In point of fact, however, the spies do not always fabricate reports wholesale. They often tell things that are true, but all depends upon the way a story is told. We passed some merry moments about a report which was addressed to the French government by a French spy who followed my wife and myself as we were travelling in 1881 from Paris to London. The spy, probably playing a double part—as they often do—had sold that report to Rochefort, who published it in his paper. Everything that the spy had told in this report was correct—but the way he had told it!
He wrote for instance: ‘I took the next compartment to the one that Kropótkin had taken with his wife.’ Quite true; he was there. We noticed him, for he had managed at once to attract our attention by his sullen, unpleasant face. ‘They spoke Russian all the time, in order not to be understood by the other passengers.’ Very true again: we spoke Russian as we always do. ‘When they came to Calais, they both took a bouillon.’ Most correct again: we took a bouillon. But here the mysterious part of the journey begins. ‘After that, they both suddenly disappeared, and I looked for them in vain, on the platform and elsewhere; and when they reappeared, he was in disguise, and was followed by a Russian priest, who never left him until they reached London, where I lost sight of the priest.’ All that was true again. My wife had a slight toothache, and I asked the keeper of the restaurant to let us go into his private room, where the tooth could be stopped. So we had disappeared indeed; and as we had to cross the Channel, I put my soft felt hat into my pocket and put on a fur cap: so I was ‘in disguise.’ As to the mysterious priest, he was also there. He was not a Russian, but this is irrelevant: he wore at any rate the dress of the Greek priests. I saw him standing at the counter and asking something which no one understood. ‘Agua, agua,’ he repeated in a woful tone. ‘Give the gentleman a glass of water,’ I said to the waiter. Whereupon the priest began to thank me for my intervention with a truly Eastern effusion. My wife took pity on him and spoke to him in different languages, but he understood none but modern Greek. It appeared at last that he knew a few words in one of the South Slavonian languages, and we could make out: ‘I am a Greek; Turkish embassy, London.’ We told him, mostly by signs, that we too were going to London, and that he might travel with us.
The most amusing part of the story was that I really found for him the address of the Turkish embassy, even before we had reached Charing Cross. The train stopped at some station on the way, and two elegant ladies entered our already full third-class compartment. Both had newspapers in their hands. One was English, and the other—a tall, nice-looking person, who spoke good French—pretended to be English. After having exchanged a few words, she asked me à brûle-pourpoint: ‘What do you think of Count Ignátieff?’ And immediately after that: ‘Are you soon going to kill the new Tsar?’ I was clear as to her profession from these two questions; but, thinking of my priest, I said to her: ‘Do you happen to know the address of the Turkish embassy?’ ‘Street So-and so, number So-and-so,’ she replied without hesitation, like a schoolgirl in a class. ‘You could, I suppose, also give the address of the Russian embassy?’ I asked her, and the address having been given with the same readiness, I communicated both to the priest. When we reached Charing Cross, the lady was so obsequiously anxious to attend to my luggage, and even to carry a heavy package herself with her gloved hands, that I finally told her, much to her surprise: ‘Enough of that; ladies do not carry gentlemen’s luggage. Go away!’
But to return to my trustworthy French spy. ‘He alighted at Charing Cross’—he wrote in his report—‘but for more than half an hour after the arrival of the train he did not leave the station, until he had ascertained that everyone else had left it. I kept aloof in the meantime, concealing myself behind a pillar. Having ascertained that all passengers had left the platform, they both suddenly jumped into a cab. I followed them nevertheless, and overheard the address which the cabman gave at the gate to the policeman—12, street So-and-so—and ran after the cab. There were no cabs in the neighbourhood; so I ran up to Trafalgar Square, where I got one. I then drove after him, and he alighted at the above address.’
All facts in this narrative are true again—the address and the rest; but how mysterious it all reads. I had warned a Russian friend of my arrival, but there was a dense fog that morning, and my friend overslept himself. We waited for him half an hour, and then, leaving our luggage in the cloak-room, drove to his house.
‘There they sat till two o’clock with drawn curtains, and then a tall man came out of the house, and returned one hour later with their luggage.’ Even the remark about the curtains was correct: we had to light the gas on account of the fog, and drew down the curtains to get rid of the ugly sight of a small Islington street wrapped in a dense fog.
When I was working with Elisée Reclus at Clarens I used to go every fortnight to Geneva to see to the bringing out of ‘Le Révolté.’ One day as I came to our printing office, I was told that a Russian gentleman wanted to see me. He had already seen my friends and had told them that he came to induce me to start a paper like ‘Le Révolté’ in Russian. He offered for that purpose all the money that might be required. I went to meet him in a café, where he gave me a German name—Tohnlehm, let us say—and told me that he was a native of the Baltic provinces. He boasted of possessing a large fortune in certain estates and manufactures, and he was extremely angry with the Russian Government, for their Russianizing schemes. On the whole he produced a somewhat indefinite impression, so that my friends insisted upon my accepting his offer; but I did not much like the man from first sight.
From the café he took me to his rooms in an hotel, and there began to show less reserve and to appear more like himself and in a still more unpleasant light. ‘Don’t doubt my fortune,’ he said to me; ‘I have made a capital invention. There’s a lot of money in it. I shall patent it, and get a considerable sum for it, and give it all for the cause of the revolution in Russia.’ And he showed me, to my astonishment, a miserable candlestick, the originality of which was that it was awfully ugly and had three bits of wire to put the candle in. The poorest housewife would not have cared for such a candlestick, and even if it could have been patented, no ironmonger would have paid the patentee more than a couple of sovereigns. ‘A rich man placing his hopes on such a candlestick! This man,’ I thought to myself, ‘can never have seen better ones,’ and my opinion about him was made up: ‘He was no rich man at all, and the money he offered was not his own.’ So I bluntly told him: ‘Very well, if you are so anxious to have a Russian revolutionary paper, and hold the flattering opinion about myself which you have expressed, you will have to put your money in my name at a bank, and at my entire disposal. But I warn you that you will have absolutely nothing to do with the paper.’ ‘Of course, of course,’ he said, ‘but just see to it, and sometimes advise you, and aid you in smuggling it into Russia.’ ‘No, nothing of the sort! You need not see me at all.’ My friends thought that I was too hard upon the man, but some time after that a letter was received from St. Petersburg warning us that we would have the visit of a spy of the Third Section—Tohnlehm by name. The candlestick had thus rendered us a good service.
Candlesticks, or anything else, these people almost always betray themselves in one way or another. When we were at London in 1881 we received, on a foggy morning, the visit of two Russians. I knew one of them by name; the other, a young man whom he recommended as his friend, was a stranger. He had volunteered to accompany his friend on a few days’ visit to England. As he was introduced by a friend, I had no suspicions whatever about him; but I was very busy that day with some work, and asked another friend who stayed close by to find them rooms and to take them about to see London. My wife had not yet seen London either, and she went with them. In the afternoon she returned saying to me: ‘Do you know, I dislike that man very much. Beware of him.’ ‘But why? What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing; but he is surely not “ours.” By the way he treated the waiter in a café, and the way he handles money, I saw at once that he is not “ours,” and if he is not—why should he come to us?’ She was so certain of her suspicions that, while she performed her duties of hospitality, she nevertheless managed never to leave that young man alone in my study, even for one minute. We had a chat, and the visitor began to exhibit himself more and more under such a low moral aspect that even his friend blushed for him, and when I asked more details about him, the explanations he gave were even still less satisfactory. We were both on our guard. In short, they both left London in a couple of days, and a fortnight later I got a letter from my Russian friend, full of excuses for having introduced to me the young man who, they had found out, at Paris, was a spy in the service of the Russian embassy. I looked then into a list of Russian secret service agents in France and Switzerland which we, the refugees, had received lately from the Executive Committee—they had their men everywhere at St. Petersburg—and I found the name of that young man on the list, with one letter only altered in it.
To start a paper, subsidized by the police, with a police agent at its head, is an old plan, and the prefect of the Paris police, Andrieux, resorted to it in 1881. I was with Elisée Reclus in the mountains when we received a letter from a Frenchman, or rather a Belgian, who announced to us that he was going to start an anarchist paper at Paris and asked our collaboration. The letter, full of flatteries, produced upon us an unpleasant impression, and Reclus had moreover some vague reminiscence of having heard the name of the writer in some unfavourable connection. We decided to refuse collaboration, and I wrote to a Paris friend that we must first of all ascertain from whence the money came with which the paper was going to be started. ‘It may come from the Orleanists—an old trick of the family—and we must know its origin.’ My Paris friend, with a workman’s straightforwardness, read that letter at a meeting at which the would-be editor of the paper was present. He simulated offence, and I had to answer several letters on this subject; but I stuck to my words: ‘If the man is in earnest, he must show us the origin of the money.’