sh Ferdinand
VII once more on the throne, a French general came to the island after
the taking of Cadiz, ostensibly to require the recognition of the King's
Government, really to see the convent and to find some means of
entering it. The undertaking was certainly a delicate one; but a man of
passionate temper, whose life had been, as it were, but one series of
poems in action, a man who all his life long had lived romances instead
of writing them, a man pre-eminently a Doer, was sure to be tempted by a
deed which seemed to be impossible.

To open the doors of a convent of nuns by lawful means! The metropolitan
or the Pope would scarcely have permitted it! And as for force or
stratagem--might not any indiscretion cost him his position, his whole
career as a soldier, and the end in view to boot? The Duc d'Angouleme
was still in Spain; and of all the crimes which a man in favour with the
Commander-in-Chief might commit, this one alone was certain to find him
inexorable. The General had asked for the mission to gratify private
motives of curiosity, though never was curiosity more hopeless. This
final attempt was a matter of conscience. The Carmelite convent on the
island was the only nunnery in Spain which had baffled his search.

As he crossed from the mainland, scarcely an hour's distance, he felt a
presentiment that his hopes were to be fulfilled; and afterwards, when
as yet he had seen nothing of the convent but its walls, and of the nuns
not so much as their robes; while he had merely heard the chanting of
the service, there were dim auguries under the walls and in the sound of
the voices to justify his frail hope. And, indeed, however faint those
so unaccountable presentiments might be, never was human passion more
vehemently excited than the General's curiosity at that moment. There
are no small events for the heart; the heart exaggerates everything; the
heart weighs the fall of a fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of
a woman's glove in the same scales, and the glove is nearly always
the heavier of the two. So here are the facts in all their prosaic
simplicity. The facts first, the emotions will follow.

An hour after the General landed on the island, the royal authority was
re-established there. Some few Constitutional Spaniards who had found
their way thither after the fall of Cadiz were allowed to charter
a vessel and sail for London. So there was neither resistance nor
reaction. But the change of governm