Chouannerie, and was holding them
ready to act at an opportune moment. There came a terrible crisis in the
Emperor's career when, shut up in the island of Lobau, he seemed about
to give way under the combined and simultaneous attack of England and
Austria. This was the moment for the Chouan uprising; but just as it was
about to take place, the victory of Wagram rendered the conspiracy in
the provinces powerless.

"This expectation of exciting civil war in Brittany, La Vendee, and
part of Normandy, coincided in time with the final wreck of the baron's
fortune; and this wreck, coming at this time, led him to undertake an
expedition to capture funds of the government which he might apply to
the liquidation of the claims upon his property. But his wife and friend
refused to take part in applying to private interests the money taken
by armed force from the Receiver's offices and the couriers and
post-carriages of the government,--money taken, as they thought,
justifiably by the rules of war to pay the regiments of 'refractories'
and Chouans, and purchase the arms and ammunition with which to equip
them. At last, after an angry discussion in which the young leader,
supported by the wife, positively refused to hand over to the husband a
portion of the large sum of money which the young leader had seized for
the benefit of the royal armies from the treasury of the West, the baron
suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, to avoid arrest for debt, having
no means left by which to ward it off. Poor Madame de la Chanterie was
wholly ignorant of these facts; but even they are nothing to the plot
still hidden behind these preliminary facts.

"It is too late to-night," said Monsieur Alain, looking at his little
clock, "to go on with my narrative, which would take me, in any case,
a long time to finish in my own words. Old Bordin, my friend, whose
management of the famous Simeuse case had won him much credit in the
royalist party, and who pleaded in the well-known criminal affair called
that of the Chauffeurs de Mortagne, gave me, after I was installed in
this house, two legal papers relating to the terrible history of Madame
de la Chanterie and her daughter. I kept them because Bordin died soon
after, before I had a chance to return them. You shall read them. You
will find the facts much more succinctly stated than I could state
them. Those facts are so numerous that I should only lose myself in the
details and confuse them, whereas in