few nights.”  At the very moment that they went there Querelle signed his first declarations before Real.

It is not necessary to follow the movements of Pichegru, nor to relate his interviews with Moreau.  The organisation of the plot is what interests us, by reason of the part taken in it by d’Ache.  No one has ever explained what might have resulted politically from the combination of Moreau’s embittered ambition, the insouciance of Pichegru, and the fanatical ardour of Georges.  Of this ill-assorted trio the latter alone had decided on action, although he was handicapped by the obstinacy of the princes in refusing to come to the fore until the throne was reestablished.  He told the truth when he affirmed before the judges, later on, that he had only come to France to attempt a restoration, the means for which were never decided on, for they had not agreed on the manner in which they should act towards Bonaparte.  A strange plan had at first been suggested.  The Comte d’Artois, at the head of a band of royalists equal in number to the Consul’s escort, was to meet him on the road to Malmaison, and provoke him to single combat, but the presence of the Prince was necessary for this revival of the Combat of Thirty, and as he refused to appear, this project of rather antiquated chivalry had to be abandoned.  Their next idea was to kidnap Bonaparte.  Some determined men—­as all of Georges’ companions were—­undertook to get into the park at Malmaison at night, seize Bonaparte and throw him into a carriage which thirty Chouans, dressed as dragoons, would escort as far as the coast.  They actually