by Robb, Graham
He reached the end of his tale–his flight from Paris and arrival in England. Then the abbé handed him the confession and held the candle while the dying man scratched his signature on every page. A few days later, he died and the abbé P…kept his promise: he sent the signed confession to the Prefect of Police in Paris. In the accompanying letter, he explained that he and his parishioner thought that ‘the police should be apprised of the series of abominable events of which this wretch was both the agent and the victim’.
There might have been a brief investigation and some tying-up of loose ends, but the events in question dated back more than a decade, and the Paris police had more pressing concerns. A new Prefect of Police had just been appointed and was busy cleaning up the city: M. Debelleyme had instituted regular sweeping and sprinkling of the streets; he obtained government funding for sanitary inspections of prostitutes; he poisoned unclaimed dogs and silenced hurdy-gurdy men who sang obscene songs; he also arranged for all the beggars who were not from Paris to be given passports and money and sent back to their towns and villages. Following the example of Sir Robert Peel, he was equipping his previously invisible policemen with bright-blue uniforms, cocked hats and shiny buttons bearing the arms of the City of Paris.
The confession was sent to the archives, where it would have disappeared forever were it not for the man who should really be the hero of this story. When the confession arrived in the vaults of the Préfecture, it was immediately devoured by one of the hungriest minds ever let loose in an archive. Until recently, Jacques Peuchet had been the head archivist of the Paris police. It was the job he had dreamed of, a reward for the courage and duplicity he had shown in the dark days of the Revolution. In his early thirties, Peuchet had been elected as a representative of the Commune of Paris but had grown disgusted with the violence of the mob. He became a secret royalist overnight. By posing as a blood-red revolutionary, he secured the job of dealing with fleeing émigrés, refractory priests and royalist conspirators. In this way, he claimed, he was able to save many people from the guillotine. ‘Running with the wolves’, he later told his friends, ‘does not mean having to share their meals.’ Of course, to keep his job in such terrible times, he must have sacrificed a few to save the many. Even so, he was never out of danger. The infamous Billaud-Varenne, who demanded the execution of the King ‘within twenty-four hours’, warned Peuchet: ‘Friend, take care. You have the face of a fanatical moderate.’
Somehow, the fanatical moderate survived. Jacques Peuchet pops up in so many places that it is hard to believe that he was a single human being. A search for him at any time between the fall of the Bastille and the fall of Napoleon might have found him hiding in the countryside north of Paris, running a town four miles to the east (and sending only a few of its citizens to the guillotine), languishing in prison, being released by a friend, editing two official newspapers and, later, censoring the press. He also compiled two encyclopedias and a statistical survey of the provinces of France.
At last, he came to rest in the archives of the Préfecture de Police. After years of looking at the world through the peephole of politics, he saw it in all its bulging reality. Those wooden shelves and boxes in the vaults of the Préfecture were the streets and dwellings of a megalopolis of secret information. Everyone who had ever lived in Paris could be found there–the rich and the poor, the innocent and the guilty. This, he thought, was the single source from which a complete picture of human nature could be deduced. In classifying the archives, he would organize ‘the unfathomable chaos’ of human history. In that seething mass of detail, he would discover ‘the mysterious tableau of private life’ and reveal it to the world in a work of many volumes.
Every morning for eleven years, Peuchet crossed the bridge by Notre-Dame and disappeared from the light of day to rummage through the chaos. Every evening, he emerged, his mind filled with conspiracies and crimes, and a growing sense of enlightenment. But a man with a murky past and a passion for the truth inevitably has enemies. Someone–a jealous colleague, a policeman whose misdemeanours were recorded in the archives, a forgotten survivor from the difficult days of compromise–spread a rumour that Peuchet was an unreformed revolutionary. Could such a man be trusted with the nation’s dirty secrets? Obviously not, especially since more dirty secrets were being created all the time. As Peuchet himself would reveal in his book, the Prefect of Police, M. Delavau, was allowing his officers to run protection rackets, gambling dens and brothels.
Peuchet was removed from his post. In a city of twenty-six thousand civil servants who read about each other’s promotions and demotions in the daily paper, it was a very public humiliation. In his memoirs, Peuchet lied and said that he gave his beloved job to someone else. In private, he described his dismissal as ‘a fatal blow’. A mysterious illness crept up on him. He sensed its progress and blamed it on his enemies. For three years, he grovelled and cajoled, cashed in old favours, traded on his reputation, and when the new Prefect, Debelleyme, took office in 1828, he was given a job in the archives, but lower down the hierarchy. After serving the state for forty years, he found himself, at the age of sixty-eight, in the position of a junior clerk.
It was then that the confession arrived from England. With his encyclopedic eye, Peuchet saw in those sheets of paper a priceless gem. The confession showed what could happen when a population was not properly policed. It also contained certain details that reminded him of his own predicament. He took copious and precise notes and added them to the enormous pile of documents at his home.
By now, he was working night and day, converting the raw material into prose. But his enemies, too, were hard at work. Peuchet was rumoured to be suffering from a mental illness. He was a threat to national security. He should be sent away to die a harmless death.
With each attack on his reputation, he felt his illness gain in strength. He began to use the book he was writing as a diary, which is not a good sign in a historian, unless perhaps he felt that his own truth was part of the bigger picture. The last pages of his manuscript contained some terrible notes:
Today I am in so much pain that I thought I might throw myself into the Seine, if I had the strength.
Today, 5th March 1830, the eve of my birthday, I feel so sick and disheartened that I am setting down my pen to start again later, if ever I can clamber out of this abyss.
A few months later, death released him from physical pain, but it came with the gloating face of his enemies. At least he had the consolation of knowing that his work was practically complete–which was just as well, because, forty years later, the Préfecture de Police went up in flames, torched by the anarchists of the Paris Commune. In the space of a few hours, the archival evidence of five hundred years of Parisian history–including the signed confession–disappeared into the skies above the Île de la Cité.
PEUCHET HAD left his wife with a civil servant’s pension and an embryonic magnum opus that was crying out for publication. Publishers came a-courting with their contracts. After several years of indecision, Peuchet’s widow sold the manuscript to Alphonse Levavasseur, who had published Balzac’s first book.
Peuchet’s style was a little dry for modern tastes but his tales of conspiracy and murder, despite apparently being true, were highly marketable. Levavasseur assured the widow that her husband’s memory would be well served and did what any reasonable publisher would have done: he hired a fluent processor of texts who could turn the swathes of documentation into tidy tales. Since retiring from the civil service, Baron Lamothe-Langon had specialized in writing the memoirs of people who never wrote their memoirs. His publications included the six–volume Memoirs of the Comtesse du Barry, Written by Herself, the Recollections of Leonard, Hairdresser of Marie-Antoinette, and several multi–volume novels such as The Vampire, or the Virgin of Hungary and The Hermit of the Mysterious Tomb. The Baron’s memorable description of epic witch-burnings in fourteenth-century France (in his well-received History of the Inquisition in France) gave histo
rians a seriously skewed impression of the period until it was shown, in 1972, to be a complete fabrication.
The Baron left most of Peuchet’s writing intact but went to town on some of the tales, especially the confession. He added dialogues and saucy details to please the novel-reading public. The confession finally saw print ten years after it was dictated to the priest in England, tarted up and travestied, and reeking of implausibility. It can be found in the fifth volume of Mémoires Tirés des Archives de la Police de Paris, by J. Peuchet, Police Archivist (1838). The Baron’s name does not appear on the title page, which is why Jacques Peuchet is often described by historians, who are forced to use the Mémoires instead of the incinerated archives, as a hack writer, a fantasist and a forger.
Extracts from the book were reprinted in magazines and miscellanies. In 1848, Karl Marx read the chapter on suicide and abortion and misquoted it to make Peuchet sound like a Marxist. The confession, titled ‘The Diamond of Vengeance’, was read by a popular novelist, who found it ‘ridiculous’ but captivating. ‘In that oyster’, he wrote, ‘I saw a pearl–a rough pearl, without shape or value, but a pearl that merely required the hand of a jeweller’. He took the plot and turned it into a magnificent, rambling and fantastic tale in a hundred and seventeen chapters. That pearl was The Count of Monte-Cristo.
The pearl, of course, was the work of Alexandre Dumas. He used the basic elements of the plot and threw away the oyster, which has lain ever since on the rubbish-heap of literary history. But perhaps, if that remnant of a lost confession could be purged of the Baron’s elaborations, and subjected to a test of historical plausibility, it might yet reveal a corner of that ‘mysterious tableau’ to which Peuchet devoted the last years of his life.
1
IN 1807, A BLIND MAN tapping his way through the muddle of streets between the Seine and Les Halles might briefly have imagined himself hundreds of miles away in the South of France. Migrant workers always settled in certain districts where they could speak their own language and eat the food of their region. The Sainte-Opportune quartier near the central markets had a thriving colony of Catholic migrants from Nîmes. In Nîmes, all the best jobs went to Protestants, but in Paris, a man could make a living regardless of his religion. If he fell on hard times, the network of relatives and compatriots would ensure that he never starved. Naturally, those crowded urban villages were not the cosy havens outsiders imagined them to be: they magnified the petty rivalries of provincial towns, where one family’s gain was another’s loss. But it was better for a man to know his neighbours than to cast himself blindly into that ocean of humanity.
Each migrant community had its café, which served as a meeting place. As such, they were well known to the police, and any café owner who cared about his profits made sure that he was on good terms with the local commissaire. The café of the Nîmois community stood in a street near the Place Sainte-Opportune, close to the central markets. On the day in question (Sunday, 15 February 1807), the owner of the café, Mathieu Loupian, was listening to the gossip even more attentively than usual.
A cobbler from Nîmes called François Picaud, a handsome and hard-working young man, had come to share his good news with the café regulars. He had just become engaged to a local girl, Marguerite de Vigoroux, who was, according to the Mémoires, ‘fresh as a daisy, comely and alluring’ and in any case endowed with the kind of beauty that comes from having a large dowry. Picaud’s compatriots concealed their envy and congratulated him on his astounding good fortune. With twenty thousand cobblers in Paris competing for oneand-a-half million feet, it was not often that a simple cobbler made such a good marriage. When Picaud left the café, Loupian and the regulars did what a bridegroom’s acquaintances were supposed to do: they tried to think of a way to make the lucky man’s last days as a bachelor as uncomfortable as could be.
Apart from Loupian, there were three men in the café that Sunday. Their names (unknown to the cobbler at the time) were Antoine Allut, Gervais Chaubard and Guilhem Solari. None of these men can be identified with certainty, but the names are worth mentioning as a mark of the tale’s authenticity. All of them were found in the region of Nîmes, but not so frequently as to be glaringly typical.
It was Loupian himself who came up with the best idea. He called it ‘a little prank’. They would tell the commissaire de police that Picaud was an English spy, then chortle merrily while Picaud tried to talk his way out of a police cell in time for his wedding. This struck Chaubard and Solari as an excellent scheme, but Antoine Allut refused to have anything to do with it. It seems his motives were sensible rather than honourable. He must have known the danger of toying with the police and was afraid that Picaud would fail to share the joke. He also suspected the café owner of having designs on Marguerite: Loupian had lost his first wife and was looking for another; the comely Marguerite would make a splendid dame de comptoir, enthroned on a red velvet chair in front of a gilded mirror, arranging sugar-lumps on the saucers, giving orders to the garçons and flirting with the customers. A girl like that was worth several thousand francs a year.
Allut was right to be wary. Yet he did nothing to warn Picaud. He left the café and went home to mind his own business. At least his conscience was clear.
IN THOSE DAYS, police commissaires were professional writers. They concocted dramas and novelettes, the success of which was determined, not by happy audiences and good reviews, but by a prison sentence or an execution. That afternoon, the commissaire of the 13th quartier closed the door to his waiting room and cleared a space among the licences and passports and confiscated song-sheets. He sat down with just a few details–cobbler, Catholic, Nîmois, possible English spy, a name sufficiently unremarkable to be an alias–and by the time the sun set over the city, he had in front of him the masterful revelation of a plot to overthrow the Empire. Even if Loupian was wrong about the English spy, cobblers were a notoriously troublesome breed. They suffered from liver complaints (too much sitting), which gave them melancholia, and from constipation (same cause), which made them disgruntled and politically active. As anyone who had lived through the Revolution knew, cobblers were always looking for trouble.
The commissaire sent his report to the Minister of Police, who was mulling over the news from the west of France. Since 1804, there had been fresh stirrings in the Vendée. British ships were occasionally seen off the coast. Spies had reported links between the rebels of the West and the royalists of the South. In the Minister’s clockwork mind, the details slotted into the grander scheme. In Nîmes, noble Catholic émigrés had returned from English exile to find the Protestants still in power. They were dangerously disillusioned with Napoleon. Now, while the Emperor was away fighting in Prussia, a web of sedition was being stretched from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coast.
It mattered little whether the commissaire’s intelligence was reliable and true in every detail. There was either a doubt or there was none. In this case, there was a doubt. Even if he was innocent, Picaud was guilty of having been denounced. And there were sufficient similarities between François Picaud and a previously untraceable suspect by the name of Joseph Lucher to warrant immediate action.
That night, men came for the cobbler and took him away without disturbing the neighbours. For the next two months, Marguerite de Vigoroux made frantic enquiries, but no one knew or no one could tell her what had happened to her fiancé. Like so many people in those turbulent times, Picaud had vanished without rhyme or reason. Loupian, who was one of the last to have seen him, consoled Marguerite as best he could. Given the slightly unexpected turn of events, it would have been madness to confess to the commissaire. Only a lunatic would try to save a falling man by jumping off the cliff after him. And perhaps, after all, the police had known something about Picaud?
Two years passed with neither news nor rumour. Then, one day, Marguerite dried her tears and married Loupian. With her dowry and the profits from the café, they were able to leave the old neighbourhood with its sad memories
and its thrifty customers. In a bright new quartier, life could begin again. All those faces and carriages passing on the boulevard, the officers playing cards and the ladies sipping lemonade, the daily panorama of a great city, would make it easy to forget the past.
2
BEYOND THE PEAKS that mark the border of France and Italy, in one of the most desolate valleys of the Cottian Alps, the fortress-complex of Fenestrelle clings like a parasite to an almost vertical crag. Its bastions once blocked the road that led to France–if a trackless, rubble-strewn ravine could be called a road. According to scholars of the time, the name Fenestrelle means either ‘little windows’ ( finestrelle) or ‘end of the earth’ ( finis terrae). Both interpretations are appropriate. From the courtyard of the lower fort, a prisoner could watch the eagles soar over the snowy wastes and trace with his eye the Great Wall of the Alps that climbs for two miles along Mount Orsiera. Inside, with the hangings pulled across the window, he could hear the howling of the wind and the wolves. This Siberia of Italy was a wretched place to live and die, and it would have been hard to explain, other than by insanity or deep religious conviction, why the old man who was preparing for his final journey that day in January 1814 had a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.
Fenestrelle was one of the strongest links in Napoleon’s chain of prisons. Instead of rebuilding the Bastille, ‘that palace of vengeance’, as Voltaire had called it, ‘where crime and innocence alike are locked away’, he used the fortresses that had survived the Revolution: Ham in the north, Saumur on the Loire, the Château d’If in the Bay of Marseille. These were the Bastilles of the new age: capacious, impregnable and a long way from Paris. Fenestrelle itself was like a human anthology of the last ten years of empire. Napoleon occasionally wrote to his brother Joseph, King of Naples: ‘You may send to Fenestrelle all whom you find troublesome’ (February 1806); ‘None but abbés or Englishmen are to be sent thither’ (March 1806); ‘I have given orders to arrest all Corsicans in the pay of England. I have already sent many to Fenestrelle’ (October 1807). In Fenestrelle, hired thugs from the slums of Naples rubbed shoulders with Roman nobility; bishops and cardinals who had refused to take the oath to the French Republic held clandestine masses with spies and assassins as the altar boys.