Having thus gained the addresses, Savary proceeded to summon each person to his presence by a letter written in the third person, and transmitted by his office messengers. He never mentioned the hour of the interview, but was careful never to send for two people on the same day. His secret agents came as requested, generally towards evening, and before they were ushered in Savary took the precaution to inquire from his groom of the chambers whether they came often to see Monsieur Fouché. The servant had almost invariably seen them before, and could give many interesting particulars about them. Thus Savary knew how to receive them; to be warm or cold in his welcome as he heard how they had been treated by his predecessor. He dealt in much the same way with the persons known only under an initial. He wrote also to them at their addresses, and sent the letters by confidential clerks who were known personally to the concierges of the houses where the agents resided. The Parisian concierge was as much an inquisitive busybody in those days as now; curious about his lodgers’ correspondence, and knowing exactly to whom he should deliver a letter with the initial address. It required only a little adroitness to put a name to these hitherto unknown people when they called in person at his office. It sometimes happened that more than one person having the same initial resided in the same house. If the concierge made the mistake of handing two letters to one individual, Savary, when he called, explained that his clerks had inadvertently written to him twice. In every case the letter of summons contained a request that the letter might be brought to the office as a passport to introduction. Savary adopted another method of making the acquaintance of the secret personnel. He ordered his cashier to inform him whenever a secret agent called for his salary. At first, being suspicious of the new régime, very few persons came, but the second and third month self-interest prevailed; people turned up, merely to inquire, as they said, and were invariably passed on to see the chief. Savary took the visit as a matter of course, discussing business, and often increasing voluntarily their rates of payment. By this means he not only re-established his connection, but greatly extended it.
Savary’s system of espionage was even more searching and comprehensive than Fouché’s, and before long earned him the sobriquet of the “Sheik of Spies.” He had a whole army at his disposal—the gossips and gobe-mouches of the clubs, the cabmen and street porters, the workmen in the suburbs. When fashionable Paris migrated to their country houses for the summer and early autumn, Savary followed them with his spies, whom he found among their servants, letter-carriers, even their guests. He also reversed the process, and actually employed masters to spy on their servants, obliging every householder to transmit a report to the police of every change in their establishments, and of the conduct of the persons employed. He essayed also to make valets spy on those whom they served, so that a man became less than ever a hero to his valet.
It followed, naturally, that Savary was the most hated of all the tyrants who wielded the power of the police prefecture. He spared no one; he bullied the priests; he increased the rigours of the wretched prisoners of war at Bitche and Verdun; and exercised such an irritating, vexatious, ill-natured surveillance over the whole town, over every class—political, social, and criminal—that he was soon universally hated. He was a stupid man, eaten up with vanity and self-importance; extremely jealous of his authority, and ever on the look out to vindicate it if he thought it assailed. Never perhaps did more inflated, unjustifiable pride precede a more humiliating fall. Savary’s pretensions as a police officer were utterly shipwrecked by the conspiracy of General Malet, a semi-madman, who succeeded in shaking Napoleon’s throne to its very foundations and making his military Police Minister supremely ridiculous.
This General Malet was a born conspirator. He had done little as a soldier, but had been concerned in several plots against Napoleon, for the last of which he had been cast into the prison of La Force. During his seclusion he worked out the details of a new conspiracy, based upon the most daring and yet simplest design. He meant to take advantage of the emperor’s absence from Paris, and, announcing his death, declare a Provisional Government, backed by the troops, of whom he would boldly take command. It all fell out as he had planned, and, but for one trifling accident, the plot would have been entirely successful. Paris at the moment he rose was weakly governed. Cambacères represented the emperor; Savary held the police, but, in spite of his espionage, knew nothing of Malet, and little of the real state of Paris below the surface; Pasquier, prefect of police, was an admirable administrator, but not a man of action. The garrison of Paris was composed mainly of raw levies, for all the best troops were away with Napoleon in Russia, and the commandant of the place, General Hullin, was a sturdy soldier—no more: a mere child outside the profession of arms.
Malet had influence with Fouché, through which, before that Minister’s disgrace, he had obtained his transfer from La Force to a “Maison de Santé” in the Faubourg St. Antoine. In this half asylum, half place of detention, the inmates were suffered to come and go on parole, to associate freely with one another, and to receive any visitors they pleased from outside. In this convenient retreat, which sheltered other irreconcilable spirits, Malet soon matured his plot. His chief confederate—the only one, indeed, he fully trusted—was a certain Abbé Lafone, a man of great audacity and determination, who had already been mixed up in Royalist plots against the empire. The two kept their own counsel, alive to the danger of treachery and betrayal in taking others into their full confidence; but Malet could command the services of two generals, Guidal and Laborie, with whom he had been intimate at La Force, but who never knew the whole aim and extent of the conspiracy.
About 8 p.m. on the 23rd of October, 1812, Malet and the Abbé left the Faubourg St. Antoine, and Malet, now in full uniform, appeared at the gates of the neighbouring barracks, where he announced the news, received by special courier, of the emperor’s death, produced a resolution from the Senate proclaiming a Provisional Government, and investing him with the supreme command of the troops. Under his orders, officers were despatched with strong detachments to occupy the principal parts of the city, the barriers, the quays, the Prefecture, the Place Royal, and other open squares. Another party was sent to the prison of La Force to extract Generals Laborie and Guidal, the first of whom, when he joined Malet, was despatched to the prefecture and thence to the Ministry of Police, to seize both the préfet and Savary and carry them off to gaol. Guidal was to support Laborie. Malet himself, with another body of troops, proceeded to the Place Vendôme, the military headquarters of Paris, and proposed to make the Commandant Hullin his prisoner.
The arrest of the heads of the police was accomplished without the slightest difficulty about 8 a.m. on the 24th of October, and they were transported under escort to La Force. (Savary ever afterwards was nicknamed the Duc de la Force.) Malet meanwhile had roused General Hullin, to whom he presented his false credentials. As the general passed into an adjoining room to examine them, Malet fired a pistol at him and “dropped” him. Then the Adjutant-General Dorcet interposed, and, seizing his papers, instantly detected the forgery. Malet was on the point of shooting him also, when a staff-officer rushed up from behind, and, backed by a handful of his guard, easily overpowered Malet. From that moment the attempt collapsed. The Police Minister and the préfet were released from prison; the conspirators were arrested. Yet for a few hours Malet had been master of Paris.
Napoleon was furiously angry with everyone, and loaded the police in particular with abuse. He did not, however, remove Savary from his office, for he knew he could still trust him, and this was no time to lose the services of a devoted friend. The insecurity of his whole position had been clearly manifested. One man, a prisoner, had, by his own inventive audacity, succeeded in suborning or imposing upon superior officers and securing the assistance of large bodies of troops, in forcing prison doors, arresting Ministers and high officials, and seizing the reins of power. No one had stood against him; the powers wielded by authority were null and void; chance alone, a mere accident, had spoilt the enterprise.