Rumors of every sort became rife. It was known that the old intriguer General Willot was again in the South. Men declared that Berry was coming to Brittany, that Charles of Artois was perhaps already in Paris, that Enghien and Dumouriez were on the eastern frontier. It was a perfect investment of plots. When Georges was captured he asserted that he was the associate of princes, and then relapsed into a profound silence which he did not again break. His servant deposed that he had seen his master in communication with a distinguished-looking youth in the suburb of Chaillot. The police remembered that in January the Duc d'Enghien had solicited from the French ambassador at Vienna a passport to cross France, and, recalling the festivities at Ettenheim, believed they were but a pretext to cover the host's absence in Paris at a time which would coincide with the mysterious interview asserted to have taken place between Georges and the unknown stranger. This was the chain of evidence which convinced Bonaparte of Enghien's participation in the plot for his assassination. True, he had not been in actual danger, for the police had been alert; but did that alter the enormity of the Bourbon intrigues against his life? It was only too natural that the terror, hate, and fury accumulated in the mind of the First Consul should concentrate on an object within his reach.
Réal, Fouché, and Talleyrand were all consulted. As yet their personal interests were bound up with their ruler's welfare, and alike they urged prompt and ruthless action to end the schemes and complots of the time. The two former needed no credentials of faithfulness. Talleyrand gave his in writing on March eighth; he had so dallied with royalists that his position must be definite now. Later efforts to discredit the note as a forgery have failed. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that all three intended by the seizure and execution of a Bourbon so to "marry," as the phrase ran, the First Consul to the terrorist side of the Revolution that he could never retreat from the position of radicalism to which they felt he had not been sufficiently committed, even yet. On March tenth the council heard and, as a body, approved Bonaparte's plan, although Lebrun was evasive and Cambacérès demurred. That night one column of a double expedition was despatched to the Rhine; it was commanded by Ordener and destined for Ettenheim. The other, under Caulaincourt, set out next day for Offenburg with a diplomatic note to the court of Baden. The latter commander was utterly ignorant of what his colleague had in hand, being instructed merely to disperse the reported company of emigrants and demand the extradition of a notorious intriguer, the Baronne de Reich. Ordener was to seize the Duc d'Enghien. The two columns proceeded by way of Strasburg without delay. Finding the baronne already a prisoner, and the police report unfounded, the generals then carried out the minute instructions of their chief as to the other part of their task.
On the twelfth, Enghien had been warned of his danger; but he was not to be intimidated, and on the thirteenth he sent a messenger to observe how immediate the danger was. On the fourteenth a French spy was despatched from Strasburg; he was recognized as such at Ettenheim, and was pursued, but escaped to report everything favorable. Still the rash young duke refused to move. On the morning of the fifteenth he awoke to find the house surrounded by French troops. Every avenue of escape being closed, he surrendered, and all his papers were seized. With his household and friends he was hurried to the citadel of Strasburg, where he was detained for two days. Couriers were promptly despatched to Paris, and the court at Karlsruhe received a formal notification of what had been done, signed by Talleyrand. Bonaparte learned by the despatches received on the seventeenth from both his expeditions that Dumouriez was not on the Rhine, and on the nineteenth he himself examined the duke's papers, which had been inventoried in their owner's presence, and then forwarded to Malmaison.
On the night of the seventeenth there arrived in Strasburg orders, written while Bonaparte still believed the reports concerning Dumouriez to be true, which directed the immediate removal of the prisoners—that is, of Enghien and Dumouriez—to Paris. In pursuance of these the duke was awakened at midnight, placed in a post-chaise, and driven rapidly toward his destination. He arrived at eleven in the morning of the twentieth, and was immediately taken to Vincennes. His seizure had created the deepest sorrow and consternation in Baden, and Massias, the French minister at Karlsruhe, not only despatched a letter direct to Paris declaring that the duke's conduct had always been "innocent and moderate," but went in person to notify the prefect at Strasburg that there was neither an assembly of emigrants nor a conspiracy at Ettenheim. Talleyrand was afterward charged by Napoleon with having suppressed Massias's despatch; and it is not known whether the prefect sent a report to the same effect or not.
On the twelfth, the First Consul had withdrawn to the seclusion of Malmaison. It was evident that under the surface there were tumultuous feelings, but in his expression there was an icy calm. At times he recited scraps of verse on the theme of clemency, but his chief occupation was consulting with the police agent Réal and with Savary, his aide-de-camp. It was arranged that the castle of Vincennes should be the prison, that the court should be military, composed of colonels from the Paris garrison, and that the main charge against the duke should be that he had borne arms against his country. He was to be asked whether the plot for assassination was known to him, and if, in case it had succeeded, he were not himself to have entered Alsace.
The court-martial was modeled on those pitiless tribunals created by the Revolution. The statute declaring that any Frenchman taking up arms against his country was a traitor and worthy of death had never been repealed. The Consulate restored the activity of these military commissions in order to tame refractory conscripts and condignly to punish tamperers, conspirators, and spies. These courts had been accustomed to take their cue as to severity or leniency from the government for the time being, whatever it was. There was therefore but little difficulty in constituting such a body expressly for the punishment of any offender. In this instance none of the members except the president and judge-advocate knew the station of the accused. Préval, who had been chosen to preside, refused when he heard the name of the prisoner, on the plea that both he and his father had served in the royalist regiment named d'Enghien, and that he had therefore tender memories incompatible with the service required of him. General Hulin, an old-time Jacobin, made no excuses, and, understanding perfectly what was expected, was invited to report the verdict direct to the First Consul.
During these days Bonaparte had also constantly before him both the papers of the English minister at Munich and the inflammatory, untruthful reports of his police agents. He studied these, and reviewed the measures taken to guard the eastern frontier against the emigrants and their hostile sympathizers, who were making demonstrations in Swabia. Until the evening of the seventeenth he believed that Dumouriez had been at Ettenheim; but though informed of his mistake, the resolution already taken became iron, and the papers of the duke were read on the nineteenth with an evident determination to construe them into evidence of his guilt. They afforded no proofs of direct complicity with Georges, but they contained two phrases which, wrested from the true sense of the correspondence, were of awful significance—one in which the duke qualified the French people as "his most cruel foe," the other in which he declared that during his "two years' residence on the frontier he had established communications with the French troops on the Rhine." These were included in the interrogatories for the trial and intrusted to Réal for his use. If the duke were tampering with the loyalty of the troops, what need of proof that he was in any sense a participator in the plot?
Mme. Bonaparte learned with intense sorrow of the determination taken by her husband. In the main his measures and his convictions had been kept a secret, but she confided both to Mme. de Rémusat, and the First Consul himself had told them to Joseph. On the twentieth the decree for the duke's trial and the questions to be put were dictated by the First Consul from the Tuileries, and in the early afternoon he returned to Malmaison, where at three o'clock Joseph found him strolling in the park, conversing with Talleyrand, who limped along at his side. "I'm afraid of that cripple," was Josephine's greeting to her brother-in-law. "Interrupt this long talk if you can." The mediation of the elder brother was kindly and skilful, and for a time the First Consul seemed softened by the memories of their boyhood, among which came and went the figure of the Prince of Condé. But other feelings prevailed: the brothers had differed about Lucien's marriage, and also about the question of descent if the consular power should become hereditary; the old coolness finally settled down and chilled the last hopes in the tenderhearted advocates for clemency. To Josephine's tearful entreaties her husband replied: "Go away; you're a child; you don't understand public duties." By five it was known that the duke had arrived at Vincennes, and at once Savary was despatched to the city for orders from Murat, the military commandant. On his arrival at Murat's office, from which Talleyrand was in the very act of departing, he was informed that the court-martial was already convened, and that it would be his duty to guard the prisoner and execute whatever sentence was passed.
The scenes of that fateful and doleful night defy description. The castle of Vincennes was beset with guards when finally, at about an hour before midnight, the various members of the court assembled. Their looks were dark and troubled as they wondered who the mysterious culprit might be. None knew but Hulin, the president; the judge-advocate; and Savary, the destined executioner. In a neighboring room was the duke, pale and exhausted by his long journey, munching a slender meal, which he shared with his dog, and explaining to his jailer his dreary forebodings at the prospect of a long imprisonment. He thought it would be ameliorated if only he could gratify his passion for hunting, and surely they two, as prisoner and keeper, might range the forest in company. But at last he fell asleep from sheer fatigue. The jailer could not well encourage the expectations of his new prisoner, for he had that very morning supervised the digging of a grave in the castle moat. At midnight the duke was awakened and confronted with the judge-advocate. Réal was unaccountably absent, and the interrogatory so carefully prepared by Bonaparte was not at hand. To the rude questions formulated by Hulin, with the aid of a memorandum from Murat, the prisoner, in spite of repeated hints from the members of the court-martial as to the consequences, would only reply that he had a pension from England, and had applied to her ministers for military service; that he hoped to fight for his cause with troops raised in Germany from among the disaffected and the emigrants; that he had already fought against France. But he stoutly denied any relations with Dumouriez or Pichegru and all knowledge of the plot to assassinate the First Consul. He was then called to the bar in the dimly lighted sitting-room where the commission sat. To the papers containing questions and answers he was ironically permitted to affix a demand for an audience with the First Consul. "My name, my station, my mode of thought, and the horror of my situation," he said, "inspire me with hope that he will not refuse my request." The tribunal followed its instincts: its members, knowing well the familiar statutes under which such bodies had acted since the days of the Convention, but not having at hand the words or forms of a verdict as prescribed by the pitiless laws concerning those who had borne arms against France, left in the record a blank to be filled out later, and pronounced their judgment that the "regular sentence" be executed at once. They were actually engaged in composing a petition for clemency to the First Consul when Savary burst into the room, demanding what had been done, and what they were then doing. Snatching the pen from Hulin's hand, he exclaimed, "The rest is my affair," and left the room.
It was now two in the morning of the twenty-first. "Follow me," said the taciturn Harel to Enghien, "and summon all your courage." A few paces through the moat, a turn of a corner, and the flare of torches displayed a file of troops not far from an open grave. As the adjutant began to read the sentence, the victim faltered for a moment and exclaimed, "Oh, God! what have I done?" But immediately he regained the mastery of himself. Calmly clipping a lock of his hair, and drawing a ring from his finger, he asked that they might be sent to the Princess Charlotte. A volley—and in an instant he was dead. Savary put spurs to his horse to carry the news to Malmaison. At the gate of Paris he met the carriage of Réal, who seemed almost overpowered by what he heard in reply to his eager questions, and terrified by his own remissness. If it really were such, it must be attributed to a misunderstanding and not to lack of zeal.