«But if you put him on trial, neither he nor Joly will admit a thing.»
«No one working for us must ever appear in a court of law, and—excuse me if I state a general rule—this applies just as well to you. Lacroix will be the victim of an accident. His widow will have a proper pension.»
Simonini didn’t mention Guédon and the bookshop in rue de Beaune. He preferred to wait and see what he might find out from his visit there. He had also been exhausted by his few days in Sainte-Pélagie.
So he went at the earliest opportunity to Laperouse, in quai des Grands-Augustins, and not downstairs, where they served oysters and entrecôtes as they used to, but upstairs, in one of the cabinets particuliers where you could order barbue sauce hollandaise, casserole au riz à la Toulouse, aspics de filets de lapereaux en chaud-froid, truffes au champagne, pudding d’abricots à la vénitienne, corbeille de fruits frais and compotes de pêches et d’ananas.
And to the devil with those convicts—idealists, murderers or whoever they were—and their soup. Prisons are there to ensure that a gentleman can go to a restaurant without coming to any harm.
Simonini’s recollections here, as in similar instances, become confused, and some passages in his diary are disjointed. All the Narrator can do is rely upon comments added by Abbé Dalla Piccola. The two are now working at full pace and in perfect coordination…
In short, Simonini realized that to be viewed favorably by the imperial service he had to give Lagrange something more. What makes a police informer truly believable? Discovering a conspiracy. He therefore had to organize a conspiracy so he could then uncover it.
It was Gaviali who had given him the idea. Simonini went to Sainte-Pélagie and learned when he was to be released. He remembered where he would find him—at Cabaret Père Laurette in rue de la Huchette.
Toward the end of the street, you entered a house through a narrow opening, though hardly narrower than rue du Chat qui Pêche, which led off from the same rue de la Huchette, and indeed so narrow that it was hard to understand why they had made it so, seeing that you had to enter sideways. After climbing a set of stairs, you walked along corridors whose stone paving exuded grease, with doorways so low that it was hard to imagine how anyone could enter the rooms. On the second floor, through a more practicable doorway, you reached a large room, created perhaps by knocking together three or more former apartments. This was the salon or hall or cabaret of Père Laurette, whom no one knew because he was thought to have died some years earlier.
There were tables all around, crowded with pipe smokers, lansquenet players and girls prematurely wrinkled, with pallid complexions, as if they were dolls for poor children, who were interested only in finding customers who hadn’t quite finished their glass so they could beg them for the last drop.
There was a commotion on the evening when Simonini arrived—someone had been stabbed, and the smell of blood seemed to have created a general tension. Apparently a madman with a cobbler’s knife stabbed one of the girls, hurled the landlady to the ground when she tried to intervene, lashed out at whoever tried to stop him, and was brought down only when a waiter smashed a carafe over the back of his head. After which everyone returned to what they had been doing, as if nothing had happened.
Simonini found Gaviali sitting at a table with companions who seemed to share his regicidal ideas, almost all of them Italian exiles and almost all experts in explosives, or enthusiasts. Once those around the table had had a reasonable amount to drink, they held forth on the failings of great terrorists of the past. The infernal machine, with which Cadoudal had tried to assassinate Napoleon when he was first consul, was a mixture of saltpeter and grapeshot, which might have worked in the narrow back streets of the old capital but would be totally useless today (as indeed it had been even then). Fieschi, in order to assassinate Louis Philippe, had built a machine with eighteen barrels that fired at the same time, and had killed eighteen people, but not the king.
…sitting at a table with companions who seemed to share his regicidal ideas, almost all of them Italian exiles and almost all experts in explosives.
«The problem,» said Gaviali, «is the composition of the explosive. Look at potassium chlorate. They decided to mix it with sulfur and charcoal to make gunpowder, but all they managed to do, once they’d built a factory to produce it, was to blow the whole place up. Then they decided that at least it could be used for making matches, but to light them you had to dip the chlorate-and-sulfur match head in sulfuric acid. Not exactly easy. Until the Germans invented phosphorus matches more than thirty years ago, which burst into flame on friction.»
«And what about picric acid?» said another. «They realized that it blew up when heated with potassium chlorate, and this led to a series of powders, each more explosive than the one before. Several experimenters were killed and the idea had to be abandoned. It would have been better with cellulose nitrate—»
«Of course.»
«Look at what the old alchemists had to say. They discovered that a mixture of nitric acid and oil of turpentine, after it sat awhile, burst into flames spontaneously. It’s been a hundred years since they discovered that when sulfuric acid, which absorbs water, is added to nitric acid, it almost always ignites.»
«I prefer xyloidin. Combine nitric acid with starch or wood fiber—»
«It sounds as if you’ve just read that novel by Verne where he uses xyloidin to shoot a manned projectile to the moon. But today there’s more interest in nitrobenzene and nitronaphthalene. Or if you treat paper and cardboard with nitric acid, you obtain nitramine, which is similar to xyloidin.»
«All these products are unstable. Perhaps there’s more interest today in guncotton—weight for weight, its explosive power is six times greater than that of gunpowder.»
«But it’s unreliable.»
And so they continued for hours, always returning to the virtues of good, honest gunpowder. As for Simonini, it seemed that he was back in Sicily, in conversation with Ninuzzo.
After offering them a few jugs of wine, it was easy to rouse that bunch into hatred for Napoleon III, who was likely to oppose the now imminent Savoy invasion of Rome. The cause of a unified Italy required the death of the dictator. Simonini had the feeling that those drunkards didn’t care much about the unification of Italy and were more interested in exploding a few good bombs. But they were also the sort of maniacs he was looking for.
«Orsini’s attack failed,» explained Simonini, «not because he couldn’t carry it out but because the bombs were badly made. We now have someone who’s prepared to risk the guillotine to throw a few bombs at the right moment, but we don’t yet have a clear idea about the type of explosive to use, and my conversations with our friend Gaviali have convinced me that your group could be very useful.»
«Who do you mean when you say ‘we’?» asked one of the patriots.
Simonini gave the impression of hesitating, then came out with the story he had concocted to gain the trust of his student friends in Turin—that he represented the Alta Vendita and was one of the lieutenants of the elusive Nubius. But they could ask him no more, since the Carbonari were organized in such a way that each of them knew only their immediate superior. The problem was that you couldn’t produce new bombs of assured effectiveness just like that; it required experiment after experiment, the work almost of an alchemist, mixing the right substances and testing them in the open countryside.
He was able to offer them a place, right there in rue de la Huchette, where they wouldn’t be disturbed, and all necessary money for expenses. As soon as the bombs were ready, the group need not be involved in the attack, but the premises would also be used to store handbills announcing the death of the emperor and explaining the attackers’ purposes. Once Napoleon III was dead, the group would have to distribute the handbills in various parts of the city and leave some of them outside the offices of the main newspapers.
«You’ll have no trouble. There’s someone in high office who will look favorably upon the attack. One of our men working for the prefect of police is called Lacroix. I’m not sure he’s completely reliable, so don’t try to contact him. If he finds out who you are, he’d be quite capable of reporting you, just to get a promotion. You know what these double agents are like…»
The deal was accepted with enthusiasm, and Gaviali’s eyes sparkled with delight. Simonini gave them the keys to the premises and a large sum of money for the initial purchases. A few days later, he went to visit the conspirators. It seemed the experiments were proceeding well. He took with him several hundred handbills produced by an obliging printer, gave them another sum of money for their expenses, cried «Long live united Italy—Rome or death!» and left.
That evening, as he was walking along rue Saint-Séverin,
