This system was admirably illustrated in the fall of Moreau, who was not a wary man, and had permitted royalist agents to hold communication with him. One of these, the Abbé David, was seized, but no damaging evidence was obtained. Thereupon recourse was had to the services of Méhée de la Touche, a base creature who, after participation in the September massacres of 1792, and an underground career of espionage during the Terror, had opposed Bonaparte on the eighteenth of Brumaire. He was at the moment in exile for participation in the plot of Nivôse, and eagerly accepted his new employment. After many adventures, he finally won the confidence not only of the French royalists in England, but of Pelham and other members of the British government. He described to the consular government the dissensions between the Bourbon leaders and the agents of Great Britain, telling how Georges Cadoudal, the Chouan leader, had been landed in France on August twenty-first, 1803, from an English ship commanded by Captain Wright, and unfolding a plan whereby the royalists could be encouraged to bring the conspiracy of which Georges was the agent to a head. His scheme was adopted, and after writing from Altona to Louis XVIII, now in Warsaw, offering his services, he visited Munich, and probably Stuttgart, where he told the story of a Jacobin rising which was soon to occur in France, and obtained from the English resident ministers money and instructions for organizing it. The official denials of the period made by the British government as to its participation in the Cadoudal conspiracy were long accepted as true and incorporated in the standard histories. Since the opening within a few years of the British archives to investigators the proof of the contrary is patent. The connected list of despatches, letters, and reports presents conclusive and damaging evidence that whether or not the ministers were privy to the plot for assassinating the First Consul, the French conspirators were in British pay.
In order to implicate Moreau in the Cadoudal conspiracy of which they had learned, the Paris police employed another person of the same stripe, Lajolais by name, who had been an officer in the Army of the Rhine, and who, as such, succeeded in meeting Moreau and extorting from him a few words of pity for Pichegru. Thereupon the police, by means still baser, got together two committees, one of royalists and one of old-time Jacobins, and had each select Moreau as its leader. This was possible, because the Bourbon pretender had, in accordance with Méhée's letter, issued a proclamation promising constitutional government and the sale of the public lands in case of his restoration. Lajolais then started for London, where he persuaded Pichegru that France was weary of Bonaparte, that Moreau was ready, and that the time was ripe for overthrowing the Consulate. As a consequence, the dupe and the decoy, with the chief military leaders of the emigrants, landed from Captain Wright's ship on January fourteenth, 1804, at Biville, near Dieppe. Artois and his son were to follow in a few days. By further misrepresentations Moreau and Pichegru were brought together on the sidewalk of a street near the church of the Madeleine, and in Lajolais' presence they exchanged a few noncommittal sentences. Within a few days a police agent, approaching Moreau as an ambassador from Pichegru, was told that if the latter would lead a movement,--and in that case the consuls and government must be disposed of,--his friends would be protected by influence which could be secured in the senate. Moreau steadily refused either to meet Georges Cadoudal or be implicated in the plot for seizing Bonaparte, of which the Chouan was the leader.