Combray family; France -- History -- Consulate and First Empire, 1799-1815
guests for cloaks and breeches of green cloth, which only needed metal
buttons to be transformed into dragoon uniforms.
Querelle's denunciations put a stop to all these preparations. Nothing
remained but to run to earth again. A great many of the conspirators
succeeded in doing this, but all were not so fortunate. The first one
seized by Real's men was Louis Picot, Georges' servant. He was a coarse,
rough man, entirely devoted to his master, under whose orders he had
served in the Veudee. He was taken to the Prefecture and promised
immediate liberty in exchange for one word that would put the police on
the track of Georges. He was offered 1,500 louis d'or, which they took
care to count out before him, and on his refusal to betray his master,
Real had him put to the torture. Bertrand, the concierge of the depot,
undertook the task. The unfortunate Picot's fingers were crushed by
means of an old gun and a screw-driver, his feet were burned in the
presence of the officers of the guard. He revealed nothing. "He has
borne everything with criminal resignation," the judge-inquisitor,
Thuriot, wrote to Real; "he is a fanatic, hardened by crime. I have now
left him to solitude and suffering; I will begin again to-morrow; he
knows where Georges is hidden and must be made to reveal it."
The next day the torture was continued, and this time agony wrung the
address of the Chaillot house from Picot. They hastened there--only to
find it empty. But the day had not been wasted, for the police, on an
anonymous accusation, had seized Bouvet de Lozier as he was entering the
house of his mistress, Mme. de Saint-Leger, in the Rue Saint-Sauveur. He
was interrogated and denied everything. Thrown into the Temple, he
hanged himself in the night, by tying his necktie to the bars of his
cell. A gaoler hearing his death-rattle, opened the door and took him
down; but Bouvet, three-quarters dead, as soon as they had brought him
to, was seized with convulsive tremblings, and in his delirium he spoke.
This attempted suicide, to tell the truth, was only half believed in,
and many people, having heard of the things that were done in the Temple
and the Prefecture, believed that Bouvet had been assisted in his
strangling, just as they had put Picot's feet to the fire. What gave
colour to these suspicions was the fact that Bouvet's hands "were
horribly swollen" when he appeared before Real the next day, and also
the strange form of the declaration which he was reputed to have
dictated at midnight, just as he was restored to life. "A man who comes
from the gates of the tomb, still covered with the shadows of death,
demands vengeance on those who, by their perfidy," etc. Many were agreed
in thinking that that was not the style of a suicide, with the
death-rattle still in his throat, but that Real's agents must have lent
their eloquence to this half-dead creature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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