Vainly did the Count de Charney devote himself to sensual pleasures. In the infancy of a social system so long estranged from the joys of life, and still defiled by the blood-stained orgies of the Revolution, attired in rags and tatters of Roman virtue, yet emulating the licentious excesses of the regency, he signalized himself by his prodigality and dissipation. Labour lost. Horses, equipages, a splendid table, balls, concerts, and hunting-parties, failed to secure Pleasure as his guest. He had friends to flatter him, mistresses to amuse his leisure; yet, though all these were purchased at the highest price, the count found himself as far as ever from the joys of love or friendship. Nothing availed to smooth the wrinkles of his heart, or force it into a smile; Charney actually laboured to be entrapped by the baits of society, without achieving captivation. The syren Pleasure, raising her fair form and enchanting voice above the surface of the waters, fascinated the man, but the eye of the philosopher could not refrain from plunging into the glassy depths below, to be disgusted by the scaly body and bifurcal tail of the ensnaring monster.
Truth and error were equally against him. To virtue he was a stranger, to vice indifferent. He had experienced the vanity of knowledge; but the bliss of ignorance was denied him. The gates of Eden were closed against his re-entrance. Reason appeared fallacious, joy apocryphal. The noise of entertainments wearied him; the silence of home was still more tedious; in company, he became a burden to others; in retirement, to himself. A profound sadness took possession of his soul!
In spite of all Charney’s efforts, the demon of philosophical analysis, far from being exorcised, served to tarnish, undermine, contract, and extinguish the brilliancy of every mode of life he selected. The praise of his friends, the endearments of his loves, seemed nothing more than the current coin given in exchange for a certain portion of his property, the paltry evidence of a necessity for living at his expense.
Decomposing every passion and sentiment, and reducing all things to their primitive element, he, at length, contracted a morbid frame of mind, amounting almost to aberration of intellect. He fancied that in the finest tissue composing his garments, he could detect the exhalations of the animal of whose fleece it was woven—on the silk of his gorgeous hangings, the crawling worm which furnishes them. His furniture, carpets, gewgaws, trinkets of coral or mother-of-pearl, all were stigmatized in his eyes as the spoil of the dead, shaped by the labours of some squalid artisan. The spirit of inquiry had destroyed every illusion. The imagination of the sceptic was paralyzed!
To such a heart as that of Charney, however, emotion was indispensable. The love which found no single object on which to concentrate its vigour expanded into tenderness for all mankind; and he became a philanthropist!
With the view of serving the cause of his fellow-creatures, he devoted himself to politics, no longer speculative, but active; initiated himself into secret societies, and grew a fanatic for freedom, the only superstition remaining for those who have renounced the higher aspirations of human nature. He enrolled himself in a plot—a conspiracy against nothing less than the sovereignty of the victorious Napoleon!
In this attempt, Charney fancied himself actuated by patriotism, by philanthropy, by love of his countrymen! More likely by animosity against the one great man, of whose power and glory he was envious! An aristocrat at heart, he fancied himself a leveller. The proud noble who had been robbed of the title of count, bequeathed him by his ancestors, did not choose that his inferior in birth should assume the title of emperor, which he had conquered at the point of his sword.
It matters little in what plot he embarked his destinies; at that epoch, there was no lack of conspiracies! It was one of the many hatched between 1803 and 1804, and not suffered to come to light: the police—that second providence which presides over the safety of empires—was beforehand with it! Government decided that the less noise made on the occasion, the better; they would not even spare it so much as a discharge of muskets on the Plaine de Grenelle, the scene of military execution: but the heads of the conspiracy were privately arrested, condemned, almost without trial, and conveyed away to solitary confinement in various state prisons, citadels, or fortresses, of the ninety-six departments of consular France.
