A few months later, the cannon of the 27th of July was belching in the streets of Paris. On the 28th, the doors of the "commercial Bastille" were thrown open, and the prisoners went out.
Colonel Swan, who went out with them, died on the 29th.
There were a few clever escapes, evasions as the French call them, from Sainte-Pélagie. What was known as the procès d'Avril, 1835, resulted in the condemnation of Guinard, Imbert, Cavaignac, Marrast, and others, who were lodged in the political wing. Forty of them joined in a scheme of evasion, and a subterranean passage was dug from the north-east angle of the prison into the garden of No. 9, Rue Copeau. The tunnel, nearly twenty yards in length, was completed on the 12th of July, and of the forty prisoners twenty-eight made good their escape from Sainte-Pélagie the "insupportable."
The excitement of a well-conducted escape is contagious, and in September of the same year the Comte de Richmond, who gave himself out as the son of Louis XVI., with his two friends in durance, Duclerc and Rossignol, broke prison ingeniously enough. By bribery or some other means, Richmond procured a pass-key which gave admission to the sentry-walk; and, head erect and a file of papers under his arm, he walked boldly out, followed by Rossignol and Duclerc. To the sentinel who challenged them, the Count with perfect sang-froid introduced himself as the director of the prison; "and these gentlemen," he added, "whom you ought to know, are my chief clerk, and my architect." The sentry saluted and let them pass, and M. de Richmond and his friends opened the door and walked out.
In 1865, an Englishman named Jackson, condemned to five years' hard labour, managed to get himself transferred to Sainte-Pélagie. On a wet wild night in the last week of January, he squeezed out of his cell, crawled over the roof to a convenient wall, and by the aid of a cord and grappling iron let himself down into the street. The night was pitchy black, rain was falling in torrents, the sentry was in his box, and Jackson footed it leisurely home.
Better than these, however, was the escape of Colonel Duvergier, one of the State prisoners of Charles X. Colonel Duvergier had been condemned to five years' "reclusion" for no apparent reason except that he was one of the most distinguished soldiers of his day. The story of his escape is one of the happiest in the romantic annals of prison-breaking, but the credit of the affair rests principally with a young littérateur, a certain Eugène de P——.
Colonel Duvergier was on the political, and Eugène de P—— on the debtors' side of Sainte-Pélagie, but they had succeeded in establishing a correspondence by letter; and Eugène, not over-eager for his own liberty, seems to have taken upon himself to procure the colonel's. With Colonel Duvergier was one Captain Laverderie, and the colonel refused to go out unless the captain could share his escape. Eugène de P—— said the captain should go also, and the plot went forward.
The first step was to get the colonel and his friend from the political to the debtors' side of the prison, and this was contrived at the exercise hour. When the political prisoners were being marched in, to give place to the debtors—there being but one exercise yard for the two classes—Duvergier and Laverderie escaped the warder's eye, and hid in the garden, until the debtors came out for their constitutional. Nowadays, the warder would have counted his flock, both on coming out and on going in; but the colonel and the captain seem to have had no difficulty, either in attaching themselves to the debtors or in taking refuge, after the exercise hour, in the cell of a debtor who was a party to the scheme.
So far, however, the fugitives had succeeded only in changing their quarters in the prison; and the next step was to procure for them two visitors' passes. These passes, deposited with the gate-warder when visitors entered, were returned to them as they left the prison. How to place in the warder's hands passes bearing the names of two "visitors" who had not entered the prison? The adroit Eugène thought it not too difficult.