ts 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 de
Horn, Baron d'Erensward, and Colonel Lilienhorn. Lilienhorn, commandant
of the guards, drawn from misery and obscurity by the king's favour,
promoted to the first rank in the army, and admitted to closest intimacy
in the palace, confessed his ingratitude and his crime; seduced, he
declared, by the ambition of commanding, during the trouble, the
national guard of Stockholm. The part played by La Fayette in Paris
seemed to him the ideal of the citizen and the soldier. He could not
resist the fascination of the perspective; half-way in the conspiracy,
he had endeavoured to render it impossible, even whilst he meditated it.
It was he who had written the anonymous letter to the king, in which the
king was warned of the failure in the attempt at Haga, and that which
threatened him at this fete; with one hand he thrust forward the
assassin--with the other he held back the victim, as though he had thus
prepared for himself an excuse for his remorse after the deed was done.

On the fatal day he had passed the evening in the king's apartments--had
seen him r