General Augereau's first wife, the Greek lady, was then at Pau, and, wishing to take leave of her, he went thither with three aides-de-camp, I being one. At that time, commanders-in-chief had each his squadron of guides, by a detachment of whom their carriages were constantly escorted so long as they were in the district occupied by troops under their command. There being as yet no guides at Bayonne, their place was supplied by posting a detachment of cavalry at every station between Bayonne and Pau. This duty was done by my late regiment, the 25th Chasseurs; so that as I sat at my ease in the commander-in-chief's carriage I could see my former comrades trotting by the side of it. This did not excite my vanity, but I admit that on entering Puyoo, where two years ago you saw me come in on foot, all muddy, and escorted by gendarmes, I could not help swaggering a little to attract the recognition of the good mayor Bordenave. I introduced him to the commander-in-chief, to whom I had already related what had befallen me in this parish in 1801, and as the escort as far as Puyoo had been joined by the gendarmerie force from Peyrehorade, I recognised the two gendarmes who had arrested me. The old mayor mischievously told them that the officer whom they saw in the commander-in-chief's fine coach was the same traveller as they had taken up for a deserter in spite of his papers being in order; the good man was indeed very proud of the judgment which he had given on that occasion.

We stayed twenty-four hours at Pau, and returned to Bayonne, whence the general despatched Mainvielle and me to Brest to get his quarters ready. We travelled by the mail as far as Bordeaux, but from that point there were no public conveyances, and we were obliged to bestride post-horses, which, of all ways of travelling, is certainly the roughest. It rained, the roads were fearful, the nights pitch-dark, and still we had to gallop ahead in spite of these hindrances, for our mission was urgent. I have never been a first-rate rider, but my practice on horseback and the year that I had just passed at the Versailles riding-school gave me sufficient confidence to enable me to push along the frightful screws which we were obliged to ride. I got pretty well therefore through my apprenticeship to the trade of mounted messenger, which you will see that I was forced by circumstances later on to learn thoroughly. Mainvielle was not so well off, so that it took us two days and two nights to reach Nantes, where he arrived utterly broken down and unable to ride post any farther. However, as we could not allow the commander-in-chief to find himself without lodging on his arrival at Brest, it was arranged that I should go on to that town, and that Mainvielle should rejoin me by carriage. On arriving I hired the house of the banker Pasquier, the brother of the former Chancellor and President of the Upper House. My comrades, including Mainvielle, soon joined me and helped me to arrange the commander-in-chief's establishment in a way that seemed suitable for the state in which he proposed to keep house. The beginning of the year 1804 found us at Brest. Our army corps consisted of two divisions of infantry and a brigade of cavalry; the troops were not encamped, but billeted in the neighbouring villages, the generals and their staffs lodging in Brest. In the roads and the harbour were many vessels of every class; with officers of the army and the navy, Brest presented a lively scene. Admiral Truguet and General Augereau gave many brilliant parties after the immemorial custom of the French when preparing for war.

During February Augereau was summoned to Paris by the First Consul to confer upon the plan of invading Ireland; I travelled with him. On reaching Paris we found the political horizon very stormy. The Bourbons, who had hoped that Bonaparte, after seizing the reins of government, would work in their cause and get ready to play the part of Monk, when they saw that he had no idea of restoring the Crown to them, resolved to overthrow him. To this end they planned a conspiracy, the leaders of which were three men, all celebrated, but with very different titles to celebrity--General Pichegru, General Moreau, and Georges Cadoudal. Pichegru had been Bonaparte's mathematical tutor at the college of Brienne, and had left it to take service. When the Revolution broke out he was sergeant of artillery; his talents and his courage soon raised him to the command of an army. It was he who conquered Holland in the middle of winter; but his ambition was his ruin. He allowed himself to be inveigled by the agents of the Prince of Conde, and kept up a correspondence with the prince, who promised him great advancement and the title of Constable if he would use his influence with the troops towards replacing Louis XVIII. on the throne of his fathers. Chance, that great arbiter of men's destinies, would have it that after a fight, in which the French troops under Moreau had beaten the division of the Austrian General Klinglin, the baggage wagon of the latter containing letters addressed by Pichegru to the Prince of Conde was captured and brought to Moreau. He was Pichegru's friend and, in some measure, owed his promotion to him, so that as long as Pichegru was in power he concealed the fact of the capture. But when that general, being a member of the Council of Elders, had been arrested with many of his colleagues for acting on behalf of the Bourbons, Moreau lost no time in sending to the Directory the papers proving his guilt, which led to his transportation to Sinamary, in the deserts of Guiana. He contrived by dint of courage to escape, reached the United States, and then England, and, having from this time no more reason to keep up appearances, he became avowedly a paid agent of Louis XVIII., and decided to come to France to overthrow the Consular Government. However, as he could not hide from himself the fact that, having been cashiered, proscribed, and more than six years absent from France, his influence with the army could not be equal to that of Moreau, the conqueror of Hohenlinden, the favourite of the troops, and their inspector-general, he consented to hold his peace about his reasons for enmity towards Moreau, and to join with him for the triumph of the cause to which he was devoted.

Moreau, a Breton by birth, was studying law at Rennes when the Revolution of 1789 broke out. The turbulent young students chose him for their leader, and when they formed a battalion of volunteers they put Moreau in command of it. Thus, starting on the career of arms in the post of superior officer, he showed himself brave and capable, and was soon raised to the rank of general, and to the chief command of armies. He won several battles, and executed a justly celebrated retreat before the Archduke Charles. But, good soldier as he was, Moreau lacked political courage; as we have seen, he refused to put himself at the head of the Government while Bonaparte was in Egypt, and although he aided him on the 18th Brumaire, he became jealous of his power when he saw him First Consul. He sought every means of supplanting him-- urged thereto, it was said, by the jealousy of his wife and his mother-in-law towards Josephine. This being Moreau's disposition, it was likely that he would easily be brought to co-operate with Pichegru for the overthrow of the Government.

A Breton named Lajolais, an agent of Louis XVIII., and a friend of Moreau, undertook to conduct the communication between him and Pichegru, and was continually passing between London and Paris. By-and-by, however, it became clear that Moreau, while willing to aid in the overthrow of Bonaparte, was minded to hold the power himself, and by no means to hand it over to the Bourbons; and it was thought that a personal interview with Pichegru might put him in a better frame of mind. The latter, accordingly, was landed by an English vessel on the French coast, near Tréport, and proceeded to Paris, where he found Georges Cadoudal, M. de la Rivière, the two Polignacs, and other Royalists.

Cadoudal was son of a miller in the Morbihan, the youngest of a large family; but a quaint custom exists in part of western Brittany 1by which the latest born takes the family property. Cadoudal's father was in easy circumstances, and he had received some education. He was of short stature, broad-shouldered, fierce as a tiger, and his daring courage had made him the chief leader of all the 'Chouans' in Brittany. Since the pacification of La Vendée he had lived in London; but his fanatical zeal for the House of Bourbon allowed him no rest so long as the First Consul was at the head of the French Government. He formed a plan of killing him, not by secret assassination, but by attacking him in open day, on the road to Saint-Cloud, with the help of a force of thirty or forty mounted and armed Chouans, disguised as soldiers of the Consular Guard. There was some chance that this plan might succeed, Bonaparte at that time being, as a rule, escorted only by four troopers.

An interview was arranged between Pichegru and Moreau. It took place at night, near the then unfinished Church of the Madeleine. Moreau agreed to the overthrow, and even to the murder, of the First Consul, but would give no aid towards the restoration of the Bourbons. Bonaparte's secret police soon gave notice that some dark business was on foot in Paris, and he ordered the arrest of several old Chouans. One of these made important revelations compromising Moreau, and the Council resolved to arrest him also.

I remember that this arrest produced a very bad impression. Cadoudal and Pichegru not being as yet arrested, no one thought that they were in France, and it was said that the conspiracy had been trumped up by Bonaparte as an excuse for arresting Moreau. It was, therefore, to the interest of the Government to prove that they were in Paris and had been in communication with him. The barriers were closed for some days, and a law of the utmost severity passed against all who sheltered the conspirators. Unable to find a hiding-place, Pichegru, M. de la Riviere, and the Polignacs soon fell into the hands of the police. Their arrest led the public to begin to believe in the conspiracy; and when Cadoudal was captured, all doubts were at an end. He admitted, when examined, that he had come to kill the First Consul, and that the plot was to have the support of a prince of the blood royal. The police were thus led to inquire the whereabouts of all the Bourbon princes. They learned that the Duke of Enghien, a descendant of the Great Conde, had been living for a short time at Ettenheim, a little town in Baden, a few leagues from the Rhine. It has never been proved that the duke was a leader of the conspiracy, though there is no doubt that he had more than once been imprudent enough to enter French territory. Be that as it may, the First Consul caused a detachment of troops, under General Ordener, to cross the Rhine under cover of night, to go to Ettenheim, and seize the Duke of Enghien. He was brought straight to Vincennes, tried, condemned, and shot, before the public had heard of his arrest. This execution was generally blamed. If the prince had been taken on French territory, the law prescribing the capital penalty in such cases might conceivably have been applied; but to carry him off from a foreign country, beyond the frontier, appeared a monstrous violation of international law.

There seems, however, reason to think that the First Consul had not intended to execute the prince, and only wished to terrify the royalist party; but General Savary, chief of the gendarmerie, hastened to Vincennes as soon as judgment was pronounced, took possession of the prince, and, with a superabundance of zeal, had him shot--in order, as he said, to deliver the First Consul from the dilemma of having either to order his death or spare the life of a dangerous enemy. Savary afterwards repudiated this remark; but I have been assured, by those who were present and heard it, that he certainly made it. Nor is it less certain that Bonaparte blamed Savary for his haste; but, the thing being done, he had to accept the consequences.

General Pichegru, ashamed of having been in league with assassins, and unwilling that the conqueror of Holland should share the sentence of Chouan criminals, hanged himself in prison with his neckcloth. An assertion was made that he had been strangled by some of Bonaparte's mamelukes; but this was a fabrication. Moreover, it would have been a useless crime, it being rather to Bonaparte's interest to display Pichegru in disgrace before a tribunal than to kill him in private. Cadoudal, with several of his associates, was condemned to death and executed. The Polignacs and M. de la Riviere were similarly sentenced, but the penalty was commuted to imprisonment for life. They were at first shut up at Vincennes, then allowed under parole to reside in a private hospital. On the approach of the Allies in 1814 they escaped, and joined the Count of Artois in Franche-Comte, and in the following year were among the bitterest in urging the prosecutions of Bonapartists. As for General Moreau, he was condemned to two years' imprisonment. The First Consul remitted his sentence, on condition of his going to the United States. He lived there in obscurity till 1813, and then returned to Europe, to take his place among the enemies of his country, and to die fighting against Frenchmen, 2thus confirming all the accusations brought against him at the time of Pichegru's conspiracy.

The French nation, weary of revolutions, and seeing how necessary Bonaparte was if order were to be maintained forgot the odious business of the Duke of Enghien, and acclaimed Bonaparte Emperor on May 25, 1804. Most Courts recognised the new sovereign. On this occasion, eighteen of the most conspicuous generals were appointed marshals of the Empire: Berthier, Augereau, Masséna, Lannes, Davout, Murat, Moncey, Jourdan, Bernadotte, Ney, Bessieres, Mortier, Soult, and Brune in the active army; Kellermann, Lefebvre, Pérignon, and Sérurier in the Senate.