RUSSIAN AGENTS IN FRANCE.

Evening Post, Volume XIV, Issue 49, 26 August 1876, Page 1 (Supplement)

RUSSIAN AGENTS IN FRANCE.

(From the Pall Mall Budget.) A Paris correspondent of the Daily News recently sent a letter full of very curious information as to the proceedings of Russian agents in France. According to this account, Russia at present is making energetic efforts to win over French politicians, journalists, and public men of all kinds to the idea of a Franco-Russian alliance, through the agency of a number of secret service emissaries commissioned for that purpose. These emissaries work independently of the Russian Ambassy, of which, however, they make use in forming social relations in fashionable and political circles. They are directed by a former Consul-General of Russia and by a Pole of Jewish extraction, " professing to subsist by pamphlets, that do not sell, on political economy." The latter lives in good style, and buttonholes ambassadors. It seems to be universally understood that he is a person of great social weight. The Consul-General is a man of ability and penetration, but does not often go into French society. He has, however, considerable influence over many persons who do, to judge from the fact that "the skeletons in the closets of Frenchmen of note have been numbered and labelled by him," and that "he is said to have photographs of compromising documents which, if communicated to the parquet, might have the effect of sending men who have held as high posts as M. Clement Duvernois to manufacture list slippers in prison." This formidable personage is assisted by a staff of clerks composed of Poles, Wallachs, Greeks, and Russians, and his " police " is organised on a system of equal rights, which is not a novel feature in Russian diplomacy." Nor are the services wanting of the sex which is supposed to furnish the best diplomatic talent. Prince Gortschakoff and his alter ego in Paris have in their service a bevy of diplomatic ladies all Russians, but some of them French by marriage. The3e ladies are, according to the writer, as energetic in their efforts as they are versatile in their abilities, and his account of their artifices for obtaining and exercising influence upon the most various classes of French society is exceedingly curious.