"The pieces that the First Consul charged me to examine did not contain enough of detail to justify an opinion. Citizen Beauvais (friend and associate of Alexandre) knows the inventor's secret, but has promised him to communicate it to no one except the First Consul. This circumstance might enable me to dispense with any report; for how judge of a machine that one has not seen and does not know the agent of? All that is known is that the _telegraphe intime_ consists of two like boxes, each carrying a dial on whose circumference are marked the letters of the alphabet. By means of a winch, the needle of one dial is carried to all the letters that one has need to use, and at the same instant the needle of the second box repeats, in the same order, all the motions and indications of the first. "When these two boxes are placed in two separate apartments, two persons can write to and answer one another, without seeing or being seen by one another, and without any one suspecting their correspondence. Neither night nor fog can prevent the transmission of a dispatch.... The inventor has made two experiments--one at Portiers and the other at Tours--in the presence of the prefects and mayors, and the record shows that they were fully successful. To-day, the inventor and his associate ask that the First Consul be pleased to permit one of the boxes to be placed in his apartment and the other at the house of Consul Cambaceres in order to give the experiment all the _éclat_ and authenticity possible; or that the First Consul accord a ten minutes' interview to citizen Beauvais, who will communicate to him the secret, which is so easy that the simple _expose_ of it would be equivalent to a demonstration, and would take the place of an experiment.... If, as one might be tempted to believe from a comparison with a bell arrangement, the means adopted by the inventor consisted in wheels, movements, and transmitting pieces, the invention would be none the less astonishing.... If, on the contrary, as the Portier's account seems to prove, the means of communication is a fluid, there would be the more merit in his having mastered it to such a point as to produce so regular and so infallible effects at such distances.... But citizen Beauvais ... desires principally to have the First Consul as a witness and appreciator.... It is to be desired, then, that the First Consul shall consent to hear him, and that he may find in the communication that will be made to him reasons for giving the invention a good reception and for properly rewarding the inventor." But Bonaparte remained deaf, and Alexandre persisted in his silence, and died at Angers, in 1832, in great poverty, without having revealed his secret.