illingly gave a passage to fugitives of any kind--bankrupts or
political refugees, it was all the same to him, provided they could pay.
His mode of taking them aboard was simple. The fugitive waited upon a
lonely point of the coast, and at the moment of setting sail, Zuela
would detach a small boat to fetch him. On his last voyage he had
assisted in this way an outlaw and fugitive from justice, named Berton;
and on this occasion he was suspected of being about to aid the flight
of the men implicated in the affair of the Bidassoa. The police were
informed, and had their eye upon him.

This period was an epoch of flights and escapes. The Restoration in
France was a reactionary movement. Revolutions are fruitful of voluntary
exile; and restorations of wholesale banishments. During the first seven
or eight years which followed the return of the Bourbons, panic was
universal--in finance, in industry, in commerce, men felt the ground
tremble beneath them. Bankruptcies were numerous in the commercial
world; in the political, there was a general rush to escape. Lavalette
had taken flight, Lefebvre Desnouettes had taken flight, Delon had taken
flight. Special tribunals were again in fashion--_plus_ Treetaillon.
People instinctively shunned the Pont de Saumur, the Esplanade de la
Reole, the wall of the Observatoire in Paris, the tower of Taurias
d'Avignon--dismal landmarks in history where the period of reaction has
left its sign-spots, on which the marks of that blood-stained hand are
still visible. In London the Thistlewood affair, with its ramifications
in France: in Paris the Trogoff trial, with its ramifications in
Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, had increased the motives for anxiety
and flight, and given an impetus to that mysterious rout which left so
many gaps in the social system of that day. To find a place of safety,
this was the general care. To be implicated was to be ruined. The spirit
of the military tribunals had survived their institution. Sentences were
matters of favour. People fled to Texas, to the Rocky Mountains, to
Peru, to Mexico. The men of the Loire, traitors then, but now regarded
as patriots, had founded the _Champ d'Asile_. Beranger in one of his
songs says--

"Barbarians! we are Frenchmen born;
Pity us, glorious, yet forlorn."

Self-banishment was the only resource left. Nothing, perhaps, seems
simpler than flight, but that monosyllable has a terrible significance.
Every obstacle is in th