My Days of Adventure: The Fall of France, 1870-71Vizetelly, Ernest Alfred
History
My Days of Adventure: The Fall of France, 1870-71
Vizetelly, Ernest Alfred
Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871 -- Personal narratives
But let me pass to other instances. One day an unfortunate individual,
working in the Paris sewers, was espied by a zealous National Guard, who
at once gave the alarm, declaring that there was a German spy in the
aforesaid sewers, and that he was depositing bombs there with the
intention of blowing up the city. Three hundred Guards at once volunteered
their services, stalked the poor workman, and blew him to pieces the next
time he popped his head out of a sewer-trap. The mistake was afterwards
deplored, but people argued (wrote Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, who sent the
story to The Morning Post) that it was far better that a hundred innocent
Frenchmen should suffer than that a single Prussian should escape. Cham,
to whom I previously alluded, old Marshal Vaillant, Mr. O'Sullivan, an
American diplomatist, and Alexis Godillot, the French army contractor,
were among the many well-known people arrested as spies at one or another
moment. A certain Mme: de Beaulieu, who had joined a regiment of Mobiles
as a _cantiniere_, was denounced as a spy "because her hands were so
white." Another lady, who had installed an ambulance in her house, was
carried off to prison on an equally frivolous pretext; and I remember yet
another case in which a lady patron of the Societe de Secours aux Blesses
was ill-treated. Matters would, however, probably be far worse at the
present time, for Paris, with all her apaches and anarchists, now includes
in her population even more scum than was the case three-and-forty years
ago.
There were, however, a few authentic instances of spying, one case being
that of a young fellow whom Etienne Arago, the Mayor of Paris, engaged as
a secretary, on the recommendation of Henri Rochefort, but who turned out
to be of German extraction, and availed himself of his official position
to draw up reports which were forwarded by balloon post to an agent of the
German Government in London. I have forgotten the culprit's name, but it
will be found, with particulars of his case, in the Paris journals of the
siege days. There was, moreover, the Hardt affair, which resulted in the
prisoner, a former lieutenant in the Prussian army, being convicted of
espionage and shot in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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