8. Tales of Secret Service (17)
An Imaginary Assassination Plot
Walking on several miles farther, the Baron reached his destined goal, the village of Muzillac, where he knocked up the maire, who was in bed, and announced himself as a colonel of gendarmerie who had lost his way, his horse, and his secretary also, in the marshes. He insisted that he had no time to waste, flourished his papers before the maire, and finally requisitioned a horse and a guide. In spite of remembrances as to the hour and the weather, Kolli persisted in being served, and, after he had dried himself for an hour before the fire, found a horse and a guide ready for him. Pushing on all through the early morning hours, he reached Vannes, the chief town of the department, before midday.
There he very boldly went to the postmaster, and ordered a post-chaise to be ready in a few hours, when he should have had time to get a little rest and food. He showed his false commission from Paris, was treated with deference, and found all ready for him at the appointed moment. Just as he was about to mount his conveyance he was surprised, and rather vexed, to see Albert de St-B trail into the post-office in a miserable state of exhaustion. He had rather hoped that he had lost him for good in the marshes. However, he picked the young man up, and took him on for several stages. But finding him absolutely torpid and useless, he dropped him again at the first large town that they passed (perhaps Angers?), with orders to follow to Paris when he should have recovered.
Kolli’s rather eccentric itinerary—Vannes, Angers, Tours, and the neighbourhood of Valençay—passed unsuspected by postmasters, who only saw a colonel de gendarmerie in a furious hurry and a bad temper. He made no attempt to enter the palace where the King lay captive, but observed from the road the exits of the park and the general lie of the château. He already knew of the exact locality in the neighbourhood where the friendly house was situated, to which he was to take the King after the first moment of his evasion.
On March 14th the Baron reached Paris, via Orleans, and, after shedding his very conspicuous uniform at the house of a trusty Royalist, went to one of the business firms to which he had been given a recommendation, and pledged there part of his stock of diamonds for 30,000 francs of French paper money. The rest of his jewellery he deposited at another address in sure hands. He then took for a month a small house belonging to a market gardener in the environs of Vincennes, with a back entrance from the forest. Here he made his headquarters from March 14th to March 23rd; and here he was rejoined on the 16th by Albert de St-B, coming in a little late from Angers.
Kolli went daily into Paris, and communicated there with the persons whose names had been given to him in London, and who were warranted to him as Royalists of approved fidelity. He did not require more than six or eight helpers, and of these the majority would be exposed to little risk, as all that each of them was asked to do was to have two good saddle-horses ready on a fixed night, apparently March 25th or 26th, at certain given spots—St-Christophe, near Tours—Le Mans—Vannes. But one pair were to pick up, at the secret friendly house near Valençay, a large berline with shuttered windows, which they were to drive via Tours and Paimbœuf towards the coast of La Vendée. There would be no one inside the carriage, which was to be used merely to attract the attention of local authorities, and it was to be abandoned at some convenient place, after it had gone on for a night and a morning. By that time the Baron thought that pursuit would be in progress, and his friends had better disappear off the road and vanish.
Now, among the very few persons whom the Baron had recruited as helpers—apparently he was to be one of the men who were to be at a given spot with two saddle-horses on the night of March 26th—was a certain ex-Vendéan officer named Richard, who had served in the band of the Prince de Talmont, had been wounded more than once, and enjoyed a reputation for fearlessness among his old companions. No one doubted his absolute loyalty. Kolli drilled him well in his itinerary, but gave him no precise indications of the character of the plan in which he was to take a part. Indeed, he seems to have explained the whole scheme to nobody but Albert St-B, and the two persons who were to drive the conspicuous berline from near Valençay towards Paimbœuf.
Unfortunately for the Baron he had talked in very high and lofty tones of the importance of his plan to this Richard, using (as he confesses) very desperate language about the martyrdom of Louis XVI, the grudge which all good Royalists owed against Bonaparte—for the fusillades in Brittany, and the execution of Georges Cadoudal, etc. He remembered afterwards that his interlocutor seemed more startled than inspired to zeal. “Mes interpellations étonnaient Richard sans échauffer son âme.” And, as luck would have it, the old Vendéan conceived the idea that Kolli (like Cadoudal of old) was plotting to assassinate the Emperor, and that the relays of horses were intended to facilitate his escape to the Breton coast after the murder.
The notion of being involved in an assassination plot, with the results that had happened to Cadoudal’s accomplices, did not please Richard. He had been seen several times in the Baron’s company, and had slept at his house in Vincennes. Therefore he considered himself a marked man, whether the plot should fail or succeed. And after some days of hesitation between loyalty, silence, or betrayal, he went to the Ministry of Police, and denounced Kolli as being engaged in a plot against the life of the Emperor. He was taken before the redoubtable Fouché himself, warned of his danger, and ordered to play the part of Judas. That is, he was to rejoin Kolli at his cottage in Vincennes, and point him out to a squad of police under the celebrated Inspector Pâques, who were to arrest them simultaneously.
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