In conformity with the usual practice, the papers had been sent by Fouquier-Tinville to the Bureau des Pièces Accusatives at the dismantled Tuileries. Now, in this department there was a clerk named Charles de Labussière, who had accepted the post as a means of securing his own safety, and who at heart was a devoted Royalist. Through Labussière’s hands passed all the documents relating to prisoners awaiting trial and, whenever he could do so with but little fear of discovery, he did not hesitate to destroy them. At first, he observed great caution and confined himself to abstracting a few pages from the portfolios; but, so soon as he became aware of the reckless disorder which characterised the proceedings of the fatal committee, he enlarged the scope of his operations and is said to have saved some hundreds from the guillotine, among whom was no less a personage than Joséphine de Beauharnais, whom Fate subsequently raised to the imperial throne of France. The method he adopted was an ingenious one. As it was then summer and exceedingly hot weather, and the lighting of a fire might have attracted attention, instead of burning the papers, it was his practice to soak them in water, until the bulky parchments had become balls of soft paste, which could be stowed away in his pockets, and to await a favourable opportunity of throwing them into the Seine. On the night of Messidor 9, Labussière abstracted the papers relating to the imprisoned actors and carried them off. He had, however, a very narrow escape of detection. On his way to the river, his movements aroused the suspicion of a patrol, by whom he was arrested; and he would undoubtedly have been searched and the papers discovered, but for the timely arrival of an official of the Committee of Public Safety, who recognised him and ordered his release.[124] Thus the players were saved, for before a new brief could be prepared, came “that happiest and most genial of revolutions, the Revolution of the 9th Thermidor,” which brought the Terror to a close and freedom to so many hundreds of prisoners. Three weeks later, the members of the Comédie-Française reappeared at their theatre in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, now called the Théâtre de l’Égalité. _La Métromanie_ and _Les Fausses Confidences_ composed the programme, and the players, notwithstanding the reactionary views they were known to hold, had a great reception from an immense audience, though, remarked Louise Contat sarcastically, nothing like so large a one as there would have been to see them guillotined.