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. Réal 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 Réal. In his usual manner, by
brief questions he soon learned the number of royalists confined in the
tower of the Temple or at Bicêtre, 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
Frotté'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
Picot, had emigrated to England. Both of these men had been denounced by
a professional instigator as having "been heard to say" that they had
come to attempt the life of the First Consul. They had been arrested at
Pont-Audemer as soon as they returned to France, and had now been
imprisoned in the Temple for nearly a year.

To these two victims Desmarets added another Chouan, Piogé, nicknamed
"Without Pity" or "Strike-to-Death," and Desol de Grisolles, an old