With another naval officer, Colles, he got away successfully by the aid of the smugglers and their agents, and reached Rye in Sussex. Between them they paid the smugglers one hundred and fifty guineas. At Rye they found another escaped prisoner in hiding, the Captain of the Diomède, and he added another fifty guineas. The latter was almost off his head, and nearly got them caught through his extraordinary behaviour. However, on November 28, 1809, they reached Boulogne after a bad passage.
Robinson with his two hundred guineas bought contraband goods in France and ran them over to England. Stevenson was not so lucky, for a little later he was caught at Deal with an escaped prisoner, was fined five hundred guineas, and in default of payment was sent to Botany Bay.
General d’Henin was one of the French generals who were taken at San Domingo in 1803. He was sent on parole to Chesterfield in Derbyshire, and, unlike several other officers who shared his fate, was most popular with the inhabitants through his pleasing address and manner. He married whilst in Chesterfield a Scots lady of fortune, and for some years resided with her at Spital Lodge, the house of the Agent, Mr. Bower. He and Madame d’Henin returned to Paris in 1814, and he fought at Waterloo, where his leg was torn off by a cannon shot.
His residence in England seems to have made him somewhat of an Anglophile, for in Horne’s History of Napoleon he is accused of favouring the British at Waterloo, and it was actually reported to Napoleon by a dragoon that he ‘harangued the men to go over to the enemy’. This, it was stated, was just before the cannon shot struck him.
From Chesterfield, d’Henin wrote to his friend General Boyer at Montgomery, under date October 30, 1804. After a long semi-religious soliloquy, in which he laments his position but supposes it to be as Pangloss says, that ‘all is for the best in this best of worlds’, he speaks of his bad health, of his too short stay at ‘Harrowgate’ (from which health resort, by the way, he had been sent, for carrying on correspondence under a false name), of his religious conversion, and of his abstemious habits, and finishes:
‘Rien de nouveau. Toujours la même vie, triste, maussade, ennuyeuse, déplaisante et sans fin, quand finira-t-elle? Il fait ici un temps superbe, de la pluie, depuis le matin jusqu’au soir, et toujours de la pluie, et du brouillard pour changer. Vie de soldat! Vie de chien!’
All the same, it is consoling to learn from the following letters written by French officers on parole to their friends, that compulsory exile in England was not always the intolerable punishment which so many authors of reminiscences would have us believe. Here is one, for instance, written from a prisoner on parole at Sevenoaks to a friend at Tenterden, in 1757:
‘I beg you to receive my congratulations upon having been sent into a country so rich in pretty girls: you say they are unapproachable, but it must be consoling to you to know that you possess the trick of winning the most unresponsive hearts, and that one of your ordinary looks attracts the fair; and this assures me of your success in your secret affairs: it is much more difficult to conquer the middle-class sex.... Your pale beauty has been very ill for some weeks, the reason being that she has overheated herself dancing at a ball with all the Frenchmen with whom she has been friendly for a certain time, which has got her into trouble with her mother.... Roussel has been sent to the “Castle” (Sissinghurst) nine days ago, it is said for having loved too well the Sevenoaks girls, and had two in hand which cost him five guineas, which he had to pay before going. Will you let me know if the country is suitable for you, how many French there are, and if food and lodgings are dear?
‘To Mr. Guerdon. A French surgeon on parole at Tenterden.’
The next is from a former prisoner, then living at Dunkirk, to Mrs. Miller at the Post Office, Leicester, dated 1757. Note the spelling and punctuation:
‘Madame,—
Vous ne scaurié croire quell plaisire j’ai de m’entretenir avec vous mon cœur ne peut s’acoutumer à vivre sans vous voire. Je nait pas encore rencontré notre chère compagnon de voyage. Ne m’oublié point, ma chère Elizabeth vous pouvé estre persuadé du plaisire que j’auré en recevant de vos nouvelles. Le gros Loys se porte bien il doit vous écrire aussi qu’à Madame Covagne. Si vous voye Mrs. Nancy donne luy un baisé pour moy’.