aspiring, reckless,--the New Race of France, bound to one man's destiny,
children of glory and of carnage, whose blood the wolf and the vulture
scent, hungry, from afar!

The conspiracy against the life of the First Consul has been detected and
defeated. Pichegru is in prison, George Cadoudal awaits his trial, the
Duc d'Enghien sleeps in his bloody grave; the imperial crown is prepared
for the great soldier, and the great soldier's creatures bask in the
noonday sun. Olivier Dalibard is in high and lucrative employment; his
rise is ascribed to his talents, his opinions. No service connected with
the detection of the conspiracy is traced or traceable by the public eye.
If such exist, it is known but to those who have no desire to reveal it.
The old apartments are retained, but they are no longer dreary and
comfortless and deserted. They are gay with draperies and ormolu and
mirrors; and Madame Dalibard has her nights of reception, and Monsieur
Dalibard has already his troops of clients. In that gigantic
concentration of egotism which under Napoleon is called the State,
Dalibard has found his place. He has served to swell the power of the
unit, and the cipher gains importance by its position in the sum.

Jean Bellanger is no more. He died, not suddenly, and yet of some quick
disease,--nervous exhaustion; his schemes, they said, had worn him out.
But the state of Dalibard, though prosperous, is not that of the heir to
the dead millionnaire. What mistake is this? The bulk of that wealth
must go to the nearest kin,--so runs the law. But the will is read; and,
for the first time, Olivier Dalibard learns that the dead man had a son,-
-a son by a former marriage,--the marriage undeclared, unknown, amidst
the riot of the Revolution; for the wife was the daughter of a proscrit.
The son had been reared at a distance, put to school at Lyons, and
unavowed to the second wife, who had brought an ample dower, and whom