ls, the descent of the princes,
the intervention of a provisional government, the reestablishment of the
monarchy, such were, in reality the events that followed; they were what
Georges had foreseen, what d'Ache had anticipated, what Le Chevalier had
divined with such clear-sightedness. Though they seemed miraculous to
many people they were simply the logical result of continued effort, the
success of a conspiracy in which the actors had frequently been changed,
but which had suffered no cessation from the coup d'etat of Brumaire
until the abdication at Fontainebleau. The chiefs of the imperial
police, then, found themselves confronted by a new "affaire Georges."
From Flierle's partial revelations and the little that had been learned
from the Buquets, they inferred that d'Ache was at the head of it, and
recommended all the authorities to search well, but quietly. In spite of
these exhortations, Caffarelli seemed to lose all interest in the plot,
which he had finally analysed as "vast but mad," and unworthy of any
further attention on his part.

The prefect of the Seine-Inferieure, Savoye-Rollin, had manifested a
zeal and ardour each time that Real addressed him on the subject of the
affair of Quesnay, in singular contrast with the indifference shown by
his colleague of Calvados. Savoye-Rollin belonged to an old
parliamentary family. Being advocate-general to the parliament of
Grenoble before 1790, he had adopted the more moderate ideas of the
Revolution, and had been made a member of the tribunate on the
eighteenth Brumaire in 1806, at the age of fifty-two, he replaced
Beugnot in the prefecture of Rouen. He was a most worthy functionary, a
distinguished worker, and possessor of a fine fortune.

Real left it to Savoye-Rollin to find d'Ache, who, they remembered, had
lived at the farm of Saint-Clair near Gournay, before Georges'
disembarkation, and who possessed some property in the vicinity of
Neufchatel. The police of Rouen was neither better organised nor more
numerous than that of Caen, but its chief was a singular personage whose
activity made up for the qualities lacking in his men. He was a little,
restless, shrewd, clever man, full of imagination and wit, frank with
every one and fearing, as he himself said, "neither woman, God nor
devil." He was named Licquet, and in 1807 was fifty-three years old. At
the time of the Revolution he had been keeper of the rivers and forests
of Caudebec, which position he had resig