"I am at a loss to understand you."
"Did you not hear of the part he played after the Quiberon affair?" "No. I have conversed with hardly anyone since my return to France."
"Well, then, you will recall that in '94, for all their burning of villages and ferocity, General Turreau's colonnes infernales failed to suppress the revolts in La Vendee. After Robespierre's fall General Hoche was sent there to replace him. Hoche is not only a good soldier but an able young diplomat Instead of shooting all the prisoners he took, he treated them humanely, then recommended a general amnesty. That is why after the landing at Quiberon had been defeated, the emigres who had come from England surrendered to him, instead of fighting on and selling their lives dearly. They expected to be treated as prisoners of war. But Tallien was sent as Representant en Mission from Paris to take charge of matters, and, despite Hoche's pleading, he had all the emigres of good family—six hundred and twelve of them—shot"
Roger endeavoured to keep the horror out of his voice, as he asked: "What in the world impelled him to such an act, when for over a year the guillotine has been used on no one but a few Robespierrists, and thousands of monarchists have been liberated from the prisons?"
"Ah; thereby hangs a tale," snuffled Fouché. "I knew, and others knew, that before the Quiberon landing took place he had already been in secret negotiation with the Royalists. But he was betrayed. His wife, learning of it, sent him an express to Brittany, warning him of his danger. That he might be able to rend his accusers on his return to Paris, and stigmatize them as calumniators, he needed to produce fresh evidence of his incorruptible patriotism. That is why he had those six hundred poor devils butchered."
"Surely, then, he must now be shaking in his shoes from fear of the fate that will overtake him should the coming coup d'etat by the Moderates prove successful?"
"Of course. And only we can save him. Therefore, he will stop at nothing to aid us, and by gaining him we gain that clever aristocrat bitch, his wife, who in the past year has become the most powerful woman in Pans."
"Who else do you intend to sound with a view to joining us?"
"That requires' most careful consideration. We should need only two or three more at the most. Providing all are men of prominence and resolution a camarilla of six, including ourselves, should be sufficient. But what of yourself? Have you thought of a means by which to explain away your long absence from Paris, so that you may shave the hair from your face and go about openly as your old self to aid in this secret coup which we intend?"
Much relieved that at last the matter that had really brought him there had been raised, and by Fouché himself, Roger replied:
"That depends on what account you gave of my disappearance. If you told Paul Barras, and perhaps others, the truth, then I see nought for it but to remain under cover."
Fouché made, what was for him, an impatient gesture. "Every secret has its value. Only a fool gives another information which may later prove to his own advantage, and this was a secret worth a fortune. I thought it possible that you might hand the boy over to Mr. Pitt. Although that would have been a stupid thing to do: as, at best, you might have got from him a few thousand guineas and the right to call yourself Sir Brook. I counted it much more likely that you would keep him in hiding until you judged the time ripe to offer him to the French Government at his true value. With myself knowing you to be an English agent I felt certain you would not dare to reappear here and approach anyone of importance without first buying my silence. That meant you must share whatever you got for the boy with me, so, naturally, I kept my mouth shut."
"You must have had to give some explanation of what occurred between us in the Temple."
"Naturally. But you, myself and Ban-as were the only people who at that time had become aware that the child in the Temple was not the little Capet; so I needed only to invent a story which would satisfy Barras. I said that while there together we had stumbled on a clue to the whereabouts of the right child That we had then quarrelled violently over which of us should remain to prevent the jailers getting a sight of the substitute, and which should reap the distinction of bringing back the real one from his hiding-place. I said that you had won and locked me in, and that as soon as I was freed in the morning I' had set off post-haste on your heels in the hope of out-distancing you. I said that you had reached the farmhouse in the Jura, where the boy was, before me, but that his protectors had outwitted you and got away with him. That they had fled with him towards the Swiss border, and that you had gone after them. That on reaching Lake Geneva I had lost track of both them and you, and that I assumed you had followed them, in the hope that you might yet secure the boy, although he was on foreign soil and bring him back with you."
Roger smiled. "That was certainly an ingenious explanation. But what story did you tell the guards at the Temple when, the morning after my flight, they broke the door in and found you on the floor trussed like a turkey cock?"
"Simply that over a past disagreement which had arisen again while we were talking together, we had come to blows; and that to revenge yourself on me you had left me tied up there." With a slightly acid note in his voice, Fouché added: "I passed a far from comfortable night, but at least during it I had ample time to think out what I should say to the guards when they found me, and, with a view to future possibilities, a suitable tale to tell Barras should you succeed in getting away with the boy. Incidentally, what did you do with him?"
"He had, as you know, been brutalized into almost a moron, and been persuaded that his idea that he had been born the son of Louis XVI was no more than a delusion. But he was still capable of working with his hands; and since he had been trained as a cobbler's apprentice under Citizen Simon, when I got him back to London I apprenticed him to another cobbler, in a quiet suburb called Camden Town."
Fouché accepted Roger's he without comment, and asked: "Have you brought him with you?"
"Nay. I wished first to reconnoitre the lie of the land."
"That was wise. But I take it you could produce him at fairly short notice?"
"Yes. I think, though, that every move in our game should be settled before I do so."
"I agree; and I have no intention of even whispering anything of this to any man, until the coup d'itat which is now in the making becomes an accomplished fact
Roger nodded. "I was about to suggest just such a policy of caution."
"Of course," Fouché remarked after a moment, "there is always the possibility that, owing to some unforeseen factor, the coup d'etat may not succeed. But, even should it fail, another opportunity to use the boy as we have planned should present itself before very long."
"Seeing the temper of the nation, that is as good as certain," Roger agreed, "and as I have already waited for so many months before attempting this big coup, I can quite well afford to wait a while longer."
Fouché made a wry grimace. "No doubt you can; but I am already at my wits' end for money."
"You surprise me. What have you done with all the jewelled crosses, chalices and copes of which you deprived the churches while you were acting as Proconsul for the Convention in Nevers? Surely you have not spent all the proceeds from them? But perhaps you have them buried and feel that it is now too great a risk to dig up and sell some of them."
Snuffling again, Fouché shook his head. Like many others, you misjudge me concerning that. I swear to you I sent every single thing that I seized, both from the churches and private individuals, back to the Convention, so that they might turn it into money wherewith to help pay the armies. The plantation my family had in the West Indies has been burnt and ravaged by revolted slaves, so I no longer receive an income from that, and my wife's little fortune was swallowed up by two bankruptcies. Now that I have been deprived of my salary as a Deputy I cannot think how I am to keep my family and myself from starvation. I wonder, though, now we are become partners, if ... if you could see your way to making me a loan?"