preserved, in their manner of transacting business, and especially of offering advice, any traces of that period in which Frenchmen flattered themselves they were free.  The warnings which he had received, when about to commence his atrocious proceedings against Spain, were remembered with the higher resentment, as the course of events in that country, month after month, and year after year, confirmed the accuracy of the foresight which he had contemned.  This haughty spirit could not endure the presence of the man who could be supposed to fancy that even on one point, he had the better of his master.

The disgrace of Fouche was certainly a very unpopular measure.  The immediate cause of it could not be divulged, and the minister was considered as having fallen a sacrifice to the honesty of his remonstrances on the Spanish invasion and the increased rigour of the Emperor’s domestic administration.  It was about this time that, in addition to the castle of Vincennes, nine new state-prisons were established in France; and the number of persons confined in these receptacles, on warrants signed by the Emperor and his slavish privy council, far exceeded those condemned to similar usage in any recent period of the Bourbon monarchy, under the lettres de cachet of the sovereign.  These were proofs, not to be mistaken, of the growth of political disaffection.  In truth the “continental system,” the terrible waste of life occasioned by the late campaigns in Poland and Austria, and the constant demands, both on the treasure and the blood of France, rendered necessary by the apparently interminable war in the Peninsula—­these were evils which could not exist without alienating the hearts of the people.  The police filled the ears of the Emperor with reports of men’s private conversation.  Citizens were daily removed from their families, and buried in remote and inaccessible dungeons, for no reason but that they had dared to speak what the immense majority of their neighbours thought.  His quarrels with Lucien, who had contracted a marriage unsuitable, in the Emperor’s opinion, to his rank, were so indecently violent, that that ablest of his brothers at length sought a refuge in England, where he remained during several years.  The total slavery of the press, its audacious lies, and more audacious silence, insulted the common sense of all men.  Disaffection was secretly, but rapidly, eating into the heart of his power; and yet, as if blinded to all consequences by some angry infliction of heaven, the irritable ambition of Napoleon was already tempting another great foreign enemy into the field.