honourable badge should be removed from their heads; and amidst thunders of applause, the motion was carried. A special commissioner was despatched to Toulon to order the abolition of the red cap from the Bagne. Accordingly all the caps were confiscated and burnt. But the National Convention had made no provision for replacing the red cap with one of another colour, consequently the prisoners had for some time to go bare-headed. In 1544 the Archbishop of Bourges sent a couple of priests and two other clerks to the captain of the galleys at Toulon, and required him to put them to hard labour. But this was regarded by the Parliament as an infringement of its rights, and the captain was ordered to send the clerics back to the archbishop.
Men were condemned to the galleys for every sort of crime and fault. Many a wretched Huguenot toiled at the oar. Often enough a nobleman laboured beside a man belonging to the dregs of the people. Haudriquer de Blancourt, in love with a lady of good rank, to flatter her made a false entry in her pedigree, so as to enhance her nobility. There ensued an outcry among heralds, and for this De Blancourt was sent to the galleys.
As naval construction and science improved, oars were no longer employed, and sails took their places; the galleys were moored at Toulon, Brest and Roquefort, and acquired the name of Bagnes. The derivation is uncertain. By some it is supposed to be derived from the Provençal bagna, which signifies “moored,” by others from the prisons of the slaves near the Bagno, or baths of the seraglio at Constantinople.
Louis XVI. abolished torture, which had filled the Bagne with cripples. Thenceforth the Bagne ceased to be an infirmary of martyrs, and became a workshop of vigorous labourers. The Revolution of 1789 tore up all the old codes, but it maintained the galleys, only it changed the name of Galerien to Travaux forcés à temps, ou à perpetuité. No one formerly seemed to be sensible to the horrible brutality of the galleys. When Madame de Grignan wrote an account of a visit to one of them to her friend Mme de Sévigné, that lady replied “she would much like to see this sort of Hell,” with “the men groaning day and night under the weight of their chains.”
Furthenbach, in his Architectura navalis (Ulm, 1629), says that the convict in a galley received 28 ounces of biscuit per week, and a spoonful of a mess of rice and vegetables. The full complement of a large galley consisted of 270 rowers, with captain, chaplain, doctor, boatswain, master, and ten to fifteen gentlemen adventurers, friends of the captain, sharing his mess, and berthed in the poop; also about eighteen marines and ten warders, a carpenter, cook, cooper, and smith, &c., and from fifty to sixty soldiers; so that the whole equipage of a galley must have reached a total of four hundred men.
The Bagne has seen strange inmates. Perhaps no story of a forçat is more extraordinary than that of Cognard, better known as the Count of Pontis de Sainte-Hélène. This man, who seemed to have been born to command, was well built, tall, and singularly handsome, with a keen eye and a lofty carriage. This fellow managed to escape from the Bagne, and made his way into Spain, where he formed an acquaintance with the noble family of Pontis de Sainte-Hélène, and by some means, never fully cleared up, blotted the whole family out of life and secured all their papers, and thenceforth passed himself off as a Pontis. Under this name he became a sub-lieutenant in the Spanish army, then rose to be captain of a squadron, and after the attack on Montevideo, gained the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Later he formed a foreign legion, and took part in the political struggles in the Peninsula. He affected the most rigid probity in all matters of military accounts, and denounced two of the officers who had been guilty of embezzlement. But these men, in their own defence, accused Pontis of malversion, and General Wimpfen had him arrested. He escaped, but was caught, and transferred to Palma, among the French prisoners. In the bay was lying a Spanish brig. Cognard proposed to his fellow prisoners to attempt to capture it. The coup de main succeeded, and after having taken the brig, they sailed for Algiers, where they sold the vessel, and went to Malaga, then in French occupation. Count Pontis was given a squadron under the Duke of Dalmatia; and when the French army retreated he was accorded a battalion in the 100th regiment of the line.
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