Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1902 — ST. PIERRE’S ONLY SURVIVOR. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

ST. PIERRE’S ONLY SURVIVOR.

The one person who escaped, of all the people who were in the city of St. Pierre at the time of the awful eruption of

Mount Pelee, is Raoul Sartout. a low. degraded criminal who was confined in an inner cell of the St. Pierre lockup. Sartout owes his life to the fact that on the morning of the eruption he became obstreperous, and as a punishment was placed in a dungeon under-

ground. During the progress of the disaster, not knowing what was going on, the prisoner beat upon the bars and yelled in frantic terror. Finally he succeeded in tearing an opening into an adjoining cell in which there was an iron grating looking up through the sidewalk. Into this apartment he stumbled, falling into the red-hot ashes with which it was already half filled. Severely burned, it the greatest difficulty that he made his way back to the dungeon. For four days and nights, he lay there shrieking with fright, and then his cries brought the first rescuing party that went into the city. The gratings were pried open and Sartout was taken out. He was nearly starved and had suffered frightfully from thirst. It is a strange trick of Fate that the only person to live through the cataclysm was the worst character in the whole city of St. Pierre.

RAOUL SARTOUT.