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from Part IV - Contradictions of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
We were too truly French to allow of our feelings being so utterly depressed by our captivity and the uncertainty of our relief as to make us pine away in useless sorrow or lamentations […] [We] procured from Edinburgh a billiard table, and all the requisites for establishing a very good coffee-house, to which no admittance was granted, except to our nationality. Soon after, ascertaining that some of us had received musical instruction, we rented instruments from the Capital, and mustered twenty-two efficient performers, who, under the leadership of a very superior violinist constituted an orchestra superior to any that had ever resounded among the echoes of our Scottish residence. We invited to our concerts, gratuitously, of course, some of the inhabitants with whom we had become acquainted.
In March 1811 nearly 150 Napoleonic prisoners of war arrived on parole in Selkirk, a county town in the Scottish borders whose relative proximity to Edinburgh, rural situation and compact population made it ideally suited to take on this vital role in the British war effort. Some were naval officers and surgeons detained in British hands years earlier, including privateer Antoine Bertrand, seized on board the Amis Reunis in the Persian Gulf in 1805, and Ensign Philippe Jatriel, who survived the destruction of the frigate Amphitrite in Martinique in 1809. Many more had been complicit in Dupont's capitulation at Bailén in 1808, having suffered almost unimaginable hardships en route to the Scottish borders via the notorious prison hulks off Andalucía, the barren Balearic islet of Cabrera and the mass holding prisons in Portsmouth and Edinburgh Castle.
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