He soon got to know his neighbours and all the inhabitants of the country very well. He was considered to be a quiet, unenterprising man, “with a positive dislike for politics, although loquacious and vain.” It was impossible to find out anything about his past life, for the prudent Baron considered it inadvisable to talk of this subject, but he was always looked upon “as an argumentative man, who wanted to know all that was going on, whether in reference to agriculture, to thrift, or to politics.” In spite of the apparent tranquillity in which he was allowed to remain, d’Auerweck followed with a certain amount of anxiety all the events which were happening not far from him, on the frontier of the Rhine. Troops were continually passing to and fro in this district; the French were close at hand, and their arrival at Offenburg inspired a feeling of vague unrest in him, although he never recognized, to tell the truth, the danger which threatened him. He had taken the precaution to destroy, before coming to Switzerland, his vast collection of papers: all that mass of correspondence which had been accumulating for the last few years, those reports and instructions, all of which constituted a very compromising record. At last, after a residence of some months, to make matters safe, he contrived, thanks to his marriage, to be enrolled as a freeman of the Grand Duchy; for it seemed to him that as a subject of Baden he would be relieved of all further cause of alarm. But all d’Auerweck’s fears were reawakened by the much-talked-of news of the Duc d’Enghien’s arrest on March 15, 1804, and by the details of how the Prince had been captured openly in the jurisdiction of Baden, at Ettenheim, that is to say, only a short distance from Offenburg. He absented himself for some days from Schutterwald, so the story goes, and took himself to the mountains. Just at the same time there arrived at the offices of the Ministry of Police in Paris a succession of memoranda, mostly anonymous, referring to Baron d’Auerweck, and to his presence in the neighbourhood of the Rhine. Some of them came from Lemaître, Reinhard’s former secretary at Hamburg. Many of them, inexact and inaccurate as they were with regard to the details of the alleged facts, agreed on this point, viz. that the individual “was one of those men, who are so powerful for good or bad, that the security of every Government requires complete information as to their resting-places and their doings.” Then followed a medley of gossiping insinuations, the precise import of which it was difficult to discover. “I shall never forget,” said one, “that, when d’Auerweck left Hamburg two months before the assassination of the French Ministers in order to take up his quarters only three leagues away from Rastadt, he said: ‘_I am about to undertake an operation which will make a great sensation, and which will render great service to the cause of the Coalition_.’”