In vain, threats and promises were urged upon the colonel.  All he would say was:  “You may be Prince Louis Napoleon, or you may not.  Napoleon, your predecessor, overthrew legitimate authority, and it is not right for you to attempt to do the same thing in this place.  Murder me if you like, but I will do my duty to the last.”

The soldiers took the side of their commander.  Resistance was of no avail.  The prince and his party were forced to leave the barracks, the gates of which were shut at once by Colonel Piguellier’s order.  The only concession the prince had been able to obtain was that he and his followers should not be pursued by the troops, but be left to be dealt with by the civil authorities.

The failure was complete.  The day before, a party of the prince’s friends had been at Boulogne on the lookout for his arrival; but when they found he did not come, they had left the city.  All that remained to be done was to attempt to save the prince.  He was almost beside himself.  Apparently he lost his self-command, and men of more nerve and experience did with him what they would.

He and his party reached the sea at last.  The National Guard of Boulogne began firing on them.  The prince, Count Persigny, Colonel Voisin, and Galvani, an Italian, were put into a boat.  As they pushed off, a fire of musketry shattered the little skiff, and threw them into the water.  Colonel Voisin’s arm was broken at the elbow, and Galvani was hit in the body.  The prince and Persigny came up to the surface at some distance from the land.  Colonel Voisin and Galvani, being nearer to the shore, were immediately rescued.  Count Orsi says that as the prince swam towards the steamer, still fired on by the National Guard stationed on the heights, a custom-house boat headed him off.  But in Boulogne it was reported and believed that he was captured and brought to land in a bathing machine.

The prisoners were tried by a royal decree.  No one was sentenced to death, but the prince, Count Montholon, Count Persigny, Colonel Voisin, Major Parquin, and another officer were sent to the fortress of Ham, on the frontier of Belgium, where they occupied the same quarters as Prince Polignac and the other ministers of Charles X. had done.  Count Montholon, four months after, made piteous appeals to be let out on parole for one day, that he might be present when the body of Napoleon was brought back to the capital.

The prince passed five years in prison, reading much, and doubtless meditating much on the mistakes of his career.  Many plans of escape had been secretly proposed to him, but he rejected all of them, fearing they were parts of a trap laid for him by the authorities.  It has always been believed, however, and it is probably true, that Louis Philippe would have been very willing to have the jailers shut their eyes while Louis Napoleon walked out of their custody, believing that the ridicule that had attended his two attempts at revolution had ruined his chances as a pretender to the throne.