A Novel of the 1835 Escape
‘Ah, gentlemen, there have been prisoners who tried to escape, but not one of them ever succeeded.’
June 1832. Paris rises. Édouard Colombat, a lodging-house keeper in the rue de la Calandre, takes up arms on the barricades. Denounced by his neighbours, arrested by Vidocq himself, sentenced to death and then to deportation, he is shut away in Mont-Saint-Michel, the prison from which, the warders say, no one has ever escaped.
In October 1834 the abbey burns. Colombat carries the governor out of the flames. He is promised that he will leave ‘by a fine door’. The door does not open.
So, with a nail picked up from the ashes, he begins to dig.
Drawn from the Souvenirs that Colombat published in 1843, The Prisoner of Mont-Saint-Michel tells, step by step, the true story of an escape that seemed impossible: seven months of nights beneath a slop tub, a skull in a dungeon pit, a rope twelve feet too short, and a night of storm on the sands.
Rudy Dexus brings years of research into declassified CIA documents, academic sources and first-hand accounts from one of history's most volatile periods.
His South American Espionage Series shows how covert American operations in Latin America shaped the modern world. Through the eyes of Gilles Duval, readers see the human cost of geopolitics and the loyalties it tests.
Published by 21R6 Editions: The Reich Ghosted, The Prisoner of Mont-Saint-Michel
