Prisoners of war are generally released by exchange between fighting powers, rank for rank, man for man; but after five months Villeneuve was allowed to return to France. He pledged his honor that unless duly exchanged he would surrender again on the English coast at the end of ninety days. So, attended by Guillemard and his servant, he crossed the channel, and from the town of Rennes--the place where Dreyfus had his trial not long ago--he wrote despatches to the government in Paris. He was coming, he said in a private letter, to arraign most of his surviving captains on the charge of cowardice at Trafalgar. Of this it seems the captains got some warning, and decided that for the sake of their own health Villeneuve should not reach Paris alive. Anyway, Guillemard says that while the admiral lay in the Hotel de Bresil, at Rennes, five strangers appeared--men in civilian dress, who asked him many questions about Villeneuve. The secretary was proud of his master, glad to talk about so distinguished a man, and thought no evil when he gave his answers. The leader of the five was a southern Frenchman, the others foreigners, deeply tanned, who wore mustaches--in those days an unusual ornament. That night the admiral had gone to bed in his room on the first floor of the inn, and the secretary was asleep on the floor above. A cry disturbed him, and taking his sword and candle, he ran down-stairs in time to see the five strangers sneak by him hurriedly. Guillemard rushed to the admiral’s room “and saw the unfortunate man, whom the balls of Trafalgar had respected, stretched pale and bloody on his bed. He ... breathed hard, and struggled with the agonies of death.... Five deep wounds pierced his breast.” So it was the fate of the slayer of Nelson to be alone with Villeneuve at his death. When he reached Paris the youngster was summoned to the Tuileries, and the Emperor Napoleon made him tell the whole story of the admiral’s assassination. Yet officially the death was announced as suicide, and Guillemard met the leader of the five assassins walking in broad daylight on the boulevards. The lad kept his mouth shut. Guillemard lived to fight in many of the emperor’s battles, to be one of the ten thousand prisoners of the Spaniards on the desert island of the Cabrera, whence he made a gallant escape; to be a prisoner of the Russians in Siberia; to assist in King Murat’s flight from France; and, finally, after twenty years of adventure, to return with many wounds and few honors to his native village. LI A. D. 1812 THE FALL OF NAPOLEON