'From a month to six weeks.'
'That is a terribly long time.'
'My action is being settled in Russia . I should not \Yonder if it is thanks to that that I am leaving France.'
'How so?'
'A week ago Rothschild told mi.' that Kiselev spoke ill of me.
Probably the Petersburg government wishes to hush up the business ; I dare say the ambassador has asked for my expulsion as a favour.'
'D'abord,' observed the offended patriot of the Prefecture, assuming an air of dignity and profound conviction, 'France will not permit any other government to interfere in her domestic affairs. l am surprised that such an idea could enter your head.
BPsides, what can be more natural than that the govl'rnment, which is doing its utmost to restore or<ler to thP suffering people, should exercise its right to remove from the country, in which
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there is so much inflammable material, foreigners who abuse the hospitality she grants them?'
I determined to get at him by money. This was as sure a method as the use of texts from the Gospel in discussion with a Catholic, and so I answered with a smile:
'For the hospitality of Paris I have paid a hundred thousand francs, and so I considered I had almost settled my account.'
This was even more successful than my somme ronde. He was embarrassed, and saying after a brief pause, 'What can we do? It is our duty,' he took my dossier from the table. This was the second volume of the novel, the first part of which I had once seen in the hands of Dubelt. Stroking the pages, as though they were good horses, with his plump hand:
'Now look,' he observed, 'your connections, your association with ill-disposed journals' (almost word for word what Sakhtynsky had said to me in 1 840) , 'and finally the considerable subventions which you have given to the most pernicious enterprises, have compelled us to resort to a very unpleasant but necessary step. That step can be no surprise to you. Even in your own country you brought political persecution upon yourself.
Like causes lead to like results.'
'I am certain,' I said, 'that the Emperor Nicholas himself has no suspicion of this solidarity; you cannot really approve of his administration.'
'Un bon citoyen respects the laws of his country, whatever they may be. . . . '
'Probably on the celebrated principle that it is in any case better there should be bad weather than no weather at all.'
'But to prove to you that the Russian government has no hand in it, I promise to try to get the Prefect to grant a postponement for one month. You will surely not think it strange if we make inquiries of Rothschild concerning your business; it is not so much a question of doubting. . . .'
'Do by all means make inquiries. We are at war, and if it had been of any use for me to have resorted to stratagem in order to remain, do you suppose I should not have employed it?'
But this nice alter ego of the Prefect, this man of the world, would not be outdone.
'People who talk l ike you never say what is untrue,' he replied.
A month later my business was still not completed. We were visited by an old doctor, Palmier, whose agreeable duty it was to make a weekly examination of an interesting class of Parisian women at the Prefecture. Since he gave such a number of certificates of health to the fair sex, I thought he would not refuse to
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write me out a certificate of sickness. Palmier was acquainted, of course, with everyone in the Prefecture: he promised me to give X. personally the history of my indisposition. To my extreme surprise Palmier came back without a satisfactory answer. Tills trait is worth noting because there is in it a fraternal similarity between the Russian and French bureaucracies. X. had given no answer but had shuffled, being offended at my not having come in person to inform him that I was ill, in bed, and unable to get up. There was no help for it: I went next day to the Prefecture,
·
glowing with health.
X. asked me most sympathetically about my illness. As I had not had the curiosity to read what the doctor had written, I had to invent an illness. Luckily I remembered Sazonov who, with his great corpulence and insatiable appetite, complained of aneurism. I told X. that I had heart disease and travelling might be very bad for me.
X. was sorry to hear it, and advised me to take care of myself; then he went into the next room, and returned a minute later, saying:
'You may stay for another month. The Prefect has charged me to tell you at the same time that he hopes and desires that your health may be restored during that period; if this should not be so, he would greatly regret it, for he cannot postpone your departure a third time.'
I understood this, and made ready to leave Paris about the 20th of June.
I came across the name of X. once more a year later. This patriot and bon citorcn had noiselessly withdrawn from France, forgetting to account for some thousands of francs belonging to people who were not well off, or even poor, who had taken tickets in a Californian lottery mn under the patronage of the Prefecture !
When the worthy citizen saw that for all his respect for the laws of his country he might find himself in the galleys for swindling, he decided that he preferred a steamer, and went to Genoa. He was a consistent person and although he had failed he did not lose his head. He took advantage of the notoriety he had acquired from the scandal of the Californian lottery and at once offered his services to a society of speculators that had been formed at that time at Turin for building railways ; since he was such a trustworthy man the society hastened to accept his services.
The last two months I spent in Paris were insufferable. I was literally garde a vue; my letters arrived shamelessly unsealed and a day late ; wherever I went I was followed at a distance by
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a loathsome individual, who at the corners passed me on with a vvink to another.
It must not be forgotten that this was the time of the most frenzied activity of the police. The stupid conservatives and revolutionaries of the Algiers-Lamartine persuasion helped the rogues and knaves surrounding Napoleon, and Napoleon himself, to prepare a network of espionage and surveillance, in order that, by spreading it over the whole of France, they might at any given minute reach out by telegraph from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Elvsee and catch all the active forces in the country and strangle them. Napoleon cleverly used the weapon entrusted to him against these men themselves. The 2nd of December meant the elevation of the police to the rank of a state authority.
There has never a nywhere, even in Austria or in Russia, been such a political police as existed in France after the time of the Convention. There are many causes for this, apart from the peculiar national bent for a police. Except in England, where the police have nothing in common with Continental espionage, the police are everywhere surrounded by hostile elements and consequently thrown on their own resources. In France, on the contrary, tht> police is the most popular institution. Whatever government seizes power, its police is ready; part of the population will help it with a zest and a fanaticism which have to be restrained and not intensified, and will help it, too, with all the frightful means at the disposal of private persons which are impossible for the police. Where can a man hide from his shopkeeper, his concierge, his tailor, his washenvoman, his butcher, his sister's husband or his brother's wife, especially i n Paris, where people do not live in separate houses as they do in London, but in something like cora l reefs or hives with a common staircase, a common courtyard and a common concierge?