Napoleon sent for the chief justice, who, after obtaining certain information from the ministry of police, explained to his Majesty the position of Malin in regard to the Simeuse brothers and the Gondreville estate.

The Emperor, at that time pre-occupied with serious matters, considered the affair explained by these anterior facts.
"Those young men are fools," he said.

"A lawyer like Malin will escape any deed they may force him to sign under violence.

Watch those nobles, and discover the means they take to set the Comte de Gondreville at liberty." He ordered the affair to be conducted with the utmost celerity, regarding it as an attack on his own institutions, a fatal example of resistance to the results of the Revolution, an effort to open the great question of the sales of "national property," and a hindrance to that fusion of parties which was the constant object of his home policy.
Besides all this, he thought himself tricked by these young nobles, who had given him their promise to live peaceably.
"Fouche's prediction has come true," he cried, remembering the words uttered two years earlier by his present minister of police, who said them under the impressions conveyed to him by Corentin's report as to the character and designs of Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne.
It is impossible for persons living under a constitutional government, where no one really cares for that cold and thankless, blind, deaf Thing called public interest, to imagine the zeal which a mere word of the Emperor was able to inspire in his political or administrative machine.
That powerful will seemed to impress itself as much upon things as upon men.

His decision once uttered, the Emperor, overtaken by the coalition of 1806, forgot the whole matter.