Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

Yet I am changed. From being the cheapest life in France, suddenly I am the most valuable. I have made myself the guardian of the greatest secrets of Europe, in these dossiers in your coffin. And then there is the dossier of Kinnaird: the invented Kinnaird, and now the Kinnaird who has reinvented himself. The core of a network of escape and espionage to confound the Revolution. I have remade myself, and at last I have made myself a life worth saving.

  ‘yours, H. Greene’.

  You were no one’s, ever. Were you, Hal?

  He beckoned to the trees, and two men emerged, silent acquaintances from the camp of the outcasts, men whose whole ancestry had lived below the regard of other men, and moved unnoticed.

  But one last time, Hal, we may pretend.

  Together, and with the care of men who live closer to the earth and what is in it, they buried the body once again.

  H. GREENE. Back on the cart, Kinnaird looked down at the now empty coffin. Efficient to the last, the Ministry of the Interior had scrawled the name in pencil on the lid. The man had gone, and in truth the reality of him had long become a thing to be rumoured, and doubted.

  The dawn was fully come. Kinnaird patted his pockets to check he had what he needed, and settled back with the rough timber close at his shoulders, and gazed at the sky, and nodded.

  For one last time, Henry Greene – or, more precisely, the absence of Henry Greene – would serve the strange dreams of other men. In his coffin, Keith Kinnaird adjusted to the swaying, wondered at the faces that would visit him in the darkness, and began the journey home.

  Author’s Note

  The great spring of history can be turned by the smallest pinion, if the mechanism is of the right quality. After playing his part in helping to destroy the French monarchy, the locksmith Gamain returned to obscurity, and we may only speculate as to whether he prospered in accordance with his diligence and skill, and whether Madame Gamain ever moved into a satisfactory home.

  As well as the secret archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, there is substantial publicly available material recording much of the detail of the incidents of autumn 1792, including the stories of the Garde-Meuble and the Armoire de Fer. The memoirs of Mademoiselle Tourzel and Madame Campan are excellent sources for the last years and the last days of royal government, and give some indication of the bewildering business of the royal documents. The published memoirs of Talleyrand are an excellent source for Talleyrand’s view of his own greatness. Various British travellers in France published their accounts of what it was like to be a foreigner on the ground at this time, even as their government contemplated war. Generally, their reaction to the strangeness and distastefulness of what was going on sounds like that of most British travellers to France over the last couple of centuries.*

  The robbery of the Garde-Meuble was, in terms of the haul and the sheer bravado of the deed, one of the most remarkable in history. The thieves used great daring, the chaos of the times, and surely some inside information to spirit away enormous wealth in the course of their five-night escapade. Most were rapidly caught. Strangely, two of the most prominent, Joseph Douligny and Jean-Jacques Chambon, had their death sentences suspended, were given new names, and disappeared to enjoy what are said to have been long and peaceful lives.

  The story of the most prominent of the jewels is itself as extraordinary as their robbery, with all of the required romance and melodrama of stories about legendary diamonds. The Regency soon reappeared, though until now it had not been clear what had happened to it between its theft and its rediscovery by the French authorities. For more than a century it has been on public display in the Louvre, though the public can only dream of holding it as close as did Raph Benjamin. (Some, of course, may envy the jewel its proximity to the man.) The Sancy disappeared for a time; there has been reasoned speculation that Danton used one of the great jewels to bribe the Duke of Brunswick to retreat. The French Blue was always thought to have been carried to England; few journeys across the Channel can have been as pleasant as that afforded by Mademoiselle de Charette. In England, it disappeared forever. In 1812 a blue jewel that would become known as the Hope Diamond was recorded. Only recently has scientific analysis confirmed that it was cut from the French Blue, and we can but guess at the motives of policy, economy, or sheer deviousness that led the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey to manage things thus.

  Raph Benjamin’s hooliganism in St-Denis on the night of 4th September was only the first of the misadventures of the surveyors Delambre and Méchain. Their triangulation of the meridian – and thus the establishment of the new ‘metre’ – continued to be obstructed by war, revolution and imprisonment. The measurements were eventually completed in 1798. They were very slightly out.

  The commission of worthies appointed by Louis XVI to examine the claims of Mesmer looks even more impressive in hindsight. Rarely can such intellectual greatness have been applied to such a dubious question; at least they took the opportunity, as Fouché found, to move forwards the very concept of scientific enquiry. Benjamin Franklin was already a legendary statesman, scientist and inventor when he went to France, having contributed to the American Declaration of Independence; he returned to contribute to the new nation’s constitution. Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not, of course, invent the guillotine (Kinnaird might have pointed out that there’d been a similar machine in Edinburgh in the sixteenth century); nor did he die on it. But his enthusiastic advocacy of what he saw as its more humane method of execution gave the machine his name for ever. Imprisoned for sheltering royalist fugitives, he survived to become an early supporter of vaccination. Jean Sylvain Bailly, astronomer and later mayor of Paris, had helped to launch the early, moderate phase of the Revolution and then tried to obstruct its more extreme turn. Already fled from Paris by the time of the events of Treason’s Spring, he was tried and guillotined in late 1793. One of the great figures of the history of science, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier failed in his attempt to lie low and conform to the new order: eventually he was arrested with the other tax farmers, denounced by Robespierre as a traitor, and executed in 1794. ‘It took only an instant to cut off his head,’ Lagrange observed, ‘and one hundred years might not suffice to produce its like.’

  The secrets exposed when Gamain revealed to the Minister of the Interior the location of the Armoire de Fer had as much impact as the spies of France, Prussia, America and Britain had anticipated. Above all, they destroyed Louis XVI. The revelations of his dealings domestic and foreign turned rumour into fact, and within weeks he was on trial for treason. After he was overwhelmingly found guilty, 360 deputies of the National Convention voted against the death penalty or for a delay; 361 voted for immediate execution, and the King was guillotined on 21st January 1793.

  At the same time, it became clear that there were strange gaps in the royal archive. Although Talleyrand and other high-profile figures were badly tarnished, the story began to circulate that some even more significant and embarrassing material had been destroyed. This may have been true, in part: Danton was left surprisingly untainted. Or we may perceive the work of Fouché, anxious to cover up his humiliation in a royal garden at dawn; certainly his zeal about the opening of the trove served him well.

  And so the Revolution entered its most notorious phase, as successive factions tried to sustain themselves by feeding others to the mob. Interior Minister Roland found himself increasingly at odds with the bloodthirstiness of Paris and radical leaders such as Robespierre. The alleged destruction of the more embarrassing political material from the Armoire de Fer was blamed on him; he may have come to regret his caution around its opening, as well as his patronage of Fouché. After the King’s execution he resigned and fled Paris.

  His brilliant young wife did not go with him. Manon Roland assisted her husband’s escape then stayed in Paris to defend their principles, despite her increasing unpopularity and vulnerability. She and other Girondin moderates were arrested in June 1793. Still she refused to compromise,
writing her memoirs in prison until she went to the guillotine in November of that year. Truly, she had been essential to her husband. Two days later Roland burned the last of his papers and, sitting against a tree in a country lane near Rouen, pinned a note to his chest: ‘Whoever finds me lying here, respect my remains: they are those of a man who died as he lived, virtuous and honourable . . . I came out of hiding as soon as I learned that they were going to slaughter my wife; I would no longer remain in a world awash with crimes.’ Then he stabbed himself to death with a sword.

  Whatever the exact details of Danton’s dealings with the Prussians and others in 1792, they saved neither the Revolution nor himself. He helped to drive the overthrow of the Girondins in 1793, and became the elder statesman of the Revolution, shaping the new system of government while remaining aloof. Increasingly embattled by the disagreements over the direction of the Revolution and by the jostling for power within its structures, at last his prominence and style worked against him. In spring 1794 he was accused of large-scale corruption, including insider trading and the taking of enormous bribes. Fearing his enduring rhetorical power over the mob, Robespierre and his confederates rushed the trial, suppressed the right of defence, threatened jurors and had Danton executed immediately after sentence.

  Fouquier-Tinville was formally named public prosecutor for the new Revolutionary Tribunal in March 1793, and became one of the most ruthless and notorious servants of the Terror. (In The Scarlet Pimpernel, it’s Fouquier-Tinville who receives messages describing the hero’s exploits, signed only with a flower; see Kinnaird and the network de la fleur below.) He survived the initial reaction against the Terror, but was soon denounced. His defence – essentially an early outing for the claim that the servant of a vicious regime was only following orders – did not save him.

  Talleyrand’s caution – and perhaps certain arrangements with the British authorities – saved him. He stayed in England for a time, and then went to America, continuing throughout his life to combine grand diplomacy, corruption and womanizing. He returned to France in 1797 as foreign minister, and facilitated the rise of Napoleon. He continued to shape the affairs of Europe, and though not always appreciated – Napoleon once called him ‘a shit in a silk stocking’ – he survived the Emperor too.

  We may doubt that the widow Philemon of Rouen and her daughter really sailed from Le Havre in the November of ’92; we can be sure, from American records, that they never arrived in Philadelphia. History has not recorded what happened to Emma Lavalier and Lucie Gérard; but with two women so brilliantly determined to live outside the conventional patterns of history, that’s hardly surprising.

  With rare prudence – perhaps for one last time he heard the voice of Pieter Marinus – High Counsellor Karl Arnim was safely beyond the borders of France by the end of November 1792. Publicly he resumed the profile and activities expected of one of his rank. That he came out of France with his reputation intact or even enhanced, and maintained his status and presumably his shadowy influence on Prussian policy for at least two decades more, is an indication of the significance of the dossier he got from Kinnaird. As he had promised, he lived to see Paris fall.

  Perhaps Fouché was as much affected by that mad autumn as Kinnaird. His biographers have remarked a curious change of attitude near the end of 1792: a diligent moderate at the inauguration of the Convention back in September, when invited to give his verdict on the fate of the King he stood and, to the surprise of many who knew him, delivered a cold vote for death. Perhaps, having seen into the archive of the Comptrollerate-General, we can understand his vindictiveness. But what he really learned was survival. Having become notorious for the atrocities he ordered when suppressing rebels in Lyon, he fell out dramatically with Robespierre, who denounced him. On what could have become the last night of his life, Fouché criss-crossed Paris, warning, cajoling – perhaps threatening; perhaps this night was the true triumph of his meticulous intelligence work. And when the next day Robespierre delivered a long speech in the Convention condemning the excesses of men like Fouché and warning of a conspiracy, he was met with silence. He went to the guillotine two days later. Remarkably for a man so prominent in the worst excesses of the Revolution, Fouché endured.

  We saw Keith Kinnaird in the half-light, at the edge of the royal ghostland of Versailles. He never really emerged. No history of British espionage at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth could be complete without him; which is perhaps precisely why no published history mentions him. He can be glimpsed – a bony finger, a cold eye, the turned back that was Lucie’s first sight of him – throughout this section of the Comptrollerate-General archive. He developed a web of spies and supporters out of the infamous dossier, his way of inhabiting the chaos and a masterpiece of espionage management: the network de la fleur. His exploits in 1805, when Britain was within hours of invasion and defeat by Napoleon (presented as part of the material in Treason’s Tide, which also reveals the paths of certain others from this volume, including the Pinsent family), suggest that he had grown willing to try the impossible and do it, as Emma had demanded; to think the unthinkable – and to think of her.

  ________

  * The story of two in particular is an extraordinary insight on contemporary politics, scientific enquiry, medicine and espionage, and links diverse elements of Treason’s Spring in the most curious way. The radical Williams, mentioned in some of the intelligence reports included in this book, was supplanted by his companion Matthews. Despite initial progress in his apparently private attempt to negotiate with the revolutionary government, Matthews was imprisoned because of his association with the moderates. Released as a lunatic, he returned to England and, confined to Bedlam, displayed with increasing passion the signs of what would now be recognized as paranoid schizophrenia. As well as stating that he had been involved in espionage work for the British government but then abandoned by them, he declared that a gang of spies was torturing him using magnetism. He kept his own clinical notes on the man whose diagnosis was preventing him from leaving Bedlam, leading to the man’s eventual dismissal. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that the Comptrollerate-General isn’t out to get you.