‘During twelve years’ residence in a town in which they were debarred the opportunity of procuring aid from their families and their country,[270] the English prisoners could not but contract debts and obligations, and they will doubtless acknowledge that the kindness and generosity of the inhabitants may have helped them to forget the disasters and misfortunes of war.... At the moment of the invasion the majority of the prisoners waited neither for official orders to depart nor for the conclusion of treaties. They quitted the country with all the facilities which circumstances naturally afforded. By depriving the creditors of their pledge, by sending the general officers, some to India, others to China, in the service of His Britannic Majesty, and thus rendering it impossible for the inhabitants of Verdun to sue their debtors, the English Government made itself responsible for the payment of the debts. The inhabitants put forward their claim from the outset, and from the outset notes on the subject were exchanged between the different Ministers.... If in that list there should prove to be a single usurious debt, one that cannot be verified by proper vouchers, let it be immediately rejected.... The number of prisoners always exceeded 1200, and frequently amounted to 2000.’[271]
The memorial asked for an instalment of 5000 francs ‘to relieve the most urgent cases of distress’ pending examination of the claims by a mixed commission.
The Times of October 18, 1839, says:—
‘A deputation from the inhabitants of Verdun in France has just arrived in London to claim the payment of £140,000, the amount of private debts incurred by English prisoners detained in that city during the war. The deputation, composed of MM. Routhier, Quentin, Leorat, Massé, and Trebout has, we are assured, been most kindly received by Lord Palmerston, who seems to have impressed the members of the deputation with the belief that no time will be lost in submitting the demand of the inhabitants of Verdun to a mixed commission charged with the liquidation of the debts. Marshal Soult,[272] we understand, has written personally to Lord Palmerston to suggest that a part of the nine million francs (the unappropriated balance of a sum of sixty millions paid by France in 1815 in liquidation of the claims of British subjects) ought to be applied in payment to the inhabitants of Verdun.’
But nothing came of this mission, and we hear of no further attempt by Verdun to obtain satisfaction. Thus ends the history of these involuntary guests.
V
TWO RESTORATIONS
The Restoration—Aristocrats and Commoners—Unwelcome Guests—Wellington in Danger—Misgivings—Napoleonic Emblems—Spectacles—Visits to Elba—Egerton’s Siege—St. Helena—Eyewitnesses and Survivors.
While the fall of Napoleon thus enabled numbers of Englishmen to return home, it allowed and tempted a smaller but yet considerable number to make or renew acquaintance with France. According to Wansey, there were four or five hundred of these,[273] scarcely any, however, staying more than a fortnight or three weeks. The through fare from London was now £5. The visitors had the interesting spectacle of the restoration of the Bourbons, while the very few who made a more lengthened stay witnessed also the Hundred Days’ reign of Napoleon, and his second and final fall. Never surely in Europe in modern times were more startling vicissitudes crowded into so brief a period. Even Spain with its pronunciamientos was not destined to present such a kaleidoscope. For a parallel we must go forward to the Central American republics or backward to the time when the pretorians made and unmade Roman emperors.
These visitors, like those who hurried over in 1802, included all sorts and conditions of men. There were statesmen like Castlereagh, anxious to weigh the chances of stability of the reinstated dynasty. He paid two visits, the first in August 1814 on his way to the Vienna Congress, the second in February 1815. It was probably on the first visit that Ney, dining with him and with officers of the allied armies, had the bad taste or want of tact to argue that an invasion of England, which he said he had strenuously urged on Napoleon, would certainly have succeeded. There were subordinate officials like Wellesley Pole, Master of the Mint and brother to Wellington, and Croker who, as we learn from the police bulletins, preferred a complaint that American privateers were still being sheltered at Bordeaux. It was not at this visit but at a subsequent one in July 1815 that Croker inspected the memorable scenes of the Revolution, discovered in the possession of Marat’s old printer Colin a large collection of pamphlets, and was introduced by him to Marat’s sister, whom he found as repulsive-looking as her brother. ‘Colin,’ said Croker, ‘had in some small dark rooms up two or three flights of stairs an immense quantity of brochures of the earlier days of the Revolution. What he had least of were the works of Marat, even those which he himself printed, which he accounted for naturally enough by saying that there were times in which it might be somewhat hazardous to possess them.’ Croker induced the British Museum in 1817 to purchase the collection, and he afterwards formed a collection of his own which ultimately had the same destination. There were politicians like Grey, F. J. Robinson, Fazakerley, Grattan, Whitbread, and Brougham. Brougham attended the sittings of the Institute, of which he was afterwards to be an associate, saw Laplace, and had a long conversation with Carnot. This was his first visit to France, for his step-grandson Sir Edward Malet is mistaken in stating that he once heard Mirabeau speak. ‘I never,’ says Brougham, ‘spent any time by half so delightful. My fortnight passed like a day.’ Are we to attribute to this visit the birth of an infant afterwards known as Madame Blaze de Bury, who died in 1894 at the age of eighty, and who in spite of her alleged birth as a Stewart in Scotland was believed to be Brougham’s daughter by a French mother? She strongly resembled him both physically and mentally. Her husband had an English mother named Bury; her daughter, like herself a writer, died in December 1902.
There was Thelwall, the acquitted Radical of 1794, who had temporarily renounced politics and taken to the cure of stammering. There was Arthur Thistlewood, who, it is said, had visited Paris in 1794, and who soon entered into conspiracies, the last of which, named from Cato Street, resulted in his conviction and execution in 1820. He was decidedly an exception among the visitors, yet the Paris air may have helped to lead him astray, for it was an atmosphere of conspiracy.