In due course Captain Fourès reached Cairo and soon realised that Barnett had told him nothing more than the truth. His wife remained a willing prisoner with Bonaparte. Accordingly he prepared for action, meaning to kill his two betrayers. It was pointed out to him that in view of the existence of martial law and his failure to carry the dispatches entrusted to him, the Commander-in-Chief would be justified in having him shot; while his friends urged, knowing the man's character, that, after all, to risk his career for a worthless woman, in a quarrel with a man like Bonaparte, was worse than madness. The Captain determined, however, to see his wife and obtain an avowal from her own lips as to the facts of the whole intrigue. According to the records, Fourès found her, still unrisen, at the mansion of Elfi Bey, learned from her own admission that she was satisfied with her present lot and, without further parley, flogged the strumpet till she writhed in agonies on her bedroom floor. Fatality of fatalities, who should enter and find her in this condition, but Bonaparte himself. He gazed for one dramatic moment at the shrieking woman and turned with a raucous laugh on his heel. Fourès, in due course, procured his divorce and made, as he himself declared, "a sacrifice of his resentment against Napoleon to France and the Army." As it happened, the luck was, on this occasion, against the British Secret Service agents. Had Bonaparte fallen a victim to the jealous rage of Fourès, should we have had a Trafalgar, an Austerlitz, a Jena, a Waterloo? There are not wanting those who maintain that all these historic events were in the inevitable logic of the French Revolution and that with a Bonaparte, or without him, they must in their due turn have come to pass—a question which is far too large for present discussion. In any case, it is certain that Bonaparte's removal in 1799 would have relieved many European cabinets of much anxiety.
XIX
CONCLUSION—BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography connected with the business of espionage is not, as may be supposed, a very extensive one. Great spies have all written their memoirs, but in no case can these works be regarded as trustworthy records of the actual parts played by their writers in important historic events or episodes, and it is always necessary to go to independent chroniclers in order to arrive at the truth. As regards themselves, they are peculiarly fortunate in that highly placed patrons and collaborators have rarely, if ever, condescended to criticise or question their claims or statements, the result being that their most preposterous pretensions find acceptance at face value. It is well, too, that not one of them, as far as the writer has discovered, evinces anything like literary tact in his attempts to conceal the essentially underhand nature of his professional art. Your Schulmeisters and Stiebers, on the bare evidence of their own life stories, disclose their real motives and characters so clearly and intimately as to leave us with the impression that it is only very poor judges of human nature who can fail to categorise them accurately.
Our own study of the master spy has left us unimpressed regarding the qualities of either head or heart which are called for in the business of espionage, and whatever courage may appear to attach to the characters of men like Schulmeister, Stieber and even André, we remain convinced that there was in none of them anything like nobility of purpose and that a very cheap material ambition underlay all their respective rôles, dramatic though those rôles may have been. The characters of the two spies of the War of Independence seem to us to have been lamentably lacking in that fine spirituality which one looks for in men who are willing to die for any strong faith that is in them; the American appears to have been an idealist of a type which is not easily differentiable from the oriental fanatic who is said to possess no very settled convictions about his cause; while the Englishman's motives were based purely upon rapid self-advancement. As to Le Caron, we admit having approached his case with every predisposition to admire him, only to find our earlier illusions entirely shattered after a careful study of his reminiscences; and the printed word must be allowed to go a long way towards self-revelation. As for Schulmeister, he threw his lot in with the side which paid him the highest price, and patriotism or nobility of sentiment in no way coloured his otherwise important abilities and services, while Stieber—the odious Stieber was at once a cringing self-seeker, a bragging bully and, shorn of his protections, an obvious and elemental coward. MacParlan was a detective pure and simple, and to him there attaches no stigma of having taken an oath to serve a cause which secretly he meant to betray. Of all the rôles enacted by the various exponents of espionage with whom we have dealt, MacParlan's appears to us to have been far and away the most heroic and, in view of the dread organisation which he was fighting single-handed, also the most patriotic and utilitarian.
In regard to the sources which we have drawn upon, those which deal with Schulmeister call for some comment. Napoleon's agent is mentioned by many of the high functionaries of the Empire who published memoirs dealing with its glittering legend. Savary, Fouché, Rapp and Marbot all give him a word, while Thiers, much later, mentions him as having contributed a share to the glories of the Corsican. With the exception of the short Life by Diffenbach, and his own very unreliable Fragments, we are aware of no exhaustive biography of the spy, while magazine and newspaper articles, such as those published in the Allgemeine Zeitung, the Courrier du Bas-Rhin and other periodicals, differ altogether as to details and chronology in descriptions of him. The author remembers to have read, when a student in Germany, many years back, an account of Schulmeister obviously written by an Alsatian and signed with the name, F. Ott, which gave particulars as to the spy's first meeting with Napoleon, as well as the story of his social career in Vienna before joining the army of Mack. These particulars are not mentioned by any other writers except Savary and a scribe in The Royal United Service Magazine of December 1897. In view of so many conflicting accounts, however, we have thought it fair to draw upon this recollection in our own story of the Alsatian, although at present we cannot recall the exact source.
Le Caron has, of course, been his own biographer and the popular Press of the time of the Parnell Commission teems with accounts, correct or imaginary, of the Anglo-American major. Sir Robert Anderson, in his reminiscences, speaks of his agent in terms of consideration and respect. In a letter which Sir Robert was so good as to write to the author, in this connection, appear the following remarks:—
"My best agents, when I had charge of secret-service work, were as much entitled to respect as were my officers in the Criminal Investigation Department when I had charge of that branch of Police work, or as our military who 'spy' the German trenches from aeroplanes. Others again take up that sort of work for 'filthy lucre sake,' and yet others from all sorts of motives, some praiseworthy and some contemptible. Spies differ as much as parsons or doctors, and no general rule can be applied to them. Le Caron was in every way a worthier and more respectable man than were some of the M.P.'s who abused him in Parliament. Some of my other agents were much in the same category. Others, again, who gave me information of great value, were creatures whom it was an ordeal to have to deal with."