take could not remain
secret. Some refractory conscripts, some deserters, appeared armed,
at different places; they had to be maintained, and without an
order _ad hoc_, but by virtue of general instructions, one of my
officers possessed himself of the public funds for the purpose....
The guilty ones are ... myself, for whom I ask nothing, not from
pride, for the haughtiest spirit need not feel humiliated at
receiving grace from one who has granted it to kings, but from
honour. Your Excellency will no doubt wish to know the motive that
urged me to conceive and nourish such projects. The motive is this:
I have seen the unhappiness of the amnestied, and my own
misfortune; people proscribed in the state, classed as serfs,
excluded not only from all employment, but also tyrannised by those
who formerly only lacked the courage to join their cause....

"Whatever fate is reserved for me, I beg you to consider that I
have not ceased to be a Frenchman, that I may have succumbed to
noble madness, but have not sought cowardly success; and I hope
that, in view of this, your Excellency will grant me the only
favour I ask for myself--that my trial, if I am to have one, may be
military, as well as its execution....

"A. Le Chevalier."

One can imagine the stupefaction, on reading this missive of Fouche, of
Real, Desmarets, Veyrat, and of all those on whom it rested to make his
people appear to the Master as enthusiastic and contented, or at least
silent and submissive. They felt that the letter was not all bragging;
they saw in it Georges' plan amplified; the same threat of a descent of
Bourbons on the coast, the same assurance of overturning, by a blow at
Bonaparte, the immense edifice he had erected. In fact, the belief that
the Empire, to which all Europe now seemed subjugated, was at the mercy
of a battle won or lost, was so firmly established in the mind of the
population, that even a man like Fouche, for example, who thoroughly
understood the undercurrents of opinion, could never believe in the
solidity of the regime that he worked for. Were not the germs of the
whole story of the Restoration in Le Chevalier's profession of faith?
Were they not found again, five years later, in the astonishing
conception of Malet? Were things very different in 1814? The Emperor
vanquished, the defection of the genera