Part 8

At this rate, they would have carried me, by easy stages, to Teheran. I, therefore, gave up all hopes of my carpet. And, taking leave of these amiable functionaries, I heard the good Shah's voice crying in the distance:

"Good-bye, Paoli, worthy Paoli! Till our next meeting!"

* * * * *

I never saw him again.

IV

THE TSAR NICHOLAS II AND THE TSARITSA ALEXANDRA FEODOROVNA

1.

One morning in June, 1901, I had just reached the Ministry of the Interior and was entering my office, when a messenger came up to me and said, solemnly:

"The Prime Minister would like to speak to you at once, sir."

When a public official is sent for by his chief,[1] the first thought that flashes across his brain is that of disgrace, and he instinctively makes a rapid and silent examination of conscience to quiet his anxious mind, unless, indeed, he only ends by alarming it. Nevertheless, I admit that when I received this message, I took it philosophically. The Prime Minister, at that time, was M. Waldeck-Rousseau. It is not my business here to pass judgment on the politician; and I have retained a most pleasant recollection of the man. To attractions more purely intellectual he added a certain cordiality. He looked upon events and upon life itself from the point of view of a more or less disillusioned dilettante; and this made him at once satirical, indulgent and obliging. He honoured me with a kindly friendship, notwithstanding the fact that he used to reproach me, in his jesting way, with becoming too much of a reactionary from my contact with the monarchs of Europe and that I once took his breath away by telling him that I had dined with the Empress Eugénie at Cap Martin.

"A republican official at the Empress's table!" he cried. "You're the only man, my dear Paoli, who would dare to do such a thing. And you're the only one," he added, slily, "in whom we would stand it!"

For all that, when I entered his room on this particular morning, I was struck with his thoughtful air; and my surprise increased still further when I saw him, after shaking hands with me, himself close the door and give a glance to make sure that we were quite alone.

"You must not be astonished at these precautions," he began. "I have some news to tell you which, for reasons which you will understand as soon as you hear what the news is, must be kept secret as long as possible and you know that the walls of a ministerial office have very sharp ears. This is the news: I have just heard from the Russian ambassador and from Delcassé that the negotiations which were on foot between the two governments in view of a second visit of the Tsar and Tsaritsa are at last completed. Their Majesties will pay an official visit of three days to France. They may come to Paris; in any case, they will stay at the Château de Compiègne, where the sovereigns will take up their quarters, together with the President of the Republic and all of us. They will arrive from Russia by sea; they will land at Dunkerque on the 18th of September; and from there they will go straight by rail to Compiègne. The festivities will end with a visit to Rheims and a review of our eastern frontier troops at Bethany Camp."

The minister paused and then continued:

"And now I must ask you to listen to me very carefully. I want _no accident nor incident_ of any kind to occur during this visit. The Tsar has been made to believe that his safety and the Tsaritsa's run the greatest risks through their coming to France. It is important that we should give the lie in a striking fashion--as we did in 1896--to this bad reputation which our enemies outside are trying to give us. They are simply working against the alliance; and we have the greatest political interest in defeating their machinations. We must, therefore, take all necessary measures accordingly; and I am entrusting this task to Cavard, the chief of the detective service, Hennion, his colleague, and yourself. You are to divide the work among you. Cavard will control the whole thing and settle the details; Hennion, with his remarkable activity, will see that they are carried out and devote himself to the protection of the Tsar; and I have reserved for you the most enviable part of the task: I entrust the Empress to your special care."

The Emperor Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra were very nearly the only members of the Russian Imperial family whom I did not yet know. At the time when they made their first journey to Paris, to celebrate the conclusion of the Franco-Russian alliance, I was in Sweden as the guest of King Oscar, His Majesty having most graciously invited me to spend a period of sick-leave with him; and it was on the deck of his yacht, at the end of a dinner which he gave me in the Bay of Stockholm, that the news of the triumphal reception of the Russian sovereigns had come to gladden my patriotism and his faithful affection for the country which, through his Bernadotte blood, was also his.

On the other hand, I had repeatedly had the honour of attending the grand-dukes; and I was attached to the person of the Tsarevitch George at the time of his two stays on the Côte d'Azur, in the villa which he occupied at the Cap d'Ail, facing the sea, among the orange-trees and thymes. I had beheld the sad and silent tragedy enacted in the mind of that pale and suffering young prince, heir to a mighty empire, whom death had already marked for its own and who knew it! He knew it, but had submitted to fate's decree without a murmur. Resigning himself to the inevitable, he strove to enjoy the few last pleasures that life still held for him: the sunlight, the flowers and the sea; he sought to beguile the anxiety of those about him and of his doctors by assuming a mask of playful good-humour and an appearance of youthful hope and zest. Lastly, at the same Villa des Terrasses, I had known the Dowager-Empress Marie Feodorovna, whom her great green-and-gold train had brought to Russia with her children, the Grand-duchess Xenia and the Grand-duke Michael, at the first news of a slight relapse on the part of the illustrious patient.

For two long months, I took part in the inner life of that little court; and more than once I detected the anguish of the mother stealthily trying to read the secret of her son's hectic eyes, peering at his pale face, watching for his hoarse, hard cough, as he walked beside her, or dined opposite her, or played at cards with his sister, or stroked with his long and too-white hands the head of his lively and slender greyhound, Moustique.

These memories were already four years old. How much had happened since then! The Tsarevitch George had gone to the Caucasus to die; the Franco-Russian alliance, the realisation of which was contemplated in the interviews that took place at the Cap d'Ail between the Dowager Empress and Baron de Mohrenheim, the Russian ambassador in Paris; this alliance might almost already be described as an old marriage, in which the heart has its reasons, of which the reason itself has become aware.

This new visit of the allied sovereigns, therefore, represented an important trump in the game of our policy as against the rest of Europe: it supplied the ready answer which we felt called upon to make from time to time to those who were anxiously waiting for the least event capable of disturbing the intimacy of the Franco-Russian alliance, with a view to exploiting any such event in favour of a rupture.

The reader will easily, therefore, imagine the importance which M. Waldeck-Rousseau attached to his watchword: "No accident nor incident of any kind!"

The measures of protection with which a sovereign is surrounded when he happens to be Emperor of Russia are of a more complicated and delicate character than in the case of any other monarch. Guarded in a formidable manner by his own police, whose brutal zeal, tending as it does to offend and exasperate, is more of a danger than a protection, the Tsar is, unknown to himself, enveloped by the majority of those who hover round him in a network of silent intrigues which keep up a latent spirit of distrust and dismay.

It does not come within my present scope nor do I here intend to frame an indictment against the Russian police. For that matter, tragic incidents and regrettable scandals enough have revealed the sinister and complex underhand methods of that occult force in such a way as to leave no doubt concerning its nature in men's minds. I will content myself with confessing that, although the numberless anonymous letters which we used to receive at the Ministry of the Interior before the Tsar's arrival mostly failed to agitate us, the appearance, on the other hand, of certain tenebrous persons, who came to concert with us as to "the measures to be taken," nearly always resulted in awakening secret terrors within us. I became acquainted in this way, with some of the celebrated "figures" of the Russian secret police: the famous Harting was one of their number; and it is also possible that I may have consorted, without knowing it, with the mysterious Azeff. My clearest recollection of my relations with these gentry--always excepting M. Raskowsky, the chief of the Russian police in Paris--is that we thought it wise to keep them under observation and to hide from them as far as possible the measures which we proposed to adopt for the safety of their sovereigns!

As I have shown above, the responsibility of organising these measures on the occasion of the Tsar's journey in 1901 was entrusted to M. Cavard, the head of the French political police; but the honour of ensuring their proper performance was due above all to M. Hennion, his chief lieutenant, who has now succeeded him. In point of fact, M. Cavard's long and brilliant administrative career had not prepared him for such rough and tiring tasks. An excellent official, this honest man, whose high integrity it is a pleasure to me to recognise, had a better grasp of the sedentary work of the offices. Hennion, on the contrary, "knew his business" and possessed its special qualities. Endowed with a remarkable spirit of initiative and an invariable coolness, eager, indefatigable and shrewd, fond of fighting, with a quick scent for danger, he was always seen in the breach and he knew how to be everywhere at one time. This was an indispensable quality when the zone to be protected extended, as it did in this case, over a length of several hundred miles and embraced almost half France.

In what did these measures consist? First of all, in doubling the watch kept on foreigners living in France and notably on the Russian anarchists. The copious information which we possessed about their antecedents and their movements made our task an easy one. Paris, like every other large city in Europe, contains a pretty active focus of nihilism. This consists mainly of students and of young women, who are generally more formidable than the men. Still, these revolutionary spirits always prefer theory to action and were, consequently, less to be feared than those who, on the pretext of seeing the festivities, might come from abroad charged with a criminal mission.

We had, therefore, established observation-posts in all the frontier stations, posts composed of officers who lost no time in fastening on the steps of any suspicious traveller. But, however minute our investigations might be, it was still possible for the threads of a plot to escape us; and we had to prepare ourselves against possible surprises at places where it was known that the sovereigns were likely to be. A special watch had to be kept along the railways over which the imperial train would travel and in the streets through which the procession would pass. For this purpose, we divided, as usual, the line from Dunkerque to Compiègne and from Compiègne to the frontier into sections and sub-sections, each placed under the command of the district commissary of police, who had under his orders the local police-force and gendarmery, reinforced by the troops stationed in the department. Posted at intervals on either side of the line, at the entrance and issue of the tunnels, on and under the bridges, sentries, with loaded rifles, prevented anyone from approaching and had orders to raise an alarm if they saw that the least suspicious object had, unknown to them, been laid on or near the rails.

We also identified the tenants of all the houses situated either along the railway-line or in the streets through which our guests were to drive. As a matter of fact, what we most feared was the traditional outrage perpetrated or attempted from a window. On the other hand, we refused (contrary to what has been stated) to adopt the system employed by the Spanish, German and Italian police on the occasion of any visit from a sovereign, the system which consists in arresting all the "suspects" during the period of the royal guest's stay. This proceeding not only appeared to us needlessly vexatious, for it constitutes a flagrant attempt upon the liberty of the individual, but we thought that, with our democracy, there was a danger of its alienating the sympathy of our population from our august visitors. We had, therefore, to be content to forestall any possible catastrophes by other and less arbitrary means.

2.

Our vigilance was naturally concentrated with the greatest attention upon Compiègne. We sent swarms of police to beat the forest and search every copse and thicket; and the château itself was inspected from garret to basement by our most trusted detectives. These precautions, however, seemed insufficient to our colleagues of the Russian police. A fortnight before the arrival of the sovereigns, one of them, taking us aside, said:

"The cellars must be watched."

"But it seems to us," we replied, "that we cannot very well do more than we are doing: they are visited every evening; and there are men posted at all the doors."

"Very good; but how do you know that your men will not be bribed and that the 'terrorists' will not succeed, unknown to you, in placing an explosive machine in some dark corner?"

"But what do you suggest, then?"

"Put men upon whom you can rely, here and now, in each cellar, with instructions to remain there night and day until Their Majesties' departure. And, above all, see that they hold no communication with the outside. They must prepare their own meals."

The solution may have been ingenious, but we declined to entertain it; we considered, in point of fact, that it was unnecessary two weeks before the coming of the Emperor and Empress, to condemn a number of decent men to underground imprisonment, a form of torture which had not been inflicted on even the worst criminals for more than a century past.

On the other hand, we mixed some detectives with the numerous staff of workmen who were engaged in restoring the old château to its ancient splendour. The erstwhile imperial residence, which had stood empty since the war, now rose again from its graceful and charming past as though by the stroke of a fairy's wand. The authorities hastily collected the most sumptuous remains of the former furniture now scattered over our museums. Gradually, the deserted halls and abandoned bed-rooms were again filled, in the same places, with the same objects that had adorned them in days gone by. The apartments set aside for the Tsar and Tsaritsa were those once occupied by the Emperors Napoleon I and Napoleon III and the Empresses Marie-Louise and Eugénie. As we passed through them, our eyes were greeted by the wonderful Beauvais tapestries of which the King of Prussia, one day, said that "no king's fortune was large enough to buy them;" we hesitated before treading on the exquisite Savonnerie carpets, with which Louis XIV had covered the floors of Versailles; in the Tsarina's boudoir, we admired Marie-Louise's cheval-glass; in her bed-room we found the proud archduchess's four-poster; in Nicholas II's bed-room, we discovered a relic: the bed of Napoleon I, the beautifully-carved mahogany bedstead in which the man whom a great historian called "that terrible antiquarian" and whom no battle had wearied, dreamt of the empire of Charlemagne. Was it not a striking irony of fate that thus awarded the conqueror's pillow to the first promoter of peaceful arbitration?

While upholsterers, gardeners, carpenters, locksmiths and painters were carrying out the amazing metamorphosis, the ministry was drawing up the programme of the rejoicings and calling in the aid of the greatest poets, the most illustrious artists, the prettiest and most talented ballet-dancers. Rehearsals were held in the theatre where, years ago, the Prince Imperial had made his first appearance; the carriages were tested in the avenues of the park; a swarm of butlers and footmen were taught court etiquette in the servants' hall; and certain ministers' wives, trusting to the discreet solitude of their boudoirs, took lessons in solemn curtseying. It was so many days and weeks of feverish expectation, during which everything had to be improvised for the occasion; for this was the first time since its advent that the Republic was entertaining in the country.

And then the great day came. One morning, on the platform of the Gare du Nord, a gentleman dressed in black, with beard neatly-trimmed, followed by ministers, generals and more persons in black, including myself, stepped into a special train. He had been preceded by a valet carrying three bags. The first--is it not a detective's duty to know everything?--was a dressing-case containing crystal, silver-topped fittings; the second, which was long and flat, held six white shirts, twelve collars, three night-shirts, a pair of slippers and two broad grand-cross ribbons, one red, the other blue; and in the third were packed a brand-new dress-suit, six pairs of white gloves and three pairs of patent-leather boots. M. Loubet, calm and smiling, was starting for Dunkerque to meet his guests.

3.

My first impression of the young sovereigns was very different from that which I expected. To judge by the fantastic measures taken in anticipation of their arrival and by the atmosphere of suspicion and mystery which people had been pleased to create around them, we were tempted to picture them as grave, solemn, haughty, mystical and distrustful; and our thoughts turned, in spite of ourselves to the court of Ivan the Terrible rather than to that of Peter the Great.

Then, suddenly, the impression was changed. When we saw them close at hand, we beheld a very united couple, very simple and kindly, anxious to please everybody and to fall in with everybody's wishes, obviously hating official pomp and ceremony and regretting to be continually separated by impenetrable barriers from the rest of the world. We perceived that they liked to be unreserved, that they were capable of "soulful outbursts" and of endless delicacy of thought, especially for their humbler fellow-citizens. We detected in the laughter in _his_ eyes a frank and youthful gaiety that disliked restraint; and we suspected in the melancholy of _hers_ the secret tragedy of an ever-anxious affection, of a destiny weighed down by the burden of a crown in which there were all too many thorns and too few roses. And I confess, at the risk of being anathematised by our fierce democrats, that autocracy, as personified by this young couple, who would clearly have been happier between a samovar and a cradle than between a double row of bayonets, that autocracy, under this unexpected aspect, possessed nothing very terrifying and even presented a certain charm.

I think, besides, that an erroneous opinion has been generally formed of the Tsar's character. He has been said and is still said to be a weak man. Now I should be inclined, on this point, to think with M. Loubet that Nicholas II's "weakness" is more apparent than real and that in him, as formerly in our Napoleon III, there is "a gentle obstinate" who has very strong ideas of his own, a being conscious of his power and proud of the glory of his name.

Nicholas II, at the time of his second visit to France, had met M. Loubet before. When the Emperor first came to France, in 1896, the future President of the Republic was president of the Senate and, in this capacity, had not only been presented to the sovereign, but received a visit from him. In this connexion, the late M. Félix Faure used to tell an amusing story, which he said that he had from the Tsar in person.

It was after a luncheon at the Élysée. Nicholas II had told President Faure that he would like to call on the president of the Senate and expressed a wish to go to the Palais du Luxembourg, if possible, _incognito_. A landau was at once provided, without an escort; and the Emperor stepped in, accompanied by General de Boisdeffre. At that hour, the peaceful Luxembourg quarter was almost deserted. The people in the streets, expecting the Tsar to drive back from the Russian Embassy, had drifted in that direction to cheer him.

Wishing first to find out if M. Loubet was there, General de Boisdeffre had ordered the coachman to stop a few yards from the palace, opposite the gate of the Luxembourg gardens. He then alighted to go and enquire and to tell the president of the Senate that an august visitor was waiting at his door.

The Tsar, left alone in the carriage and delighted at feeling free and at his ease, looked out of the window with all the zest of a schoolboy playing truant. He saw before him one of those picturesque street-Arabs, who seem to sprout between the paving-stones of Paris. This particular specimen, seated against the railings, was whistling the refrain of the Russian national hymn, with his nose in the air. Suddenly, their eyes met. The wondering street-boy sprang to his feet; he had never seen the Emperor, but he had seen his photographs; and the likeness was striking.

"Suppose it is Nicholas?" he said to himself, greatly puzzled.

And, as he was an inquisitive lad, he resolved to make sure without delay. He took an heroic decision, walked up to within a yard of the carriage and there, bobbing down his head, shouted in a hoarse voice to the unknown foreigner:

"How's the Empress?"

Picture his stupefaction--for, in point of fact, he only thought that he was having a good joke--when he heard the stranger reply, with a smile:

"Thank you, the Empress is very well and is delighted with her journey."

The boy, then and there, lost his tongue. He stared at the speaker in dismay; and then, after raising his cap, stalked away slowly, very slowly, to mark his dignity.

Nicholas II retained a delightful recollection of this private interview with a true Parisian and long amused himself by scandalising the formal set around him with the story of this adventure.

4.

If, on his second stay, he did not have the occasion of coming into contact with the people, he none the less enjoyed the satisfaction of being admirably received.