regret at being obliged to leave him, as I must return to Bordeaux. He looked at me and said "Good! I shall go to Bayonne."

The next day we were walking in the Quinconse. Morning and evening (as in Paris) I was absent from the hotel, ostensibly on business. But in reality I was reporting to the then Prefect, Monsieur Haussmann.

The eve of their Majesties' passage, at ten o'clock at night, I took a walk with my friend on the shores of the Gironde. The Prefect of Bordeaux passed, and informed me that their Imperial Majesties were nearly there, and that it was time to

The next day a man with a dagger in the back of his neck was taken out of the river and carried to the Morgue just as the Imperial party were crossing the town on their way to Biarritz. A few days after that Monsieur Haussmann was made Prefect of the Seine (he is still that).

He has also

been made Senator and decorated with the Grand Cross. Monsieur Duhamel became a States' Councillor, Deputy, and so forth, as a reward for his services in this unfortunate affair.

As for me, I lost my dagger, which remained at Bordeaux in the hands of justice as a proof of the murder of Silvani, of Perrugia !

CHAPTER XXVII.

PIANORI.

THIS wretched Pianori, who was a shoemaker by profession, arrived in Paris and lodged in the Rue de la Galande. Being unable to speak French, and finding no work, he fell into the most abject misery. In the same house lived one of those scoundrels whom I branded in Chapter XXI. under the name of hired plotters. He resolved to make Pianori his victim, feeling sure that this same victim would make his fortune. The spy began by pitying Pianori, gave him money, paid for his food, and particularly his drink, and, when he was drunk, incited him against Napoleon.

The employé from the Prefecture gained such an ascendancy over the Italian, that the latter, thinking he had found a beneficent angel, would have thrown himself into the Seine rather than disobey the benefactor who fed and lodged him without making him work. The day of the criminal attempt,

Pianori, drunk with absinthe, was taken by the agent to the Champs Elysées; a revolver was placed in his hands, and he fired three times at Napoleon. He was arrested, tried, and condemned to death. The day of his execution, at six o'clock in the morning, just at the moment when Pianori's head. was falling into the basket, the Moniteur announced to its readers that Hebert had been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour as a reward for his exceptional services.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

ORSINI.

THIS chapter, which I shall devote to the hero of bombshells, will not be long. Everyone has heard of the trial. It is said that Orsini used to be the Grand Master of a Masonic Lodge in Italy. In my eyes he was only a petty conspirator, a miserable assassin, a man without any decency of character. He came to Paris to assassinate Napoleon. Instead of that, however, he contented himself with buying a horse and riding with the head of the State every day. He had some bombs made, and sent for two unfortunate countrymen of his to throw them amongst the crowd.

The night of the crime he was satisfied to look on as an amateur. As soon as his murderers had sown death and desolation around the Imperial carriages, Orsini returned home, and went to bed quietly like a grocer of the Marais.

Arrested in bed, he turned informer, and betrayed all the men concerned in the plot.

This is the hero whose partisans published his memoirs, and for whom subscriptions were raised, as well as for his sister, who poses as a martyr to liberty.

A number of police agents were decorated, many victims perished. The Prefect of Police and the Minister of the Interior sent in their resignation. The Orsini affair brought the laws for public safety into existence.