He scatters money among the passers-by in the streets of Boulogne, sticks his hat on the point of his sword, and himself cries, "Vive l'Empereur!" fires a pistol shot at an officer,[3] which hits a soldier and knocks out three of his teeth, and finally runs away.

He is taken into custody; there are found on his person 500,000 francs, in gold and bank-notes;[4] the procureur-general, Franck-Carre, says to him in the Court of Peers: "You have been tampering with the soldiers, and distributing money to purchase treason." The peers sentenced him to perpetual imprisonment.

He was confined at Ham.

There his mind seemed to take refuge within itself and to mature: he wrote and published some books, instinct, notwithstanding a certain ignorance of France and of the age, with democracy and with progress: "The Extinction of Pauperism," "An Analysis of the Sugar Question," "Napoleonic Ideas," in which he made the Emperor a "humanitarian." In a treatise entitled "Historical Fragments," he wrote thus: "I am a citizen before I am a Bonaparte." Already in 1852, in his book "Political Reveries," he had declared himself a republican.

After five years of captivity, he escaped from the prison of Ham, disguised as a mason, and took refuge in England.
[2] Court of Peers.