There were always several secret committees in Paris occupied in collecting information for the King respecting the measures of the factions, and in influencing some of the committees of the Assembly.  M. Bertrand de Molleville was in close correspondence with the Queen.  The King employed M. Talon and others; much money was expended through the latter channel for the secret measures.  The Queen had no confidence in them.  M. de Laporte, minister of the civil list and of the household, also attempted to give a bias to public opinion by means of hireling publications; but these papers influenced none but the royalist party, which did not need influencing.  M. de Laporte had a private police which gave him some useful information.

I determined to sacrifice myself to my duty, but by no means to any intrigue, and I thought that, circumstanced as I was, I ought to confine myself to obeying the Queen’s orders.  I frequently sent off couriers to foreign countries, and they were never discovered, so many precautions did I take.  I am indebted for the preservation of my own existence to the care I took never to admit any deputy to my abode, and to refuse all interviews which even people of the highest importance often requested of me; but this line of conduct exposed me to every species of ill-will, and on the same day I saw myself denounced by Prud’homme, in his ’Gazette Revolutionnaire’, as capable of making an aristocrat of the mother of the Gracchi, if a person so dangerous as myself could have got into her household; and by Gauthier’s Gazette Royaliste, as a monarchist, a constitutionalist, more dangerous to the Queen’s interests than a Jacobin.

At this period an event with which I had nothing to do placed me in a still more critical situation.  My brother, M. Genet, began his diplomatic career successfully.  At eighteen he was attached to the embassy to Vienna; at twenty he was appointed chief secretary of Legation in England, on occasion of the peace of 1783.  A memorial which he presented to M. de Vergennes upon the dangers of the treaty of commerce then entered into with England gave offence to M. de Calonne, a patron of that treaty, and particularly to M. Gerard de Rayneval, chief clerk for foreign affairs.  So long as M. de Vergennes lived, having upon my father’s death declared himself the protector of my brother, he supported him against the enemies his views had created.  But on his death M. de Montmorin, being much in need of the long experience in business which he found in M. de Rayneval, was guided solely by the latter.  The office of which my brother was the head was suppressed.  He then went to St. Petersburg, strongly recommended to the Comte de Segur, minister from France to that Court, who appointed him secretary of Legation.  Some time afterwards the Comte de Segur left him at St. Petersburg, charged with the affairs of France.  After his return from Russia, M. Genet was appointed ambassador to the United States by the party called Girondists, the deputies who headed it being from the department of the Gironde.  He was recalled by the Robespierre party, which overthrew the former faction, on the 31st of May, 1793, and condemned to appear before the Convention.  Vice-President Clinton, at that time Governor of New York, offered him an asylum in his house and the hand of his daughter, and M. Genet established himself prosperously in America.