Consul, the police had
never lost sight of him. It was known that he was staying in England,
and he was under surveillance there; but if it was true that he had
escaped this espionage, the danger was imminent, and the predicted
"earthquake" at hand.

Bonaparte, more irritated than uneasy at these tales, wished to remove
all doubt about the matter. He mistrusted Fouche, whose devotion he had
reason to suspect, and who besides had not at this time--officially at
least--the superintendence of the police; and he had attached to himself
a dangerous spy, the Belgian Real. It was on this man that Bonaparte, on
certain occasions, preferred to rely. Real was a typical detective. The
friend of Danton, he had in former days, organised the great popular
manifestations that were to intimidate the Convention. He had penetrated
the terrible depths of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the Committee of
Public Safety. He knew and understood how to make use of what remained
of the old committees of sections, of "septembriseurs" without
occupation, lacqueys, perfumers, dentists, dancing masters without
pupils, all the refuse of the revolution, the women of the Palais-Royal:
such was the army he commanded, having as his lieutenants Desmarets, an
unfrocked priest, and Veyrat, formerly a Genevese convict, who had been
branded and whipped by the public executioner. Real and these two
subalterns were the principal actors in the drama that we are about to
relate.

On this night Bonaparte sent in haste for Real. In his usual manner, by
brief questions he soon learned the number of royalists confined in the
tower of the Temple or at Bicetre, their names, and on what suspicions
they had been arrested. Quickly satisfied on all these points he ordered
that before daylight four of the most deeply implicated of the prisoners
should be taken before a military commission; if they revealed nothing
they were to be shot in twenty-four hours. Aroused at five o'clock in
the morning, Desmarets was told to prepare the list, and the first two
names indicated were those of Picot and Lebourgeois. Picot was one of
Frotte's old officers, and during the wars of the Chouannerie had been
commander-in-chief of the Auge division. He had earned the surname of
"Egorge-Bleus" and was a Chevalier of St. Louis. Lebourgeois, keeper of
a coffee-house at Rouen, had been accused about the year 1800 of taking
part in an attack on a stage-coach, was acquitted, and like his friend