Читать книгу France in the Nineteenth Century - Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer - Страница 8

The soldiers took the side of their commander. Resistance was of no avail. The prince and his party were forced to leave the barracks, the gates of which were shut at once by Colonel Piguellier's order. The only concession the prince had been able to obtain was that he and his followers should not be pursued by the troops, but be left to be dealt with by the civil authorities.

The failure was complete. The day before, a party of the prince's friends had been at Boulogne on the lookout for his arrival; but when they found he did not come, they had left the city. All that remained to be done was to attempt to save the prince. He was almost beside himself. Apparently he lost his self-command, and men of more nerve and experience did with him what they would.

He and his party reached the sea at last. The National Guard of Boulogne began firing on them. The prince, Count Persigny, Colonel Voisin, and Galvani, an Italian, were put into a boat. As they pushed off, a fire of musketry shattered the little skiff, and threw them into the water. Colonel Voisin's arm was broken at the elbow, and Galvani was hit in the body. The prince and Persigny came up to the surface at some distance from the land. Colonel Voisin and Galvani, being nearer to the shore, were immediately rescued. Count Orsi says that as the prince swam towards the steamer, still fired on by the National Guard stationed on the heights, a custom-house boat headed him off. But in Boulogne it was reported and believed that he was captured and brought to land in a bathing machine.

The prisoners were tried by a royal decree. No one was sentenced to death, but the prince, Count Montholon, Count Persigny, Colonel Voisin, Major Parquin, and another officer were sent to the fortress of Ham, on the frontier of Belgium, where they occupied the same quarters as Prince Polignac and the other ministers of Charles X. had done. Count Montholon, four months after, made piteous appeals to be let out on parole for one day, that he might be present when the body of Napoleon was brought back to the capital.

The prince passed five years in prison, reading much, and doubtless meditating much on the mistakes of his career. Many plans of escape had been secretly proposed to him, but he rejected all of them, fearing they were parts of a trap laid for him by the authorities. It has always been believed, however, and it is probably true, that Louis Philippe would have been very willing to have the jailers shut their eyes while Louis Napoleon walked out of their custody, believing that the ridicule that had attended his two attempts at revolution had ruined his chances as a pretender to the throne.

During the years Louis Napoleon was imprisoned at Ham, he received constant marks of sympathy, especially from foreigners. He was known to favor the project of an interoceanic canal by the Nicaragua route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the Government of Nicaragua proposed to him to become president of a company that would favor its views, expressing the hope that he would make himself as great in America by undertaking such a work, as his uncle has made himself by his military glory.

The illness of his father in Florence gave Prince Louis Napoleon a good reason for asking enlargement on parole from the French Government. Louis Philippe was willing to grant this; but his ministers demurred, unless Louis Napoleon would ask pardon loyalement. This Louis Napoleon refused to do; and having by this time managed to extract a loan of £6,000 from the rich and eccentric Duke of Brunswick, he resolved to attempt an escape.

Here is the story as he told it himself when he reached England. The governor of Ham, it must be premised, was a man wholly uncorruptible. He was kind to his prisoner, with whom he played whist every evening, but he was bent on fulfilling his duty.

This duty obliged him to See the prince twice a day, and at night to turn the key upon him, which he put into his pocket.

The fortress of Ham forms a square, with a round tower at each of the angles. There is only one gate. Between the towers are ramparts, on one of which the prince daily walked, and in one corner had made a flower-garden. A canal ran outside the ramparts on two sides; barracks were under the others. Thélin, the prince's valet, was suffered to go in and out of the fortress at his pleasure. On the 23d of May, 1845, Thélin went to St. Quentin, the nearest large town, and hired a cabriolet, which was to meet him the next day at an appointed place upon the high-road. The prince's plan depended on there being workmen in the prison, and he had been about to make a request to have his rooms papered and painted, when the governor informed him that the staircase was to be repaired. The day before the one chosen for the attempt, two English gentlemen, probably by a previous understanding, had visited the prisoner, and he asked one of them to lend his passport to the valet Thélin.

"Very early on the morning of May 25th, the prince, Dr. Conneau, and Thélin were looking out eagerly for the arrival of the workmen. A private soldier whose vigilance they had reason to dread had been placed on guard that morning, but by good luck he was called away to attend a dress parade.

"The workmen arrived. They proved to be all painters and masons—which was a disappointment to the prince, who had hoped to go out as a carpenter. But at once he shaved off his long moustache, and put over his own clothes a coarse shirt, a workman's blouse, a pair of blue overalls much worn, and a black wig. His hands and face he also soiled with paint; then, putting on a pair of wooden shoes and taking an old clay pipe in his mouth, and throwing a board over his shoulder, he prepared to leave the prison. He had with him a dagger, and two letters from which he never parted—one written by his mother, the other by his uncle, the emperor.

"It was seven o'clock by the time these preparations were made. Thélin called to the workmen on the staircase to come in and have a glass of wine. On the prince's way downstairs he met two warders. One Thélin skilfully drew apart, pretending to have something to say to him; the other was so intent on getting out of the way of the board carried by the supposed workman that he did not look in the prince's face, and the prince and Thélin passed safely into the yard."

As he was passing the first sentinel, the prince let his pipe fall from his mouth. He stooped, picked it up, and re-lighted it deliberately.

"Close to the door of the canteen he came upon an officer reading a letter. A little farther on, a few privates were sitting on a bench in the sun. The concierge at the gate was in his lodge, but his attention was given to Thélin, who was following the prince, accompanied by his dog Ham. The sergeant, whose duty it was to open and shut the gate, turned quickly and looked at the supposed workman; but a movement the prince made at that moment with his board caused him to step aside. He opened the gate: the prince was free.

"Between the two drawbridges the prince met two workmen coming towards him on the side his face was exposed. He shifted his board like a man weary of carrying a load upon one shoulder. The men appeared to eye him with suspicion, as if surprised at not knowing him. Suddenly one said: 'Oh! it is Berthon;' and they passed on into the fortress."

The prince hastened with Thélin to the place where the cabriolet engaged the day before was waiting for them. As Louis Napoleon was about to fling away the board he had been carrying, another cabriolet drove by. As soon as it was out of sight, the prince jumped into his own, shook the dust off his clothes, kicked off his wooden shoes, and seized the reins. The fifteen miles to St. Quentin were soon accomplished. The prince got out at some distance from the town, and Thélin entered it alone, to exchange the cabriolet for a postchaise. The mistress of the post-house offered him a large piece of pie, which he thankfully accepted, knowing that it would be a godsend to his master. A woman, whom they had passed upon the highway on entering the town, took Thélin aside and asked him how he came to be driving with such a shabby, common man that morning; for Thélin was well known in the neighborhood.

Before he rejoined the prince with the pie and the postchaise, Louis Napoleon had become very impatient. Seeing a carriage approach, he stopped it, and asked the occupant if he had seen anything of a postchaise coming from St. Quentin. The traveller proved afterwards to have been the prosecuting attorney of the district (le procureur du roi).

It was nine in the evening when the prince, Thélin, and the dog Ham were safely in the carriage. They reached Valenciennes at a quarter to three A. M., and had to wait more than an hour at the station for the train. The prince had discarded his working clothes, but still wore his black wig. The train arrived at last. By help of the Englishman's passport the prince safely crossed the frontier, and soon reached Brussels. Thence he went by way of Ostend to London.

He was not in time to see his father, who died in Florence before he could get permission from the German States to cross the continent.

All the French papers treated his escape as a matter of no consequence. Immediately on reaching London, he wrote a letter to Louis Philippe, pledging himself to make no further attempt to disturb the peace of France during his reign. He probably judged that the end of the Orleans dynasty might be near.

His escape from prison was not known until the evening. Dr. Conneau gave out that he had been very ill during the night, but under the influence of opiates was sleeping quietly. The governor insisted on remaining all day in the sitting-room, and finally upon seeing him. In the dim light of the sick chamber he saw only a figure, with its face turned to the wall, covered up in the bed-clothes.

At last he became suspicious. Thélin's prolonged absence seemed unaccountable. A closer examination was insisted on, and the truth was discovered. Nobody was punished except Dr. Conneau, who suffered a few months' imprisonment.

LOUIS PHILLIPE. ("The Citizen-King.")