A baker harboured us. In the evening, at nine o'clock, I went to pay my court to the King. His Majesty was lodged in the abbey buildings: they had all the difficulty in the world to prevent the little girls of the Legion of Honour[353] from crying, "Long live Napoleon!" I first entered the church: a piece of wall adjoining the cloister had fallen; the old abbey church was lit only by a lamp. I said my prayer at the entrance to the vault where I had seen Louis XVI. lowered: full of dread as to the future, I do not know that I ever felt my heart drowned in a more profound and more religious melancholy. Next I went to His Majesty's: shown into one of the rooms which preceded the King's, I found no one there; I sat down in a corner and waited. Suddenly, a door opened: silently vice entered leaning on the arm of crime, M. de Talleyrand walking supported by M. Fouché; the infernal vision passed slowly before me, penetrated into the King's closet, and vanished. Fouché was coming to swear fealty and homage to his lord; the trusty regicide on his knees laid the hands which caused the head to fall of Louis XVI. between the hands of the brother of the Royal Martyr; the apostate bishop was surety for the oath. On the next day, the Faubourg Saint-Germain arrived; everything concerned itself with the nomination, already obtained, of Fouché: religion as well as impiety, virtue as well as vice, the Royalist as well as the Revolutionary, the foreigner as well as the Frenchman; on every hand the cry was heard: "No safety for the King without Fouché; no salvation for France without Fouché: he alone has saved the country, he alone can complete his work." [Illustration: Fouché, Duc D'Otrante.] The old Duchesse de Duras was one of the noble dames who joined most eagerly in the pæan; the Bailli de Crussol[354], a survivor of Malta, chimed in: he declared that, if his head was still on his shoulders, it was because M. Fouché had permitted it. The timorous ones had stood in such terror of Bonaparte that they had taken the butcher of Lyons for a Titus[355]. During more than three months, the drawing-rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain looked upon me as a miscreant, because I disapproved of the nomination of their ministers. Poor people, they had prostrated themselves at the feet of the "upstarts;" they none the less made a great noise about their nobility, their hatred of the Revolutionaries, their unshaken fidelity, the inflexibility of their principles: and they adored Fouché.