With the view of serving the cause of his fellow-creatures, he devoted himself to politics, no longer speculative, but active; initiated himself into secret societies, and grew a fanatic for freedom, the only superstition remaining for those who have renounced the higher aspirations of human nature. He enrolled himself in a plot—a conspiracy against nothing less than the sovereignty of the victorious Napoleon! In this attempt, Charney fancied himself actuated by patriotism, by philanthropy, by love of his countrymen! More likely by animosity against the one great man, of whose power and glory he was envious! An aristocrat at heart, he fancied himself a leveller. The proud noble who had been robbed of the title of count, bequeathed him by his ancestors, did not choose that his inferior in birth should assume the title of emperor, which he had conquered at the point of his sword. It matters little in what plot he embarked his destinies; at that epoch, there was no lack of conspiracies! It was one of the many hatched between 1803 and 1804, and not suffered to come to light: the police—that second providence which presides over the safety of empires—was beforehand with it! Government decided that the less noise made on the occasion, the better; they would not even spare it so much as a discharge of muskets on the Plaine de Grenelle, the scene of military execution: but the heads of the conspiracy were privately arrested, condemned, almost without trial, and conveyed away to solitary confinement in various state prisons, citadels, or fortresses, of the ninety-six departments of consular France. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER II. In traversing the Alps on my way to Italy—an humble tourist, with my staff in my hand, and my wallet on my shoulder, I remember pausing to contemplate, near the pass of Rodoretto, a torrent swollen by the melting of the glaciers. The tumultuous sounds produced by its course, the foaming cascades into which it burst, the varying colors and hues created by the movement of its waters, yellow, white, green, black, according to its channel through marl, slate, chalk, or peat earth—the vast blocks of marble or granite it had detached without being able to remove, around which a thousand ever-changing cataracts added roar to roar, cascade to cascade; the trunks of trees it had uprooted, of which the still foliaged branches emerging from the water were agitated by the winds, while the roots were buffeted by the waves; fragments of the very banks clothed with verdure, and driven like floating islands against the trees, as the trees were driven in their turn against the blocks of granite—all this, these murmurs, clashings, and roarings, confined between narrow and precipitous banks, impressed me with wonder and admiration. And this torrent was the Clusone!