Savary's system of espionage was even more searching and comprehensive than Fouché's, and before long earned him the sobriquet of the "Sheik of Spies." He had a whole army at his disposal--the gossips and _gobe-mouches_ of the clubs, the cabmen and street porters, the workmen in the suburbs. When fashionable Paris migrated to their country houses for the summer and early autumn, Savary followed them with his spies, whom he found among their servants, letter-carriers, even their guests. He also reversed the process, and actually employed masters to spy on their servants, obliging every householder to transmit a report to the police of every change in their establishments, and of the conduct of the persons employed. He essayed also to make valets spy on those whom they served, so that a man became less than ever a hero to his valet. It followed, naturally, that Savary was the most hated of all the tyrants who wielded the power of the police prefecture. He spared no one; he bullied the priests; he increased the rigours of the wretched prisoners of war at Bitche and Verdun; and exercised such an irritating, vexatious, ill-natured surveillance over the whole town, over every class--political, social, and criminal--that he was soon universally hated. He was a stupid man, eaten up with vanity and self-importance; extremely jealous of his authority, and ever on the look out to vindicate it if he thought it assailed. Never perhaps did more inflated, unjustifiable pride precede a more humiliating fall. Savary's pretensions as a police officer were utterly shipwrecked by the conspiracy of General Malet, a semi-madman, who succeeded in shaking Napoleon's throne to its very foundations and making his military Police Minister supremely ridiculous. This General Malet was a born conspirator. He had done little as a soldier, but had been concerned in several plots against Napoleon, for the last of which he had been cast into the prison of La Force. During his seclusion he worked out the details of a new conspiracy, based upon the most daring and yet simplest design. He meant to take advantage of the emperor's absence from Paris, and, announcing his death, declare a Provisional Government, backed by the troops, of whom he would boldly take command. It all fell out as he had planned, and, but for one trifling accident, the plot would have been entirely successful. Paris at the moment he rose was weakly governed. Cambacères represented the emperor; Savary held the police, but, in spite of his espionage, knew nothing of Malet, and little of the real state of Paris below the surface; Pasquier, prefect of police, was an admirable administrator, but not a man of action. The garrison of Paris was composed mainly of raw levies, for all the best troops were away with Napoleon in Russia, and the commandant of the place, General Hullin, was a sturdy soldier--no more: a mere child outside the profession of arms. [Illustration: MALET IN PRISON.