A Book of the Riviera

by S. Baring-Gould

2. Was the consequence of this capitulation, that the army laid down its arms?

3. Did Marshal Bazaine, both verbally and by writing, correspond with the enemy, without having previously done all that was his duty?

4. Is Marshal Bazaine guilty, on October 28th, 1870, of having capitulated to the enemy, and delivered over the fortress of Metz, over which he had command, without having previously used every effort in his power to defend it, and exhausted every means of holding out that lay open to him in duty and honour?

The jury answered Yes, unanimously, to all these questions, and he was sentenced to degradation and death; but the sentence of death was commuted to imprisonment for twenty years. On December 25th—Christmas Day—1873, he was taken from the Trianon, Versailles, in a close carriage, to Villeneuve l’Etang, and thence conveyed to Antibes, where he was placed on a steamboat and transferred to the fortress of Ste. Marguerite. On August 10th, 1874, the director of the prison, named Marchi, found Bazaine’s prison empty. The first thought in France, when this news was spread by the telegraph, was that he had been allowed to escape by the connivance of MacMahon. Then details were published which put a romantic gloss on the evasion.

In the fortress of Ste. Marguerite three rooms had been placed at the disposal of the prisoner, as well as a little terrace, which latter was reached by a stone bridge with a wall on each side, and here stood a sentinel, on the wall; but he could not see those who passed over the bridge nor what went on upon the terrace, as the latter was partly covered with an awning against the sun. On the terrace, to which led several steps from the bridge, the Marshal had formed for himself a little garden; and whilst working therein one day he found a choked gutter intended for carrying off rain-water from the castle shoots; it was bored through the rock; and he set to work to clear it. By means of sympathetic ink he was able to maintain a correspondence with his wife; and all was planned for his escape.

On the evening determined on he asked his gaoler, who usually accompanied him for a stroll on the terrace after dinner, to allow him to walk it alone, and this was readily permitted.

After a while Bazaine opened and slammed the gate, and the sentinel supposed that he had passed out of the terrace garden, on his way back to the prison. But that the Marshal, instead, had cleared the drain hole and slipped through, he could not see, because the awning hid from him all view of the terrace. In the drain was a rope, and this Bazaine let down the face of the rock, making it fast to an iron bar crossing the conduit. The descent was for eighty feet. Below burnt a light, giving him notice that his wife was there awaiting him in a boat.

The descent was not a little arduous, and he scratched and bruised his knuckles and knees against the rock, as a high wind was blowing at the time. When he reached the bottom a voice across the water asked who was there, and he struck a match and showed his face. The boat could not come up under the cliff, and he was obliged to plunge into the water to reach it. In the boat were his Creole wife and his nephew, a Mexican, Don Alvarez de Rull. Mme. Bazaine had been in Genoa from August 3rd, and had there hired a pleasure steam-yacht, the Baron Ricasoli, and in this she had either remained in the harbour of Genoa or had gone cruises in it, and had penetrated more than once to the Gulf of Saint Juan. At La Croisette she and her nephew had been set ashore, nominally that she might look at a villa, that she pretended she had an idea of renting. There they hired a boat, and in this they rowed to the foot of the cliff under the foot of the fortress, and awaited the arrival of the Marshal. No sooner was he in the boat than they rowed to the vessel, which had all steam up, and started at full speed for Genoa.

In a letter written by Mme. Bazaine to the French Minister of the Interior, General Chabaud-Latour, dated August 16th, she stated that she had had no confederates. Bazaine also made the same assertion in a letter from Cologne. But no one believed this except the Ultramontane editor of the Univers, who attributed the happy escape to the merits of a consecrated scapular and a thread of the Blessed Virgin’s smock, which Bazaine wore about his neck. Colonel Villette, who had voluntarily shared the Marshal’s imprisonment, and who quitted Ste. Marguerite the day after his escape, was arrested at Marseilles and brought before the magistrates. During the investigation it became clear enough that Bazaine had not been without confederates.

The rope by which Bazaine had let himself down had been woven partly out of the cord that had tied up his boxes, partly out of a swing that his children had used, when allowed to share his imprisonment for awhile. Bazaine himself was not skilful enough to have made this rope; it was woven by Villette. The iron bar to which it was asserted that the rope had been fastened was not to be found in the drain; and it was evident that some one must have held the end when the Marshal was let down.