At the turn of May and June, two events of great significance stirred Paris.
The first was the public announcent by the Paris Police Directorate that Officer Javert had invented a new, highly efficient thod of fingerprint identification. This innovation, based on the unique and irreplaceable patterns of human fingerprints, allowed investigators to establish personal identity and solve cris with unprecedented certainty. Several successful cases had already proven its reliability.
The achievent won imdiate recognition from several eminent mbers of the Académie des Sciences, whose earlier physiological research had ford the theoretical foundation of the thod. After a round of legal review, the Palais de Justice officially recognized fingerprint analysis as admissible evidence — a powerful new instrunt for the courts of France.
The second event ca from the Paris Waterworks Company. In early June, ten major newspapers across the capital published a sensational report that soon spread throughout France: unclean well water within the city was the principal source of repeated cholera outbreaks.
Louis Périer, head of the company, declared that he had commissioned a mathematician nad Joseph Fourier to compile a statistical study, recording detailed figures from the five major cholera epidemics that had struck Paris between 1780 and 1789. On the basis of this data, Monsieur Fourier had produced a mortality map revealing that most deaths clustered around the wells located in the city’s central residential quarters. From this, he concluded—supported by other evidence—that Paris’s well water was the true culprit behind the spread of cholera.
The publication of this report caused a storm of public debate. The well rchants and their political allies denounced it furiously, while both the Académie des Sciences and the City Hall maintained cautious silence. A week later, urged by the National Constituent Assembly, the two institutions ford a joint commission to verify Fourier’s data through on-site investigation.
The commission’s conclusion was unanimous: the “Fourier Cholera Map” was authentic. Although it could not yet declare well water to be the sole cause of cholera, there was, beyond doubt, a strong correlation. The report ended by affirming that the clean water provided by the Paris Waterworks Company had greatly reduced the likelihood of cholera and other epidemics.
The next day, the company’s two-year bonds were flooded with speculative demand. Their value, less than one livre at the beginning of June, soared to twelve. Behind the scenes, André reaped an extraordinary profit — from an investnt of 30,000 livres, he gained 270,000 in only ten days.
By mid-June, following his agreent with the Périer brothers, André injected 200,000 livres into the newly founded Joint Steam Engine Company, acquiring 70 percent of its shares. At the sa ti, Jean-Baptiste Say, not yet twenty-four, accepted André’s invitation to serve as general manager. Born into a rchant family in Lyon, Say had begun his career early in trade, studied at a comrcial school near London, and there discovered both the progress of the British Industrial Revolution and the theories of Adam Smith.
The Périer brothers, too, erged as winners. Partnering with André, they had feasted on the securities market and earned a fortune. The City Hall, far from withdrawing its subsidies, increased them instead and extended the company’s concession by fifteen years. With political, economic, and public opinion now aligned, the company’s canal projects advanced swiftly. Politicians who had once opposed them now sang their praises, while the defeated well rchants had no choice but to fall silent.
Fortune also smiled upon Fourier. The “Fourier Cholera Map” made the young man from Auxerre famous overnight. Scholars of the Académie des Sciences — Monge, Laplace, Lagrange, Lavoisier, and Legendre — publicly hailed him as a prodigy. He was recomnded to a professorship at the Sorbonne, and calls arose to include him in the soon-to-be-created National Commission on Weights and asures, which had been preparing for three years to standardize France’s systems of asurent.
Overwheld by these sudden honors, Fourier was bewildered. He knew that he had played only the role of a clerk; the true architect behind it all was his employer, Monsieur André Franck — a man seemingly omniscient and omnipotent, lacking only in higher geotry. That alone seed inexplicable, for in the Europe of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, every scientist was first and foremost a mathematician.
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Among the other beneficiaries was Inspector Javert. Seeing Fourier’s embarrassnt, he sought to reassure him:
“Do not feel guilty,” said Javert. “André is the God-Favoured, carrying out the Lord’s rcy through us. Swear only to remain faithful to him, and you will never betray the Apostle of God.”
Javert ant it. Since joining André, his fellow Reims native had never been treated unfairly. A few days earlier, Chief Commissioner Legoff had privately assured him that before the upcoming Festival of the Federation in July, when the Police Directorate would be reorganized into the tropolitan Police Bureau, Javert would be promoted to Deputy Chief and appointed deputy director of one of the six district branches.
anwhile, Sergeant Hoche, having completed his correspondence course in artillery at the Military School by mid-July, would be promoted to Second Lieutenant. Sergeant Augereau, praised for his excellence in training the cavalry recruits, would also advance one rank to Staff Sergeant.
One by one, André’s associates were rising in rank and position, while he himself remained confined to his largely symbolic post as the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court. Yet he could not complain: the 300,000 livres profit had enriched him beyond asure. But his joy was short-lived. 200,000 went into the new company; another 100,000 were dispatched to London with Ouvrard. His broker, acting on further instructions, invested 150,000 livres in French assignats on the London Exchange.
At tis, André wondered whether he was a fool. He could have fled with his fortune to so peaceful corner of the world, to eat well, drink deeply, and live out his life in ease. Instead, driven by a strange, unspoken vision, he had poured out every livre he possessed — and staked everything upon a dream.
Ti slipped by. By late June 1790, according to his arrangent with Ouvrard, he was to depart within a week for Bordeaux, ostensibly to assist the local court in tax investigations, but in truth to begin acquiring Church property — especially the fine vineyards along the Garonne River.
Then a letter arrived, signed Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, forcing him to abandon his plan. André imdiately wrote to Ouvrard, postponing his journey until after the Festival of the Federation on July 14.
Yes — that Saint-Just: one of the future leaders of the Jacobin dictatorship, Robespierre’s closest ally, and, for his beauty and coldness combined, known to his enemies as “the Angel of Death.”
His connection to André, however, was peculiar. In truth, they had t only by chance. In October 1787, Saint-Just, then studying at Reims University, had been harassed by a lecherous priest who soon received a soldier’s son’s beating for his trouble. The university, ignoring the circumstances, sought to expel Saint-Just. André, then an assistant lecturer, courageously testified in his defense before the faculty council and saved him from disgrace.
From that day, the two beca friends. Two years André’s junior, Saint-Just returned to his hotown of Blérancourt, but they continued to correspond.
In September 1789, Saint-Just published a long political poem, Organt, a satire against the Church and monarchy; André was the first to read it in Paris.
In early 1790, Saint-Just was elected Lieutenant Colonel of the National Guard in the Aisne Departnt, and André sent him 500 livres in congratulations.
Now, in June, Saint-Just wrote again: he would travel to Paris as the representative of Blérancourt and the Aisne to attend the Festival of the Federation on July 14. He asked André to deliver an enclosed letter personally to Deputy Robespierre.
The letter bore no seal or stamp; Saint-Just clearly permitted André to read it.
It said, in words later recorded by history:
“I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not rely a representative of a province; you are the representative of the Republic and of mankind. You have upheld our weary fatherland amidst the torrents of tyranny and conspiracy. Only a miracle allows to know you — I salute you.”
For reasons both practical and moral, André had to remain in Paris until he could et Saint-Just and deliver the ssage.
Since the Babeuf affair, he had t Robespierre only twice in public: once during a session of the Tax Committee, where he promised to raise sixty million livres from the tax-farrs; and again when Prieur and Robespierre invited him to join the Jacobin Club as its ninety-eighth mber, after paying the six-livre fee.
Though a revolutionary by conviction, André viewed Robespierre with instinctive dread. Even in Robespierre’s hotown of Arras, his mory would one day be shrouded in sha. Two centuries later, the roof of the Arras Assembly Hall — where he had first been elected to the Estates-General — would remain draped in black cloth, a silent apology to the nation and its victims.
Thus, André had deliberately kept his distance from the future dictator, until now.
After the Constituent Assembly followed Louis XVI to the Tuileries, Robespierre moved his residence to the right bank of the Seine — No. 30, Rue Saintonge, between the Hôtel de Ville and the Arsenal District. His growing prominence had already forced him to hire a poor journalist and playwright, Pierre Villiers, as his personal secretary.
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