aubriand, who was about to proceed as the envoy of France
to the Republic of Valais, at once offered his resignation and assumed
an attitude of covert defiance. And that was the conduct of all
royalists who were not dazzled by the glamour of success or cajoled by
Napoleon's favours. Many of his friends ventured to show their horror
of this Corsican vendetta; and a _mot_ which was plausibly, but it
seems wrongly, attributed to Fouche, well sums up the general opinion
of that callous society: "It was worse than a crime--it was a
blunder."

Scarcely had Paris recovered from this sensation when, on April 6th,
Pichegru was found strangled in prison; and men silently but almost
unanimously hailed it as the work of Napoleon's Mamelukes. This
judgment, however natural after the Enghien affair, seems to be
incorrect. It is true the corpse bore marks which scarcely tallied with
suicide: but Georges Cadoudal, whose cell was hard by, heard no sound of
a scuffle; and it is unlikely that so strong a man as Pichegru would
easily have succumbed to assailants. It is therefore more probable that
the conqueror of Holland, shattered by his misfortunes and too proud to
undergo a public trial, cut short a life which already was doomed. Never
have plotters failed more ignominiously and played more completely into
the hands of their enemy. A _mot_ of the Boulevards wittily sums up the
results of their puny efforts: "They came to France to give her a king,
and they gave her an Emperor."

* * * * *

CHAPTER XX

THE DAWN OF THE EMPIRE

For some time the question of a Napoleonic dynasty had been freely
discussed; and the First Consul himself had latterly confessed his
intentions to Joseph in words that reveal his super-human confidence
and his caution: "I always intended to end the Revolution by the
establishment of heredity: but I thought that such a step could not be
taken before the lapse of five or six years." Events, however, bore
him along on a favouring tide. Hatred of England, fear of Jacobin
excesses, indignation at the royalist schemes against his life, and
finally even the execution of Enghien, helped on the establishment of
the Empire. Though moderate men of all parties condemned the murder,
the remnants of the Jacobin party hailed it with joy. Up to this time
they had a lingering fear that the First Consul was about to play the
part of Monk. The pomp of the Tuileries and the hated Concordat