rowing
popularity of his name with the army.

Fouche, and, it is said also, Talleyrand, did all they could to dissuade
the First Consul from this attempt, but he was fixed and immutable in
his resolve, and the Police Minister at once addressed himself to his
task with all his accustomed cleverness.

High play was one of the great vices of the day. It was a time of wild
and varied excitement, and men sought even in their dissipations, the
whirlwind passions that stirred them in active life. Moreau, however,
was no gambler; it was said that he never could succeed in learning a
game. He, whose mind could comprehend the most complicated question of
strategy, was obliged to confess himself conquered by ecarte! So much
for the vaunted intellectuality of the play-table! Neither was he
addicted to wine. All his habits were temperate, even to the extent of
unsociality.

A man who spoke little, and wrote less, who indulged in no dissipations,
nor seemed to have taste for any, was a difficult subject to treat; and
so Fouche found, as, day after day, his spies reported to him the utter
failure of all their schemes to entrap him. Lajolais, the friend of
Pichegru, and the man who betrayed him, was the chief instrument the
Police Minister used to obtain secret information. Being well born, and
possessed of singularly pleasing manners, he had the entree of the best
society of Paris, where his gay, easy humour made him a great favourite.
Lajolais, however, could never penetrate into the quiet domesticity
of Moreau's life, nor make any greater inroad on his intimacy than a
courteous salutation as they passed each other in the garden of the
Luxembourg. At the humble restaurant where he dined each day for two
francs, the 'General,' as he was distinctively called, never spoke to
any one. Unobtrusive and quiet, he occupied a little table in a recess
of the window, and arose the moment he finished his humble meal After
this he was to be seen in the garden of the Luxembourg, with a cigar and
a book, or sometimes without either, seated pensively under a tree for
hours together.

If he had been conscious of the espionage established over all
his actions, he could scarcely have adopted a more guarded or more
tantalising policy. To the verbal communications of Pichegru and Armand
Polignac, he returned vague replies; their letters he never answered
at all; and Lajolais had to confess that, after two months of close
pursuit, the game was as far