Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/252

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198
THE RIVIERA

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