Part 51

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.’

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.

Nothing escapes the attention of village folk in the country, and the baron soon awakened suspicions. He wrote a new letter to my wife, even more loquacious than the former ones. Now, he asked her pardon for having tried to introduce himself as an acquaintance. He owned that she did not know him; but nevertheless he was a well-wisher. He had to make to her a most important communication. My life was in danger and he wanted to warn her. The baron and his secretary took an outing in the fields to read together that letter and to consult about its tenor--the forest-guard following them at a distance--but they quarrelled about it, and the letter was torn to pieces and thrown in the fields. The forester waited till they were out of sight, gathered the pieces, connected them, and read the letter. In one hour’s time the village knew that the baron had never really been acquainted with my wife; the romance which was so sentimentally repeated by the baron’s party crumbled to pieces.

‘Ah, then, they are not what they pretended to be,’ the brigadier de gendarmerie concluded in his turn; ‘then they must be German spies’--and he arrested them.

It must be said in his excuse that a German spy had really been at Clairvaux shortly before. In time of war the vast buildings of the prison might serve as depôts for provisions or barracks for the army, and the German General Staff was surely interested to know the inner capacity of the prison buildings. A jovial travelling photographer came accordingly to our village, made friends with everyone by photographing them for nothing, and was admitted to photograph, not only the inside of the prison yards, but also the dormitories. Having done this, he travelled to some other town on the eastern frontier, and was there arrested by the French authorities as a man found in possession of compromising military documents. The brigadier, fresh from the impression of the photographer’s visit, jumped to the conclusion that the baron and his secretary were also German spies, and took them in custody to the little town of Bar-sur-Aube. There they were released next morning, the local paper stating that they were not German spies but ‘persons commissioned by another more friendly power.’

Now public opinion turned entirely against the baron and his secretary, who had to live through more adventures. After their release they entered a small village café, and there ventilated their griefs in German in a friendly conversation over a bottle of wine. ‘You were stupid, you were a coward,’ the would-be interpreter said to the would-be baron. ‘If I had been in your place, I would have shot that examining magistrate with this revolver. Let him only repeat that with me--he will have these bullets in his head!’ And so on.

A commercial traveller who quietly sat in the corner of the room, rushed at once to the brigadier to report the conversation which he had overheard. The brigadier made at once an official report, and once more arrested the secretary--a pharmacist from Strasburg. He was taken before a police court at the same town of Bar-sur-Aube, and got a full month’s imprisonment for ‘menaces uttered against a magistrate in a public place.’ At last the two adventurers left Clairvaux.

* * * * *

These spy adventures ended in a comical way. But how many tragedies--terrible tragedies--we owe to these villains! Precious lives lost, and whole families wrecked, simply to get an easy living for such swindlers. When one thinks of the thousands of spies going about the world in the pay of all governments; of the traps they lay for all sorts of artless people; of the lives they sometimes bring to a tragical end, and the sorrows they sow broadcast; of the vast sums of money thrown away in the maintenance of that army recruited from the scum of society; of the corruption of all sorts which they pour into society at large, nay, even into families, one cannot but be appalled at the immensity of the evil which is thus done. And this army of villains is not only limited to those who play the spy on revolutionists or to the military espionage system. In this country there are papers, especially in the watering towns, whose columns are covered with advertisements of private detective agencies which undertake to collect all sorts of information for divorce suits, to spy upon husbands for their wives and upon wives for their husbands, to penetrate into families and entrap simpletons, and who will undertake anything which may be asked of them, for a corresponding sum of money. And while people feel scandalized at the espionage villainies lately revealed in the highest military spheres of France, they do not notice that amongst themselves, perhaps under their own roofs, the same and even worse things are being committed by both the official and private detective agencies.

Demands for our release were continually raised, both in the Press and in the Chamber of Deputies--the more so as about the same time that we were condemned Louise Michel was condemned, too--for robbery. Louise Michel, who always gives literally her last shawl or cloak to the woman who is in need of it, and who never could be compelled, during her imprisonment, to have better food, because she always gave her fellow prisoners what was sent to her, was condemned, together with another comrade, Pouget, to nine years’ imprisonment for highway robbery! That sounded too bad even for the middle-class opportunists. She marched one day at the head of a procession of the unemployed, and, entering a baker’s shop, took a few loaves from it and distributed them to the hungry column: this was her robbery. The release of the anarchists thus became a war-cry against the government, and in the autumn of 1885 all my comrades save three were set at liberty by a decree of President Grévy. Then the outcry on behalf of Louise Michel and myself became still louder. However, Alexander III. objected to it; and one day the prime minister, M. Freycinet, answering an interpellation in the Chamber, said that ‘diplomatic difficulties stood in the way of Kropótkin’s release.’ Strange words in the mouth of the prime minister of an independent country; but still stranger words have been heard since in connection with that ill-omened alliance of France with imperial Russia.