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 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 discovery,
if it has really been made, is a fortunate one indeed.
Another variety of police spy to be met with in Paris is the officious
volunteer spy. He may belong to the lower or to the higher ranks of
society. He takes upon himself to observe and to denounce, without
instructions, and solely in the hope of a pecuniary recompense. This
variety is probably the most contemptible and the vilest. It should be
mentioned, too, that the French capital swarms with invisible and
unrecognisable spies, disguised, as they sometimes are, beneath an
appearance of luxury or magnificence. This or that personage passes for
a member of the diplomatic service. He is an admired figure in
fashionable drawing-rooms, and while affecting to converse on the
European situation, exercises the ear of a fox terrier and the eye of a
hawk. Then, of course, there is the military spy, who is superior to the
civil variety inasmuch as whilst the latter, in case of recognition,
only incurs a more or less disagreeable misadventure, the former is
liable to be shot. The military spy, therefore, may have all the heroism
of the professed soldier.
The civil spy system was naturally developed to an extraordinary degree
by the subtle Richelieu. His secret agent took as many shapes as
Proteus. Now it was a brave old seigneur, infirm and professedly deaf,
in whose presence people would not hesitate to speak out and say
everything, but who recovered his vigour and his legs in order to go and
report to the cardinal a conversation of which he had not missed one
detail. Now it was a woman, who, having insinuated herself into the
intimate friendship of some young and brilliant courtier, wrested from
him a dangerous and terrible secret. But it was not only throughout the
length and breadth of France that Richelieu had spies; numbers of them
were in his pay abroad, all over the Continent indeed, regularly
reporting political intrigues, and furnishing clandestine copies of
secret treaties.
Enough, however, of the spy; let it simply be added that he has been
introduced into two novels by Balzac, into one by Hugo, and into two by
Alexandre Dumas, who has likewise made him figure in a couple of plays.
* * * * *
Let us pass from the most slinking and distasteful Paris character to
the most open and, as many consider, the most charming one--from the
“espion,” that is to say, to the “écuyère.”
At Paris the circus-woman is the object of a much higher admiration than
in London. Théophile Gautier, in his dramatic feuilletons, has
frequently shown that he preferred the equestrian fairy of the circus to
the sylph who dances at the opera. He goes into ecstasies over her
agility, vigour, and courage, and is displeased with nothing but the
drapery in which her lower limbs are enveloped, holding that, just as
the most virtuous fashionable woman or actress takes care to exhibit her
bare arms if they are beautiful, so the “écuyère” of the circus should
be allowed to display the full symmetry and grace of her legs. The
“écuyère” whom Balzac brings on the scene in his _Fausse Maîtresse_,
Malaga by name, is an excellent type of the French circus-woman, who is
nearly always without relatives, sometimes a foundling, sometimes a
stolen child, and who, coming one knows not whence, goes, the idol of a
day, one knows not where. “At the fair,” says the greatest of French
novelists--or rather, one of his characters--“this delicious Columbine
used to carry chairs on the tip of her nose--the prettiest little Greek
nose I ever saw. Malaga, madame, is skill personified. Of Herculean
strength, she only requires her tiny fist or diminutive foot to rid
herself of three or four men. She is, in fact, the goddess of
gymnastics. Careless as a gipsy, she says everything that enters her
head; she thinks as much of the future as you do of the halfpence you
throw to beggars, and sometimes sublime things escape from her. No one
could ever persuade her that an old diplomatist is a beautiful youth; a
million could not change her opinion. Her love is, for whoever inspires
it, a perpetual flattery. Endowed as she is with really insolent health,
her teeth are thirty-two exquisite pearls encased in coral.”
The performances of the Paris circus-woman too closely resemble those of
her sister in London to need description. The characters, however, of
the two equestrians are not identical, and that of the écuyère can
scarcely be represented better than in the words of a vivacious French
writer, who says: “You can easily imagine what must be, not the future
(alas! has she one?), but the present of this poor, intrepid, careless
creature. After being exposed twenty times a day to the risk of breaking
her jaw, she has hardly earned her food; and every morning she has to
wash, stretch, and otherwise renovate the costume in which she is to
dazzle her spectators at night.... Some of these circus-women marry a
Hercules or a professional fool; at the third or fourth child Mme.
Hercules or Mme. Fool takes her mare by the head, kisses her on the
nose, and bids a weeping adieu to the brave, affectionate beast, the
only friend who has never beaten her. It is done: the whole
family--husband, wife and children, go forth to try their luck as
strolling players. Their theatre is the fair in summer and the street in
winter. Hercules will lift, at arm’s length, enormous weights, and the
children will form the living column, or dance on the rope, while the
mother, as short-skirted as ever, but now plump enough to burst her
vestments, will contribute some kind of music or exhort the outside
public to enter the show.” She frequently fills up her intervals with
fortune-telling; informs young women whether they will be married the
same year, and whether the visionary swain is fair or dark; lets married
men know if their wives are faithful, and wives if their husbands are
engaged in amours. Nurse-maids learn from her that in the mounted
gendarmerie or the cuirassiers there is a hero of six-feet-six, only
awaiting an opportunity of declaring his passion.
This, however, is a sketch of the more fortunate of the strolling circus
artists. Occasionally the husband breaks a limb, or kills himself in
attempting some daring feat; in that case his family is often reduced to
beggary or something worse.