The conspiracy said Bonaparte, some twenty years afterwards at St. Helena, "was revealed by a captain in the line.[87] What limit is there," he added, "to the combinations of folly and stupidity! This officer had a horror of me as Consul but adored me as general. He was anxious that I should be torn from my post, but he would have been very sorry that my life should be taken. I ought to be made prisoner, he said, in no way injured, and sent to the army to continue to defeat the enemies of France. The other conspirators laughed in his face, and when he saw them distribute daggers, and that they were going beyond his intentions, he proceeded at once to denounce the whole affair." Bonaparte, after the informer had been brought before him, suggested to the officers of his staff, the Prefect of Police and other functionaries whom he had assembled, that it would be as well not to let him appear at the Opera in the evening; but the general opinion was, that on the contrary, he should be forced to go, and ultimately it was decided that until the commencement of the performance everything should be allowed to take place as if the conspiracy had not been discovered. [Sidenote: AN OPERATIC PLOT.] In the evening the First Consul went to the Opera, attended by a number of superior officers, all in plain clothes. The first act passed off quietly enough--in all probability, far too quietly to please the composer, for some two hundred persons among the audience, including the conspirators, the police and the officers attached to Bonaparte's person, were thinking of anything but the music of _les Horaces_. It was necessary, however, to pay very particular attention to the music of the second act in which the scene of the oath occurred. The sentinels outside the Consul's box had received orders to let no one approach who had not the pass word, issued an hour before for the opera only; and as a certain number of conspirators had taken up their positions in the corridors, to extinguish the lights at the signal agreed upon, a certain number of Bonaparte's officers were sent also into the corridors to prevent the execution of this manœuvre. The scene of the oath was approaching, when a body of police went to the boxes in which the leaders of the plot were assembled, found them with fireworks and grenades in their hands, notified to them their arrest in the politest manner, cautioned them against creating the slightest disturbance, and led them so dexterously and quietly into captivity, that their disappearance from the theatre was not observed, or if so, was doubtless attributed to the badness of Porta's music. The officers in the corridors carried pistols, and at the proper moment seized the appointed lamp-extinguishers. Then the old Horatius came forward and exclaimed-- "_Jurez donc devant moi, par le ciel qui m'écoute._ _Que le dernier de vous sera mort ou vainqueur._"