Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Part VI · Chapter 6 14 (2/2)

And so he did at last. Pressed by questions, he said that the money came from his aunt, a rich lady of antiquated opinions, who yielded, however, to his fancy of having a paper, and had parted with the money. The lady was not in France; she was staying at London. We insisted nevertheless upon having her name and address, and our friend Malatesta volunteered to see her. He went with an Italian friend who was connected with the secondhand trade in furniture. They found the lady occupying a small flat, and while Malatesta spoke to her and was more and more convinced that she was simply playing the aunt’s part in the comedy, the furniture friend, looking round at the chairs and tables, discovered that all of them had been taken the day before⁠—probably hired⁠—from a secondhand furniture dealer, his neighbor. The labels of the dealer were still fastened to the chairs and the tables. This did not prove much, but naturally reinforced our suspicions. I absolutely refused to have anything to do with the paper.

The paper was of an unheard-of violence; burning, assassination, dynamite bombs⁠—there was nothing but that in it. I met the man, the editor of the paper, when I went to the London congress, and the moment I saw his sullen face and heard a bit of his talk and caught a glimpse of the sort of women with whom he always went about, my opinions concerning him were settled. At the congress, during which he introduced all sorts of terrible resolutions, all present kept aloof from him; and when he insisted upon having the addresses of all anarchists throughout the world, the refusal was made in anything but a flattering manner.

To make a long story short, he was unmasked a couple of months later, and the paper was stopped forever on the very next day. Then, a couple of years after that, the prefect of police, Andrieux, published his Memoirs, and in this book he told all about the paper which he had started, and the explosions which his agents had organized at Paris, by putting sardine-boxes filled with something under the statue of Thiers.

One can imagine the quantities of money all these things cost the French and other nations.

I might write several chapters on this subject, but I will mention only one more story, of two adventurers at Clairvaux.

My wife stayed in the only inn of the little village which has grown up under the shadow of the prison wall. One day the landlady entered her room with a message from two gentlemen, who came to the hotel and wanted to see my wife. The landlady interceded with all her eloquence in their favor. “Oh, I know the world,” she said, “and I assure you, madame, that they are the most correct gentlemen. Nothing could be more comme-il-faut. One of them gave the name of a German officer. He is surely a baron, or a ‘milord’ and the other is his interpreter. They know you perfectly well. The baron is going now to Africa, perhaps never to return, and he wants to see you before he leaves.”

My wife looked at the visiting card, which bore “A Madame la Principesse Kropotkine. Quand à voir?” and needed no more commentaries about the comme-il-faut of the two gentlemen. As to the contents of the message, they were even worse than the address. Against all rules of grammar and common sense the “baron” wrote about a mysterious communication which he had to make. She refused point blank to receive the writer and his interpreter.

Thereupon the baron wrote to my wife letter upon letter, which she returned without opening them. All the village soon became divided into two parties⁠—one siding with the baron and led by the landlady, the other against him and headed, as a matter of fact, by the landlady’s husband. Quite a romance was circulated. The baron had known my wife before her marriage. He had danced with her many times at the Russian embassy in Vienna. He was still in love with her, but she, the cruel one, refused even to allow him a glimpse of her before he went upon his perilous expedition.

Then came the mysterious story of a boy, whom we were said to conceal. “Where is their boy?” the baron wanted to know. “They have a son, six years old by this time⁠—where is he?” “She never would part with a boy if she had one,” the one party said. “Yes, they have one, but they conceal him,” the other party maintained.

For us two this contest contained a very interesting revelation. It proved to us that my letters were not only read by the prison authorities, but that their contents were made known to the Russian embassy as well. When I was at Lyons, and my wife had gone to see Elisée Reclus in Switzerland, she wrote to me once that “our boy” was getting on very well; his health was excellent, and they all spent a very nice evening at the anniversary of his fifth birthday. I knew that she meant Le Révolté, which we often used to name in conversations “our gamin,”⁠—our naughty boy. But now that these gentlemen were inquiring about “our gamin,” and even designated so correctly his age, it was evident that the letter had passed through other hands than those of the governor. It was well to know this.

Nothing escapes the attention of village-folk in the country, and the baron soon awakened suspicions. He wrote a new letter to my wife, even more wordy than the former ones. Now he asked her pardon for having tried to introduce himself as an acquaintance. He owned that she did not know him; but nevertheless he was a well-wisher. He had a most important communication to make to her. My life was in danger, and he wanted to warn her. The baron and his secretary took an outing in the fields to read this letter together and to consult about its tenor⁠—the forest-guard following them at a distance; but they quarreled about it, and the letter was torn to pieces and thrown on the ground. The forester waited till they were out of sight, gathered the pieces, connected them, and read the letter. In an hour’s time the village knew that the baron had never really been acquainted with my wife; the romance which was so sentimentally repeated by the baron’s party crumbled to pieces.

“Ah, then they are not what they pretended to be,” the brigadier de gendarmerie concluded in his turn; “then they must be German spies;” and he arrested them.

It must be said in his behalf that a German spy had really been at Clairvaux shortly before. In time of war the vast buildings of the prison might serve as depots for provisions or barracks for the army, and the German general staff was surely interested to know the inner capacity of the prison buildings. Accordingly a jovial traveling photographer came to our village, made friends with everyone by photographing all of them for nothing, and was admitted to photograph not only the inside of the prison yards, but also the dormitories. Having done this, he traveled to some other town on the eastern frontier, and was there arrested by the French authorities, as a man found in possession of compromising military documents. The brigadier, fresh from the impression of that visit, jumped to the conclusion that the baron and his secretary were also German spies, and took them in custody to the little town of Bar-sur-Aube. There they were released next morning, the local paper stating that they were not German spies, but “persons commissioned by another more friendly power.”

Now public opinion turned entirely against the baron and his secretary, who had to live through more adventures. After their release they entered a small village café, and there ventilated their griefs in German in a friendly conversation over a bottle of wine. “You were stupid, you were a coward,” the self-styled interpreter said to the self-styled baron. “If I had been in your place, I would have shot that examining magistrate with this revolver. Let him only repeat that with me⁠—he will have these bullets in his head!” And so on.

A commercial traveler who sat quietly in a corner of the room rushed at once to the brigadier to report the conversation which he had overheard. The brigadier made an official report immediately, and again arrested the secretary⁠—a pharmacist from Strasbourg. He was taken before a police court at the same town of Bar-sur-Aube, and got a full month’s imprisonment “for menaces uttered against a magistrate in a public place.” After that the baron had more adventures, and the village did not resume its usual quietness till after the departure of the two strangers.

I have here related only a very few of the spy stories that I might tell. But when one thinks of the thousands of villains going about the world in the pay of all governments⁠—and very often well paid for their villainies⁠—of the traps they lay for all sorts of artless people, of the vast sums of money thrown away in the maintenance of that army, which is recruited in the lowest strata of society and from the population of the prisons, of the corruption of all sorts which they pour into society at large, nay, even into families, one cannot but be appalled at the immensity of the evil which is thus done.