PART VI—LOUIS NAPOLEON
By Anna Erwin Woods
He wrote to the Minister of the Interior: “I come, M. Minister, to declare to you that if the French Government will permit me to go to Florence and perform a sacred duty, I promise, upon honor, to return and become a prisoner again whenever the Government expresses its desire that I shall do so.” He also addressed a letter to the king: “Sire, it is not without keen emotion that I come to ask Your Majesty, as a benefit, for permission to leave France, even momentarily; I, who have for the last five years found an ample recompense for the torments of captivity in the air of my fatherland. But, at present, my sick and infirm father demands my care. In order to obtain my freedom he has addressed himself to persons known for their devotion to Your Majesty; it is my duty, on my part, to do all that depends upon me to reach him. The Ministerial Council, not thinking it within its competence to grant the request I have made to go to Florence, promising to return and to become once more a prisoner when the Government shall manifest its desire for me to do so, I come, Sire, with confidence, to make an appeal to Your Majesty’s humane sentiments, and to renew my request by submitting it, Sire, to your high and generous intervention. Your Majesty, I am convinced, will appreciate as it deserves a step which pledges my gratitude in advance; and touched by the isolated position in a foreign land of a man who, on the throne, merited the esteem of Europe will hear the prayers of my father, and my own. I beg Your Majesty to receive the expression of my profound respect.”
The Council of Ministers thought this letter insufficient to permit the exercise of clemency by the king. The leader of the Opposition went, in a private capacity, to plead the situation of the aged, infirm, solitary father, comparing it with that of the king, who was surrounded by a numerous family. The government, however, would not allow the petition to be considered.
When Prince Louis Napoleon became convinced that all his efforts were unavailing, he took a resolution which he afterwards described in a letter as follows: “The desire to see my father once more in this world urged me to the most audacious enterprise I ever attempted; one that demanded more courage and determination than Strasbourg or Boulogne, since I was resolved not to endure the ridicule attaching to a man arrested under a disguise, and a failure would have been insupportable.” He confided his scheme to two persons only, Dr. Conneau and Charles Thelin. The doctor had carried his devotion to such lengths that, even during the previous year when it was proposed that he should leave the prison, he had declared: “I have elected my domicile in the prison of Ham and submit to all conditions which the authorities have seen fit to impose upon me.” Charles Thelin was fully determined never to quit his master and, as his captivity was entirely voluntary, he was treated in a special manner, and allowed to leave the fortress at times and go about the town. But for this fact, and one other, the escape of the Prince would have been impossible. Charles Thelin bought in Ham the clothes in which his master was disguised and arranged all the details of the flight.
General de Montholon was not told of the plan. The general had disapproved of the Boulogne expedition, of which he had been kept in ignorance until the very moment of landing. The prince well knew that he would oppose the plan of escape, considering it a fatal absurdity and folly. When the prince acquainted Dr. Conneau with his plans the latter made every effort to dissuade him. Failure seemed inevitable; indeed, so rash seemed the attempt that the most unheard-of audacity and coolness alone could have rendered possible the miracle of success. But the improbable is sometimes true, and history furnishes greater surprises than romance.
To glance at a plan of the fortress of Ham it would be hard to realize that any man had even been rash enough to make such an attempt, and without the connivance of a single jailor or soldier. The prison of the prince was on the side of the barracks near the dungeon, at the back of the court. To go out of the only door of the fortress it was necessary, in the first place, to pass in front of two jailors, cross the entire length of the court, go under the windows of the commandant who lodged near the drawbridge, then through the wicket where there was an orderly, a sergeant, a gate-keeper, a sentry, and last, a post of thirty men.
That the Prince should conceive the idea of going out alone, in broad daylight, in sight of everybody, was a contingency so strange, so incredible, that not even the most suspicious jailor would have admitted its possibility. That the prisoner himself should have thought of it was due, altogether, to a peculiar condition of circumstances. The commandant of the fortress had asked for and been granted a sum of money for the purpose of making some indispensable repairs in the apartment of the prince and the stairway leading to it. There was a continual coming and going of workmen in the court and the prince remarked that they were very carefully searched on coming in but much less so on going out. This was an illumination to him and he determined that, disguised as a workman, he would, in the presence of all, leave the fortress in open daylight.
That a man who had for five years, on this very spot, been subjected to the closest scrutiny; whose every look, movement, expression, had been closely studied, should undertake to challenge the alert watchfulness of this strict guard, certainly indicated a daring self-control which a writer of romance would scarcely expect thoughtful readers to accept as a characteristic of even a very daring knight of the middle ages, a hero of marvelous and incredible adventures. That this should have occurred within our own prosaic generation, that many of those still living should have looked upon this man of gentle, quiet dignity, brings to mind how immeasurably below the strong realities of truth fall the portrayals of romance upon the mimic stage.
The dress of a workman was secured by Charles Thelin and successfully brought into the fortress; a blue blouse soiled with plaster; a black wig with long hair, a peaked cap rubbed threadbare with pumice stone, a pair of wooden sabots to make the prince look taller.