Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (7 page)

16 October 1793

The view from the Place de la Révolution (formerly Place de LouisXV) was one of the finest in Paris. The afternoon sun shone through the trees on the Champs-Élysées and bathed the square in deep shadows and pink light–which is why the face of Charlotte Corday appeared to blush when her head was shown to the crowd. The phenomenon, observed by several thousand people, gave rise to an official scientific enquiry into the question of sensory survival, and, since Mlle Corday had dressed herself nicely in the manner of her native Caen, it started a fashion for lacy Norman bonnets.

The men and women who were taken to the square in open carts showed astounding calm. For all the ferocious, gloating rhetoric of the sans-culottes, there is scarcely a single account of an aristocrat disgracing herself with a cowardly display. The words of those who stood ten feet above the square and looked about them at the scene of chaos contained by uniformed soldiers and by the very architecture of the city are almost universally impressive:

They came in tumbrels from the Conciergerie, across the river, and along the Rue Saint-Honoré. It was a journey of about two miles. Some of them, as they descended from the cart and climbed the wooden steps, knew for the first time in their lives exactly where they were, and how they had got there. At the end of her ride through Paris, Mme Roland asked for pen and ink so as to record the last moments of her journey, and ‘to consign to paper the discoveries she had made on the way from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution’.

Though she seemed to commune silently with herself and to concentrate on her courage, the Queen at times appeared to become observant of her surroundings. Several witnesses saw her studying the revolutionary inscriptions on the walls, and the tricolour flags that flew from windows. She would have heard the noonday cannon in the Palais-Royal. As the cart turned off the Rue Saint-Honoré and into the square, she was seen to look across the gardens towards the Tuileries Palace. ‘Signs of deep emotion’ were noted on her face by the official reporter.

From that vantage point, the city had an almost providential air. Several of Verniquet’s principal triangulation points were visible from the Place de la Révolution, and several more if the observer was on a platform: the dome of the Tuileries, the north tower of Saint-Sulpice and the summit of Montmartre. By some inexplicable design, the curve of the Seine appeared to have been straightened, so that the eye might have traced an uninterrupted line along the palace walls and the river to the hills beyond the city. The colonnades of the Tuileries, the tall houses that ran away to the east and the billowing architecture of clouds that rested on the rooftops made it possible to imagine that what had seemed a chaos created by the centuries was in fact a model of the heavenly city. From the centre of the square, one could see a long way and be seen from a great distance. A man who was standing that day in front of the Tuileries Palace, and who, hearing the noise of the crowd, climbed onto the pedestal of a statue, quite distinctly saw the blade of the guillotine fall, at a distance of almost half a mile.

I
T ENDED SOME WHERE IN
England in 1828. An elderly man lay in bed, dying of an illness that left his mind clear enough to feel the weight of sin that clung to his immortal soul. Beside the bed, a French Catholic priest sat at a writing desk with a sheaf of paper. A scene like this suggests Soho, where most French exiles and expatriates lived. The abbé P…(only his initial is known) would have heard dozens of death-bed confessions in which the recent history of France was twisted up in personal tales of loss and betrayal, but this man’s tale was long and twisted even by the standards of exile. Fortunately, the story had told itself in his head so many times that the dictation was quite straightforward.

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:

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.

P
EUCHET 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 historians 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

I
N
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.