They spent the night in fruitless searching about the house and buildings; several times they passed within a few steps of the king, and he could hear their threats and imprecations.  At last, half an hour before dawn, they went away.  Marouin watched them go, and when they were out of sight he ran to the king.  He found him lying in a corner, a pistol clutched in each hand.  The unhappy man had been overcome by fatigue and had fallen asleep.  Marouin hesitated a moment to bring him back to his wandering, tormented life, but there was not a minute to lose.  He woke him.

They went down to the beach at once.  A morning mist lay over the sea.  They could not see anything two hundred yards ahead.  They were obliged to wait.  At last the first sunbeams began to pierce this nocturnal mist.  It slowly dispersed, gliding over the sea as clouds move in the sky.  The king’s hungry eye roved over the tossing waters before him, but he saw nothing, yet he could not banish the hope that somewhere behind that moving curtain he would find his refuge.  Little by little the horizon came into view; light wreaths of mist, like smoke, still floated about the surface of the water, and in each of them the king thought he recognised the white sails of his vessel.  The last gradually vanished, the sea was revealed in all its immensity, it was deserted.  Not daring to delay any longer, the ship had sailed away in the night.

“So,” said the king, “the die is cast.  I will go to Corsica.”

The same day Marshal Brune was assassinated at Avignon.

II—­CORSICA

Once more on the same beach at Bonette, in the same bay where he had awaited the boat in vain, still attended by his band of faithful followers, we find Murat on the 22nd August in the same year.  It was no longer by Napoleon that he was threatened, it was by Louis XVIII that he was proscribed; it was no longer the military loyalty of Marshal Brune who came with tears in his eyes to give notice of the orders he had received, but the ungrateful hatred of M. de Riviere, who had set a price [48,000 francs.] on the head of the man who had saved his own.[Conspiracy of Pichegru.] M. de Riviere had indeed written to the ex-King of Naples advising him to abandon himself to the good faith and humanity of the King of France, but his vague invitation had not seemed sufficient guarantee to the outlaw, especially on the part of one who had allowed the assassination almost before his eyes of a man who carried a safe-conduct signed by himself.  Murat knew of the massacre of the Mamelukes at Marseilles, the assassination of Brune at Avignon; he had been warned the day before by the police of Toulon that a formal order for his arrest was out; thus it was impossible that he should remain any longer in France.  Corsica, with its hospitable towns, its friendly mountains, its impenetrable forests, was hardly fifty leagues distant; he must reach Corsica, and wait in its towns, mountains, and forests until the crowned heads of Europe should decide the fate of the man they had called brother for seven years.