Memoirs of a revolutionist

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

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 second-hand 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 second-hand furniture dealer, his neighbour. 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, as I went to the London congress, and the moment I saw his sullen face, and heard a bit of his talk, and caught a glance 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, the delegates kept aloof from him; and when he insisted upon having the addresses of anarchists all over 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 for ever 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 every other nation.

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 favour. ‘Oh, I know the world,’ she said, ‘and I may 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 address of the message, which was: ‘A Madame la Principesse Kropotkine,’ and needed no further proof of the comme-el-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 baron and his interpreter.

Thereupon the baron wrote to my wife letter upon letter, which she returned unopened. All the village soon became divided into two parties—one siding with the baron and led by the landlady, and 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 to cast a glance at 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 was a very interesting revelation. It proved that our 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 went to see Elisée Reclus in Switzerland, she wrote to me once that ‘our boy’ was going on 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 conversation ‘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 such a thing.