We settled once more in Thonon, taking lodgings with our former
hostess, Madame Sansaux. A brother of my wife, who was dying of
consumption, and had come to Switzerland, joined us.
I never saw such numbers of Russian spies as during the two months
that I remained at Thonon. To begin with, as soon as we had engaged
lodgings, a suspicious character, who gave himself out for an
Englishman, took the other part of the house. Flocks, literally flocks
of Russian spies besieged the house, seeking admission under all
possible pretexts, or simply tramping in pairs, trios, and quartettes
in front of the house. I can imagine what wonderful reports they wrote.
A spy must report. If he should merely say that he has stood for a week
in the street without noticing anything mysterious, he would soon be
put on the half-pay list or dismissed.
It was then the golden age of the Russian secret police. Ignátieff’s
policy had borne fruit. There were two or three bodies of police
competing with one another, each having any amount of money at their
disposal, and carrying on the boldest intrigues. Colonel Sudéikin,
for instance, chief of one of the branches--plotting with a certain
Degáeff, who after all killed him--denounced Ignátieff’s agents to
the revolutionists, and offered to the terrorists all facilities for
killing the minister of the interior, Count Tolstóy, and the Grand Duke
Vladímir; adding that he himself would then be nominated minister of
the interior, with dictatorial powers, and the Tsar would be entirely
in his hands. This activity of the Russian police culminated, later on,
in the kidnapping of the Prince of Battenberg from Bulgaria.
The French police, also, were on the alert. The question, ‘What is he
doing at Thonon?’ worried them. I continued to edit ‘Le Révolté,’ and
wrote articles for the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Newcastle
Chronicle.’ But what reports could be made out of that? One day the
local gendarme paid a visit to my landlady. He had heard from the
street the rattling of some machine, and wished to report that I had
in the house a secret printing press. So he came in my absence and
asked the landlady to show him the press. She replied that there was
none, and suggested that perhaps the gendarme had overheard the noise
of her sewing-machine. But he would not be convinced by so prosaic an
explanation, and actually compelled the landlady to use the machine,
while he listened inside the house and outside, to make sure that the
rattling he had heard was the same.
‘What is he doing all day?’ he asked the landlady.
‘He writes.’
‘He cannot write all day long.’
‘He saws wood in the garden at midday, and he takes walks every
afternoon between four and five.’ It was in November.
‘Ah, that’s it! When the dusk is coming on?’ (_A la tombée de la
nuit?_) And he wrote in his note-book, ‘Never goes out except at dusk.’
I could not well explain at that time this special attention of the
Russian spies; but it must have had some connection with the following.
When Ignátieff was nominated prime minister, advised by the ex-prefect
of Paris, Andrieux, he hit on a new plan. He sent a swarm of his agents
into Switzerland, and one of them undertook the publication of a paper
which slightly advocated the extension of provincial self-government in
Russia, but whose chief purpose was to combat the revolutionists, and
to rally to its standard those of the refugees who did not sympathize
with terrorism. This was certainly a means of sowing division. Then,
when nearly all the members of the Executive Committee had been
arrested in Russia, and a couple of them had taken refuge at Paris,
Ignátieff sent an agent to Paris to offer an armistice. He promised
that there should be no further executions on account of the plots
during the reign of Alexander II., even if those who had escaped arrest
fell into the hands of the government; that Chernyshévsky should be
released from Siberia; and that a commission should be nominated to
revise the cases of all those who had been exiled to Siberia without
trial. On the other side, he asked the Executive Committee to promise
to make no attempts against the Tsar’s life until his coronation was
over. Perhaps the reforms in favour of the peasants, which Alexander
III. intended to make, were also mentioned. The agreement was made
at Paris, and was kept on both sides. The terrorists suspended
hostilities. Nobody was executed for complicity in the former
conspiracies; those who were arrested later on under this indictment
were immured in the Russian Bastille at Schlüsselburg, where nothing
was heard of them for fifteen years, and where most of them still
are. Chernyshévsky was brought back from Siberia, and ordered to
stay at Astrakhan, where he was severed from all connection with the
intellectual world of Russia, and soon died. A commission went through
Siberia, releasing some of the exiles, and specifying terms of exile
for the remainder. My brother Alexander received from it an additional
five years.
While I was at London, in 1882, I was also told one day that a man who
pretended to be a _bonâ fide_ agent of the Russian government, and
could prove it, wanted to enter into negotiations with me. ‘Tell him
that if he comes to my house I will throw him down the staircase,’ was
my reply. The consequence of it was, I suppose, that while Ignátieff
considered the Tsar guaranteed from the attacks of the Executive
Committee, he thought that the anarchists might make some attempt and
wanted therefore to have me out of the way.