The story of the collapse of the proposed invasion is too well known to need description. Ten thousand troops were on board ship. Marshal Saxe and Prince Charles were ready to embark. On the night of the 6th of March a terrible storm arose which lasted some days. The protecting men-of-war were dispersed, many of the transports were sunk, a British fleet appeared in the Channel, and Saxe was ordered to tell the Prince first that the enterprise was postponed, and later that it was abandoned. Charles, nearly broken-hearted, remained on in France, living in great privacy, and hoping against hope that the French would renew their preparations. For a time he remained at Gravelines, where Lord Marischal was with him. He longed for action, and implored the earl to urge the French to renew the expedition to England, but Marischal only suggested difficulties. Charles proposed an expedition to Scotland, but his lordship said it would mean destruction. Then he desired to make a campaign with the French army, but Lord Marischal said it would only disgust the English. Charles removed to Montmartre, near Paris, but he was ordered to maintain the strictest incognito. He asked to see King Louis, but he was refused any audience. His old tutor, Sir Thomas Sheridan, was sent from Rome to be with him; also George Kelly, Atterbury’s old secretary, who, since his escape from the Tower, had been living at Avignon. He took as his confessor a Cordelier friar of the name Kelly, a relative of the Protestant George Kelly, and, sad to say, a sorry drunkard, whose example did Charles no good. These Irish companions soon quarrelled with Balhaldy and Sempill, who wrote to the Chevalier complaining of their evil influence, while the Irishmen also wrote denouncing Balhaldy and Sempill. Charles left Montmartre. His cousin, the Bishop of Soissons, son of the Marshal Duke of Berwick, kindly lent him his Château Fitzjames, a house seven posts from Paris on the Calais road, where he remained for a time. Another cousin, the Duke of Bouillon, a nephew of his mother, also was very kind, and entertained him at Navarre, a château near Evreux in Normandy. But his life was full of weary days. He could get nothing from the French, and ‘our friends in England,’ he wrote to his father, are ‘afraid of their own shadow, and think of little else than of diverting themselves.’ Things seemed very hopeless: the Scots alone remained faithful. [Sidenote: Suspense in Scotland.]