The French soldiers were impatient and murmuring; their attachment to Napoleon himself was deep and unshaken, but human nature shrinks from perpetual contact with death; and they were tired of war. This feeling induced some officers of high rank, serving in Spain, to form a plan for changing the French government. Generally speaking, these men were friendly to Napoleon personally; but they were republicans in their politics, and earnest to reduce the power of the emperor. Their project, founded upon the discontent of the troops in the Peninsula, was to make a truce with the English army, to elect a chief, and march into France with the resolution to abate the pride of Napoleon, or to pull him from his throne. The conspirators at first turned their eyes upon marshal Ney, but finally resolved to choose Gouvion St. Cyr for their leader. Yet it was easier to resolve than to execute. Napoleon’s ascendancy, supported by the love and admiration of millions, was not to be shaken by the conspiracy of a few discontented men: and, although their hopes were not entirely relinquished until after Massena’s retreat from Portugal in 1810, long before that period they discovered that the soldiers, tired as they were of war, were faithful to their great monarch, and would have slain any who openly stirred against him. The foregoing facts are stated on the authority of a principal mover of the sedition; but many minor plots had cotemporary existence, for this was the spring time of folly. In the second corps, the conspirators were numerous, and, by their discourses and their slow and sullen execution of orders, had continually thwarted the operations of marshal Soult, yet without exciting his suspicions; but, as he penetrated into Portugal, their counteractions increased, and, by the time he arrived at Oporto, their design was ripe for execution.