hered around
him in our land the most desperate of the French royalists, whose hopes,
hatreds, schemes, and unending requests for British money may be scanned
by the curious in some thirty large volumes of letters bequeathed by
their factotum the Comte de Puisaye, to the British Museum.
Unfortunately this correspondence throws little light on the details of
the plot which is fitly called by the name of Georges Cadoudal.

This daring Breton was, in fact, the only man of action on whom the
Bourbon princes could firmly rely for an enterprise that demanded a
cool head, cunning in the choice of means, and a remorseless hand.
Pichegru it is true, lived near London, but saw little of the
_emigres_, except the venerable Conde. Dumouriez also was in the great
city, but his name was too generally scorned in France for his
treachery in 1793 to warrant his being used. But there were plenty of
swashbucklers who could prepare the ground in France, or, if fortune
favoured, might strike the blow themselves; and a small committee of
French royalists, which had the support of that furious royalist, Mr.
Windham, M.P., began even before the close of 1802 to discuss plans
for the "removal" of Bonaparte. Two of their tools, Picot and Le
Bourgeois by name, plunged blindly into a plot, and were arrested soon
after they set foot in France. Their boyish credulity seems to have
suggested to the French authorities the sending of an agent so as to
entrap not only French _emigres_, but also English officials and
Jacobinical generals.

The _agent provocateur_ has at all times been a favourite tool of
continental Governments: but rarely has a more finished specimen of
the class been seen than Mehee de la Touche. After plying the trade of
an assassin in the September massacres of 1792, and of a Jacobin spy
during the Terror, he had been included by Bonaparte among the Jacobin
scapegoats who expiated the Chouan outrage of Nivose. Pining in the
weariness of exile, he heard from his wife that he might be pardoned
if he would perform some service for the Consular Government. At once
he consented, and it was agreed that he should feign royalism, should
worm himself into the secrets of the _emigres_ at London, and act as
intermediary between them and the discontented republicans of Paris.

The man who seems to have planned this scheme was the ex-Minister of
Police. Fouche had lately been deprived by Bonaparte of the
inquisitorial powers which he so unscru