These circumstances tallied well with Buonaparte’s designs, and they were dexterously improved by Murat. Even before he entered Madrid, General Mouthion was dispatched to Aranjuez with a letter to the Queen of Etruria, which contained assurances to the deposed King of Buonaparte’s support. A snare was laid for the imbecile Charles, and he rushed into it. However compulsory the act of abdication might have been, it was now as much his interest as that of his family, that he should acquiesce in it. But actuated by a sense of his wrongs, and still more perhaps by the Queen, who, trembling for her paramour, hated her son with all the virulence of an adulterous mother, he committed his last and consummating folly, by appealing to the very tyrant, whose open and undisguised aggressions had driven him, not a week before, to the resolution of abandoning his throne and seeking refuge in America. He assured Mouthion that the revolution had been preconcerted and brought about by money; that his son and Caballero were the chief agents; that he had signed the act of abdication only to save the Queen’s life and his own, knowing that if he had refused they would both have been murdered in the course of the night. The conduct of the Prince of Asturias was more shocking, he added, inasmuch as having perceived his desire to reign, and being himself near threescore years of age, he had agreed to surrender the crown to him on his marriage with a French princess, an event which he, the King, ardently desired. The Prince, he added, chose that he and the Queen should retire to Badajoz, though he had remonstrated against the climate as injurious to his health, and entreated permission to choose another place, his wish being to obtain leave of the Emperor to purchase an estate where he might end his days. The Queen said she had begged her son at least to postpone their departure for Badajoz, but even this was refused, and they were to set out on the following Monday. This fact alone would evince how little the inclinations of Charles were consulted throughout these transactions. The part of Spain where Badajoz stands is notoriously unhealthy during the summer months; and to have fixed upon that place for the residence of the deposed monarch, and persisted in the choice after he had objected to it on the score of his health, implied in the new government an equal want of feeling and of sense. ♦HE WRITES TO BUONAPARTE, ENTREATING HIM TO INTERFERE.♦