kept a careful eye upon him. One evening the Emperor: had a great deal
of company at the Elysee, he told me not to go home, because he wished to
speak to me. When everybody was gone the Emperor stopped with Fouche in
the apartment next to the one I was in. The door remained half open.
They walked up and down together talking very calmly. I was therefore
greatly astonished when, after a quarter of, an hour, I heard the Emperor
say to him' gravely, 'You are a traitor! Why do you remain Minister of
the Police if you wish to betray me? It rests with me to have you
hanged, and everybody would rejoice at your death!' I did not hear
Fouche's reply, but the conversation lasted above half an hour longer,
the parties all the time walking up and down. When Fouche went away he
bade me cheerfully, good-night, and said that the Emperor had gone back
to his apartments.

"The next day the Emperor spoke to me of the previous night's
conversation. 'I suspected,' he said, 'that the wretch was in
correspondence with Vienna. I have had a banker's clerk arrested on his
return from that city. He has acknowledged that he brought a letter for
Fouche from Metternich, and that the answer was to be sent at a fixed
time to Bale, where a man was to wait for the bearer on the bridge: I
sent for Fouche a few days ago, and kept him three hours long in my
garden, hoping that in the course of a friendly conversation he would
mention that letter to me, but he said nothing. At last, yesterday
evening, I myself opened the subject.' (Here the Emperor repeated to me
the words I had heard the night before, 'You are a traitor,' etc.) He
acknowledged, in fact, continued the Emperor, 'that he had received such
a letter, but that it was not signed and that he had looked upon it as a
mystification. He showed it me. Now that letter was evidently an
answer, in which the writer again declared that he would listen to
nothing more concerning the Emperor, but that, his person excepted, it