s in London; and their nimble fancy pictured the
French army and nation as ready to fling themselves at the feet of
Louis XVIII. The future monarch did not share these illusions. In the
chilly solitudes of Warsaw he discerned matters in their true light,
and prepared to wait until the vaulting ambition of Napoleon should
league Europe against him. Indeed, when the plans of the forward wing
in London were explained to him, with a view of enlisting his support,
he deftly waved aside the embarrassing overtures by quoting the lines:

"Et pour etre approuves
De semblables projets veulent etre acheves,"

a cautious reply which led his brother, then at Edinburgh, scornfully
to contemn his _feebleness_ as unworthy of any further confidences.[281]
In truth, the Comte d'Artois, destined one day to be Charles X. of
France, was not fashioned by nature for a Fabian policy of delay: not
even the misfortunes of exile could instill into the watertight
compartments of his brain the most elementary notions of prudence.
Daring, however, attracts daring; and this prince had gathered around
him in our land the most desperate of the French royalists, whose hopes,
hatreds, schemes, and unending requests for British money may be scanned
by the curious in some thirty large volumes of letters bequeathed by
their factotum the Comte de Puisaye, to the British Museum.
Unfortunately this correspondence throws little light on the details of
the plot which is fitly called by the name of Georges Cadoudal.

This daring Breton was, in fact, the only man of action on whom the
Bourbon princes could firmly rely for an enterprise that demanded a
cool head, cunning in the choice of means, and a remorseless hand.
Pichegru it is true, lived near London, but saw little of the
_emigres_, except the venerable Conde. Dumouriez also was in the great
city, but his name was too generally scorned in France for his
treachery in 1793 to warrant his being used. But there were plenty of
swashbucklers who could prepare the ground in France, or, if fortune
favoured, might strike the blow themselves; and a small committee of
French royalists, which had the support of that furious royalist, Mr.
Windham, M.P., began even before the close of 1802 to discuss plans
for the "removal" of Bonaparte. Two of their tools, Picot and Le
Bourgeois by name, plunged blindly into a plot, and were arrested soon
after they set foot in France. Their boyish cred