One week later—30 Nivose, the last day of the month of snow—a combined force of officers from the Paris Prefecture, the Ministry of Police, and the National Guard surrounded a country house outside Orleans and arrested Pierre Robinault Saint-Réjant, the plotter who had paid for the unfortunate mare Marguerite. He offered no resistance.
A wretch who was regularly thrown down the steps of a café on the nearest corner had recognized him from a rude police sketch, dining near the hearth, and had followed him when he left. A grateful Fouché had signed a voucher freeing one hundred francs from the Ministry budget, supplementing the vagabond’s monthly stipend as a spy in good standing. The Minister’s tentacles wound into the press, the arts, wayside inns, the military, and even the First Consul’s own Republican guard; he could hardly have been expected to overlook the gutters.
The owner of the house, a friend of the prisoner’s and a Royalist sympathizer, was taken as well and put to the Question, then released when Saint-Réjant gave up the identities of Carbon and Limoëlan but refused to name his host as a conspirator.
Early in Pluviose, the month of rain, Carbon and Saint-Réjant were taken from their place of confinement and stood before a firing squad under a drizzle not unlike the one that had drenched the Rue Saint Nicaise on the notorious 4 Nivose.
“Last words, Citizen?” the sergeant of the squad asked Saint-Réjant.
“Vive le Roi.” He mumbled through lips torn and swollen.
“Just so. Fire!”
“And Carbon?” asked Bonaparte.
“He said nothing, your excellency,” Fouché reported.
“Precisely what he believed in. I can respect an adversary and loathe a traitor. Mercenaries leave me cold.”
Days later, without fanfare, some 223 Jacobins and Jacobin sympathizers were turned loose by Consular order, dumped like refuse beyond the frontiers of France. Some of the same carts which during the Terror had trundled the condemned to the Place de la Revolution were pressed into this service. Stories went round of trees denuded to make crutches for those who could walk, litters for those who could not, provided they had comrades willing to drag them. Others crawled into the backs of passing wagons; those whose drivers would have them. The remains of still others were found in Germinal, the month of budding, when the snows receded.
Joseph Pierre Picot de Limoëlan, who had rejected Cadoudal’s kidnap plan in favor of assassinating Napoleon Bonaparte; the man who had whistled the signal to touch off the gunpowder, killing many and maiming more, vanished from France.
Months later, a man answering his description surfaced in America and entered the priesthood.
“May the red Indians have him.” Dubois crossed himself, remembering the wretched remains of the girl Pensol.
Broadsides and public bulletins announced that with the deaths of two of the major conspirators the affair was at an end.
Joseph Fouché, meanwhile, read reports and filed them. He still wore a black armband for the servant who had come face-to-face so early in life with the Great Mystery. His successor, the Minister was pleased to note, had no taste for wine.
On the third day of Germinal, Year VIII (March 23, 1801), a man took a room for the night at an inn in Doudeville, a port on the English Channel. A storm raged without; the guest stood in a puddle as he signed the registry.
The proprietor read the name upside-down. “What brings you to France, Monsieur Chaucer?”
“I’m visiting friends.”
The stranger spoke French with a peculiar accent, possibly an English dialect with which the innkeeper was unfamiliar.
“A terrible time to cross over, just to be social.”
The Englishman—if that’s what he was—made no response.
“Christine will carry your bag.”
“Thank you. I’ll manage.” He hoisted the valise, a fine one although worn.
Christine, the girl who made up the room, was a spy in the employ of the Ministry of Police. She waited until the man went down for supper, then went through the items in the valise: shirts, breeches inexpertly darned at the knees, stockings, underdrawers, some books in English, which meant nothing to her as she couldn’t read in any language. There were paraphernalia for the maintenance of a pistol, excluding powder and balls; these she did not touch, as she had a fear of things that were designed to blow up. The Christmas Eve affair had kept her awake for several nights.
She assumed the weapon itself had remained on its owner’s person. Although it was not a crime (nor, for that matter, a rarity) in France to travel armed, she thought the absence of loads worth noting, in case she was asked. (Surely a man did not venture out in these unpredictable times with only the single charge in his pistol.) She found nothing worth the formality of a report.
She was not a professional. She overlooked the false bottom.