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I could not help, however, being uneasy at this espionnage, when the least common sense was sufficient to see that flight was now my only object. They tried to alarm me about the arrival of my Russian passport; they pretended that I might have to wait several months for it and that then the war would prevent me from passing.
It is true that madame had her own system for managing and regulating this mass of machinery; and a very pretty system it was: the reader has seen a specimen of it in that small affair of turning my pocket inside out and reading my private memoranda. Surveillance, espionnage, these were her watchwords.
Bluebell started, vexed at being observed, and also at this proof of espionnage on her actions, but a little later she fell into more serious self betrayal. They were trying over songs in a locked manuscript book. "Dear me, what is this air? I know it so well," she cried, incautiously humming it. "A sea song of my cousin, Harry Dutton's. I had no idea any one else possessed a copy."
The boys at one Catholic school described by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, "are never without surveillance of some sort." A more degraded and degrading life than that of the wretched pion, it is impossible to imagine. In an English private school, the system of espionnage and tale bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike what Mr. Anstey describes in Vice Versa.
A man sent by force out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish for domestic affections interrupted such a man, I think, I could dare warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of the present French Directory.
There must have been some unusual cause for so much personal espionnage, and, at length, I came to the following conclusion on the subject. I had heard that church government, among the puritans, descended into all the details of life; that it was a part of their religious duty to watch over each other, jog the memories of the delinquents, and serve God by ferreting out vice.
M. de Sommerive, however, who soon discovered that he was an object of espionnage, became so much exasperated that, having on one occasion encountered the royal confidant at a convenient moment for the purpose, he drew his sword and attacked him so vigorously that his intended victim was compelled to save himself by flight.
For eighteen long years he retained the power, which he had acquired through perjury and violence, by pandering to the baser passions of his subjects, and by an organized system of fraud, mendacity, and espionnage. Beneath his blighting rule French women only sought to surpass each other in reckless extravagance, and Frenchmen lost the courage which had half redeemed their frivolity.
This was all the residence I wished in Paris, in the state of distrust and espionnage which had begun to be established, and I confess I cannot see what inconsistency there would have been in the first consul allowing me to remain in this state of voluntary exile.
It was only this second departure which gave the hint to the police of the prefect of the Leman: so true it is, that to the other qualities of espionnage we must still add stupidity. Fortunately my mother was already far beyond the reach of the gendarmes, and she could continue the journey of which the narrative follows. Passage through Austria; 1812.
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