[3] He bought his freedom for 2400 francs by a decree of the governor of Guadeloupe,[4][5] André had then declared to the royal commissioner accepting his money "You captured me in the land of Africa to enslave me.

[20] Knocking these three years off his age nevertheless allowed Sosthène Héliodore Camille to have a secondary education up to baccalauréat level and then free higher studies without any suspicion of the fate they would offer him.

[25][26] In 1877 Camille Mortenol obtained his baccalauréat ès sciences and then began preparing for the entrance examination to the École polytechnique; he came nineteenth out of 209 applicants.

[27] At the same time he was also offered a place at the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr but preferred the Polytechnique, which he entered on 1 November 1880,[28]

I recognised you by your shiny face, with brilliant reflections, on which two white eyes stand out like the two "rostos"[36] on a sapin in the darkness of the night.

[27] Camille Mortenol chose a career as a naval officer (the first of four graduates of the Polytechnique to choose that corps)[27] and he was admitted to the navy on 1 October 1882.

At the end of this period, praised by his superior officers,[42][c] he transferred to the ironclad Amiral Duperré, on which he sailed across the Mediterranean Sea between November 1883 and May 1884.

This was his last-ever visit to the island, although he retained links with it, writing several articles for local newspapers such as Les Nouvellistes and meeting fellow Guadeloupeans based in Paris.

General Jacques Charles René Achille Duchesne was put in command and the naval division was led by captain Amédée Bienaimé.

[46] and Maevatanana on 9 June the same year[47] After the capture of Tananarive on 30 September 1895 by the French expeditionary force, Martenol was one of the officers for in Gallieni's entourage and on 19 August 1895 was rewarded for his bravery by being made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, presented in person by president Félix Faure.

He therefore sailed near Madagascar again and Forestier wrote on 15 August 1896:Mr Mortenol is an excellent officer, whose services I have already had the chance of appreciating.

[54] In a note dated 25 July 1899 captain Jean Baptiste Pierre Jules Arden, commander of the mobile defences, wrote of Mortenol: One cannot hide the fact that this officer's colour may be a source of a little trouble.

There is a prejudice on this one which one cannot avoid reckoning with, and I had the opportunity of seeing the astonishment, exclamations and remarks of the populations of ports seeing a torpedo boat arrive commanded by a black officer.

In June 1902 he had to return to mainland France again to convalesce[60] and on 9 September that year in the 14th arrondissement of Paris he married Marie-Louise Vitalo (17 May 1866, Cayenne - 28 July 1912, Brest[61]), the widow of a mathematics teacher.

[28] At the end of the year Mortenol was ordered to join the cruiser Redoutable and found himself off Saigon as part of the reserve division of France's Far East Squadron.

[67] On 2 April 1911 he was awarded the Imperial Order of the Dragon of Annam[68] and on 12 July the same year he was made an officier of the Légion d’honneur,[69] followed by promotion "capitaine de vaisseau" on 7 September 1912.

[28] Martenol had been aged 55 when the First World War had broken out and he sought a way to be really useful to France, especially since (with retirement approaching) he could not seek the command of a major battleship.

Mortenol obtained several more, transferred from other sectors, and later increased their illumination power, with one installed for instance on mont Valérien to deter night attacks by German aircraft.

In 1917 Mortenol reached the maximum age for his rank, but general Michel Joseph Maunoury (by then Paris's military governor) was very satisfied with his services and demanded that he be kept in post.

The Minister of War Paul Painlevé approved this and Mortenol was made an artillery colonel in the reserve of the French Army so he could remain in command of the anti-aircraft defences.

[42] At the time of the Armistice in November 1918 he was in command of 10,000 men with 65 projectors with large diameter and (compared to 10 at the start of the war) 200 artillery pieces adapted for anti-aircraft purposes.

[42] In his Les hommes célèbres de la Guadeloupe Timmy Oriol did not hesitate to write that "it was to him and to Gallieni that Paris owed its safety".

[28] On 16 June 1920 he was promoted to a commander of the Légion d’Honneur,[69] with the citation: A superior officer of the greatest merit, at his post day and night to watch over Paris, performing his duties with rare dedication and enlightened skill.

[62] He is buried in division 5 of Vaugirard Cemetery[76] In Oriol's words, in him Guadeloupe lost "one of its most glorious children, a great and valiant soldier, as modest as brave",[77] whilst Jean-Claude Degras wrote[78] "Mortenol's success has an undeniable symbolic significance in the collective unconscious.

Degras added that in December 1950 the Guyanese Gaston Monnerville, himself a descendent of a slave who had become president of the Conseil de la République, attested that "Mortenol [was] an admirable example.