At Briançon (where I spent the following day), I carefully abstained from drawing, as it was a fortified town. But on April 23 I left the station at Vizille to visit the old château of the famous Lesdiguières, two miles distant. I had seen the château, and began to occupy the quarter of an hour which remained before the omnibus started for the station by sketching it from the village street, when I was pounced upon by a gendarme. “Who has authorised you to sketch the château of Vizille?”—“No one.”—“If you can draw this, you may also have drawn other places. You will go with me to the gendarmerie;” and I was marched through the long street of Vizille, followed by a crowd, and with the hand of the gendarme occasionally grasping me by the shoulder. At the gendarmerie a superior officer appeared, and, with the most extreme insolence of manner, demanded what I had been doing in France, &c. “What had I drawn?”—“Churches and mountains.”—“Ah! mountains! then it has been very easy for you to make a little mark in the drawing, known only to yourself, meaning here is a fortress, and there a fortress.”—“But I am an Englishman.”—“Oh, you are, are you? Then I am all the more glad that we have taken you, for we shall probably soon be at war with England, and then you will make your sketches useful to your Government; so you will consider yourself under arrest.” The letter of the Préfet de la Seine was treated as worthless because it had no seal. The passport was rejected altogether with contempt. After this, all further protestations and remonstrances were answered by an insolent shout of—“Taisez vous donc, vous êtes en état d’arrestation.”
Then the first gendarme was sent with me to the station, where my portmanteaux were opened and ransacked, the contents being tossed out upon the platform. Two suspicious articles were found. First, a slight sketch of the gorge at Sisteron (not the fort; the fort is on the other side of the rock), and, far worse, three volumes of the Guide Joanne for France. “What did I want with guidebooks?”—“To study the country.”—“Ah! that is just what I thought;” and all the officials of the station were called in to witness the discovery. The gendarme then declared that I must return with him and be locked up at Vizille, but a train coming up at that moment, I made a dash into it, and probably thinking a public scrimmage impolitic, the gendarme allowed the station-master to fasten my boxes and bring me a ticket. The gendarme then took his place opposite to me in a first-class carriage.
At 5 P.M. the train arrived at Grenoble. At the station the gendarme of Vizille summoned a gendarme of the town, and I was conducted as a prisoner by the two to the Hotel Monnet. The gendarme of Vizille then left me in care of the other, shut up in a room of the hotel, where the gendarme of Grenoble sat silent opposite to me till 6.30. I thought that then the other gendarme would come back from the Préfecture with an order that I was to be freed from further annoyance. Not a bit of it! He came back with an order that all my possessions were to be carefully ransacked, and all the contents of my boxes were turned out upon the floor. All suspected articles—all my sketches, manuscripts, letters, and all the volumes of the Guide Joanne were then put into my smallest portmanteau, which one of the gendarmes carried, and I was marched between the two to the old palace of the Dauphins, where the courts are. Here two clerks (or secretaries of the Préfecture) subjected me to a long examination—who I was, what was my employment, where I had been, &c. The English letters found in my blotting-book (ordinary family letters) were translated into French by a clerk who understood English. All my drawings (chiefly of church architecture) were examined in detail, and their objects inquired into. The terrible Guides Joanne were passed in review and, after an hour, I was told I was free, but without a single word of apology or regret. Indeed, I should not have got away then if at last one of the clerks had not said in his insolent manner, “Est que vous êtes donc un tel, qu’il n’y a une seule personne dans toute cette partie de la France qui peut répondre de vous?” And goaded to desperation I answered, “Well, yes, there is one person, it is a lady; she is only a few miles from here now (at Aix les Bains): it is the Queen of England.” On parting, the gendarme of Vizille was told in my presence that he had only done his duty in arresting me for having ventured to draw the Château of Lesdiguières; and he left, carrying off in his pocket (by accident no doubt) a sealed packet which he had taken from my dressing-case, saying, “Nous allons ouvrir ça devant ces messieurs, ça doit être des instruments pour tirer des plans.” I called the next day upon my examiners to ask them to obtain restitution of the packet, but they declined to take any trouble. One of their comrades, looking up from his writing, said insolently, “Puisque vous avez été arrêté hier, est-ce qu’on ne vous a encore condamné?”
I wrote this story in the train, and posted it at one of the stations to the editor of the Times, who inserted it in the paper, so that when I reached home I found England ringing with it, and a question asked in the House about it. I also complained to the Foreign Office, and Lord Salisbury sent me afterwards the French answer to the inquiries made. They allowed the facts of the examination, but denied that I had ever been arrested, though the leading feature through the whole had been that whenever I attempted to speak I had been silenced by a shout of “Taisez-vous donc; rappelez-vous donc que vous êtes en arrestation.” The sealed packet was never restored.