"Well, my child! yes! For your sake, I will forgive your father. This is enough. Now rise and leave me."
At these words the suppliant fainted, and fell lifeless upon the floor. She was conveyed to the apartment of Josephine, where she soon revived, and, though in a state of extreme exhaustion, proceeded immediately to Paris. M. Lavalette, then aid-de-camp of Napoleon, and his wife, accompanied her to the prison of the Conciergerie, with the joyful tidings. When she arrived in the gloomy cell where her father was immured, she threw herself upon his neck, and her convulsive sobbings, for a time, stifled all possible powers of utterance. Suddenly, her frame became convulsed, her eyes fixed, and she fell in entire unconsciousness into the arms of Madame Lavalette. When she revived, reason had fled, and the affectionate daughter was a hopeless maniac!
Napoleon, in the evening, was informed of this new calamity. He dropped his head in silence, mused painfully, brushed a tear from his eye, and was heard to murmur, in a low tone of voice, "Poor child! poor child!—a father who has such a daughter is still more culpable. I will take care of her and of her mother."
Six others of the conspirators also soon received a pardon. Such was the termination of the Bourbon conspiracy for the assassination of Napoleon.
["WHO MURDERED DOWNIE?"]
About the end of the eighteenth century, whenever any student of the Marischal College, Aberdeen, incurred the displeasure of the humbler citizens, he was assailed with the question, "Who murdered Downie?" Reply and rejoinder generally brought on a collision between "town and gown;" although the young gentlemen were accused of what was chronologically impossible. People have a right to be angry at being stigmatized as murderers, when their accusers have probability on their side; but the "taking off" of Downie occurred when the gownsmen, so maligned, were in swaddling clothes.
But there was a time, when to be branded as an accomplice in the slaughter of Richard Downie, made the blood run to the cheek of many a youth, and sent him home to his books, thoughtful and subdued. Downie was sacrist or janitor at Marischal College. One of his duties consisted in securing the gate by a certain hour; previous to which all the students had to assemble in the common hall, where a Latin prayer was delivered by the principal. Whether, in discharging this function, Downie was more rigid than his predecessor in office, or whether he became stricter in the performance of it at one time than another, can not now be ascertained; but there can be no doubt that he closed the gate with austere punctuality, and that those who were not in the common hall within a minute of the prescribed time, were shut out, and were afterward reprimanded and fined by the principal and professors. The students became irritated at this strictness, and took every petty means of annoying the sacrist; he, in his turn, applied the screw at other points of academic routine, and a fierce war soon began to rage between the collegians and the humble functionary. Downie took care that in all his proceedings he kept within the strict letter of the law; but his opponents were not so careful, and the decisions of the rulers were uniformly against them, and in favor of Downie. Reprimands and fines having failed in producing due subordination, rustication, suspension, and even the extreme sentence of expulsion had to be put in force; and, in the end, law and order prevailed. But a secret and deadly grudge continued to be entertained against Downie. Various schemes of revenge were thought of.
Downie was, in common with teachers and taught, enjoying the leisure of the short New Year's vacation—the pleasure being no doubt greatly enhanced by the annoyances to which he had been subjected during the recent bickerings—when, as he was one evening seated with his family in his official residence at the gate, a messenger informed him that a gentleman at a neighboring hotel wished to speak with him. Downie obeyed the summons, and was ushered from one room into another, till at length he found himself in a large apartment hung with black, and lighted by a solitary candle. After waiting for some time in this strange place, about fifty figures also dressed in black, and with black masks on their faces, presented themselves. They arranged themselves in the form of a Court, and Downie, pale with terror, was given to understand that he was about to be put on his trial.
A judge took his seat on the bench; a clerk and public prosecutor sat below; a jury was empanelled in front; and witnesses and spectators stood around. Downie at first set down the whole affair as a joke; but the proceedings were conducted with such persistent gravity, that, in spite of himself, he began to believe in the genuine mission of the awful tribunal. The clerk read an indictment, charging him with conspiring against the liberties of the students; witnesses were examined in due form, the public prosecutor addressed the jury; and the judge summed up.
"Gentlemen," said Downie, "the joke has been carried far enough—it is getting late, and my wife and family will be getting anxious about me. If I have been too strict with you in time past, I am sorry for it, and I assure you I will take more care in future."