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Catherine's Day, that is, her feast-day. The émigrés, Mrs. Nagle's own people, had in exile jealousy kept up their own customs, and to Charles Nagle's wife the twenty-fifth day of November had always been a day of days, what her birthday is to a happy Englishwoman.
Leaving him she came to England, where she remained until the First Consul permitted the emigres to return to their homes, but she was soon discovered to be engaged in royalist intrigues and exiled; her endeavours to obtain the royal favour at the Restoration were vain.
Fouché at the inquisitorial Ministry of Police, and Merlin, Berlier, Real, and Boulay de la Meurthe in the Council of State seemed a barrier to all monarchical schemes; and the Jacobins therefore remained quiet, even while Catholic worship was again publicly celebrated, while Vendean rebels were pardoned, and plotting émigrés were entering the public service.
One of the first acts which followed the Restoration of the Bourbons was the grant of a pecuniary indemnity, amounting to a milliard, or forty millions sterling, to be distributed amongst the emigres who had lost fortunes or estates by their devotion to the royal family.
It was thus that the abbe, with rare sagacity, read the character of his guests. So it was with great sorrow, but without surprise, that he heard the duke advance, on the questions of the day, the impossible ideas shared by nearly all the emigres.
The French sympathisers in America mingled with these emigres and were more or less concerned with their plans. The press offered the opportunity to vent much of their spleen on Washington and to express their opinions of the "British United States Government," as they called it.
In this policy of commercial prohibition Napoleon was confirmed by our refusal to expel the Bourbon princes. He declined to accept our explanation that they were not officially recognized, and could not be expelled from England without a violation of the rights of hospitality; and he bitterly complained of the personal attacks made upon him in journals published in London by the French émigrés.
The effective restitution is therefore only moderate; the emigres who return recover but little more than one-twentieth of their patrimony, one hundred millions out of more than two milliards.
One hundred and ninety-two thousand names have been inscribed on the list of emigres the terms of the law, every emigre is civilly dead, and his possessions have become the property of the Republic;" if he dared return to France, the same law condemned him to death; there could be no appeal, petition, or respite; it sufficed to prove identity and the squad of executioners was at once ordered out.
This unfortunate youth, blind and yet clear-sighted, was counted as nothing by old men jealously keeping the reins of the State in their feeble hands, while the monarchy could have been saved by their retirement and the accession of this Young France, which the old doctrinaires, the emigres of the Restoration, still speak of slightingly.
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