“Parbleu! it is that the Prince, who is cracked about your crazy godmother” (Blondeau was an Orléanist, of my grandfather’s way of thinking), “has escaped from prison. I think she has helped him in his flight, and that, as she adores him and is now separated from him, she must feel, as your grandparents say, at once very happy and very unhappy; that is all the mystery.”
The next morning at breakfast they foolishly continued to keep up their mysterious airs before me; so I said to my godmother, Blondeau not being present:
“Why do you try to hide what everyone knows,—that Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte has escaped from his prison at Ham?”
“How can it be known already? When was it discovered?” exclaimed my godmother. “He had just escaped when I left yesterday afternoon, and they could not have known it before evening.”
“Tell me the beginning of the story, godmother,” said I, “since I know the end.”
She hesitated.
My grandmother, happy at having a chance to relate an adventure, asked Camille if she would allow her to tell it to me.
Godmother made a sign of assent.
“Well, imagine that Prince Louis pretended to be ill, and to have need of taking a purge, and shut himself up in his room.”
“Oh! grandmother, that is not poetical,” I interrupted.