8. Tales of Secret Service (22)
Release, Reward, and Insolvency
In 1811 the Baron discovered a weak stone in a dark corner of his cell, and set to work (after the fashion of Trenck fifty years before) to dig it out and work towards the exterior of the wall. Six months of tedious labour ended in his penetrating to the open air. He dropped just before dawn into the ditch, by means of a rope contrived from his bed-clothes, and tried to escape, by mingling with a party of masons who came in every day to work on a new building. He got as far as the outermost gate of all, carrying a hoe, and was there detected by a workman, who pointed him out to the porter as not belonging to the gang. After this the Governor moved him up to the topmost row of cells in the keep, some 120 feet from the ground. The only solace to his misery was that he was level with the platform of the keep, where certain prisoners were allowed to take exercise, and contrived to get into communication with several of them, notably with the Spanish general Charles O‘Donnell and other officers taken at the capitulation of Valencia in January 1812.
But for this distraction Kolli thinks that he would have died of inanition; his digestion had gone out of order, he got rheumatism and had fevers in the winters, and the years passed by without incident. Only vague news of the Moscow Retreat and the Leipzig disaster reached the denizens of the keep. It was a surprise, therefore, when at the end of February 1814 the whole of the prisoners in Vincennes, some forty of them—Vendéans, Spaniards, Germans, four survivors of Malet’s conspiracy, two Russians, and a stray English diplomat—were packed into closed carriages and sent off to Saumur on the Loire. The Allies were in Champagne, and Napoleon was fighting his last furious campaign to cover Paris. On March 31st the capital city fell; on April 13th Napoleon had ratified the Act of Fontainebleau and started on his way to Elba. On April 16th the prisoners at Saumur were turned loose on a world very unfamiliar to most of them.
The Baron had much pressing business before him: to find his wife and children, whom he had not seen for five years; to clear his reputation with his old employers, the British Government; to explain to King Ferdinand the risks that he had taken for him; and to get back the packet of diamonds which he had stowed away in the Paris bank, or if not the stones themselves, then their estimated value in cash. His efforts were moderately successful. The British Government accepted his explanation, and made no inquiry as to what had become of the diamonds. With the aid of the Spanish Ambassador in Paris, Pizarro, he got from the new Royalist government permission to hunt over the Valençay documents in the Ministry of Police, and found Fouché’s orders to Major Berthémy, and Berthémy’s official and confidential reports to Fouché. These established his case, and when they were sent to Madrid, King Ferdinand showed a gratitude rather greater than one would have expected from a personage of such a self-centred and callous disposition.
He created Kolli a Knight of the Order of Carlos III, and gave him a warrant, on the governmental tobacco monopoly of Havannah for no less a sum than 100,000 dollars, to be spread over several years. In Paris he was less fortunate. When he applied to the ministers of Louis XVIII for the restitution of the residue of his 100,000 francs of diamonds, which Fouché’s police had seized, as well as of his personal effects, he got an order for 15,000 francs to cover his minor claims, but a dilatory explanation as to the difficulty of identifying the sum produced by his diamonds in 1810, which had been absorbed into the general funds of the state.
Then came the Hundred Days, during which the Baron took arms under the Duchesse d’Angoulême in the futile attempt to hold the South loyal to Louis XVIII. He was taken prisoner by General Clausel, and only released after Waterloo. Resuming his campaign for the value of his diamonds against the ministers of the Second Restoration, he finally received the answer that the sum which he claimed was British money, and that as Great Britain had been at war with France in 1810 it was a legitimate prize of war. The Due Decazes would not stir from this decision.
However, the Spanish pension remained, and for a year or two the Baron was moderately solvent. Alas! he gave his power of attorney to an American banker at Savannah to cash his grant, and Mr. Elihu Keane drew a great part of it, and then went bankrupt and levanted! The Spanish Revolutionary Government of 1820 abolished all Royal grants made since 1814, and so the rest of Ferdinand’s liberality disappeared.
To earn some useful louis d’or the Baron wrote his little book of adventure in 1821. I have seldom read one whose literary style is more detestable, but a great part of the story is undoubtedly true.
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