Whether by candlesticks or something else, these people almost always betray themselves in one way or another. When we were at London in 1881, we received on a foggy morning a visit from two Russians. I knew one of them by name; the other, a young man whom he recommended as his friend, was a stranger. The latter had volunteered to accompany his friend on a few days’ visit to London. As he was introduced by a friend, I had no suspicions whatever about him; but I was very busy that day and asked another friend, who lived near by, to find them a room and take them about to see London. My wife had not yet seen England, either, and she went with them. In the afternoon she returned, saying to me: “Do you know, I dislike that man very much. Beware of him.” “But why? What’s the matter?” I asked. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, but he is surely not ‘ours.’ By the way he treated the waiter in a café, and the way he handles money, I saw at once he is not ‘ours,’ and if he is not, why should he come to us?” She was so certain of the justice of her suspicions that while she performed her duties of hospitality, she nevertheless managed never to leave that young man alone in my study even for one minute. We had a chat, and the visitor began to exhibit himself more and more under such a low moral aspect that even his friend blushed for him, and when I asked more details about him, the explanations they both gave were still less satisfactory. We were both on our guard. In short, they left London in a couple of days, and a fortnight later I got a letter from my Russian friend, full of excuses for having introduced the young man, who, they had found out at Paris, was a spy in the service of the Russian embassy. I looked then into a list of Russian secret service agents in France and Switzerland, which we refugees had received lately from the Executive Committee—they had their men everywhere at St. Petersburg—and I found the name of that young man on the list, with one letter only altered in it.
To start a paper, subsidized by the police, with a police agent at its head, is an old plan, and the prefect of the Paris police, Andrieux, resorted to it in 1881. I was staying with Elisée Reclus in the mountains, when we received a letter from a Frenchman, or rather a Belgian, who announced to us that he was going to start an anarchist paper at Paris, and asked our collaboration. The letter, full of flatteries, produced upon us an unfavorable impression, and Reclus had, moreover, some vague recollection of having heard the name of the writer in some unfavorable connection. We decided to refuse collaboration, and I wrote to a Paris friend that we must first of all ascertain whence the money came with which the paper was going to be started. It might come from the Orleanists—an old trick of the family—and we must know its origin. My Paris friend, with a workman’s straightforwardness, read that letter at a meeting at which the would-be editor of the paper was present. He simulated offense, and I had to answer several letters on this subject; but I stuck to my words: “If the man is in earnest, he must show us the origin of the money.”
And so he did at last. Pressed by questions, he said that the money came from his aunt, a rich lady of antiquated opinions, who yielded, however, to his fancy of having a paper, and had parted with the money. The lady was not in France; she was staying at London. We insisted nevertheless upon having her name and address, and our friend Malatesta volunteered to see her. He went with an Italian friend who was connected with the secondhand trade in furniture. They found the lady occupying a small flat, and while Malatesta spoke to her and was more and more convinced that she was simply playing the aunt’s part in the comedy, the furniture friend, looking round at the chairs and tables, discovered that all of them had been taken the day before—probably hired—from a secondhand furniture dealer, his neighbor. The labels of the dealer were still fastened to the chairs and the tables. This did not prove much, but naturally reinforced our suspicions. I absolutely refused to have anything to
