Читать книгу: «Scenes from a Courtesan's Life», страница 8

“Dat is true,” said the Baron.

“Ah, he is the greatest of the great! such another as the famous Corentin, Fouche’s right arm, who was, some say, his natural son, born while he was still a priest; but that is nonsense. Fouche knew how to be a priest as he knew how to be a Minister. Well, you will not get this man to do anything for you, you see, for less than ten thousand-franc notes – think of that. – But he will do the job, and do it well. Neither seen nor heard, as they say. I ought to give Monsieur de Saint-Germanin notice, and he will fix a time for your meeting in some place where no one can see or hear, for it is a dangerous game to play policeman for private interests. Still, what is to be said? He is a good fellow, the king of good fellows, and a man who has undergone much persecution, and for having saving his country too! – like me, like all who helped to save it.”

“Vell den, write and name de happy day,” said the Baron, smiling at his humble jest.

“And Monsieur le Baron will allow me to drink his health?” said Contenson, with a manner at once cringing and threatening.

“Shean,” cried the Baron to the gardener, “go and tell Chorge to sent me one twenty francs, and pring dem to me – ”

“Still, Monsieur le Baron, if you have no more information than you have just given me, I doubt whether the great man can be of any use to you.”

“I know off oders!” replied the Baron with a cunning look.

“I have the honor to bid you good-morning, Monsieur le Baron,” said Contenson, taking the twenty-franc piece. “I shall have the honor of calling again to tell Georges where you are to go this evening, for we never write anything in such cases when they are well managed.”

“It is funny how sharp dese rascals are!” said the Baron to himself; “it is de same mit de police as it is in buss’niss.”

When he left the Baron, Contenson went quietly from the Rue Saint-Lazare to the Rue Saint-Honore, as far as the Cafe David. He looked in through the windows, and saw an old man who was known there by the name of le Pere Canquoelle.

The Cafe David, at the corner of the Rue de la Monnaie and the Rue Saint-Honore, enjoyed a certain celebrity during the first thirty years of the century, though its fame was limited to the quarter known as that of the Bourdonnais. Here certain old retired merchants, and large shopkeepers still in trade, were wont to meet – the Camusots, the Lebas, the Pilleraults, the Popinots, and a few house-owners like little old Molineux. Now and again old Guillaume might be seen there, coming from the Rue du Colombier. Politics were discussed in a quiet way, but cautiously, for the opinions of the Cafe David were liberal. The gossip of the neighborhood was repeated, men so urgently feel the need of laughing at each other!

This cafe, like all cafes for that matter, had its eccentric character in the person of the said Pere Canquoelle, who had been regular in his attendance there since 1811, and who seemed to be so completely in harmony with the good folks who assembled there, that they all talked politics in his presence without reserve. Sometimes this old fellow, whose guilelessness was the subject of much laughter to the customers, would disappear for a month or two; but his absence never surprised anybody, and was always attributed to his infirmities or his great age, for he looked more than sixty in 1811.

“What has become of old Canquoelle?” one or another would ask of the manageress at the desk.

“I quite expect that one fine day we shall read in the advertisement-sheet that he is dead,” she would reply.

Old Canquoelle bore a perpetual certificate of his native province in his accent. He spoke of une estatue (a statue), le peuble (the people), and said ture for turc. His name was that of a tiny estate called les Canquoelles, a word meaning cockchafer in some districts, situated in the department of Vaucluse, whence he had come. At last every one had fallen into the habit of calling him Canquoelle, instead of des Canquoelles, and the old man took no offence, for in his opinion the nobility had perished in 1793; and besides, the land of les Canquoelles did not belong to him; he was a younger son’s younger son.

Nowadays old Canquoelle’s costume would look strange, but between 1811 and 1820 it astonished no one. The old man wore shoes with cut-steel buckles, silk stockings with stripes round the leg, alternately blue and white, corded silk knee-breeches with oval buckles cut to match those on his shoes. A white embroidered waistcoat, an old coat of olive-brown with metal buttons, and a shirt with a flat-pleated frill completed his costume. In the middle of the shirt-frill twinkled a small gold locket, in which might be seen, under glass, a little temple worked in hair, one of those pathetic trifles which give men confidence, just as a scarecrow frightens sparrows. Most men, like other animals, are frightened or reassured by trifles. Old Canquoelle’s breeches were kept in place by a buckle which, in the fashion of the last century, tightened them across the stomach; from the belt hung on each side a short steel chain, composed of several finer chains, and ending in a bunch of seals. His white neckcloth was fastened behind by a small gold buckle. Finally, on his snowy and powdered hair, he still, in 1816, wore the municipal cocked hat which Monsieur Try, the President of the Law Courts, also used to wear. But Pere Canquoelle had recently substituted for this hat, so dear to old men, the undignified top-hat, which no one dares to rebel against. The good man thought he owed so much as this to the spirit of the age. A small pigtail tied with a ribbon had traced a semicircle on the back of his coat, the greasy mark being hidden by powder.

If you looked no further than the most conspicuous feature of his face, a nose covered with excrescences red and swollen enough to figure in a dish of truffles, you might have inferred that the worthy man had an easy temper, foolish and easy-going, that of a perfect gaby; and you would have been deceived, like all at the Cafe David, where no one had ever remarked the studious brow, the sardonic mouth, and the cold eyes of this old man, petted by his vices, and as calm as Vitellius, whose imperial and portly stomach reappeared in him palingenetically, so to speak.

In 1816 a young commercial traveler named Gaudissart, who frequented the Cafe David, sat drinking from eleven o’clock till midnight with a half-pay officer. He was so rash as to discuss a conspiracy against the Bourbons, a rather serious plot then on the point of execution. There was no one to be seen in the cafe but Pere Canquoelle, who seemed to be asleep, two waiters who were dozing, and the accountant at the desk. Within four-and-twenty hours Gaudissart was arrested, the plot was discovered. Two men perished on the scaffold. Neither Gaudissart nor any one else ever suspected that worthy old Canquoelle of having peached. The waiters were dismissed; for a year they were all on their guard and afraid of the police – as Pere Canquoelle was too; indeed, he talked of retiring from the Cafe David, such horror had he of the police.

Contenson went into the cafe, asked for a glass of brandy, and did not look at Canquoelle, who sat reading the papers; but when he had gulped down the brandy, he took out the Baron’s gold piece, and called the waiter by rapping three short raps on the table. The lady at the desk and the waiter examined the coin with a minute care that was not flattering to Contenson; but their suspicions were justified by the astonishment produced on all the regular customers by Contenson’s appearance.

“Was that gold got by theft or by murder?”

This was the idea that rose to some clear and shrewd minds as they looked at Contenson over their spectacles, while affecting to read the news. Contenson, who saw everything and never was surprised at anything, scornfully wiped his lips with a bandana, in which there were but three darns, took his change, slipped all the coppers into his side pocket, of which the lining, once white, was now as black as the cloth of the trousers, and did not leave one for the waiter.

“What a gallows-bird!” said Pere Canquoelle to his neighbor Monsieur Pillerault.

“Pshaw!” said Monsieur Camusot to all the company, for he alone had expressed no astonishment, “it is Contenson, Louchard’s right-hand man, the police agent we employ in business. The rascals want to nab some one who is hanging about perhaps.”

It would seem necessary to explain here the terrible and profoundly cunning man who was hidden under the guise of Pere Canquoelle, as Vautrin was hidden under that of the Abbe Carlos.

Born at Canquoelles, the only possession of his family, which was highly respectable, this Southerner’s name was Peyrade. He belonged, in fact, to the younger branch of the Peyrade family, an old but impoverished house of Franche Comte, still owning the little estate of la Peyrade. The seventh child of his father, he had come on foot to Paris in 1772 at the age of seventeen, with two crowns of six francs in his pocket, prompted by the vices of an ardent spirit and the coarse desire to “get on,” which brings so many men to Paris from the south as soon as they understand that their father’s property can never supply them with means to gratify their passions. It is enough to say of Peyrade’s youth that in 1782 he was in the confidence of chiefs of the police and the hero of the department, highly esteemed by MM. Lenoir and d’Albert, the last Lieutenant-Generals of Police.

The Revolution had no police; it needed none. Espionage, though common enough, was called public spirit.

The Directorate, a rather more regular government than that of the Committee of Public Safety, was obliged to reorganize the Police, and the first Consul completed the work by instituting a Prefect of Police and a department of police supervision.

Peyrade, a man knowing the traditions, collected the force with the assistance of a man named Corentin, a far cleverer man than Peyrade, though younger; but he was a genius only in the subterranean ways of police inquiries. In 1808 the great services Peyrade was able to achieve were rewarded by an appointment to the eminent position of Chief Commissioner of Police at Antwerp. In Napoleon’s mind this sort of Police Governorship was equivalent to a Minister’s post, with the duty of superintending Holland. At the end of the campaign of 1809, Peyrade was removed from Antwerp by an order in Council from the Emperor, carried in a chaise to Paris between two gendarmes, and imprisoned in la Force. Two months later he was let out on bail furnished by his friend Corentin, after having been subjected to three examinations, each lasting six hours, in the office of the head of the Police.

Did Peyrade owe his overthrow to the miraculous energy he displayed in aiding Fouche in the defence of the French coast when threatened by what was known at the time as the Walcheren expedition, when the Duke of Otranto manifested such abilities as alarmed the Emperor? Fouche thought it probable even then; and now, when everybody knows what went on in the Cabinet Council called together by Cambaceres, it is absolutely certain. The Ministers, thunderstruck by the news of England’s attempt, a retaliation on Napoleon for the Boulogne expedition, and taken by surprise when the Master was entrenched in the island of Lobau, where all Europe believed him to be lost, had not an idea which way to turn. The general opinion was in favor of sending post haste to the Emperor; Fouche alone was bold enough to sketch a plan of campaign, which, in fact, he carried into execution.

“Do as you please,” said Cambaceres; “but I, who prefer to keep my head on my shoulders, shall send a report to the Emperor.”

It is well known that the Emperor on his return found an absurd pretext, at a full meeting of the Council of State, for discarding his Minister and punishing him for having saved France without the Sovereign’s help. From that time forth, Napoleon had doubled the hostility of Prince de Talleyrand and the Duke of Otranto, the only two great politicians formed by the Revolution, who might perhaps have been able to save Napoleon in 1813.

To get rid of Peyrade, he was simply accused of connivance in favoring smuggling and sharing certain profits with the great merchants. Such an indignity was hard on a man who had earned the Marshal’s baton of the Police Department by the great services he had done. This man, who had grown old in active business, knew all the secrets of every Government since 1775, when he had entered the service. The Emperor, who believed himself powerful enough to create men for his own uses, paid no heed to the representations subsequently laid before him in favor of a man who was reckoned as one of the most trustworthy, most capable, and most acute of the unknown genii whose task it is to watch over the safety of a State. He thought he could put Contenson in Peyrade’s place; but Contenson was at that time employed by Corentin for his own benefit.

Peyrade felt the blow all the more keenly because, being greedy and a libertine, he had found himself, with regard to women, in the position of a pastry-cook who loves sweetmeats. His habits of vice had become to him a second nature; he could not live without a good dinner, without gambling, in short, without the life of an unpretentious fine gentleman, in which men of powerful faculties so generally indulge when they have allowed excessive dissipation to become a necessity. Hitherto, he had lived in style without ever being expected to entertain; and living well, for no one ever looked for a return from him, or from his friend Corentin. He was cynically witty, and he liked his profession; he was a philosopher. And besides, a spy, whatever grade he may hold in the machinery of the police, can no more return to a profession regarded as honorable or liberal, than a prisoner from the hulks can. Once branded, once matriculated, spies and convicts, like deacons, have assumed an indelible character. There are beings on whom social conditions impose an inevitable fate.

Peyrade, for his further woe, was very fond of a pretty little girl whom he knew to be his own child by a celebrated actress to whom he had done a signal service, and who, for three months, had been grateful to him. Peyrade, who had sent for his child from Antwerp, now found himself without employment in Paris and with no means beyond a pension of twelve hundred francs a year allowed him by the Police Department as Lenoir’s old disciple. He took lodgings in the Rue des Moineaux on the fourth floor, five little rooms, at a rent of two hundred and fifty francs.

If any man should be aware of the uses and sweets of friendship, is it not the moral leper known to the world as a spy, to the mob as a mouchard, to the department as an “agent”? Peyrade and Corentin were such friends as Orestes and Pylades. Peyrade had trained Corentin as Vien trained David; but the pupil soon surpassed his master. They had carried out more than one undertaking together. Peyrade, happy at having discerned Corentin’s superior abilities, had started him in his career by preparing a success for him. He obliged his disciple to make use of a mistress who had scorned him as a bait to catch a man (see The Chouans). And Corentin at that time was hardly five-and-twenty.

Corentin, who had been retained as one of the generals of whom the Minister of Police is the High Constable, still held under the Duc de Rovigo the high position he had filled under the Duke of Otranto. Now at that time the general police and the criminal police were managed on similar principles. When any important business was on hand, an account was opened, as it were, for the three, four, five, really capable agents. The Minister, on being warned of some plot, by whatever means, would say to one of his colonels of the police force:

“How much will you want to achieve this or that result?”

Corentin or Contenson would go into the matter and reply:

“Twenty, thirty, or forty thousand francs.”

Then, as soon as the order was given to go ahead, all the means and the men were left to the judgment of Corentin or the agent selected. And the criminal police used to act in the same way to discover crimes with the famous Vidocq.

Both branches of the police chose their men chiefly from among the ranks of well-known agents, who have matriculated in the business, and are, as it were, as soldiers of the secret army, so indispensable to a government, in spite of the public orations of philanthropists or narrow-minded moralists. But the absolute confidence placed in two men of the temper of Peyrade and Corentin conveyed to them the right of employing perfect strangers, under the risk, moreover, of being responsible to the Minister in all serious cases. Peyrade’s experience and acumen were too valuable to Corentin, who, after the storm of 1820 had blown over, employed his old friend, constantly consulted him, and contributed largely to his maintenance. Corentin managed to put about a thousand francs a month into Peyrade’s hands.

Peyrade, on his part, did Corentin good service. In 1816 Corentin, on the strength of the discovery of the conspiracy in which the Bonapartist Gaudissart was implicated, tried to get Peyrade reinstated in his place in the police office; but some unknown influence was working against Peyrade. This was the reason why.

In their anxiety to make themselves necessary, Peyrade, Corentin, and Contenson, at the Duke of Otranto’s instigation, had organized for the benefit of Louis XVIII. a sort of opposition police in which very capable agents were employed. Louis XVIII. died possessed of secrets which will remain secrets from the best informed historians. The struggle between the general police of the kingdom, and the King’s opposition police, led to many horrible disasters, of which a certain number of executions sealed the secrets. This is neither the place nor the occasion for entering into details on this subject, for these “Scenes of Paris Life” are not “Scenes of Political Life.” Enough has been said to show what were the means of living of the man who at the Cafe David was known as good old Canquoelle, and by what threads he was tied to the terrible and mysterious powers of the police.

Between 1817 and 1822, Corentin, Contenson, Peyrade, and their myrmidons, were often required to keep watch over the Minister of Police himself. This perhaps explains why the Minister declined to employ Peyrade and Contenson, on whom Corentin contrived to cast the Minister’s suspicions, in order to be able to make use of his friend when his reinstatement was evidently out of the question. The Ministry put their faith in Corentin; they enjoined him to keep an eye on Peyrade, which amused Louis XVIII. Corentin and Peyrade were then masters of the position. Contenson, long attached to Peyrade, was still at his service. He had joined the force of the commercial police (the Gardes du Commerce) by his friend’s orders. And, in fact, as a result of the sort of zeal that is inspired by a profession we love, these two chiefs liked to place their best men in those posts where information was most likely to flow in.

And, indeed, Contenson’s vices and dissipated habits, which had dragged him lower than his two friends, consumed so much money, that he needed a great deal of business.

Contenson, without committing any indiscretion, had told Louchard that he knew the only man who was capable of doing what the Baron de Nucingen required. Peyrade was, in fact, the only police-agent who could act on behalf of a private individual with impunity. At the death of Louis XVIII., Peyrade had not only ceased to be of consequence, but had lost the profits of his position as spy-in-ordinary to His Majesty. Believing himself to be indispensable, he had lived fast. Women, high feeding, and the club, the Cercle des Etrangers, had prevented this man from saving, and, like all men cut out for debauchery, he enjoyed an iron constitution. But between 1826 and 1829, when he was nearly seventy-four years of age, he had stuck half-way, to use his own expression. Year by year he saw his comforts dwindling. He followed the police department to its grave, and saw with regret that Charles X.‘s government was departing from its good old traditions. Every session saw the estimates pared down which were necessary to keep up the police, out of hatred for that method of government and a firm determination to reform that institution.

“It is as if they thought they could cook in white gloves,” said Peyrade to Corentin.

In 1822 this couple foresaw 1830. They knew how bitterly Louis XVIII. hated his successor, which accounts for his recklessness with regard to the younger branch, and without which his reign would be an unanswerable riddle.

As Peyrade grew older, his love for his natural daughter had increased. For her sake he had adopted his citizen guise, for he intended that his Lydie should marry respectably. So for the last three years he had been especially anxious to find a corner, either at the Prefecture of Police, or in the general Police Office – some ostensible and recognized post. He had ended by inventing a place, of which the necessity, as he told Corentin, would sooner or later be felt. He was anxious to create an inquiry office at the Prefecture of Police, to be intermediate between the Paris police in the strictest sense, the criminal police, and the superior general police, so as to enable the supreme board to profit by the various scattered forces. No one but Peyrade, at his age, and after fifty-five years of confidential work, could be the connecting link between the three branches of the police, or the keeper of the records to whom political and judicial authority alike could apply for the elucidation of certain cases. By this means Peyrade hoped, with Corentin’s assistance, to find a husband and scrape together a portion for his little Lydie. Corentin had already mentioned the matter to the Director-General of the police forces of the realm, without naming Peyrade; and the Director-General, a man from the south, thought it necessary that the suggestion should come from the chief of the city police.

At the moment when Contenson struck three raps on the table with the gold piece, a signal conveying, “I want to speak to you,” the senior was reflecting on this problem: “By whom, and under what pressure can the Prefet of Police be made to move?” – And he looked like a noodle studying his Courrier Francais.

“Poor Fouche!” thought he to himself, as he made his way along the Rue Saint-Honore, “that great man is dead! our go-betweens with Louis XVIII. are out of favor. And besides, as Corentin said only yesterday, nobody believes in the activity or the intelligence of a man of seventy. Oh, why did I get into a habit of dining at Very’s, of drinking choice wines, of singing La Mere Godichon, of gambling when I am in funds? To get a place and keep it, as Corentin says, it is not enough to be clever, you must have the gift of management. Poor dear M. Lenoir was right when he wrote to me in the matter of the Queen’s necklace, ‘You will never do any good,’ when he heard that I did not stay under that slut Oliva’s bed.”

If the venerable Pere Canquoelle – he was called so in the house – lived on in the Rue des Moineaux, on a fourth floor, you may depend on it he had found some peculiarity in the arrangement of the premises which favored the practice of his terrible profession.

The house, standing at the corner of the Rue Saint-Roch, had no neighbors on one side; and as the staircase up the middle divided it into two, there were on each floor two perfectly isolated rooms. Those two rooms looked out on the Rue Saint-Roch. There were garret rooms above the fourth floor, one of them a kitchen, and the other a bedroom for Pere Canquoelle’s only servant, a Fleming named Katt, formerly Lydie’s wet-nurse. Old Canquoelle had taken one of the outside rooms for his bedroom, and the other for his study. The study ended at the party-wall, a very thick one. The window opening on the Rue des Moineaux looked on a blank wall at the opposite corner. As this study was divided from the stairs by the whole width of Peyrade’s bedroom, the friends feared no eye, no ear, as they talked business in this study made on purpose for his detestable trade.

Peyrade, as a further precaution, had furnished Katt’s room with a thick straw bed, a felt carpet, and a very heavy rug, under the pretext of making his child’s nurse comfortable. He had also stopped up the chimney, warming his room by a stove, with a pipe through the wall to the Rue Saint-Roch. Finally, he laid several rugs on his floor to prevent the slightest sound being heard by the neighbors beneath. An expert himself in the tricks of spies, he sounded the outer wall, the ceiling, and the floor once a week, examining them as if he were in search of noxious insects. It was the security of this room from all witnesses or listeners that had made Corentin select it as his council-chamber when he did not hold a meeting in his own room.

Where Corentin lived was known to no one but the Chief of the Superior Police and to Peyrade; he received there such personages as the Ministry or the King selected to conduct very serious cases; but no agent or subordinate ever went there, and he plotted everything connected with their business at Peyrade’s. In this unpretentious room schemes were matured, and resolutions passed, which would have furnished strange records and curious dramas if only walls could talk. Between 1816 and 1826 the highest interests were discussed there. There first germinated the events which grew to weigh on France. There Peyrade and Corentin, with all the foresight, and more than all the information of Bellart, the Attorney-General, had said even in 1819: “If Louis XVIII. does not consent to strike such or such a blow, to make away with such or such a prince, is it because he hates his brother? He must wish to leave him heir to a revolution.”

Peyrade’s door was graced with a slate, on which very strange marks might sometimes be seen, figures scrawled in chalk. This sort of devil’s algebra bore the clearest meaning to the initiated.

Lydie’s rooms, opposite to Peyrade’s shabby lodging, consisted of an ante-room, a little drawing-room, a bedroom, and a small dressing-room. The door, like that of Peyrade’s room, was constructed of a plate of sheet-iron three lines thick, sandwiched between two strong oak planks, fitted with locks and elaborate hinges, making it as impossible to force it as if it were a prison door. Thus, though the house had a public passage through it, with a shop below and no doorkeeper, Lydie lived there without a fear. The dining-room, the little drawing-room, and her bedroom – every window-balcony a hanging garden – were luxurious in their Dutch cleanliness.

The Flemish nurse had never left Lydie, whom she called her daughter. The two went to church with a regularity that gave the royalist grocer, who lived below, in the corner shop, an excellent opinion of the worthy Canquoelle. The grocer’s family, kitchen, and counter-jumpers occupied the first floor and the entresol; the landlord inhabited the second floor; and the third had been let for twenty years past to a lapidary. Each resident had a key of the street door. The grocer’s wife was all the more willing to receive letters and parcels addressed to these three quiet households, because the grocer’s shop had a letter-box.

Without these details, strangers, or even those who know Paris well, could not have understood the privacy and quietude, the isolation and safety which made this house exceptional in Paris. After midnight, Pere Canquoelle could hatch plots, receive spies or ministers, wives or hussies, without any one on earth knowing anything about it.

Peyrade, of whom the Flemish woman would say to the grocer’s cook, “He would not hurt a fly!” was regarded as the best of men. He grudged his daughter nothing. Lydie, who had been taught music by Schmucke, was herself a musician capable of composing; she could wash in a sepia drawing, and paint in gouache and water-color. Every Sunday Peyrade dined at home with her. On that day this worthy was wholly paternal.

Lydie, religious but not a bigot, took the Sacrament at Easter, and confessed every month. Still, she allowed herself from time to time to be treated to the play. She walked in the Tuileries when it was fine. These were all her pleasures, for she led a sedentary life. Lydie, who worshiped her father, knew absolutely nothing of his sinister gifts and dark employments. Not a wish had ever disturbed this pure child’s pure life. Slight and handsome like her mother, gifted with an exquisite voice, and a delicate face framed in fine fair hair, she looked like one of those angels, mystical rather than real, which some of the early painters grouped in the background of the Holy Family. The glance of her blue eyes seemed to bring a beam from the sky on those she favored with a look. Her dress, quite simple, with no exaggeration of fashion, had a delightful middle-class modesty. Picture to yourself an old Satan as the father of an angel, and purified in her divine presence, and you will have an idea of Peyrade and his daughter. If anybody had soiled this jewel, her father would have invented, to swallow him alive, one of those dreadful plots in which, under the Restoration, the unhappy wretches were trapped who were designate to die on the scaffold. A thousand crowns were ample maintenance for Lydie and Katt, whom she called nurse.

As Peyrade turned into the Rue des Moineaux, he saw Contenson; he outstripped him, went upstairs before him, heard the man’s steps on the stairs, and admitted him before the woman had put her nose out of the kitchen door. A bell rung by the opening of a glass door, on the third story where the lapidary lived warned the residents on that and the fourth floors when a visitor was coming to them. It need hardly be said that, after midnight, Peyrade muffled this bell.