Then, before the assembled guard and under arms, the sentence is read by the government commissioner to the marshal who listens to it without a shudder.
Is that all? asks Bazaine calmly.
General Pourcet lowers his head in an affirmative gesture.
Shoot me ASAP! simply murmurs the Marshal. I'm ready!
Marshal Bazaine was not shot because, at the very moment when he declared himself ready to undergo the punishment of his faults, his judges, once again assembled in the room of their
deliberations, decided to sign a petition for pardon in his favor and addressed a letter to the Minister of War in which they evoked the long service of the condemned man and which they ended thus:
Think of the long detention he has just undergone; to think of this torture of two months during which he heard, every day. discuss his honor in front of him and you will join us in begging the President of the Republic not to allow the sentence we have just pronounced to be carried out.
This wish was granted and, the next day. the Official published a presidential decree commuting the death penalty to twenty years of detention with exemption from military degradation.
Interned in the fort of Île Sainte-Marguerite. in the bay of Cannes, Bazaine escaped with the complicity of his wife on the night of August 9 to 10, 1874. He took refuge in Madrid where he lived miserably and where he died in 1888.
It had been a long time since anyone had spoken of him.