What we know for a certainty is that the spy's father was a kind of unattached or nonconforming Lutheran minister at Neu-Freistett in 1760, and that Karl Schulmeister was born here on 5th August 1770, when Napoleon was about one year old. The meagre accounts which remain extant give us the picture of a village boy of respectable position whose character bore a striking resemblance to that which Robert Clive earned among the townspeople of Market Drayton in his early years. Schulmeister, at the age of twelve, was the acknowledged leader of the local band of youthful marauders and scapegraces—hooligans we would call them in these days. At the age of seventeen he had already become known as one of the most accomplished smugglers on the Franco-German frontier, a business, it is noteworthy, in which he engaged, either personally or by proxy, to the closing years of his life. At the age of twenty-two he married an Alsatian maid called Unger, and established himself in two distinct trades which his considerable smuggling operations were likely to render lucrative at the time. In after years, however, when he had become the lord of a château and large pleasance, and preferred to be known as Monsieur de Meinau, the spy was prone to overlook the fact that he had at one time kept a provision shop and an ironmongery at Neu-Freistett. Smuggling he was always willing to admit, and for the reason that in Revolutionary times, when life was accounted cheap, it required much courage and resource, he said, to become a successful smuggler. Undoubtedly the experience he acquired in this dangerous trade had called for many of the mental qualities which were to serve him so well in his after-career.
About 1799 he was introduced to Colonel Savary, afterwards to become the Duc de Rovigo, who was then engaged on a minor commissarial mission for the Directory in Alsatian countries. Savary was evidently one of those fortunate individuals on whom the gift of sensing great events to come appears to be bestowed, and, like all of his kind, he had both the eye for useful men and the talent for attaching them. An acuminous judge of character, he was first attracted to Schulmeister by the latter's cool audacity and splendid resource in the conduct of perilous smuggling enterprises, though whether, as it is said, Savary was himself anxious to share in the very liberal profits of the smuggler's trade, is not so clear. It is certain, however, that the rising soldier and the prosperous contrabandist continued to meet and to correspond, so that in 1804, being commissioned to allure a princely _emigré_ across the French frontier, in accordance with Napoleon's resolve to put a term to conspiracies against his power by sacrificing the blood of a Bourbon, Savary at once remembered his friend Karl Schulmeister. The man who had so long and successfully eluded the excise officials at the frontier would in all probability, he argued, prove easily equal to the task of trapping a royalist on the wrong side of the international boundary-line.