AT THE SALON.
CHAPTER III.
MORE PARISIAN TYPES.
The Spy—Under Sartines and Berryer—Fouché—Delavau—The Present System—The Écuyère—The Circus in Paris.
TO return, however, to native Parisian types. Mention has already been made of the French spy, but he is such an important and historical character that it is impossible to dismiss him in a few words.
The police, already strongly organised under Louis XIV., resorted largely to espionage; but in Louis XV.’s reign the famous Lieutenant of Police, de Sartines, fashioned the spy system into a civil institution, and gave it a prodigious development. Spies were now employed to follow the Court or to watch the doings of distinguished foreigners who had recently arrived in the capital. Then there were domestic spies, the most terrible of all, to judge by the following observations extracted from a report attributed to Louis XV.’s lieutenant. “The ‘family,’ amongst us, lives under the protection of a reputation for virtue which cannot impose on the magistracy; the family is a repertory of crimes, an arsenal of infamies. The hypocrisy of the false caresses which are lavished in it must be apparent to all but fools. In a family of twenty persons the police ought to place forty spies.” After Sartines, Lieutenant Berryer by no means allowed the spy service to deteriorate. He employed convicts as spies, one of the conditions of their employment being that on the slightest failure in the vile duties they had to perform, they should be restored to prison. The services, too, of coachmen, landladies, lodgers, were called into requisition. Even domestic servants were sometimes Berryer’s agents, and many a mysterious lettre-de-cachet was issued on the strength of some[{18}] word uttered carelessly within the hearing of a lady’s-maid or valet-de-chambre.
Stories are even told of men so innocent that they acted as spies without being aware of it. Such a one was Michel-Perrin, of Mme. de Bawr’s tale, which, in its dramatic form, gave Bouffé one of his best parts. The simple-minded man had in his youth, when he was a student of theology, known Fouché, afterwards to become Napoleon’s Minister of Police. In due time Michel-Perrin took orders, and was doing duty in a little village when, under the Revolution, public worship was abolished. Calling upon Fouché to ask his old friend for some suitable employment, he can obtain nothing until, moved by the urgency of his solicitations, the Police Minister suggests to him, with so much delicacy that his true meaning remains unperceived, that he shall walk about the public places, go into cafés and restaurants, and frequent all kinds of resorts where people congregate, and that he shall then return to Fouché with an account of anything remarkable he may have seen or heard. This seems to the delighted Michel-Perrin mere child’s play, and he regards it as little more than a pretext on the part of the generous minister for handing him every evening a gold piece. When, however, the unconscious spy finds one day that he has revealed a political conspiracy, and jeopardised the lives of many, perhaps innocent men, he suddenly awakens to a sense of what he has been doing, and in horror throws up his employment. Fouché, it seems, was pained to have humiliated the unoffending priest, and, public worship being just at that time restored, he used his influence with Napoleon to obtain the ingenuous man’s re-appointment as village curé.
Under the Revolution the spy was replaced by the official denunciator, an agent no less formidable. At length came the Empire, and then Fouché invested espionage with the importance of a science. In 1812 the “brigade of safety” appeared, which was first composed of four agents, but which, in 1823 and 1824, always under the direction of the famous Vidocq, numbered close upon thirty. Delavau, the prefect of police, had permitted him to establish, on the public road, a game known as “troll-madam”; and this game, an excellent trap for boobies and passers-by whose slightest words and actions were keenly watched by Vidocq’s hounds, produced, from the 20th of July to the 4th of August, 1823, a net profit of 4,364 francs. This sum was added to the subvention already granted to the spy department.
The Prefect Delavau returned to the method of Lieutenant Berryer in employing as spies convicts, whom he threw back into prison for the slightest fault. One of his predecessors, Baron Pasquier, had endeavoured, like Berryer, to enlist domestic servants into the secret police force; and, with this object, Delavau renewed an old ordinance, calling upon them to get their names noted in the books of the prefecture every time they entered a situation or left one. The domestics, however, perceived the motive of Delavau’s measure, and were so unanimous in withholding their names from the books in question, that all idea of family espionage, on which much value had been set, was soon to be abandoned. Delavau drew even more largely upon the criminal class for his myrmidons than Pasquier had done, and in his day no public gathering took place at which some felon, released for the purpose from gaol, was not lurking about for an ill-sounding word or a suspicious gesture. Such agents as these worked with the industry of bloodhounds. “Between the populace and the subalterns of the police,” says the historian Peuchet, “there is a continual war; the latter are ill-bred dogs who seize every opportunity for applying their fangs. The police will never inspire respect for order so long as part of its force consists of released gaol-birds who owe a grudge to the whole of the people. When these two elements are in contact there is inevitably a fermentation.” The justice of these remarks was recognised by M. Delavau’s successor, M. de Belleyme, whose first care was to dismiss and even restore to their respective prisons this army of felon-spies. To-day, although he has not risen much in public estimation, the spy of the police-force is a citizen in every sense of the word, enjoying all the rights of a Frenchman, and not obtaining his commission from the prefecture until after his past life and his moral character have stood the test of a keen investigation. Thus espionage has been purified as far as that is possible; but whether the system is not in itself essentially immoral, is a question which has exercised the minds even of such writers as Montesquieu. “Espionage,” he says, “is never tolerable; if it were so it would be practised by honest men; but the necessary infamy of the person indicates the infamy of the thing.” This is in effect another version of the famous utterance of Argenson, who, reproached with employing as spies none but rogues and villains, exclaimed: “Find me honest men who will do this work.” The present prefecture of police believes it has found such men, and the[{19}] discovery, if it has really been made, is a fortunate one indeed.