"Madame Lewrie alluded to many royalistes escaping Toulon on 'her husband's ship,' she said, citoyen, though the only one she gave name to was a Vicomtesse Maubeuge… her former… ward, I believe Madame Lewrie said," Charitй easily recalled.
"Citoyenne Phoebe Aretino… hmm," Fouchй said with a grunt of displeasure. "Corsican, oui. Of noble birth? Non. A common putain in Toulon, as I recall. There is a dossier," Fouchй said with an idle wave of one hand. "An avid supporter of the Revolution in Toulon had no reason to flee. Service the invaders' officers, for they were the only ones with money at the time, but… did Citoyenne Aretino deny any of the accusations?"
"No, citoyen," Charitй told him, shifting uncomfortably on her hard chair. She'd come to warn the authorities and to get vengeance on the bastard who'd slaughtered her kin and ruined her plans for revolt, but… Charitй hadn't planned on sending anyone else to prison-or the guillotine! "She seemed very upset by the confrontation, but… after, she… I asked her, not in so many words, n'est-ce pas? Mada-… Citoyenne Aretino seemed… wistful. La tristesse? A woman can see the look of a former lover who is still fond… "
"Womanly intuition," Fouchй sarcastically said with a sneer.
"In this instance, oui, citoyen, I am sure she was once Lewrie's mistress, or lover," Charitй could firmly state. "But so many years ago, surely… "
"You have given me some things to look into, citoyenne" Fouchй told her, making more pencilled notes.
"I failed the Revolution, Citoyen Fouchй," Charitй declared with a clever bit of frankness, and a becoming sniff into a handkerchief drawn from her left dress sleeve. "I truly did believe that I killed him with my shot. I am ashamed to confess my failure, one that puts you to extra work."
Fouchй tilted his shiny head to one side and peered at her for a long moment, unsure whether to laugh out loud at her pretensions as a patriot, and her theatricality. "I will look into this… Lewrie person's presence in Paris, citoyenne," he said at last. "I thank you for your honesty and your alacrity in bringing this matter before me. Perhaps it is nothing, yet… for the safety of the Republic, and the First Consul, enquiries must be made. Is that all, Citoyenne de Guilleri?"
"It is, citoyen Fouchй, merci et au revoir" Charitй said with a sense of relief as she rose from her chair and escaped from the foul spider's immediate grasp… though not his web, for it spanned all of France. In the heady early days, the French newspapers that reached New Orleans had limned Fouchй in her pantheon of heroes with men such as Marat, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the other brilliant lions of the Jacobins, people she wished to emulate. It was only once she got to Paris and met some of those rare, surviving revolutionaries that Charitй had had the scales torn from her eyes. Joseph Fouchй was an ice-hearted executioner, plain and simple, and no coquetry, no beauty or grace, no flattery could make an impression upon him.
She would love it if Fouchй found cause to arrest Lewrie as a spy, to hunt him down, fetch him into court in chains, and put his head on the block, ready to be shorn and tumbled into the basket at last.
Yet Charitй already rued her coming to Fouchй if Mlle. Phoebe Aretino was swept up as a reactionary, a secret royaliste traitor to the Revolution, perhaps even now in league with her former lover, the Anglais spy! Charitй intellectually knew of the excesses of the Reign of Terror, of the slaughter in the surf with shot, bayonet, and sword as those refugees who had not found a ship tried to flee Toulon. Three thousand men, women, and children in the space of two hours, the rumour related! And twice that number perished under Gen. Dugommier's guillotines over the next month after the city was re-taken.
But she had not been in Paris during those times, hadn't seen, heard, or smelled the holocaust, which was now mostly a bad memory to the French, uneasily shrugged off as a temporary necessity. But for men like Fouchй, it would never be over, so long as displaced aristos overseas, beyond his grasp, schemed and plotted to overthrow the Revolution and its new leaders. And there were those to aid them, in France!
"Mon Dieu, I have denounced an innocent!" Charitй whispered to herself as she reached the clean air along the banks of the Seine, recalling how lovely and petite, how vivacious and charming Mlle. Aretino was, had been whenever she'd visited her shop. Would her glorious hair be shorn at the nape, would she die under the guillotine, for nothing?
Fouchй rang a small bell on his desk to summon a clerk. There must be enquiries made about this Lewrie, even so. Laisser-passers were now
required of all foreign visitors, and this Lewrie must have one, issued by the Foreign Ministry, registered at the city gates, and noted by the municipal authorities at the Hфtel de Ville. And every concierge at every hotel or lodging house, no matter how grand or how mean, might as well be in Fouchй's employ, and this would make locating the man and his wife very easy.
Fouchй would send for information from the Ministry of Marine, as well, which kept dossiers on enemy Captains and Admirals, to see if they considered this Lewrie dangerous, beyond the scope of naval combat. He paused in his written demands, wondering if Citoyen Pouzin at the Foreign Ministry, a spymaster and aristo hunter well known to him, might have some information; he had been in the Mediterranean in the 1790s, when the de Guilleri chit said that this Lewrie had been.
"All these enquiries I wish answered by this time tomorrow," Fouchй demanded with an even fiercer scowl. "See to it, vite, vite."
Oddly enough, at about that same time of late afternoon, Citoyen Philippe Pouzin (though no one was ever sure if that was the name he had been given at birth) was sharing a bottle of brandy with an old compatriot from his time in the Mediterranean, though with a certain well-hidden sense of distaste. Pouzin's mission to subvert the Genoese, Savoyards, and Piedmontese in order to aid Gen. Bonaparte's First Italian Campaign had been a smashing success, destroying their will to fight for the British, and buying their zeal to ally themselves with France. He and his underling spies, male and female, had even penetrated the elusive and ultra-secret Last Romans movement, which aspired to unite all Italy once more, and turn it into a world power which would re-take everything that had once been under the old Empire in the Balkans and Greece, in the Holy Land, Egypt, and North Africa. Not only penetrated the movement, but turned it to France's advantage!
For that, Pouzin had been rewarded, promoted, and allowed to be among the living as the various feuding factions of the Directory slit each others' throats and sent each other to the guillotine. He'd been overseas, like Napoleon, safe from the treacherous games. Now he held an elevated position in the spy organisation under the aegis of the Foreign Ministry, and had thickened on a rich, safe salary.
His unfortunate compatriot, however, had not been so successful, and had, if appearances were reliable judges, fallen even further than anyone but the unfortunate Job could dread.
"The West Indies, Saint Domingue, and Guadeloupe were not my areas of concern, Capitaine Choundas," said Pouzin in apology for not being cognisant of Choundas's troubles. "The undermining of the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies, the retention of Malta, and the Adriatic took all my attention at the time of the Quasi-War with the Amйricains. You have my condolences for your, ah… lack of success."