He made no attempt to hide his monarchist sympathies, and this, together with the way in which he reported the trial and death of Louis XVI., brought him in peril of his life; to avoid this danger he enlisted in the army, but after Thermidor he returned to Paris and to his newspaper work.
The second son, Prince Louis Napoleon, an officer in the Russian army, showed a steadier disposition, and was more favoured in some monarchist quarters; in 1906 he was made governor of the Caucasus.
In November Admiral Mello left Rio de Janeiro in the armoured cruiser " Aquidaban " and went to Desterro, the naval forces in Rio Bay being left in charge of Admiral Saldanha da Gama, an ardent monarchist, who had thrown in his lot with the insurgent cause.
The Freemasons had been largely instrumental in overthrowing Iturbide; they now divided into the Escoceses (lodges of the Scottish ritual), who were Monarchist and Centralist, and the Yorkinos, who took their ritual from New York, and their cue, it was alleged, from the American minister, Joel Poinsett.
Though he remained, to the end, firm in his belief that there had been an active monarchist party, 2 this obsession did not carry him out of touch with the realities of human nature and of his time.