The Arena plot and other recent events seemed to point to wild Jacobins and anarchists as the authors of this outrage: but Fouche ventured to impute it to the royalists and to England.
"There are in it," Bonaparte at once remarked, "neither nobles, nor Chouans, nor priests.

They are men of September (_Septembriseurs_), wretches stained with blood, ever conspiring in solid phalanx against every successive government.

We must find a means of prompt redress." The Councillors at once adopted this opinion, Roederer hotly declaring his open hostility to Fouche for his reputed complicity with the terrorists; and, if we may credit the _on dit_ of Pasquier, Talleyrand urged the execution of Fouche within twenty-four hours.

Bonaparte, however, preferred to keep the two cleverest and most questionable schemers of the age, so as mutually to check each other's movements.

A day later, when the Council was about to institute special proceedings, Bonaparte again intervened with the remark that the action of the tribunal would be too slow, too restricted: a signal revenge was needed for so foul a crime, rapid as lightning: "Blood must be shed: as many guilty must be shot as the innocent who had perished--some fifteen or twenty--and two hundred banished, so that the Republic might profit by that event to purge itself." This was the policy now openly followed.