That steamer was the “Carlo Alberto,” a little vessel which had been already used by some republican conspirators, and had been purchased for the service of Marie Caroline.  It had some of her most devoted adherents on board, but the captain was in ignorance.  He thought himself bound for Genoa, and was inclined to disobey when his passengers ordered him to lay to off the harbor of Massa.  However, they used force, and at three in the morning Marie Caroline, who was sleeping, wrapped in her cloak, upon the sand, was roused, put on board a little boat, and carried out to the steamer.  She had a tempestuous passage of four days to Marseilles.  The steamer ran out of coal, and had to put into Nice.  At last, in a heavy sea which threatened to dash small craft to pieces, a fishing-boat approached the “Carlo Alberto,” containing some of the duchess’s most devoted friends.  With great danger she was transferred to it, and was landed on the French coast.  She scrambled up slippery and precipitous rocks, and reached a place of safety.  But the delay in the arrival of her steamer had been fatal to her enterprise.  A French gentleman in the secret had hired a small boat, and put out to sea in the storm to see if he could perceive the missing vessel.  His conduct excited the suspicion of his crew, who talked about it at a wine-shop, where they met other sailors, who had their story to tell of a lady landed mysteriously a few hours before at a dangerous and lonely spot a few miles away.  The two accounts soon reached the ears of the police, and Marseilles was on the alert, when a party of young men, with their swords drawn and waving white handkerchiefs, precipitated their enterprise, by appearing in the streets and striving to rouse the populace.  They were arrested, as were also the passengers left on board the “Carlo Alberto,”—­among them was a lady who deceived the police into a belief that she was the Duchesse de Bern.

Under cover of this mistake the duchess, finding that all hope was over in the southern provinces, resolved to cross France to La Vendee.  At Massa she had had a dream.  She thought the Duc de Bern had appeared to her and said:  “You will not succeed in the South, but you will prosper in La Vendee.”

She quitted the hut in which she had been concealed, made her way on foot through a forest, lost herself, and had to sleep in the vacant cabin of a woodcutter.  The next night she passed under the roof of a republican, who respected her sex and would not betray her.  She then reached the chateau of a Legitimist nobleman with the appropriate name of M. de Bonrecueil.  Thence she started in the morning in a postchaise to cross all France along its public roads.

She accomplished her journey in safety, and fixed May 24, 1832, as the day for taking up arms.  She made her headquarters at a Breton farm-house, Les Meliers.  She wore the costume of a boy,—­a peasant of La Vendee—­and called herself Petit Pierre.