ons
have taken place, none but elderly persons can recall the immense
excitement produced in Europe by the abduction of a senator of the
French Empire. No trial, if we except that of Trumeaux, the grocer of
the Place Saint-Michel, and that of the widow Morin, under the Empire;
those of Fualdes and de Castaing, under the Restoration; those of Madame
Lafarge and Fieschi, under the present government, ever roused so much
curiosity or so deep an interest as that of the four young men accused
of abducting Malin. Such an attack against a member of his Senate
excited the wrath of the Emperor, who was told of the arrest of the
delinquents almost at the moment when he first heard of the crime and
the negative results of the inquiries. The forest, searched throughout,
the department of the Aube, ransacked from end to end, gave not the
slightest indication of the passage of the Comte de Gondreville nor
of his imprisonment. Napoleon sent for the chief justice, who, after
obtaining certain information from the ministry of police, explained to
his Majesty the position of Malin in regard to the Simeuse brothers
and the Gondreville estate. The Emperor, at that time pre-occupied
with serious matters, considered the affair explained by these anterior
facts.

"Those young men are fools," he said. "A lawyer like Malin will escape
any deed they may force him to sign under violence. Watch those nobles,
and discover the means they take to set the Comte de Gondreville at
liberty."

He ordered the affair to be conducted with the utmost celerity,
regarding it as an attack on his own institutions, a fatal example of
resistance to the results of the Revolution, an effort to open the great
question of the sales of "national property," and a hindrance to that
fusion of parties which was the constant object of his home policy.
Besides all this, he thought himself tricked by these young nobles, who
had given him their promise to live peaceably.

"Fouche's prediction has come true," he cried, remembering the words
uttered two years earlier by his present minister of police, who said
them under the impressions conveyed to him by Corentin's report as to
the character and designs of Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne.

It is impossible for persons living under a constitutional government,
where no one really cares for that cold and thankless, blind, deaf Thing
called public interest, to imagine the zeal which a mere word of the
Emperor was able to inspire in