are ... myself, for whom I ask nothing, not from pride, for the haughtiest spirit need not feel humiliated at receiving grace from one who has granted it to kings, but from honour.  Your Excellency will no doubt wish to know the motive that urged me to conceive and nourish such projects.  The motive is this:  I have seen the unhappiness of the amnestied, and my own misfortune; people proscribed in the state, classed as serfs, excluded not only from all employment, but also tyrannised by those who formerly only lacked the courage to join their cause....

“Whatever fate is reserved for me, I beg you to consider that I have not ceased to be a Frenchman, that I may have succumbed to noble madness, but have not sought cowardly success; and I hope that, in view of this, your Excellency will grant me the only favour I ask for myself—­that my trial, if I am to have one, may be military, as well as its execution....

“A.  Le Chevalier.”

One can imagine the stupefaction, on reading this missive of Fouche, of Real, Desmarets, Veyrat, and of all those on whom it rested to make his people appear to the Master as enthusiastic and contented, or at least silent and submissive.  They felt that the letter was not all bragging; they saw in it Georges’ plan amplified; the same threat of a descent of Bourbons on the coast, the same assurance of overturning, by a blow at Bonaparte, the immense edifice he had erected.  In fact, the belief that the Empire, to which all Europe now seemed subjugated, was at the mercy of a battle won or lost, was so firmly established in the mind of the population, that even a man like Fouche, for example, who thoroughly understood the undercurrents of opinion, could never believe in the solidity of the regime that he worked for.  Were not the germs of the whole story of the Restoration in Le Chevalier’s profession of faith?  Were they not found again, five years later, in the astonishing conception of Malet?  Were things very different in 1814?  The Emperor vanquished, the defection of the generals, the descent of the princes, the intervention of a provisional government, the reestablishment of the monarchy, such were, in reality the events that followed; they were what Georges had foreseen, what d’Ache had anticipated, what Le Chevalier had divined with such clear-sightedness.  Though they seemed miraculous to many people they were simply the logical result of continued effort, the success of a conspiracy in which the actors had frequently been changed, but which had suffered no cessation from the coup d’etat of Brumaire until the abdication at Fontainebleau.  The chiefs of the imperial police, then, found themselves confronted by a new “affaire Georges.”  From Flierle’s partial revelations and the little that had been learned from the Buquets, they inferred that d’Ache was at the head of it, and recommended all the authorities to search well, but quietly.  In spite of these exhortations, Caffarelli seemed to lose all interest in the plot, which he had finally analysed as “vast but mad,” and unworthy of any further attention on his part.