Nevertheless, throughout Convention, Terror, and Directory they had cherished high hopes, preserved some forms of courtliness and organization, had kept their anniversaries, their military style, and even a formal system, social and military; had dreamed of a restoration in full form and a return to one-time wealth, dignity, and social power; political power they had not had within the memories of men, ecclesiastical power they enjoyed not as Frenchmen but as Romanists. Their old-time merry arrogance had given place to an acrid humor born of hunger and want, but they kept their temper and ambition in spite of the mistakes they committed and heaped one upon another, cradling their own hopes in the disasters of the Directory, which so outdid their own as to insure, they were convinced, the reëstablishment of monarchy. Brumaire and its consequences opened their eyes and confounded their plans; every step in the consolidation of Bonaparte's power was a new blow to their pretensions, and the amnesty which he tendered of his mercy was gall and bitterness. But facts are stronger than feelings; they returned in throngs, a hundred and twenty-five thousand at the lowest estimate, slowly and painfully securing the erasure of their names from the list of proscription, reveling in their mother tongue and familiar scenes, winning a poor livelihood by their accustomed arts while scheming, fawning even to secure the crumbs which fell from the tables of those in power. The great ladies who had never fled gave them some poor comfort, the Jacobins scoffed and jeered, but the versatile Talleyrand, and above all the plotting Fouché, were open to suggestions.