betrayed the royal cause out of personal ambition and for that reason alone should not succeed him on the throne. For the next five years, d'Antraigues and his family lived in Graz and Vienna on an allowance provided by Czar Paul I of Russia. In Vienna, he became friends with the Prince de Ligne and Baron Gustav Armfelt, the Swedish ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire. In 1802, Czar Alexander I of Russia sent him as a Russian attaché to Dresden, the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, but in 1806 he published a violent pamphlet against Napoleon and the French Empire, and was expelled by the Saxon government. He then went to London where he developed a close relationship with both George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, and the Duke of Kent, one of King George III's sons. It was universally believed that d'Antraigues was the agent who revealed the secrets articles of the Treaty of Tilsit to the British cabinet, but his biographer, Leonce Pingaud, contests this. In England, he also became an intimate of fellow émigrés, Charles François Dumouriez and the duc d'Orléans (the future King Louis Philippe of the French). Throughout his long exile (1790–1812), he published a number of pamphlets (Des monstres ravagent partout, Point d'accommodement, etc.) against both the French Revolution and Napoleon. Assassination In 1812 he and his wife were assassinated with a stiletto at their country home at 27 Barnes Terrace, by an Italian servant whom they had dismissed. It has never been established whether the murder was committed from private or political motives. Some claimed that the motive behind the murders was simply the fact that d'Antraigues' wife treated her servants badly. Others saw more sinister political machinations at work. Both Napoleon and Louis XVIII had ample cause to want d'Antraigues removed from the scene. References In turn, it cites as references: Edmond de Goncourt, La Saint-Huberty et l'opéra au XVIIIe siècle Leonce Pingaud, Un Agent secret sous la révolution et l'empire, le comte d'Antraigues (Paris, 1893) H. Vaschalde, Notice bibliographique sur Louis Alexandre de Launay, comte d'Antraigues, sa vie et ses œuvres Colin Duckworth, The D'Antraigues Phenomenon: The Making and Breaking of a Revolutionary Royalist Espionage Agent (Newcastle upon Tyne, Avero Publications Ltd., 1986) 1753 births 1812 deaths Politicians from Montpellier Counts of Antraigues French counter-revolutionaries Members of the National Constituent Assembly (France) People of the First French Empire French