hereafter, all striving to overturn the
existing order of things--though in the end each purposed the triumph of
his own cause when a general chase should have ensued. The French
nation, though strong, great and powerful when its parts are united, was
then composed of royalists frankly devoted to the government of the
restoration of ultra royalists, more so even than the King himself--and
who wished the country to retrace its steps to principles, which good
sense, time, healthy reason, and especially the revolutionary tempest,
had most painfully refuted. Next came the Bonapartists, who seeing
themselves disinherited by a peaceful government, and deprived of the
prospects of glory they had deemed their own, regretted sincerely the
man of victory and his triumphs. Next came the liberals, a portion of
whom were sincerely devoted to political progress, for which the country
was not yet prepared--and, finally, the Jacobins, old relics of 1793,
who sought to precipitate France into that abyss of horror, the very
trace of which the wonderful genius of Napoleon had effaced. All these
opinions, advocated by intelligent and capable men, of gifted minds, but
also of turbulent and dangerous spirits, to whom agitation is the
natural element--all these were secretly busy, watching their
opportunity to burst upon the public attention. Paris, the head of the
great French body, was all the time happy as possible, and seemed calm
and flourishing. It was like those men with a smiling face, a calm and
cold icy exterior, but who nurse violent passions and bitter
animosities. The police at that time was under the control of a minister
who was young and active, but who was often led astray; just as
greyhounds, who, when almost overrunning their quarry, catch a glimpse
of other prey. The multiplied and contradictory devices of the factions,
therefore, led the police and its agents into difficulties of which the
criminals always contrived to take advantage. For two years, plot
followed plot, almost uninterruptedly; Bonapartist, liberal,
ultra-royalist plots followed each other; that of Didier was the first.
His object was to confide the Kingly office to a Lieutenant-General, to
the Duke of Orleans. Didier sought for his confederates among the men,
whom a kind of fanaticism yet attached to the exile of Saint-Helena;
among the old soldiers of the valley of the Loire, and that crowd of
imperial agents whom the restoration had stripped of honor and