position that an honest man ever found himself in.

"I have not seen you," he said to me, "because since leaving the school
I have practised daily firing with a pistol; I have now acquired a skill
beyond the common, and I am about to employ it in ridding France of the
tyrant who has confiscated all her liberties. My measures are taken: I
have hired a small room on the Carrousel, close to the place by which
Napoleon, on coming out from the court, will pass to review the cavalry;
from the humble window of my apartment will the ball be fired which will
go through his head."

I leave it to be imagined with what despair I received this confidence.
I made every imaginable effort to deter Brissot from his sinister
project; I remarked how all those who had rushed on enterprises of this
nature had been branded in history by the odious title of assassin.
Nothing succeeded in shaking his fatal resolution; I only obtained from
him a promise on his honour that the execution of it should be postponed
for a time, and I put myself in quest of means for rendering it
abortive.

The idea of announcing Brissot's project to the authorities did not
even enter my thoughts. It seemed a fatality which came to smite me, and
of which I must undergo the consequences, however serious they might be.

I counted much on the solicitations of Brissot's mother, already so
cruelly tried during the revolution. I went to her home, in the Rue de
Condé, and implored her earnestly to coöperate with me in preventing her
son from carrying out his sanguinary resolution. "Ah, sir," replied this
lady, who was naturally a model of gentleness, "if Silvain" (this was
the name of her son) "believes that he is accomplishing a patriotic