Charles-Hippolyte Labussière entered into the Committee of Public Safety’s Prisoners Bureau as a copy clerk three and a half months before 9 Thermidor. This Prisoners Bureau provided information concerning prisoners throughout the Republic and served as a depository for documents delivered to the Popular Commission, by order of the Committee of Public Safety, so that they could be handed over to the Revolutionary Tribunal. Labussière was the clerk to whom the documents came last, to be numbered and registered. Every day, at two in the afternoon, he would give them to a member of the Popular Commission, who was instructed to take them from his hands without giving him a receipt. Forty-eight hours later the detainees were judged, which is to say, sent to the scaffold.

Labussière, from the very first moment of his entry into the Prisoners Bureau, had already conceived of his project to use his position in favor of as many victims as he could save. Every day he had twenty to twenty-five documents to give to the commission. He began first by removing the Sénéchal family, Madame Leprestre de Château-Giron and her two daughters. During the first six days he was content to hide the documents. However, since the volume began to grow too large, and since he could neither take them out during the day, nor keep them hidden, he imagined a way to make them disappear during the night. He would thus return to the Committee of Public Safety at one o’clock in the morning, while the members of the committee were deliberating. He would climb up to his office, go to his hiding-place, take the documents, soak them in a bucket of water, and make six or seven balls out of the paste, which he would put in his pockets. Towards six o’clock in the morning he would go to the baths, where he would soak these same balls of paper some more, since they had already hardened because of the extreme heat (it was the early days of Messidor). He would subdivide them into smaller balls which he would then toss into the Seine through the window of his bath.