“Be quiet! you must think of the end pursued and achieved. Well, then, as some workmen for several days had been going in and coming out of the citadel making repairs, he cut his beard and disguised himself as a carpenter, and passed out before the guard with a plank of wood on his shoulder.”
“Grandmother, don’t you think it rather commonplace for a prince to disguise himself as a carpenter?”
“I think it very clever of him to have got the better of his jailers, in spite of all their surveillance. Doctor Conneau, who had been set free several months previously, arranged and prepared it all, aided by Camille. Yesterday he drove out of the town in a tilbury with your godmother, who got out and hid herself at a certain point, and gave her place to the prince, who had doffed his workman’s clothes; and with well-prepared relays, Doctor Conneau and the Prince reached the frontier. Meanwhile your godmother came to us in a carriage she had hired at a village, after having walked a long way.”
Was the Prince saved? No one knew as yet, since no one except Blondeau, who knew nothing about it, had spoken of it. However, at dinner, Blondeau absolved me of my untruth, by announcing that he had heard that morning of the Prince’s successful escape.
“All the same,” he added, as I had previously said, “to disguise one’s self as a carpenter is not irreproachable good form.”
“A Napoleon elevates every one of his acts. A Bonaparte could not remain the prisoner of an Orléans,” replied my grandfather. “He has escaped. That is everything.”
“The romantic part of it,” added my grandmother, “lies in the fact that he has escaped from his jailers, that his prison doors, so strongly barred, have been opened by a stratagem that no one foresaw nor discovered. It is those who imprisoned him—I regret to say it—who have been tricked and made ridiculous. I love King Louis Philippe, as Camille knows, more than this Bonaparte, who seems to me in his character of pretender a plotter and an intriguer. But as a man, from all Camille has told me of him, I confess he is charming; and as he was her friend, I think she did right in aiding him in his flight. If I had been in her place I would not have hesitated either.”
My godmother remained with us for a fortnight, but was not consoled for the absence of her Prince, for I saw her weeping more than once.
