of inferior
prisoners, owed their captivity in most cases to a secret meeting
betrayed, a store of arms discovered, a discontented letter opened, or
even to an expression of opinion, such as that France had been better
off under the Bourbons. Napoleon kept France down with an iron hand,
while the young men and lads in hundreds of thousands shed their blood
for him, the women wept, and the old men sometimes raged: but yet France
as a whole submitted. The memory of the Terror made this milder tyranny
bearable. And genius commands, as long as it is victorious, and till
this year of the Spanish war, there had been no check to Napoleon. He
had not yet set out to extinguish the flame of his glory in Russian
snows.

The police all over France obeyed his orders only too well--"_Surveillez
tout le monde, excepte moi!_" To a great degree it was necessary, for
French society, high and low, was honeycombed with Royalist plots, some
of them hardly worthy of a cause which called itself religious as well
as royal. Leaders like Cadoudal and Frotte were long dead; some of their
successors in conspiracy were heroes rather of scandal than of loyalty,
and many a tragic legend lingers in French society concerning the men
and women of those days.

To a great extent, the old families of La Vendee, the La
Rochejacqueleins at their head, refrained from mixing themselves up in
the smaller plots against the Empire in which hundreds of Chouans,
noble and peasant, men and women, were constantly involved during these
years with probable loss of life and liberty. It was not till later that
the general feeling became intensified so that Napoleon had to weaken
his army, in the Waterloo campaign, by sending some thousands of men
against a new insurrection in the West, under Louis de la
Rochejaquelein, a second La Vendee war, only stopped by the final return
of the Bourbons.

Monsieur Joseph's gay little room looked like anything but a haunt of
conspirators; but his friends were earnestly discussing with him the
possibility of raising the country, arming the peasants, marching on the
chief town of the department, capturing the Prefect, as well as the
General in command of the division, and holding them as hostages while
the insurrection went on spreading through Anjou and the neighbouring
provinces.

The most eager, the most original of the plotters was the Baron d'Ombre,
a dark, square young man with frowning brows. He turned quite fiercely
on a m