had hired an apartment in the neighbourhood, where the very next day her visit to the milliner’s was announced to him.  While his secretary, with four other persons, entered the milliner’s house through the street door, Chaptal, with four of his spies, forced the door of the passage open, which was no sooner done than the disguised gallant was found, and threatened in the most rude manner by the Minister and his companions.  He would have been still worse used had not the unexpected appearance of Duroc and a whisper to Chaptal put a stop to the fury of this enraged lover.  The incognito is said to have been Bonaparte himself, who, the same evening, deprived Chaptal of his ministerial portfolio, and would have sent him to Cayenne, instead of to the Senate, had not Duroc dissuaded his Sovereign from giving an eclat to an affair which it, would be best to bury in oblivion.

Chaptal has never from that day approached Mademoiselle George, and, according to report, Napoleon has also renounced this conquest in favour of Duroc, who is at least her nominal gallant.  The quantity of jewels with which she has recently been decorated, and displayed with so much ostentation in the new tragedy, ‘The Templars’, indicate, however, a Sovereign rather than a subject for a lover.  And, indeed, she already treats the directors of the theatre, her comrades, and even the public, more as a real than a theatrical Princess.  Without any cause whatever, but from a mere caprice to see the camp on the coast, she set out, without leave of absence, and without any previous notice, on the very day she was to play; and this popular and interesting tragedy was put off for three weeks, until she chose to return to her duty.

When complaint was made to the prefects of the palace, now the governors of our theatres, Duroc said that the orders of the Emperor were that no notice should be taken of this ‘etourderie’, which should not occur again.

Chaptal was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt chemist at Montpellier, having ruined himself in search after the philosopher’s stone.  To persons in such circumstances, with great presumption, some talents, but no principles, the Revolution could not, with all its anarchy, confusion, and crime, but be a real blessing, as Chaptal called it in his first speech at the Jacobin Club.  Wishing to mimic, at Montpellier, the taking of the Bastille at Paris, he, in May, 1790, seduced the lower classes and the suburbs to an insurrection, and to an attack on the citadel, which the governor, to avoid all effusion of blood, surrendered without resistance.  He was denounced by the municipality to the National Assembly, for these and other plots and attempts, but Robespierre and other Jacobins defended him, and he escaped even imprisonment.  During 1793 and 1794, he monopolized the contract for making and providing the armies with gunpowder; a favour for which he paid Barrere, Carnot, and other members of the Committee of Public Safety, six millions of