Whilst the king was receiving the first attentions, and being conveyed to the palace, the guards stationed at the doors of the ball-room compelled all to take off their masks, asked their names, and searched their persons:  nothing suspicious was discovered.  Four of the chief conspirators, men of the highest nobility in Stockholm, had succeeded in escaping from the apartment in the first confusion produced by the report of the pistol, and before the doors had been closed.  Of nine confidants or accomplices in the crime, eight had already gone away without exciting any suspicion:  only one was left in the apartment, who affected a slow step and calm demeanour as guarantees of his innocence.

He left the apartment last of all, raising his mask before the officer of police, and saying, as he looked steadfastly at him, “As for me, sir, I hope you do not suspect me.”  This man was the assassin.

They allowed him to pass; the crime had no other evidence than itself, a pistol, and a knife, sharpened as a poignard, found beneath the masks and flowers on the floor of the opera.  The weapon revealed the hand.  A gunsmith at Stockholm identified the pistol, and declared he had recently sold it to a Swedish gentleman, formerly an officer in the guards, named Ankastroem.  They found Ankastroem at his house, neither thinking of exculpation nor of flight.  He confessed the weapon and the crime.  An unjust judgment, he averred, in which however the king spared his life, the wearisomeness of an existence which he had cherished to employ and make illustrious at its close for his country’s advantage, the hope, if he succeeded, of a national recompence worthy of the deed, had, he declared, inspired this project; and he claimed to himself alone the glory or disgrace.  He denied all plot and all accomplices.  Beneath the fanatic he masked the conspirator.

He failed in his part, after a few days, beneath the truth and his remorse.  He avowed the conspiracy, named the guilty, and the reward of his crime.  It was a sum of money, that had been weighed, rix-dollar by rix-dollar, against the blood of Gustavus.  The plot, planned six months before, had been thrice frustrated, by chance or destiny—­at the diet of Jessen, at Stockholm, and at Haga.  The king killed, all his favourites—­all the instruments of his government—­must be sacrificed to the vengeance of the senate and the restoration of the aristocracy.  Their heads were to have been carried at the tops of pikes, in the streets of the capital, in imitation of the popular punishments of Paris.  The duke of Sudermania, the king’s brother, was to be sacrificed.  The young monarch, handed over to the conspirators, was to serve as a passive instrument to re-establish the ancient constitution, and legitimate their crime.  The principal conspirators belonged to the first families in Sweden; the shame of their lost power had debased their ambition, even to crime.  They were the Count de Bibbing, Count