boldest horseman. Her
hand, so noble, so flexible, could handle gun or pistol with the ease of
a practised marksman. She always wore when out of doors the coquettish
little cap with visor and green veil which women wear on horseback. Her
delicate fair face, thus protected, and her white throat tied with a
black cravat, were never injured by her long rides in all weathers.

Under the Directory and at the beginning of the Consulate, Laurence had
been able to escape the observation of others; but since the government
had become a more settled thing, the new authorities, the prefect of the
Aube, Malin's friends, and Malin himself had endeavored to undermine
her in the community. Her preoccupying thought was the overthrow of
Bonaparte, whose ambition and its triumphs excited the anger of her
soul,--a cold, deliberate anger. The obscure and hidden enemy of a man
at the pinnacle of glory, she kept her gaze upon him from the depths
of her valley and her forests, with relentless fixity; there were
times when she thought of killing him in the roads about Malmaison or
Saint-Cloud. Plans for the execution of this idea may have been the
cause of many of her past actions, but having been initiated, after the
peace of Amiens, into the conspiracy of the men who expected to make
the 18th Brumaire recoil upon the First Consul, she had thenceforth
subordinated her faculties and her hatred to their vast and well
laid scheme, which was to strike at Bonaparte externally by the vast
coalition of Russia, Austria, and Prussia (vanquished at Austerlitz) and
internally by the coalition of men politically opposed to each other,
but united by their common hatred of a man whose death some of them
were meditating, like Laurence herself, without shrinking from the word
assassination. This young girl, so fragile to the eye, so powerful to
those who knew her well, was at the present moment the faithful guide
and assistant of the exiled gentlemen who came from England to take part
in this deadly enterprise.

Fouche relied on the co-operation of the _emigres_ everywhere beyond
the Rhine to lure the Duc d'Enghien into the plot. The presence of that
prince in the Baden territory, not far from Strasburg, gave much weight
later to the accusation. The great question of whether the prince really
knew of the enterprise, and was waiting on the frontier to enter France
on its success, is one of those secrets about which, as about several
others, the house of Bour