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+Project Gutenberg's Legends of the Bastille, by Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Legends of the Bastille
+
+Author: Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
+Translator: George Maidment
+
+Release Date: July 16, 2013 [EBook #43231]
+
+Language: English
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE ***
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+
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+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Chuck Greif and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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+
+                        LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE
+
+[Illustration: MODEL OF THE BASTILLE, CARVED IN ONE OF THE STONES OF THE
+FORTRESS.
+
+_One of these models, made by the instructions of the architect Palloy,
+was sent to the chief-town of every department in France._]
+
+
+
+
+                               Legends of
+                              the Bastille
+
+                                   BY
+                         FRANTZ FUNCK-BRENTANO
+
+               _WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIEN SARDOU_
+
+                       AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
+                            GEORGE MAIDMENT
+
+                        WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                 LONDON
+                          DOWNEY & CO. LIMITED
+                                  1899
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+     _Legendes et Archives de la Bastille._ Paris: Hachette et Cie.,
+     1898; second edition, 1899. Crowned by the French Academy.
+
+     _Die Bastille in der Legende und nach historischen Documenten._
+     German translation by Oscar Marschall von Bieberstein. Breslau:
+     Schottlaender, 1899.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+In his own entertaining way, Mr. Andrew Lang has recently been taking
+the scientific historian to task, and giving him a very admirable lesson
+on "history as she ought to be wrote." But though the two professors to
+whom he mainly addresses himself are Frenchmen, it would be doing an
+injustice to France to infer that she is the _alma mater_ of the modern
+dryasdust. The exact contrary is the case: France is rich in historical
+writers like the Comte d'Haussonville, M. de Maulde la Clavière, M.
+Gaston Boissier, to name only a few, who know how to be accurate without
+being dull.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano, whom I have the honour of introducing here to the
+English public, belongs to the same class. Of literary parentage and
+connections--his uncle is Professor Lujo Brentano, whose work on the
+English trade gilds is a standard--he entered in his twentieth year the
+École des Chartes, the famous institution which trains men in the
+methods of historical research. At the end of his three years' course,
+he was appointed to succeed François Ravaisson in the work of
+classifying the archives of the Bastille in the Arsenal Library,--a work
+which occupied him for more than ten years. One fruit of it is to be
+seen in the huge catalogue of more than one thousand pages, printed
+under official auspices and awarded the Prix Le Dissez de Penanrum by
+the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. Another is the present
+work, which has been crowned by the French Academy. Meanwhile M.
+Funck-Brentano had been pursuing his studies at the Sorbonne and at
+Nancy, and his French thesis for the doctorate in letters was a volume
+on the origins of the Hundred Years' War, which obtained for him the
+highest possible distinction for a work of erudition in France, the
+Grand Prix Gobert. This volume he intends to follow up with two others,
+completing a social rather than a military history of the war, and this
+no doubt he regards as his _magnum opus_. He is known also as a lecturer
+in Belgium and Alsace as well as in Paris, and being general secretary
+of the Société des Etudes historiques and deputy professor of history at
+the College of France as well as sub-librarian of the Arsenal Library,
+he leads a busy life.
+
+Trained in the rigorous methods of the École des Chartes and inspired by
+the examples of Fustel de Coulanges and M. Paul Meyer, M. Funck-Brentano
+has developed a most interesting and conscientious method of his own. He
+depends on original sources, and subjects these to the most searching
+critical tests; but this is a matter of course: his individuality
+appears in regard to the publication of the results of his researches.
+When he has discoveries of importance to communicate, he gives them to
+the world first in the form of articles or studies in reviews of
+standing, thus preparing public opinion, and at the same time affording
+opportunities for the search-light of criticism to play on his work.
+Some of the chapters of this book thus appeared in the various _revues_,
+and have subsequently gone through a severe process of pruning and
+amending. It is now eleven years since the first appearance, in the
+pages of the _Revue des deux Mondes_, of the study of Latude which, in a
+much altered shape, now forms one of the most interesting portions of
+this book. The coming autumn will see the publication in France of a
+striking work by M. Funck-Brentano on the amazing poison-dramas at Louis
+XIV.'s court, and of this book also the several sections have been
+appearing at intervals for several years past.
+
+The present work, as I have already said, is the fruit of many years of
+research. Its startling revelations, so well summarized in M. Victorien
+Sardou's Introduction, have revolutionized public opinion in France, and
+in particular the solution of the old problem of the identity of the Man
+in the Iron Mask has been accepted as final by all competent critics.
+The _Athenæum_, in reviewing the book in its French form the other day,
+said that it must be taken cautiously as an ingenious bit of special
+pleading, and that the Bastille appears in M. Funck-Brentano's pages in
+altogether too roseate hues, suggesting further that no such results
+could be obtained without prejudice from the same archives as those on
+which Charpentier founded his _La Bastille dévoilée_ in 1789. This
+criticism seems to me to ignore several important points. Charpentier's
+book, written in the heat of the revolutionary struggle, is not a
+history, but a political pamphlet, which, in the nature of the case, was
+bound to represent the Bastille as a horror. Moreover, Charpentier could
+only have depended superficially on the archives, which, as M.
+Funck-Brentano shows, were thrown into utter disorder on the day of the
+capture of the Bastille. The later writer, on the other hand, approached
+the subject when the revolutionary ardours had quite burnt out, and with
+the independent and dispassionate mind of a trained official. He spent
+thirteen years in setting the rediscovered archives in order, after his
+predecessor Ravaisson had already spent a considerable time at the same
+work. He was able, further (as Charpentier certainly was not), to
+complete and check the testimony of the archives by means of the memoirs
+of prisoners--the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, Renneville, Dumouriez, and a
+host of others. In these circumstances it would be surprising if his
+conclusions were not somewhat different from those of Charpentier a
+hundred years ago.
+
+The gravamen of the _Athenæun's_ objection is that M. Funck-Brentano's
+description of the treatment of prisoners in the Bastille applies only
+to the favoured few, the implication being that M. Funck-Brentano has
+shut his eyes to the cases of the larger number. But surely the reviewer
+must have read the book too rapidly. M. Funck-Brentano shows, by means
+of existing and accessible documents, that the fact of being sent to the
+Bastille at all was itself, in the eighteenth century at least, a mark
+of favour. Once at the Bastille, the prisoner, whoever he might be, was
+treated without severity, unless he misbehaved. Prisoners of no social
+importance, such as Renneville, Latude (a servant's love-child),
+Tavernier (son of a house-porter), were fed and clothed and cared for
+much better than they would have been outside the prison walls. A young
+man named Estival de Texas, who was being exiled to Canada because he
+was a disgrace to his family, wrote to the minister of Paris on June 22,
+1726, from the roadstead of La Rochelle: "Your lordship is sending me to
+a wild country, huddled with mean wretches, and condemned to a fare very
+different from what your lordship granted me in the Bastille." Here was
+a friendless outcast looking back regretfully on his prison fare! On
+February 6, 1724, one of the king's ministers wrote to the lieutenant
+of police: "I have read to the duke of Bourbon the letter you sent me
+about the speeches of M. Quéhéon, and his royal highness has instructed
+me to send you an order and a _lettre de cachet_ authorizing his removal
+to the Bastille. But as he thinks that this is _an honour the fellow
+little deserves_, he wishes you to postpone the execution of the warrant
+for three days, in order to see if Quéhéon will not take the hint and
+leave Paris as he was commanded." It is on such documents as these,
+which are to be seen in hundreds at the Arsenal Library in Paris, that
+M. Funck-Brentano has founded his conclusions. Anyone who attacks him on
+his own ground is likely to come badly off.
+
+With M. Funck-Brentano's permission, I have omitted the greater part of
+his footnotes, which are mainly references to documents inaccessible to
+the English reader. On the other hand, I have ventured to supply a few
+footnotes in explanation of such allusions as the Englishman not reading
+French (and the translation is intended for no others) might not
+understand. On the same principle I have attempted rhymed renderings of
+two or three scraps of verse quoted from Regnier and Voltaire, to whom I
+make my apologies. The proofs have had the advantage of revision by M.
+Funck-Brentano, who is, however, in no way responsible for any
+shortcomings. The Index appears in the English version alone.
+
+The portrait of Latude and the views of the Bastille are reproduced from
+photographs of the originals specially taken by M. A. Bresson, of 40 Rue
+de Passy, Paris.
+
+GEORGE MAIDMENT.
+
+_August, 1899._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                           1
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ARCHIVES                                                          47
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE                                               57
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LIFE IN THE BASTILLE                                                  85
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK                                             114
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE                                       147
+
+  I. VOLTAIRE                                                        148
+
+ II. LA BEAUMELLE                                                    152
+
+III. THE ABBÉ MORELLET                                               155
+
+ IV. MARMONTEL                                                       158
+
+  V. LINGUET                                                         163
+
+ VI. DIDEROT                                                         165
+
+VII. THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU                                         166
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LATUDE                                                               168
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY                                               238
+
+INDEX                                                                277
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Model of the Bastille                                      _Frontispiece_
+
+Facsimile of Du Junca's note regarding the
+entry of the Iron Mask                                 _Facing page_ 115
+
+Facsimile of Du Junca's note regarding the
+death of the Iron Mask                                     "         116
+
+Facsimile of the Iron Mask's burial certificate            "         142
+
+Facsimile of the cover of Latude's explosive box           "         173
+
+Facsimile of Latude's writing with blood on linen          "         188
+
+Portrait of Latude                                         "         229
+
+The Capture of the Bastille                                "         257
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+At the great Exhibition of 1889 I visited, in company with some friends,
+the reproduction of the Bastille, calculated to give all who saw it--and
+the whole world must have seen it--an entirely false impression.
+
+You had barely cleared the doorway when you saw, in the gloom, an old
+man enveloped in a long white beard, lying on the "sodden straw" of
+tradition, rattling his chains and uttering doleful cries. And the guide
+said to you, not without emotion, "You see here the unfortunate Latude,
+who remained in this position, with both arms thus chained behind his
+back, for thirty-five years!"
+
+This information I completed by adding in the same tone: "And it was in
+this attitude that he so cleverly constructed the ladder, a hundred and
+eighty feet long, which enabled him to escape."
+
+The company looked at me with surprise, the guide with a scowl, and I
+slipped away.
+
+The same considerations that prompted my intervention have suggested to
+M. Funck-Brentano this work on the Bastille, in which he has set the
+facts in their true light, and confronted the legends which everyone
+knows with the truth of which many are in ignorance.
+
+For in spite of all that has been written on the subject by Ravaisson,
+in the introduction to his _Archives of the Bastille_, by Victor
+Fournel, in his _Men of the Fourteenth of July_, and by other writers,
+the popular idea of the internal administration of the Bastille in 1789
+holds by the description of Louis Blanc: "Iron cages, recalling
+Plessis-les-Tours[1] and the tortures of Cardinal La Balue![2]--underground
+dungeons, the loathsome haunts of toads, lizards, enormous rats,
+spiders--the whole furniture consisting of one huge stone covered with a
+little straw, where the prisoner breathed poison in the very air....
+Enveloped in the shades of mystery, kept in absolute ignorance of the
+crime with which he was charged, and the kind of punishment awaiting
+him, he ceased to belong to the earth!"
+
+If this Bastille of melodrama ever had any existence, the Bastille of
+the eighteenth century bore the least possible resemblance to it. In
+1789, these dungeons on the ground floor of the fortress, with windows
+looking on the moats, were no longer reserved, as under Louis XV., for
+prisoners condemned to death, dangerous madmen, or prisoners who had
+been insolent, obstreperous, or violent; nor for warders guilty of
+breaches of discipline. At the time of Necker's first ministry, the use
+of these dungeons had been abolished altogether.
+
+The prisoner, put through an interrogation in the early days of his
+detention, was never left in ignorance of the "delinquency" with which
+he was charged, and had no reason to be concerned about the kind of
+punishment awaiting him; for there had been neither torture nor
+punishment of any kind at the Bastille for a hundred years.
+
+Instead of a dungeon or a cage of iron, every prisoner occupied a room
+of fair size, its greatest defect being that it was rather poorly
+lighted by a narrow window, secured by bars, some of them projecting
+inwards. It was sufficiently furnished; and there was nothing to hinder
+the prisoner from getting in more furniture from outside. Moreover, he
+could procure whatever clothing and linen he desired, and if he had no
+means to pay for them, money was supplied. Latude complained of
+rheumatism, and furs were at once given him. He wanted a dressing-gown
+of "red-striped calamanco"; the shops were ransacked to gratify him. A
+certain Hugonnet complained that he had not received the shirts "with
+embroidered ruffles" which he had asked for. A lady named Sauvé wanted a
+dress of white silk spotted with green flowers. In all Paris there was
+only a white dress with green stripes to be found, with which it was
+hoped that she would be satisfied.
+
+Every room was provided with a fireplace or a stove. Firewood was
+supplied, and light; the prisoner could have as many candles as he
+pleased. Paper, pens, and ink were at his disposal; though he was
+deprived of them temporarily if he made bad use of them, like Latude,
+who scribbled all day long only to heap insults in his letters on the
+governor and the lieutenant of police. He could borrow books from the
+library, and was at liberty to have books sent in from outside. La
+Beaumelle had six hundred volumes in his room. He might breed birds,
+cats, and dogs--by no means being reduced to taming the legendary spider
+of Pellisson,[3] which figures also in the story of Lauzun,[4] and,
+indeed, of all prisoners in every age. Instruments of music were
+allowed. Renneville played the fiddle, and Latude the flute. There were
+concerts in the prisoners' rooms and in the apartments of the governor.
+
+Every prisoner could work at embroidery, at the turning lathe, or the
+joiner's bench, at pleasure. All whose conduct was irreproachable were
+allowed to come and go, to pay each other visits, to play at
+backgammon, cards, or chess in their rooms; at skittles, bowls, or
+_tonneau_[5] in the courtyard. La Rouërie asked for a billiard table for
+himself and his friends, and he got it.
+
+The prisoners were permitted to walk on the platform of the fortress,
+from which they could see the people passing up and down the Rue
+Saint-Antoine and the vicinity, and watch the animated crowds on the
+boulevard at the hours when fashionable people were accustomed to take
+their drives. By the aid of telescopes and big letters written on boards
+they were able to communicate with the people of the neighbourhood, and,
+like Latude, to keep up a secret correspondence with the grisettes of
+the district. Michelet, with too obvious a design, declares that under
+Louis XVI. the regulations of the prison were more severe than under
+Louis XV., and that this promenade on the platform was done away with.
+There is not a word of truth in it. The promenade was forbidden only to
+those prisoners who, like the Marquis de Sade, took advantage of it to
+stir up riots among the passers-by; and from the accession of Louis
+XVI. and the visitation of Malesherbes,[6] the rule of the prison grew
+milder day by day.
+
+Certain of the prisoners were invited to dine with the governor, and to
+walk in his gardens, in excellent company. Some were allowed to leave
+the fortress, on condition of returning in the evening; others were even
+allowed to remain out all night!
+
+Those who had servants could have them in attendance if the servants
+were willing to share their captivity. Or they had room-mates, as was
+the case with Latude and Allègre.
+
+In regard to food, the prisoners are unanimous in declaring that it was
+abundant and good. "I had five dishes at dinner," says Dumouriez, "and
+five at supper, without reckoning dessert." The Provost de Beaumont
+declared that he had quitted the Bastille with regret, because there he
+had been able to eat and drink to his heart's content. Poultier
+d'Elmotte says: "M. de Launey had many a friendly chat with me, and
+sent me what dishes I wished for." Baron Hennequin, a hypochondriac who
+found fault with everything, confesses nevertheless that they gave him
+more meat than he could eat. The Abbé de Buquoy affirms that he fared
+sumptuously, and that it was the king's intention that the prisoners
+should be well fed. The splenetic Linguet owns, in his pamphlet, that he
+had three good meals a day, and that meat was supplied to him in such
+quantities that his suspicions were aroused: "They meant to poison me!"
+he says. But he omits to say that de Launey sent him every morning the
+menu for the day, on which he marked down with his own hand the dishes
+he fancied, "choosing always the most dainty, and in sufficient
+quantities to have satisfied five or six epicures."
+
+In Louis XIV.'s time, Renneville drew up the following list of dishes
+served to him: "Oysters, prawns, fowls, capons, mutton, veal, young
+pigeons; forcemeat pies and patties; asparagus, cauliflower, green peas,
+artichokes; salmon, soles, pike, trout, every kind of fish whether
+fresh-water or salt; pastry, and fruits in their season." We find Latude
+complaining that the fowls given him were not stuffed! M.
+Funck-Brentano tells the amusing story of Marmontel's eating by mistake
+the dinner intended for his servant, and finding it excellent.
+
+Mdlle. de Launay, afterwards Madame de Staal, who was imprisoned for
+complicity in the Cellamare[7] plot, relates that on the first evening
+of her sojourn in the Bastille, she and her maid were both terrified by
+the strange and prolonged sound, beneath their feet, of a mysterious
+machine, which conjured up visions of an instrument of torture. When
+they came to inquire, they found that their room was over the kitchen,
+and the terrible machine was the roasting-jack!
+
+The prisoners were not only allowed to receive visits from their
+relations and friends, but to keep them to dinner or to make up a
+rubber. Thus Madame de Staal held receptions in the afternoon, and in
+the evening there was high play. "And this time," she says, "was the
+happiest in my life."
+
+Bussy-Rabutin received the whole court, and all his friends--especially
+those of the fair sex. M. de Bonrepos--an assumed name--was so
+comfortable in the Bastille that when he was directed to retire to the
+Invalides,[8] he could only be removed by force.
+
+"I there spent six weeks," says Morellet, "so pleasantly, that I chuckle
+to this day when I think of them." And when he left, he exclaimed: "God
+rest those jolly tyrants!"
+
+Voltaire remained there for twelve days, with a recommendation from the
+lieutenant of police that he should be treated with all the
+consideration "due to his genius."
+
+The objection may be raised that these cases are all of great lords or
+men of letters, towards whom the government of those days was
+exceptionally lenient. (How delightful to find writers put on the same
+footing with peers!) But the objection is groundless.
+
+I have referred to Renneville and Latude, prisoners of very little
+account. The one was a spy; the other a swindler. In the three-volume
+narrative left us by Renneville, you hear of nothing but how he kept
+open house and made merry with his companions. They gambled and smoked,
+ate and drank, fuddled and fought, gossiped with their neighbours of
+both sexes, and passed one another pastry and excellent wine through the
+chimneys. How gladly the prisoners in our jails to-day would accommodate
+themselves to such a life! Renneville, assuredly, was not treated with
+the same consideration as Voltaire; but, frankly, would you have wished
+it?
+
+As to Latude--who was supplied with dressing-gowns to suit his
+fancy--the reader will see from M. Funck-Brentano's narrative that no
+one but himself was to blame if he did not dwell at Vincennes[9] or in
+the Bastille on the best of terms--or even leave his prison at the
+shortest notice, by the front gate, and with a well-lined pocket.
+
+For that was one of the harsh measures of this horrible Bastille--to
+send away the poor wretches, when their time was expired, with a few
+hundred livres in their pockets, and to compensate such as were found to
+be innocent! See what M. Funck-Brentano says of Subé, who, for a
+detention of eighteen days, received 3000 livres (£240 to-day), or of
+others, who, after an imprisonment of two years, were consoled with an
+annual pension of 2400 francs of our reckoning. Voltaire spent twelve
+days in the Bastille, and was assured of an annual pension of 1200
+livres for life. What is to be said now of our contemporary justice,
+which, after some months of imprisonment on suspicion, dismisses the
+poor fellow, arrested by mistake, with no other indemnity than the
+friendly admonition: "Go! and take care we don't catch you again!"
+
+Some wag will be sure to say that I am making out the Bastille to have
+been a palace of delight. We can spare him his little jest. A prison is
+always a prison, however pleasant it may be; and the best of cheer is no
+compensation for the loss of liberty. But there is a wide difference, it
+will be granted, between the reality and the notion generally
+held--between this "hotel for men of letters," as some one called it,
+and the hideous black holes of our system of solitary confinement. I
+once said that I should prefer three years in the Bastille to three
+months at Mazas.[10] I do not retract.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Linguet and Latude, unquestionably, were the two men whose habit of
+drawing the long bow has done most to propagate the fables about the
+Bastille, the falsity of which is established by incontrovertible
+documents. Party spirit has not failed to take seriously the interested
+calumnies of Linguet, who used his spurious martyrdom to advertise
+himself, and the lies of Latude, exploiting to good purpose a captivity
+which he had made his career.
+
+Let us leave Linguet, who, after having so earnestly urged the
+demolition of the Bastille, had reason to regret it at the Conciergerie
+at the moment of mounting the revolutionary tumbril, and speak a little
+of the other, this captive who was as ingenious in escaping from prison,
+when locked up, as in hugging his chains when offered the means of
+release.
+
+For the bulk of mankind, thirty-five years of captivity was the price
+Latude paid for a mere practical joke: the sending to Madame de
+Pompadour of a harmless powder that was taken for poison. The punishment
+is regarded as terrific: I do not wonder at it. But if, instead of
+relying on the gentleman's own fanfaronades, the reader will take the
+trouble to look at the biography written by M. Funck-Brentano and amply
+supported by documents, he will speedily see that if Latude remained in
+prison for thirty-five years, it was entirely by his own choice; and
+that his worst enemy, his most implacable persecutor, the author of all
+his miseries was--himself.
+
+If, after the piece of trickery which led to his arrest, he had followed
+the advice of the excellent Berryer, who counselled patience and
+promised his speedy liberation, he might have got off with a few months
+of restraint at Vincennes, where his confinement was so rigorous that he
+had only to push the garden gate to be free!
+
+That was the first folly calculated to injure his cause, for the new
+fault was more serious than the old. He was caught; he was locked in the
+cells of the Bastille: but the kind-hearted Berryer soon removed him.
+Instead of behaving himself quietly, however, our man begins to grow
+restless, to harangue, to abuse everybody, and on the books lent him to
+scribble insulting verses on the Pompadour. But they allow him an
+apartment, then give him a servant, then a companion, Allègre. And then
+comes the famous escape. One hardly knows which to wonder at the most:
+the ingenuity of the two rogues, or the guileless management of this
+prison which allows them to collect undisturbed a gimlet, a saw, a
+compass, a pulley, fourteen hundred feet of rope, a rope ladder 180 feet
+long, with 218 wooden rungs; to conceal all these between the floor and
+the ceiling below, without anyone ever thinking to look there; and,
+after having cut through a wall four and a half feet thick, to get clear
+away without firing a shot!
+
+They were not the first to get across those old walls. Renneville
+mentions several escapes, the most famous being that of the Abbé de
+Buquoy.[11] But little importance seems to have been attached to them.
+
+With Allègre and Latude it was a different matter. The passers-by must
+have seen, in the early morning, the ladder swinging from top to bottom
+of the wall, and the escape was no longer a secret. The Bastille is
+discredited. It is possible, then, to escape from it. The chagrined
+police are on their mettle. There will be laughter at their expense. The
+fugitives are both well known, too. They will take good care to spread
+the story of their escape, with plenty of gibes against the governor,
+the lieutenant of police, the ministry, the favourite, the king! This
+scandal must be averted at any cost; the fugitives must be caught!
+
+And we cannot help pitying these two wretches who, after a flight so
+admirably contrived, got arrested so stupidly: Allègre at Brussels,
+through an abusive letter written to the Pompadour; Latude in Holland,
+through a letter begging help from his mother.
+
+Latude is again under lock and key, and this time condemned to a
+stricter confinement. And then the hubbub begins again: outcries,
+demands, acts of violence, threats! He exasperates and daunts men who
+had the best will in the world to help him. He is despatched to the
+fortress of Vincennes, and promised his liberty if he will only keep
+quiet. His liberation, on his own showing, was but a matter of days. He
+is allowed to walk on the bank of the moat. He takes advantage of it to
+escape again!
+
+Captured once more, he is once more lodged at Vincennes, and the whole
+business begins over again. But they are good enough to consider him a
+little mad, and after a stay at Charenton,[12] where he was very well
+treated, he at last gets his dismissal, with the recommendation to
+betake himself to his own part of the country quietly. Ah, that would
+not be like Latude! He scampers over Paris, railing against De Sartine,
+De Marigny; hawking his pamphlets; claiming 150,000 livres as
+damages!--and, finally, extorting money from a charitable lady by
+menaces!
+
+This is the last straw. Patience is exhausted, and he is clapped into
+Bicêtre[13] as a dangerous lunatic. Imagine his fury and disgust!
+
+Let us be just. Suppose, in our own days, a swindler, sentenced to a few
+months' imprisonment, insulting the police, the magistrates, the court,
+the president; sentenced on this account to a longer term, escaping
+once, twice, a third time; always caught, put in jail again, sentenced
+to still longer terms: then when at last released, after having done his
+time, scattering broadcast insulting libels against the chief of police,
+the ministers, the parliament, and insisting on the President of the
+Republic paying him damages to the tune of 150,000 francs; to crown it
+all, getting money out of some good woman by working on her fears! You
+will agree with me that such a swaggering blade would not have much
+difficulty in putting together thirty-five years in jail!
+
+But these sentences would of course be public, and provide no soil for
+the growth of those legends to which closed doors always give rise. Yet
+in all that relates to the causes and the duration of the man's
+imprisonment, his case would be precisely that of Latude--except that
+for him there would be no furs, no promenading in the gardens, no
+stuffed fowls for his lunch!
+
+Besides some fifty autograph letters from Latude, addressed from Bicêtre
+to his good angel, Madame Legros, in which he shows himself in his true
+character, an intriguing, vain, insolent, bragging, insupportable
+humbug, I have one, written to M. de Sartine, which Latude published as
+a pendant to the pamphlet with which he hoped to move Madame de
+Pompadour to pity, and in which every phrase is an insult. This letter
+was put up at public auction, and these first lines of it were
+reproduced in the catalogue:--
+
+"I am supporting with patience the loss of my best years and of my
+fortune. I am enduring my rheumatism, the weakness of my arm, and a ring
+of iron around my body for the rest of my life!"
+
+A journalist, one of those who learn their history from Louis Blanc, had
+a vision of Latude for ever riveted by a ring of iron to a pillar in
+some underground dungeon, and exclaimed with indignation: "A ring of
+iron! How horrible!"
+
+And it was only a linen band!
+
+That fabulous iron collar is a type of the whole legend of the
+unfortunate Latude!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everything connected with the Bastille has assumed a fabulous character.
+
+What glorious days were those of the 13th and 14th of July, as the
+popular imagination conjures them up in reliance on Michelet, who, in a
+vivid, impassioned, picturesque, dramatic, admirable style, has
+written, not the history, but the romance of the French Revolution!
+
+Look at his account of the 13th. He shows you all Paris in revolt
+against Versailles, and with superb enthusiasm running to arms to try
+issues with the royal army. It is fine as literature. Historically, it
+is pure fiction.
+
+The Parisians were assuredly devoted to the "new ideas," that is, the
+suppression of the abuses and the privileges specified in the memorials
+of the States General; in a word, to the reforms longed for by the whole
+of France. But they had no conception of gaining them without the
+concurrence of the monarchy, to which they were sincerely attached. That
+crowd of scared men running to the Hôtel de Ville to demand arms, who
+are represented by the revolutionary writers as exasperated by the
+dismissal of Necker and ready to undermine the throne for the sake of
+that Genevan, were much less alarmed at what was hatching at Versailles
+than at what was going on in Paris. If they wished for arms, it was for
+their own security. The dissolution of the National Assembly, which was
+regarded as certain, was setting all minds in a ferment, and
+ill-designing people took advantage of the general uneasiness and
+agitation to drive matters to the worst extremities, creating disorder
+everywhere. The police had disappeared; the streets were in the hands of
+the mob. Bands of ruffians--among them those ill-favoured rascals who
+since the month of May had been flocking, as at a word of command, into
+Paris from heaven knows where, and who had already been seen at work,
+pillaging Réveillon's[14] establishment--roamed in every direction,
+insulting women, stripping wayfarers, looting the shops, opening the
+prisons, burning the barriers. On July 13 the electors of Paris resolved
+on the formation of a citizen militia for the protection of the town,
+and the scheme was adopted on the same day by every district, with
+articles of constitution, quoted by M. Funck-Brentano, which specify the
+intentions of the signatories. It was expressly in self-defence against
+the "Brigands," as they were called, that the citizen militia was
+formed: "To protect the citizens," ran the minutes of the
+Petit-Saint-Antoine district, "against the dangers which threaten them
+each individually." "In a word," says M. Victor Fournel, "the
+dominating sentiment was fear. Up till the 14th of July, the Parisian
+middle-classes showed far more concern at the manifold excesses
+committed by the populace after Necker's dismissal than at the schemes
+of the court." And M. Jacques Charavay, who was the first to publish the
+text of the minutes in question, says not a word too much when he draws
+from them this conclusion: "The movement which next day swept away the
+Bastille might possibly have been stifled by the National Guard, if its
+organization had had greater stability."
+
+All that was wanting to these good intentions was direction, a man at
+the helm, and particularly the support of Besenval. But his conduct was
+amazing! He left Versailles with 35,000 men and an order signed by the
+king--obtained not without difficulty--authorizing him "to repel force
+by force." Now let us see a summary of his military operations:--
+
+On the 13th, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, a skirmish of the
+German regiment on the Place Vendôme, where it came into collision with
+the "demonstration"--as we should say to-day--which was displaying busts
+of Necker and the Duke of Orleans, and dispersed it.
+
+At six o'clock, a march of the same horse soldiers to the
+swinging-bridge of the Tuileries, where they had five or six chairs
+thrown at their head; and the massacre, by M. de Lambesc, of the
+legendary grey-beard who, an hour after, was describing his tragic end
+at the Palais-Royal!
+
+At nine o'clock, a military promenade of the same regiment along the
+boulevards. A volley from the Gardes Françaises slew two of their
+number, and the regiment beat a retreat without returning fire, to the
+great surprise of M. de Maleissye, officer of the Guards. For, by his
+own confession, if the cavalry had charged, it would easily have routed
+the Gardes Françaises "in the state of drunkenness in which they then
+were."
+
+And Besenval, terrified at such a resistance, assembled all his troops,
+shut himself up with them in the Champ de Mars, and did not move another
+step!
+
+We ask ourselves, "Was he a fool? or was he a traitor?" He was a fool,
+for he thought he had "three hundred thousand men" in front of him, took
+every excited person for a rebel, and did not understand that out of
+every hundred Parisians there were ninety who were relying on him to
+bring the mutineers to reason.
+
+He had no confidence in his troops, he said.
+
+It was rather for them to have no confidence in him, and to lose heart
+utterly at such a spectacle of cowardice. But he was slandering them.
+One solitary regiment showed disloyalty. And if he had only given the
+Swiss the word to march, their conduct on August 10 gives ample proof
+that they could have been depended on.
+
+"And then," says he again, "I was fearful of letting loose civil war!"
+
+Indeed! And so a soldier going to suppress a revolt is not to run the
+risk of fighting!
+
+Last reason of all: "I requested orders from Versailles--and did not get
+them!"
+
+What, then, had he in his pocket?
+
+Finally, after having sent word to Flesselles and De Launey to maintain
+their position till he arrived, and after having allowed the arms of the
+Invalides to be looted under his eyes without a single effort to save
+them, he waited till the Bastille was taken before making up his mind to
+leave the Champ de Mars, and to return quietly to Versailles with his
+35,000 men, who had not fired a shot!
+
+Ah! those were the days for rioting!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"On July 13," says Michelet, "Paris was defending herself." (Against
+whom?) "On the 14th, she attacked! A voice wakened her and cried, 'On,
+and take the Bastille!' And that day was the day of the entire People!"
+
+Admirable poetry; but every word a lie!
+
+Listen to Marat, who is not open to suspicion, and who saw things at
+closer quarters. "The Bastille, badly defended, was captured by a
+handful of soldiers and a gang of wretches for the most part Germans and
+provincials. The Parisians, those everlasting star-gazers, came there
+out of curiosity!"
+
+In reality, Michelet's "entire people" reduces itself to a bare thousand
+assailants, of whom three hundred at most took part in the fight: Gardes
+Françaises and deserters of all arms, lawyers' clerks, and citizens who
+had lost their heads: fine fellows who thought themselves engaged in
+meritorious work in rushing on these inoffensive walls; bandits
+attracted by the riot which promised them theft and murder with
+impunity. And a number of mere spectators--spectators above all!
+
+"I was present," says Chancellor Pasquier, "at the taking of the
+Bastille. What is called the fight was not serious. The resistance was
+absolutely nil. The truth is, that this grand fight did not cause an
+instant's alarm to the spectators, who had flocked up to see the result.
+Among them there were many ladies of the greatest elegance. In order to
+get more easily to the front they had left their carriages at a
+distance. By my side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Comédie Française. We
+stayed to see the finish, and then I escorted her on my arm to her
+carriage in the Place Royale."
+
+"The Bastille was not taken; truth must be told, it surrendered." It is
+Michelet himself who makes this statement, and he adds: "what ruined it
+was its own evil conscience!"
+
+It would be too simple to acknowledge that it was the incapacity of its
+governor.
+
+There is no connoisseur in old prints but is acquainted with those
+last-century views which represent the taking of the Bastille. The
+platform of the fortress bristles with cannon all firing together,
+"belching forth death,"--without the slightest attention on the part of
+the assailants, for all the balls from this artillery, passing over
+their heads, would only kill inoffensive wayfarers without so much as
+scratching a single one of the besiegers!
+
+And the Bastille did not fire a single shot in self-defence!
+
+In the morning, at the request of Thuriot de la Rozière, De Launey had
+readily consented to the withdrawal of the fifteen cannon of the
+platform from their embrasures, and had blocked up the embrasures with
+planks. Of the three guns which later on he ranged batterywise before
+the entrance gate, not one was effective, and the discharge attributed
+to one of them came from a piece of ordnance on the wall.
+
+He placed such absolute reliance on succour from Besenval that, on
+evacuating the arsenal and getting the whole garrison together into the
+Bastille--eighty-two Invalides and M. de Flue's thirty-two Swiss--he had
+forgotten to increase his stock of provisions. Now, the Bastille had no
+reserve of provisions. Every morning, like a good housewife, it received
+the goods ordered the night before, brought by the different purveyors;
+on this day, they were intercepted. So it happened that at three o'clock
+in the afternoon the garrison was without its usual rations, and the
+Invalides, who had been for a week past going in and out of all the inns
+in the neighbourhood, and were disposed to open the doors to their good
+friends of the suburbs, used the scantiness of their rations as a
+pretext for mutiny, for refusing to fight, and for muddling the brains,
+never very clear, of the unhappy De Launey.
+
+"On the day of my arrival," says De Flue, "I was able to take this man's
+measure from the absolutely imbecile preparations which he made for the
+defence of his position. I saw clearly that we should be very poorly led
+in case of attack. He was so struck with terror at the idea of it that,
+when night came on, he took the shadows of trees for enemies! Incapable,
+irresolute, devoting all his attention to trifles and neglecting
+important duties--such was the man."
+
+Abandoned by Besenval, instead of cowing his Invalides into obedience by
+his energy, and maintaining his position to famishing point behind walls
+over which the balls of the besiegers flew without killing more than
+one man, De Launey lost his head, made a feint of firing the powder
+magazine, capitulated, and opened his gates to men who, as Chateaubriand
+says, "could never have cleared them if he had only kept them shut."
+
+If this poor creature had done his duty, and Besenval had done his,
+things would have had quite a different complexion. That is not to say
+that the Revolution would have been averted--far from it! The Revolution
+was legitimate, desirable, and, under the generous impulse of a whole
+nation, irresistible. But it would have followed another bent, and would
+have triumphed at a slighter cost, with less ruin and less bloodshed.
+The consequences of the 14th of July were disastrous. The mere words,
+"The Bastille is taken!" were the signal for the most frightful
+disorders throughout France. It seemed as though those old walls were
+dragging down with them in their fall all authority, all respect, all
+discipline; as though the floodgates were being opened to every kind of
+excess. Peasants went about in bands, ravaging, pillaging, firing the
+châteaux, the burghers' houses, and burning alive those who fell into
+their hands. The soldiers mutinied, insulted their chiefs, and fell to
+carousing with the malefactors whom they set free. There was not a town
+or village where the mob did not put on menacing airs, where decent
+people were not molested by the brawlers of the clubs and the
+street-corners. Such violence led to a rapid reaction, and there were
+numerous defections--of men who, on the very eve of the outbreak, among
+the magistracy, the army, the clergy, the nobility, though sympathizing
+with the new ideas, abruptly cut themselves loose from the movement,
+like the good Duke de la Rochefoucauld, who exclaimed, "Liberty is not
+entered by such a door as this!" Hovering between the desire and the
+fear of granting the promised reforms, urged on one side to resistance,
+on the other to submission, and more than ever destitute of all
+political acumen and all will power, the king went to Paris, and,
+bending before the revolt, approved of the assassination of his most
+faithful servants--and took, on that fatal day, his first step towards
+the scaffold! Henceforth, under the pressure of the populace, to whom
+its first success had shown the measure of its strength, and who became
+every day more exacting, more threatening, the Revolution was to go on
+in its perverse course, stumbling at every step, until it came to the
+orgy of '93, which, properly speaking, was only the systematizing of
+brigandage. Malouet was right indeed: what we symbolize in our festival
+of the 14th of July is not the rising sun, the dawn of Liberty; it is
+the first lurid lightning flash of the Terror!
+
+Doctor Rigby, after having walked up and down the whole afternoon in the
+Jardin Monceau without the least idea of what was going on in the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine, returned in the evening to his house near the
+Palais-Royal. He saw the mob reeling in drunkenness. Men and women were
+laughing, crying, and embracing one another: "The Bastille is taken! At
+last we are free!" And not the least enthusiastic were those very men of
+the citizen militia who, ready yesterday to fight the insurrection, were
+to-day hailing its triumph! The first sabre brandished by the first
+national guard was in point of fact that of Joseph Prudhomme![15]
+
+All at once this delirious crowd shudders, parts asunder with cries of
+horror!
+
+Down the Rue Saint-Honoré comes a yelling mob of wine-soaked
+malefactors, bearing along, at the ends of two pikes, the still bleeding
+heads of De Launey and De Flesselles!
+
+And the silly folk, so madly rejoiced by the fall of an imaginary
+tyranny which has not even the wits to defend itself, go their several
+ways, struck dumb with consternation.
+
+For here the Real is making its entrance!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Do not fancy that because the Bastille has opened its gates, the legends
+which give it so cruel a name are going to vanish into thin air, like
+the phantoms of an ancient château when light is let in.
+
+While Michelet's "entire Paris" is making short work of the Invalides
+who surrendered the place; cutting in pieces the man who prevented its
+blowing up; slaughtering Major de Losme, the friend and benefactor of
+the prisoners; torturing the hapless De Launey, who, from the Bastille
+to the Hôtel de Ville, stabbed, slashed, hacked with sabres and pikes
+and bayonets, is finally decapitated by the aid of a short knife--an
+episode which Michelet skilfully slurs over--while all the criminals of
+the district, crowding along in the wake of the combatants, are rushing
+to the official buildings, looting, smashing, throwing into the moats
+furniture, books, official papers, archives, the remnants of which will
+be collected with such difficulty--some good people are saying to
+themselves: "But come now, there are some prisoners! Suppose we go and
+set them free?"
+
+Here let us see what Louis Blanc has to say:--
+
+"Meanwhile the doors of the cells" (he insists on the cells) "were burst
+in with a mighty effort; the prisoners were free! Alas! for three of
+them it was too late! The first, whose name was the Comte de Solages, a
+victim for seven years of the incomprehensible vengeance of an
+implacable father, found neither relatives who would consent to
+acknowledge him, nor his property, which had become the prey of covetous
+collateral heirs! The second was called Whyte. Of what crime was he
+guilty, accused, of, at any rate, suspected? No one has ever known! The
+man himself was questioned in vain. In the Bastille he had lost his
+reason. The third, Tavernier, at the sight of his deliverers, fancied he
+saw his executioners coming, and put himself on the defensive. Throwing
+their arms round his neck they undeceived him; but next day he was met
+roaming through the town, muttering wild and whirling words. He was
+mad!"
+
+As many wilful errors as there are words!
+
+The Comte de Solages was an execrable libertine, confined at the request
+of his family for "atrocious and notorious crimes." His relatives
+nevertheless had the humanity to take him in after his deliverance, and
+it was with them that he died in 1825.
+
+Whyte and Tavernier did not go mad in the Bastille. They were in the
+Bastille because they were mad; and the second was, further, implicated
+in an assassination. Finding shelter with a perruquier of the
+neighbourhood, he set about smashing all his host's belongings, which
+necessitated his banishment to Charenton, where Whyte soon rejoined him.
+It was not worth the trouble of changing their quarters!
+
+Four other prisoners who were set free, Corrège, Béchade, Pujade, and
+Laroche, were imprisoned for forgery. And so Louis Blanc is careful
+silently to pass them over!
+
+Ten days before, another victim of tyranny had been groaning in
+irons--the Marquis de Sade, who, from the height of the platform, used
+to provoke the passers-by with the aid of a speaking trumpet. De Launey
+was compelled to transfer him to Vincennes, thus depriving the victors
+of the glory of liberating the future author of _Justine_. The Republic
+took its revenge in making him later secretary of the "Pike" ward,[16]
+an office for which he was marked out by his virtues!
+
+But of all these prisoners the most celebrated, the most popular, the
+man whose misfortunes all Paris deplored, was the famous Comte de
+Lorges, who, according to the biographical sketch devoted to him by the
+unknown author of his deliverance, had been shut up for thirty-two
+years. The story must be read in the pamphlet of Citizen Rousselet,
+conqueror of the Bastille: "The tide of humanity penetrates into ways
+narrowed by mistrust. An iron door opens: what does one see? Is this a
+man? Good heavens! this old man loaded with irons! the splendour of his
+brow, the whiteness of his beard hanging over his breast! What majesty!
+the fire still flashing from his eyes seems to shed a gentle light in
+this lugubrious abode!"
+
+Surprised at seeing so many armed men, he asks them if Louis XV. is
+still alive. They set him free, they lead him to the Hôtel de Ville.
+
+For fifteen days all Paris went to visit the black dungeon in which this
+unhappy wretch had been shut up for so many years without other light
+than that which escaped "from his eyes"! A stone from that dungeon had a
+place in the Curtius Museum. His portrait was published. A print
+represents him at the moment when his chains were broken, seated on a
+chair in his cell, a pitcher of water by his side!
+
+And this hapless greybeard--he was never seen! He never existed!
+
+In reality there were in the Bastille, on the 14th of July, only seven
+prisoners--two madmen, a _Sadique_,[17] and four forgers. But about
+their number and their right to imprisonment Michelet remains dumb: to
+discuss that would spoil his epic! And he excels in making the most of
+everything that can support his case, and in ignoring everything that
+damages it. And so he contents himself with speaking of the two who had
+"gone mad"!--a prevarication worthy of Louis Blanc, nay, unworthy even
+of him!
+
+The conquerors were somewhat surprised at the small number of victims,
+more surprised still to find them comfortably installed in rooms, some
+of which were furnished with arm-chairs in Utrecht velvet! The author of
+_The Bastille Unmasked_ exclaims: "What! No corpses! No skeletons! No
+men in chains!" "The taking of the Bastille," said "Cousin Jacques,"[18]
+"has opened the eyes of the public on the kind of captivity experienced
+there."
+
+But in this he was greatly mistaken. Legends die hard! A Bastille
+without cells, dungeons, cages of iron! Public opinion did not admit
+that it could have been deceived on that point.
+
+"Several prisoners," says the _History of Remarkable Events_, "were set
+at liberty; but some, and perhaps the greater number, had already died
+of hunger, because men could not find their way about this monstrous
+prison. Some of these prisoners confined within four walls received food
+only through holes cut in the wall. A party of prisoners was found
+starved to death, because their cells were not discovered till several
+days had elapsed!"
+
+Another pamphlet on the underground cells discovered in the Bastille,
+resuscitating an old fable which had already done duty for the Cardinal
+de Richelieu, shows us a prisoner taken from his cell and led by the
+governor into "a room which had nothing sinister in its appearance. It
+was lit by more than fifty candles. Sweet-scented flowers filled it with
+a delicious perfume. The tyrant chatted amicably with his prisoner....
+Then he gave the horrible signal: a bascule let into the floor opened,
+and the wretched man disappeared, falling upon a wheel stuck with razors
+and set in motion by invisible hands." And the author winds up with this
+magnificent reflection:--"Such a punishment, so basely contrived, is not
+even credible--and yet it was at Paris, in that beautiful and
+flourishing city, that this took place!"
+
+Dorat-Cubières, who was one of the literary disgraces of the eighteenth
+century, goes further! He saw, with his own eyes, one of those dens
+where the captive, shut up with enough bread to last him a week, had
+thereafter nothing else to subsist on but his own flesh. "In this den,"
+he says, "we came upon a horrible skeleton, the sight of which made me
+shrink back with horror!"
+
+And the popular picture-mongers did not fail to propagate these
+insanities. I have an engraving of the time nicely calculated to stir
+sensitive hearts. Upon the steps of a gloomy cellar the conquerors are
+dragging along a man whom his uniform shows to be one of the defenders
+of the Bastille, and are pointing out to him an old man being carried
+away, another being cut down from the ceiling where he is hanging by the
+arms; yet others lying on a wheel furnished with iron teeth, chained to
+it, twisted into horrible contortions by abominable machines; and in a
+recess behind a grating appears the skeleton--which Dorat-Cubières never
+saw!
+
+The non-existence of these dungeons and holes with skeletons was too
+great a shock to settled beliefs. This Bastille _must_ contain concealed
+below ground some unknown cells where its victims were moaning! And
+naturally enough, when one bent down the ear, one heard their despairing
+appeals! But after having pierced through vaults, sunk pits, dug,
+sounded everywhere, there was no help for it but to give up these
+fancies, though--an agreeable thing to have to say!--with regret.
+
+They fell back then on instruments of torture. For though the rack had
+been abolished for a hundred years, how was it possible to conceive of
+the Bastille without some slight instruments of torture?
+
+They had no difficulty in finding them--"chains," says Louis Blanc,
+"which the hands of many innocent men had perhaps worn, machines of
+which no one could guess the use: an old iron corslet which seemed to
+have been invented to reduce man to everlasting immobility!"
+
+As a matter of fact, these chains belonged to two statuettes of
+prisoners which stood on either side of the great clock in the
+courtyard. The machines, the use of which no one could guess, were the
+fragments of a clandestine printing-press that had been pulled to
+pieces. And the iron corslet was a piece of fifteenth-century armour!
+
+Skeletons, too, were missing, though indeed some bones were found in the
+apartment of the surgeon of the fortress; but the utmost bad faith could
+not but be compelled to acknowledge that these were anatomical
+specimens. Happily for the legend, a more serious discovery was made:
+"two skeletons, chained to a cannon-ball," as the register of the
+district of Saint-Louis la Culture declared.
+
+They both came to light in the rubbish dug out during the construction
+of the bastion afterwards turned into a garden for the governor. "One,"
+says the report of Fourcroy, Vicq-d'Azyr, and Sabatier, instructed to
+examine them, "was found turned head downwards on the steps of a steep
+staircase, entirely covered with earth, and appears to be that of a
+workman who had fallen by accident down this dark staircase, where he
+was not seen by the men working at the embankment. The other, carefully
+buried in a sort of ditch, had evidently been laid there a long time
+previously, before there was any idea of filling up the bastion."
+
+As to the cannon-ball, it must have dated back to the Fronde.[19]
+
+But skeletons were necessary! They had found some: they might as well
+profit by them!
+
+The demolisher of the Bastille, that charlatan Palloy, exhibited them to
+the veneration of the faithful in a cellar by the light of a funereal
+lamp, after which they were honoured with a magnificent funeral, with
+drums, clergy, a procession of working men, between two lines of
+National Guards, from the Bastille to the Church of St. Paul. And
+finally, in the graveyard adjoining the church, they raised to them,
+amid four poplars, a monument of which a contemporary print has
+preserved the likeness.
+
+After such a ceremony, dispute if you dare the authenticity of the
+relics!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The memory of the Man in the Iron Mask is so closely bound up with the
+story of the Bastille that M. Funck-Brentano could not neglect this
+great enigma about which for two hundred years so much ink has been
+spilt. He strips off this famous mask--which, by the way, was of
+velvet--and shows us the face which the world has been so anxious to
+see: the face of Mattioli, the confidant of the Duke of Mantua and the
+betrayer of both Louis XIV. and his own master.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano's demonstration is so convincing as to leave no room
+for doubt. But one dare not hope that the good public will accept his
+conclusions as final. To the public, mystery is ever more attractive
+than the truth. There is a want of prestige about Mattioli; while about
+a twin brother of Louis XIV.--ah, _there_ is something that appeals to
+the imagination!
+
+And then there are the guides, the showmen, to reckon with--those
+faithful guardians of legends, whose propaganda is more aggressive than
+that of scholars. When you reflect that every day, at the Isles of
+Saint-Marguerite, the masked man's cell is shown to visitors by a good
+woman who retails all the traditional fables about the luxurious life of
+the prisoner, his lace, his plate, and the attentions shown him by M.
+de Saint-Mars, you will agree that a struggle with this daily discourse
+would be hopeless. And you would not come off with a whole skin!
+
+I was visiting the Château d'If before the new buildings were erected.
+The show-woman of the place, another worthy dame, pointed out to us the
+ruined cells of the Abbé Faria and Edmond Dantès.[20] And the spectators
+were musing on the story as they contemplated the ruins.
+
+"It seems to me," I said, "that these cells are rather near one another,
+but surely Alexandre Dumas put them a little farther apart!"
+
+"Oh, well!" replied the good creature, withering me with a glance of
+contempt, "if, when I'm relating gospel truth, the gentleman begins
+quoting a novelist--!"
+
+To come nearer home. Follow, one of these days, a batch of Cook's
+tourists at Versailles, shown round by an English cicerone. You will see
+him point out the window from which Louis XVI. issued, on a flying
+bridge, to reach his scaffold, erected in the marble court! The guide is
+no fool. He knows well enough that the Place de la Concorde would not
+appeal to the imagination of his countrymen; while it is quite natural
+to them to draw a parallel in their minds between the scaffold of Louis
+XVI. at Versailles and that of Charles I. at Whitehall.
+
+And the conclusion of the whole matter is this: that whatever may be
+said or written, nothing will prevail against the popular beliefs that
+the Bastille was "the hell of living men," and that it was taken by
+storm. Legends are the history of the people, especially those which
+flatter their instincts, prejudices, and passions. You will never
+convince them of their falsity.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano must also expect to be treated as a "reactionary," for
+such is, to many people, any one who does not unreservedly decry the
+_ancien régime_. It had, assuredly, its vices and abuses, which the
+Revolution swept away--to replace them by others, much more tolerable,
+to be sure; but that is no reason for slandering the past and painting
+it blacker than it really was. The fanatical supporters of the
+Revolution have founded in its honour a sort of cult whose intolerance
+is often irritating. To hear them you would fancy that before its birth
+there was nothing but darkness, ignorance, iniquity, and wretchedness!
+And so we are to give it wholehearted admiration, and palliate its
+errors and its crimes; even gilding, as Chateaubriand said, the iron of
+its guillotine. These idolaters of the Revolution are very injudicious.
+By endeavouring to compel admiration for all that it effected, good and
+ill without distinction, they provoke the very unreasonable inclination
+to regard its whole achievement with abhorrence. It could well dispense
+with such a surplusage of zeal, for it is strong enough to bear the
+truth; and its work, after all, is great enough to need no justification
+or glorification by means of legends.
+
+VICTORIEN SARDOU.
+
+
+
+
+LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ARCHIVES.
+
+
+"The Bastille," wrote Sainte-Foix, "is a castle which, without being
+strong, is one of the most formidable in Europe, and about it I shall
+say nothing." "Silence is safer than speech on that subject," was the
+saying in Paris.
+
+At the extremity of the Rue Saint-Antoine, as one entered the suburb,
+appeared the eight lofty towers, sombre, massive, plunging their
+moss-grown feet into pools of muddy water. Their walls were pierced at
+intervals with narrow, iron-barred windows: they were crowned with
+battlements. Situated not far from the Marais, the blithe and wealthy
+quarter, and quite near to the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where industry
+raised its perpetual hum, the Bastille, charged with gloom and silence,
+formed an impressive contrast.
+
+The common impression it made is conveyed by Restif de la Bretonne in
+his _Nights of Paris_: "It was a nightmare, that awesome Bastille, on
+which, as I passed each evening along the Rue Saint-Gilles, I never
+dared to turn my eyes."
+
+The towers had an air of mystery, harsh and melancholy, and the royal
+government threw mystery like a cloud around them. At nightfall, when
+the shutters were closed, a cab would cross the drawbridge, and from
+time to time, in the blackness of night, funeral processions, vague
+shadows which the light of a torch set flickering on the walls, would
+make their silent exit. How many of those who had entered there had ever
+been seen again? And if perchance one met a former prisoner, to the
+first question he would reply that on leaving he had signed a promise to
+reveal nothing of what he had seen. This former prisoner had, as a
+matter of fact, never seen anything to speak of. Absolute silence was
+imposed upon the warders. "There is no exchanging of confidences in this
+place," writes Madame de Staal, "and the people you come across have all
+such freezing physiognomies that you would think twice before asking the
+most trifling question." "The first article of their code," says
+Linguet, "is the impenetrable mystery which envelops all their
+operations."
+
+We know how legends are formed. Sometimes you see them open out like
+flowers brilliant under the sun's bright beams, you see them blossom
+under the glorious radiance that lights up the life of heroes. The man
+himself has long gone down into the tomb; the legend survives; it
+streams across the ages, like a meteor leaving its trail of light; it
+grows, broadens out, with ever-increasing lustre and glow: in this light
+we see Themistocles, Leonidas, Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon.
+
+Or may be, on the contrary, the legend is born in some remote corner,
+covered with shade and silence. There men have lived their lives, there
+it has been their lot to suffer. Their moans have risen in solitude and
+confinement, and the only ears that heard them were harder than their
+stone walls. These moans, heard by no compassionate soul, the great
+resounding soul of the people catches up, swelling them with all its
+might. Soon, among the mass of the people, there passes a blast
+irresistible in its strength, like the tempest that upheaves the
+restless waves. Then is the sea loosed from its chains: the tumultuous
+breakers dash upon the affrighted shore: the sea-walls are all swept
+away!
+
+In a letter written by Chevalier, the major of the Bastille, to Sartine,
+the chief of the police, he spoke of the common gossip on the Bastille
+that was going about. "Although utterly false," he said, "I think it
+very dangerous on account of its dissemination through the kingdom, and
+that has now been going on for several years." No attention was paid to
+Chevalier's warning. Mystery continued to be the rule at the Bastille
+and in all that related to it. "The mildness of manners and of the
+government," writes La Harpe, "had caused needlessly harsh measures in
+great part to disappear. They lived on in the imagination of the
+people, augmented and strengthened by the tales which credulity and hate
+seize upon." Ere long the _Memoirs_ of Latude and of Linguet appeared.
+Latude concealed his grievous faults, to paint his long sufferings in
+strokes of fire. Linguet, with his rare literary talent, made of the
+Bastille a picture dark in the extreme, compressing the gist of his
+pamphlet into the sentence: "Except perhaps in hell, there are no
+tortures to approach those of the Bastille." At the same period, the
+great Mirabeau was launching his powerful plea against _lettres de
+cachet_, "arbitrary orders." These books produced a mighty
+reverberation. The Revolution broke out like a clap of thunder. The
+Bastille was disembowelled. The frowning towers crumbled stone by stone
+under the picks of the demolishers, and, as if they had been the
+pedestal of the _ancien régime_, that too toppled over with a crash.
+
+One of the halls of the Bastille contained, in boxes carefully arranged,
+the entire history of the celebrated fortress from the year 1659, at
+which date the foundation of this precious store of archives had been
+begun. There were collected the documents concerning, not only the
+prisoners of the Bastille, but all the persons who had been lodged
+there, either under sentence of exile, or simply arrested within the
+limits of the generality of Paris in virtue of a _lettre de cachet_.
+
+The documents in this store-room had been in charge of archivists, who
+throughout the eighteenth century had laboured with zeal and
+intelligence at putting in order papers which, on the eve of the
+Revolution, were counted by hundreds of thousands. The whole mass was
+now in perfect order, classified and docketed. The major of the château,
+Chevalier, had even been commissioned to make these documents the basis
+of a history of the prisoners.
+
+The Bastille was taken. In the disorder, what was the fate of the
+archives? The ransacking of the papers continued for two days, writes
+Dusaulx, one of the commissioners elected by the Assembly for the
+preservation of the archives of the Bastille. "When, on Thursday the
+16th, my colleagues and myself went down into the sort of cellar where
+the archives were, we found the boxes in very orderly arrangement on the
+shelves, but they were already empty. The most important documents had
+been carried off: the rest were strewn on the floor, scattered about the
+courtyard, and even in the moats. However, the curious still found some
+gleanings there." The testimony of Dusaulx is only too well confirmed.
+"I went to see the siege of the Bastille," writes Restif de la Bretonne;
+"when I arrived it was all over, the place was taken. Infuriated men
+were throwing papers, documents of great historical value, from the top
+of the towers into the moats." Among these papers, some had been burnt,
+some torn, registers had been torn to shreds and trailed in the mud. The
+mob had invaded the halls of the château: men of learning and mere
+curiosity hunters strove eagerly to get possession of as many of these
+documents as possible, in which they thought they were sure to find
+startling revelations. "There is talk of the son of a celebrated
+magistrate," writes Gabriel Brizard, "who went off with his carriage
+full of them." Villenave, then twenty-seven years of age and already a
+collector, gathered a rich harvest for his study, and Beaumarchais, in
+the course of a patriotic ramble through the interior of the captured
+fortress, was careful to get together a certain number of these papers.
+
+The papers purloined from the archives on the day of the capture and the
+day following became dispersed throughout France and Europe. A large
+packet came into the hands of Pierre Lubrowski, an attaché in the
+Russian embassy. Sold in 1805, with his whole collection, to the Emperor
+Alexander, the papers were deposited in the Hermitage Palace. To-day
+they are preserved in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg.
+
+Fortunately, the custody of the captured fortress was entrusted on July
+15 to the company of arquebusiers, which received orders to prevent the
+removal of any more papers. On July 16 one of the members present at a
+sitting of the Electoral Assembly, sprang forward to the table and
+cried, "Ah, gentlemen, let us save the papers! It is said that the
+papers of the Bastille are being plundered; let us hasten to collect the
+remnants of these old title-deeds of an intolerable despotism, so that
+we may inspire our latest posterity with their horror!" There was
+rapturous applause. A committee was nominated, consisting of Dusaulx, De
+Chamseru, Gorneau, and Cailleau. Let us follow the style of the period:
+"Before the Bastille the commissioners received a triumphant reception.
+Amid the cheers of the people, who had been informed of their mission,
+ten distinguished men of letters besought them to lead the commissioners
+into the heart of that famous fortress, so long detested." When they got
+into the Bastille, the commissioners were not long in perceiving that
+they were a little behind the fair: "Many boxes were empty, and there
+was an immense heap of papers in complete disorder."
+
+The question of the papers of the Bastille grew day by day
+extraordinarily popular. The Electoral Assembly had just appointed
+commissioners to collect them; La Fayette, commander of the National
+Guards, imposed a similar duty on the St. Elizabeth district; Bailly,
+the mayor of Paris, delegated Dusaulx to the same office. In the
+Constituent Assembly, the Comte de Châtenay-Lanty proposed that the
+municipality of Paris should be instructed to get together the papers
+found at the Bastille, so that they might be arranged, and that extracts
+from them might be printed and published, "in order to keep for ever
+alive in the hearts of Frenchmen, by means of this reading, the
+detestation of arbitrary orders and the love of liberty"! This book was
+to be the preface to the constitution. Finally, the district of St. Roch
+took the initiative in calling upon the electors to restore to the
+nation the papers carried off from the Bastille by Beaumarchais.
+
+In the sitting of July 24, the Electoral Assembly passed a resolution
+enjoining such citizens as were in possession of papers from the
+Bastille to bring them back to the Hôtel de Ville. The appeal was
+responded to, and the restitutions were numerous.
+
+When the pillage and destruction had been stopped and possession had
+been regained of a part of the stolen documents, the papers were
+consigned to three different depositories; but it was not long before
+they were deposited all together in the convent of St. Louis la Culture.
+At length, on November 2, 1791, the Commune of Paris resolved to have
+the precious documents placed in the city library. The decision was so
+much the more happy in that the transfer, while placing the papers under
+the guardianship of trained men and genuine librarians, did not
+necessitate removal, since the city library at that date occupied the
+same quarters as the archives of the Bastille, namely, the convent of
+St. Louis la Culture.
+
+To the revolutionary period succeeded times of greater calm. The
+archives of the Bastille, after being the object of so much discussion,
+and having occupied the Constituent Assembly, the Electoral Assembly,
+the Paris Commune, the press, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, all Paris,
+the whole of France, fell into absolute oblivion. They were lost from
+sight; the very recollection of them was effaced. In 1840, a young
+librarian named François Ravaisson discovered them in the Arsenal
+library at the bottom of a veritable dungeon. How had they got stranded
+there?
+
+Ameilhon, the city librarian, had been elected on April 22, 1797, keeper
+of the Arsenal library. Anxious to enrich the new depository of which he
+had become the head, he obtained a decree handing over the papers of the
+Bastille to the Arsenal library. The librarians recoiled in dismay
+before this invasion of documents, more than 600,000 in number and in
+the most admired disorder. Then, having put their heads together, they
+had the papers crammed into a dusty back-room, putting off the sorting
+of them from day to day. Forty years slipped away. And if it happened
+that some old antiquary, curious and importunate, asked to be allowed to
+consult the documents he had heard spoken of in his youth, he was
+answered--no doubt in perfect good faith--that they did not know what he
+was talking about.
+
+In 1840 François Ravaisson had to get some repairs done in his kitchen
+at the Arsenal library. The slabs of the flooring were raised, when
+there came to view, in the yawning hole, a mass of old papers. It
+happened by the merest chance that, as he drew a leaf out of the heap,
+Ravaisson laid his hand on a _lettre de cachet_. He understood at once
+that he had just discovered the lost treasure. Fifty years of laborious
+effort have now restored the order which the victors of the 14th of July
+and successive removals had destroyed. The archives of the Bastille
+still constitute, at the present day, an imposing collection, in spite
+of the gaps made by fire and pillage in 1789, for ever to be regretted.
+The administration of the Arsenal library has acquired copies of the
+documents coming from the Bastille which are preserved at St.
+Petersburg. The archives of the Bastille are now open to inspection by
+any visitor to the Arsenal library, in rooms specially fitted up for
+them. Several registers had holes burnt in them on the day of the
+capture of the Bastille, their binding is scorched black, their leaves
+are yellow. In the boxes the documents are now numbered, and they are
+daily consulted by men of letters. The catalogue has been compiled and
+published recently, through the assiduity of the minister of public
+instruction.
+
+It is by the light of these documents, of undeniable genuineness and
+authority, that the black shade which so long brooded over the Bastille
+has at length been dispelled. The legends have melted away in the clear
+light of history, as the thick cloak of mist with which night covers the
+earth is dissipated by the morning sun; and enigmas which mankind,
+wearied of fruitless investigations, had resigned itself to declare
+insoluble, have now at last been solved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Julius Cæsar describes a structure three stories high which his
+legionaries used rapidly to erect in front of towns they were besieging.
+Such was the remote origin of the "bastides" or "bastilles," as these
+movable fortresses were called in the Middle Ages. Froissart, speaking
+of a place that was being invested, says that "bastides were stationed
+on the roads and in the open country" in such a manner that the town
+could get no food supplies. It was not long before the designation was
+applied to the fixed towers erected on the ramparts for the defence of
+the towns, and more particularly to those which were constructed at the
+entrance gates.
+
+In 1356, the chroniclers mention some important works that had been done
+on the circumvallations of Paris. These were constructions interrupting
+the wall at intervals, and so placed as to protect either an entrance
+gate or the wall itself. The special designations of _eschiffles_,
+_guérites_, or _barbacanes_ were applied to such of these buildings as
+rose between two gates of the city, while the _bastilles_ or _bastides_
+were those which defended the gates. The first stone of the edifice
+which for more than four centuries was to remain famous under the name
+of the Bastille was laid on April 22, 1370, by the mayor of Paris in
+person, Hugh Aubriot, the object being to strengthen the defences of the
+city against the English. To reproach the king, Charles V., with the
+construction of a cruel prison would be almost as reasonable as to
+reproach Louis-Philippe with the construction of the fortress of Mont
+Valérien. We borrow these details from M. Fernand Bournon's excellent
+work on the Bastille in the _Histoire générale de Paris_.
+
+"The Bastille," writes M. Bournon, "at the time of its capture on July
+14, 1789, was still identical, except in some trifling particulars, with
+the work of the architects of the fourteenth century." The Place de la
+Bastille of the present day does not correspond exactly to the site of
+the fortress. Mentally to restore that site it is necessary to take away
+the last houses of the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV.;
+the ground they occupy was then covered with the château and its glacis.
+The round towers, however, must have extended considerably in advance of
+the line of the houses and have encroached upon the pavement. The plan
+reproducing the site exactly is to-day marked by lines of white stones,
+by means of which all Parisians may get some notion of it if they go to
+the Place de la Bastille.
+
+M. Augé de Lassus, who drew so largely upon the works of M. Bournon and
+ourselves for his lecture on the Bastille,[21] will permit us in our
+turn to borrow from him the description he gave of the Bastille, so far
+as its construction is concerned. Prints of the commonest kind which
+have circulated in thousands, the more recent reconstruction which in
+1889 gave Paris so much entertainment, have familiarized us with the
+aspect of the Bastille, whose eight circular towers, connected by
+curtains of equal height, give us the impression of a box all of a
+piece, or, if you prefer it, an enormous sarcophagus. The eight towers
+all had their names. There were the Corner, the Chapel, and the Well
+towers, names readily accounted for by their position or by details of
+their construction. Then came the Bertaudière and Bazinière towers,
+baptized by the names of two former prisoners. The Treasure tower was so
+called because it had received on many occasions, notably under Henri
+IV., the custody of the public money. The excellent poet Mathurin
+Regnier alludes to this fact in these oft-quoted lines:--
+
+    "Now mark these parsons, sons of ill-got gain,
+     Whose grasping sires for years have stolen amain,
+     Whose family coffers vaster wealth conceal,
+     Than fills that royal store-house, the Bastille."
+
+The seventh tower was known as the County tower, owing its name, as M.
+Bournon conjectures, to the feudal dignity called the County of Paris.
+"The hypothesis," he adds, "derives the greater weight from the fact
+that the mayors of Paris were called, up to the end of the _ancien
+régime_, mayors of the town and viscounty of Paris." The eighth tower
+bore a name which, for the tower of a prison, is very remarkable. It was
+called the Tower of Liberty. This odd appellation had come to it from
+the circumstance that it had been the part of the Bastille where
+prisoners were lodged who enjoyed exceptionally favourable treatment,
+those who had the "liberty" of walking during the day in the courtyards
+of the château. These prisoners were said to be "in the liberty of the
+court"; the officers of the château called them the "prisoners of the
+liberty" in contradistinction to the prisoners "in durance"; and that
+one of the eight towers in which they were lodged was thus, quite
+naturally, called "the Tower of Liberty."
+
+The towers of the Chapel and the Treasure, which were the oldest, had
+flanked the original gateway, but this was soon walled up, leaving
+however in the masonry the outline of its arch, and even the statues of
+saints and crowned princes that had been the only ornaments of its bare
+walls. "In accordance with custom," says M. Augé de Lassus, "the
+entrance to the Bastille was single and double at the same time; the
+gate for vehicles, defended by its drawbridge, was flanked by a smaller
+gate reserved for foot passengers, and this, too, was only accessible
+when a small drawbridge was lowered."
+
+In the first of the two courtyards of the Bastille, D'Argenson had
+placed a monumental clock held up by large sculptured figures
+representing prisoners in chains. The heavy chains fell in graceful
+curves around the clock-face, as a kind of ornamentation. D'Argenson and
+his artists had a ferocious taste.
+
+On the morrow of the defeat at St. Quentin,[22] the fear of invasion
+decided Henri II., under the advice of Coligny, to strengthen the
+Bastille. It was then, accordingly, that there was constructed, in front
+of the Saint-Antoine gate, the bastion which was at a later date to be
+adorned with a garden for the prisoners to walk in.
+
+Around the massive and forbidding prison, in the course of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, quite a little town sprang up and
+flourished, as in the Middle Ages happened around lofty and impressive
+cathedrals. Barbers, cobblers, drink-sellers, poulterers, cheesemongers,
+and general dealers had their shops there. These new buildings
+encroached on the Rue Saint-Antoine, and extended as far as the convent
+of the Visitation, the chapel of which, converted into a Protestant
+place of worship, still exists.
+
+"In its latter days," writes M. de Lassus, "the Bastille with its
+appendages presented an appearance somewhat as follows:--On the Rue
+Saint-Antoine, a gateway of considerable size, and, with its trophies of
+arms, making some pretensions to a triumphal arch, gave access to a
+first court skirted with shops, and open, at least during the day, to
+all comers. People might pass through it freely, but were not allowed to
+loiter there. Then appeared a second entrance, a double one for horse
+and foot traffic, each gate defended by its drawbridge. Admittance
+through this was more difficult, and the sentry's instructions more
+rigorous; this was the outer guard. As soon as this entrance was passed,
+one came to the court of the governor, who received the more or less
+voluntary visitor. On the right stretched the quarters of the governor
+and his staff, contiguous to the armoury. Then there were the moats,
+originally supplied by the waters of the Seine--at that time people
+frequently fell in and were drowned, the moats not being protected by
+any railing--in later times they were for the most part dry. Then rose
+the lofty towers of the citadel, encircled, nearly a hundred feet up, by
+their crown of battlements; and then one found the last drawbridge, most
+often raised, at any rate before the carriage gate, the door for foot
+passengers alone remaining accessible, under still more rigorous
+conditions."
+
+These conditions, so rigorous for contemporaries--the Czar Peter the
+Great himself found them inflexible--are removed for the historian:
+thanks to the numerous memoirs left by prisoners, thanks to the
+documents relating to the administration of the Bastille now in the
+Arsenal library, and to the correspondence of the lieutenants of police,
+we shall penetrate into the interior of these well-fenced precincts and
+follow the life of the prisoners day by day.
+
+In its early days, then, the Bastille was not a prison, though it became
+such as early as the reign of Charles VI. Yet for two centuries it kept
+its character as a military citadel. Sometimes the kings gave lodgment
+there to great personages who were passing through Paris. Louis XI. and
+Francis I. held brilliant fêtes there, of which the chroniclers speak
+with admiration.
+
+It is Richelieu who must be considered the founder of the Bastille--the
+Bastille, that is, as a royal prison, the Bastille of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries. Before him, imprisonment in the old fortress
+was merely casual; it is to him that we must trace the conception of the
+state prison as an instrument of government. Here we shall be arrested
+by the question, what is to be understood by a state prison? The term,
+vague and open to discussion, is explained by M. Bournon. "By a state
+prison--taking the Bastille as a particular instance--must be understood
+a prison for those who have committed a crime or misdemeanour not
+provided for by the common law; for those who, rightly or wrongly, have
+appeared dangerous to the safety of the state, whether the nation itself
+is concerned, or its head, or a body more or less considerable of
+citizens, a body sometimes no larger than the family of the suspect. If
+we add to this class of prisoners personages too conspicuous to be
+punished for a crime at common law on equal terms with the ordinary
+malefactor, and for whom it would appear inevitable that an exceptional
+prison should be reserved, we shall have passed in review the different
+kinds of delinquents who expiated their misdeeds at the Bastille from
+the time of Richelieu to the Revolution."
+
+The administration of the Bastille, which, up to the reign of Louis
+XIII., was entrusted to great lords, dukes, constables, marshals of
+France--the Marshal de Bassompierre, the Constable de Luynes, the
+Marshal de Vitry, the Duke of Luxemburg, to mention only the last of
+them--was placed by Richelieu in the hands of a real jailer, Leclerc du
+Tremblay, brother of Père Joseph.[23]
+
+Documents throwing any light on the Bastille at the time when the Red
+Man, as Victor Hugo named Richelieu, was supreme, are however very
+rare. An advocate, Maton de la Varenne, published in 1786, in his
+_Revolutions of Paris_, a letter which ostensibly had been written on
+December 1, 1642, to Richelieu, at that time ill. In it we read: "I,
+whom you are causing to rot in the Bastille for having disobeyed your
+commandment, which would have brought upon my soul condemnation to
+eternal hell, and would have made me appear in eternity with hands
+stained with blood----" It is impossible to guarantee the authenticity
+of this document. To us it appears suspicious, the text having been
+published at a time when many apocryphal documents were produced as
+coming from the archives of the Bastille. More worthy of arresting our
+attention is the "return of the prisoners who are in the château of the
+Bastille," a document of Richelieu's time which M. Bournon discovered in
+the archives of the Foreign Office. This catalogue, containing
+fifty-three names, is the oldest list of prisoners of the Bastille known
+up to the present time. Among the prisoners several are suspected or
+convicted of evil designs against "Monsieur le cardinal," some are
+accused of an intention to "complot," that is, to conspire against the
+throne, or of being spies. There is an "extravagant" priest, a monk who
+had "opposed Cluni's election," three hermits, three coiners, the
+Marquis d'Assigny, condemned to death, but whose punishment had been
+commuted to perpetual imprisonment, a score or so of lords designated as
+"madmen, vile scoundrels, evil wretches," or accused of some definite
+crime, theft or murder; finally, those whose name is followed by the
+simple note, "Queen-mother," or "Monsieur,"[24] whence we may conclude
+that the clerk had no exact information about the prisoners of the
+cardinal. We shall give later the list of the prisoners in the Bastille
+on the day of its capture, July 14, 1789; and the comparison between the
+two lists at the two periods, the remotest and the most recent that we
+could select, will be instructive. We have also, to assist us in forming
+a judgment of the Bastille in Richelieu's time, the memoirs of
+Bassompierre and of Laporte, which transport us into a state prison,
+elegant, we might almost say luxurious, reserved for prisoners of birth
+and breeding, where they lived observing all social usages in their
+mutual relations, paying and returning calls. But the Bastille preserved
+its military character for many more years, and among the prisoners we
+find especially a number of officers punished for breaches of
+discipline. Prisoners of war were confined there, and foreign personages
+of high rank arrested by way of reprisal, secret agents and spies
+employed in France by hostile nations; finally, powerful lords who had
+incurred the king's displeasure. The court intrigues under Richelieu and
+Mazarin contributed to the diversion of the Bastille from its original
+intention: they began to incarcerate there _valets de chambre_ who had
+somehow become mixed up in the plots of sovereigns.
+
+Religious persecution was revived by the government of Louis XIV., and
+ere long a whole world of gazetteers and "novelists," the journalists of
+the period, were seen swarming like flies in the sun. Louis XIV. was not
+precisely a stickler for the liberty of the press, but on the other hand
+he shrank from cooping up men of letters, Jansenists and Protestants
+convinced of the truth of their beliefs, pell-mell with the vagabonds
+and thiefs confined at Bicêtre, Saint-Lazare, and the other prisons of
+Paris. He threw open to them, too generously no doubt, the portals of
+his château in the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where they mixed with young men
+of family undergoing a mild course of the Bastille at the request of
+their parents, and with quarrelsome nobles whom the marshals of France,
+anxious to avoid duels, used to send there to forget their animosities.
+Further, the reign of Louis XIV. was marked by some great trials which
+produced a strange and appalling impression, and threw around the
+accused a halo of mystery--trials for magic and sorcery, cases of
+poisoning and base coining. The accused parties in these cases were
+confined in the Bastille. And here we encounter a fresh departure from
+the primitive character of the old fortress; prisoners were sent there
+whose cases were tried by the regularly constituted judges. Henceforth
+prisoners who appeared before the court of the Arsenal were divided
+between the Bastille and the fortress of Vincennes.
+
+This is the grand epoch in the history of the Bastille: it is now a
+veritable prison of state. Writers can speak of its "nobleness." It
+shows itself to us in colours at once charming and awe-inspiring,
+brilliant, majestic, now filled with sounds of merriment, now veiled
+with an appalling silence. From the gloomy regions within the massive
+walls there come to us the sounds of song and laughter mingled with
+cries of despair, with sobs and tears. This is the period of the Iron
+Mask: the period when the governor receives mysterious letters from the
+court. "I beg you, sir, to see that, if anyone comes to ask for news of
+the prisoner whom Desgrez conducted to the Bastille this morning by
+order of the king, nothing be said about him, and that, if possible, in
+accordance with the intention of His Majesty and the accompanying
+instructions, no one may get to know him or even his name." "M. de
+Bernaville (the name of one of the governors of the Bastille), having
+given orders for the conveyance of an important prisoner to the prison
+of my château of the Bastille, I send this letter to inform you of my
+intention that you receive him there and keep him closely guarded until
+further orders, warning you not to permit him, under any pretext
+whatever, to hold communication with any person, either by word of mouth
+or in writing." The prisoners surrounded with so absolute a silence
+almost all belonged to the same category, namely, distinguished spies,
+who seem to have been rather numerous in France at the full tide of
+Louis XIV.'s wars, and who were hunted down with an eagerness which grew
+in proportion as fortune frowned on the royal armies. We read in the
+Journal kept by the King's lieutenant, Du Junca: "On Wednesday,
+December 22, about ten o'clock in the morning, M. de la Coste, provost
+of the King's armies, came here, bringing and leaving in our custody a
+prisoner whom for greater secrecy he caused to enter by our new gate,
+which allows us to pass into or out of the garden of the Arsenal at all
+hours--the which prisoner, M. d'Estingen by name, a German, but married
+in England, was received by the governor by order of the King sent by
+the hand of the Marquis de Barbezieux, with explicit instructions to
+keep the prisoner's presence a secret and to prevent him from holding
+communication with anyone, in speech or writing: the which prisoner is a
+widower, without children, a man of intelligence, and doing a brisk
+trade in news of what is happening in France, sending his information to
+Germany, England, and Holland: a gentlemanly spy." On February 10, 1710,
+Pontchartrain wrote to Bernaville, governor of the Bastille: "I cannot
+refrain from telling you that you and the Chevalier de la Croix speak a
+good deal too much and too openly about the foreign prisoners you have.
+Secrecy and mystery is one of your first duties, as I must ask you to
+remember. Neither D'Argenson nor any other than those I have apprized
+you of should see these prisoners. Give explicit warning to the Abbé
+Renaudot and to de la Croix of the necessity of maintaining an
+inviolable and impenetrable secrecy."
+
+It happened also at that period that a prisoner remained in complete
+ignorance of the reason of his incarceration: "The prisoner at the
+Bastille named J. J. du Vacquay," writes Louvois to the governor, "has
+complained to the King that he has been kept there for thirteen years
+without knowing the reason: be good enough to let me know what minister
+signed the warrant under which he is detained, so that I may report to
+His Majesty."
+
+As the greater part of the papers relating to the arrest were destroyed
+as soon as the incarceration was effected, it sometimes happened that in
+certain cases the reasons were not known even in the offices of the
+ministers. Thus Seignelay writes to the governor, M. de Besmaus: "The
+King has commanded me to write and ask you who is a certain prisoner
+named Dumesnil, how long he has been at the Bastille, and for what
+reason he was placed there." "The demoiselle de Mirail, a prisoner at
+the Bastille, having demanded her liberty of the King, His Majesty has
+instructed me to write and ask you the reason of her detention; if you
+know it, be good enough to inform me at your earliest convenience."
+Again, we find Louvois writing to the same effect: "I am sending you a
+letter from M. Coquet, in regard to which the King has commanded me to
+ask who signed the warrant under which he was sent to the Bastille, and
+whether you know the reason of his being sent there." "Sir, I am writing
+a line merely to ask you to let me know who is Piat de la Fontaine, who
+has been five years at the Bastille, and whether you do not remember why
+he was placed there."
+
+Letters of this kind are, it is true, very rare; yet if one compares the
+state of things they disclose with the extraordinary comfort and luxury
+with which the prisoners were surrounded, they help to characterize the
+celebrated prison at this epoch of its history, namely, the seventeenth
+century.
+
+In 1667 the office of lieutenant of police had been created. The first
+to hold the title was Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, a man of the
+greatest worth. It is very important to note that under the _ancien
+régime_ the lieutenant of police had a double function, being at the
+same time a subordinate of the minister of Paris[25] and a member of the
+Châtelet.[26] His duties were thus of a twofold nature, administrative
+and judicial. Now the Bastille, as a state prison, was more especially
+an administrative institution; but gradually, owing to the character of
+the persons brought there as prisoners, it became difficult to avoid
+turning it also into a judicial institution, and the minister of Paris
+became accustomed to delegate his subordinate, the lieutenant of police,
+to conduct the examination of the prisoners at the Bastille. Though La
+Reynie took practically the whole responsibility of the administration
+of the Bastille, his visits to the prison itself were nevertheless
+relatively rare, and on every occasion a permit signed by Louis XIV. or
+by Colbert was necessary.
+
+La Reynie was succeeded by D'Argenson. Under him the powers of the
+lieutenant of police were very largely extended, and the Bastille was
+comprised within his jurisdiction. Henceforth the lieutenant of police
+will enter the state prison whenever it seems good to him, as lord and
+master, accompanied by his subordinates at the Châtelet, clerks and
+inspectors of police; the prisoners will be in direct and constant
+communication with him, and he will make an inspection of all the
+chambers at least once a year. We find that at every change in the
+lieutenancy of police, it sufficed for the minister of Paris to send the
+name of the new officer to the governor. Dating from this period, the
+prison in the Suburb Saint-Antoine remained under the authority of a
+magistrate.
+
+The Regency was a transition period between the reigns of Louis XIV. and
+Louis XV., and there was a corresponding transition period in the
+history of the Bastille. The incarcerations were less numerous and less
+rigorous, but the rule of the prison lost something of that aristocratic
+air which had characterized it. The most important episode in the
+history of the Bastille during the Regency was the incarceration of
+those who were accused of complicity in the Cellamare conspiracy. Among
+these was Mdlle de Launay, later to be known as Madame de Staal. She
+has left some charming pages about her imprisonment, in which we find,
+related with a fluent and subtle pen, the little romance which we
+proceed to outline.
+
+Mdlle de Launay was secretary to the Duchess of Maine. She had had some
+part in drawing up the scheme of the Cellamare conspiracy, which, if it
+had succeeded, would have placed the king of Spain on the throne of
+France. On December 10, 1718, the Regent sent her, with several of her
+accomplices, to the Bastille, less with the idea of punishing her for
+machinations against the state than to obtain from her details of the
+conspiracy. At that period of her life she was of but moderate fortune
+and rank, and it would not have been strange if she had been treated
+with rigour. She found at the Bastille, on the contrary, unexpected
+comfort and consideration. In her _Memoirs_, she writes that her sojourn
+at the Bastille was the pleasantest time of her life. Her maid, Rondel,
+was permitted to live with her. She was installed in a veritable suite
+of rooms. She complained of the mice there, and a cat was given her, to
+drive out the mice and provide some amusement. By and by there were
+kittens, and the sportive tricks of the numerous little family cheered
+her wonderfully, she said. Mdlle de Launay was regularly invited to dine
+with the governor; she spent her days in writing and card-playing. The
+king's lieutenant, Maisonrouge, a man well on in years, who held, after
+the governor, the first place in the administration of the château,
+conceived a profound and pathetic passion for the fair prisoner. He
+declared that nothing would give him greater happiness than to make her
+his wife. His apartments happened to be near those of Mdlle de Launay.
+Unhappily for the king's lieutenant, there was in the neighbourhood a
+third suite, occupied by a young and brilliant nobleman, the Chevalier
+de Ménil, who also was implicated in the Cellamare affair. The fair
+prisoner was not acquainted with him. Maisonrouge impresses us as a man
+of great dignity, and rare nobility of character. He spoke to the two
+young prisoners about each other, hoping, by bringing them into
+communication, to provide them with fresh distractions, more
+particularly the lady, whom he loved. The Chevalier de Ménil and Mdlle
+de Launay could not see each other; they had never met. They began by
+exchanging epistles in verse. Like everything that came from her pen,
+the verses of Mdlle de Launay were full of animation and charm. The good
+Maisonrouge played post between them, happy to see his little friend's
+delight in the diversion she owed to him. It was not long before the
+verses carried from one room to the other by Maisonrouge began to speak
+of love, and this love--surprising as it may seem, but not difficult to
+understand in the sequestered life of the Bastille--ere long became real
+in the consciousness of the young people, who saw each other in
+imagination under the most charming colours. Maisonrouge was soon
+induced to contrive an interview between them. It is a delightful
+moment. The two captives had never seen each other, yet loved each
+other passionately: what will their mutual impressions be? Mdlle de
+Launay's impression, when she saw the gay chevalier, was of unmixed
+enthusiasm; the chevalier's, maybe, was more subdued; but if it is true,
+as someone has said, that to nuns the gardener represents mankind, to a
+prisoner every young woman must be an exquisite creature. The interviews
+continued under the benevolent eye of Maisonrouge, who watched the
+development of Mdlle de Launay's love for Ménil--the love of the girl
+whom he himself loved intensely, but whose happiness he preferred to his
+own. There are delightful details which may be found delightfully
+described in Mdlle de Launay's _Memoirs_. It is M. Bournon's opinion
+that, according to the testimony of Mdlle de Launay herself, this idyll
+of the Bastille had "the dénouement that might have been foretold." We
+have caught no hint of the sort in the _Memoirs_ of Madame de Staal, but
+then, M. Bournon is no doubt the better psychologist. At any rate, the
+governor of the Bastille got wind of the diversions of the lovers. He
+put his foot down. Ménil was transferred to a distant tower, Mdlle de
+Launay shed tears, and, incredible as it seems, Maisonrouge, while
+redoubling his efforts to please her, sympathized with her lot to the
+point of arranging fresh and more difficult interviews with the sparkish
+chevalier. Mdlle de Launay left the prison in the spring of 1720, after
+having sent to the Regent a detailed statement of the facts of the
+conspiracy, which hitherto she had refused to furnish. Once at liberty,
+she vainly implored the Chevalier de Ménil to fulfil his pledges and
+make her his wife. Maisonrouge died in the following year, of
+disappointment, says the gay coquette, at his failure to get from her,
+during her imprisonment, the promise of marriage which now she would
+have been glad enough to fulfil.
+
+It seems as though under the Regency everything at the Bastille turned
+on love--a reflection of the epoch itself. The young Duke de Richelieu
+was locked up there because he did not love his wife. The brilliant
+nobleman was kept under lock and key for several weeks, "in solitude and
+gloom," he says, when suddenly the door of his room flew open and Madame
+de Richelieu appeared, a wonder of grace, brightness and charm: "The
+fair angel," writes the duke, "who flew from heaven to earth to set
+Peter free was not so radiant."
+
+We have seen how the Bastille had been transformed from a military
+citadel into a prison of state. We shall now witness, under the
+government of the Duke of Orleans, another transformation, betokened by
+an event which is of little apparent importance. The Duke de Richelieu
+was imprisoned in the Bastille a second time as the result of a duel: a
+judge of the Parlement went there to question him and the Parlement
+tried his case. The Parlement[27] at the Bastille, in the prison of the
+king! From that moment the fortress continued year by year to grow more
+like our modern prisons. "Under the Cardinal de Fleury," writes La
+Harpe, "this famous château was inhabited by hardly any but Jansenist
+writers: it then became the enforced residence of champions of
+philosophy and authors of clandestine satires, and acted as a foil to
+their obscurity and shame." It became increasingly the practice to
+confine there accused persons whose cases were regularly tried at the
+Châtelet or even before the Parlement. By the second half of the
+eighteenth century accused persons had come to be incarcerated in the
+Bastille by direct order of the Châtelet, which would have seemed
+incredible to a contemporary of Louis XIV. The summoning officer would
+post himself before the towers, and there, while the prisoner pressed
+his head close against the bars of the window, the officer would shout
+the terms of the writ at him across the moat. The advocates defending
+the accused obtained permission to go and consult their clients, and
+they were the only persons who were permitted to interview the prisoners
+in private. On the appointed day the prisoner was transferred to the law
+courts quietly and by night to avoid the curiosity of the crowd.
+
+Under Louis XVI. the judges of the Parlement visited the Bastille as
+they visited the other prisons; at length the minister Breteuil sent
+instructions to the officials informing them that no more _lettres de
+cachet_ would be issued without stating the duration of the penalty to
+which the guilty person was condemned and the grounds for his
+punishment. The Bastille was now merely a prison like the others,
+except that the prisoners were better treated there.
+
+In 1713 Voysin, the Secretary of State, wrote to D'Argenson:
+"Beaumanielle is not sufficiently deserving of consideration to warrant
+his removal from the Châtelet to the Bastille." La Harpe has well
+described the transformation which from this time came over the great
+state prison by saying that, from the beginning of the century, none of
+the prisoners who had been placed there "had merited the honour." His
+remark receives corroboration from Linguet: "It is not, in these latter
+days especially, for criminals of state that the Bastille is reserved:
+it has become in some sort the antichambre of the conciergerie."
+
+If the glories of the Bastille paled as it grew older, on the other hand
+torture, which, it is true, had never been applied except by order of
+the courts, had completely disappeared. From the beginning of the
+eighteenth century, the cells and chains were merely a temporary
+punishment reserved for insubordinate prisoners: from the accession of
+Louis XVI. they had fallen into disuse. Breteuil forbade any person
+whatever to be placed in the cells, which were the rooms on the lowest
+floor of each tower, a sort of damp and gloomy vaults. On September 11,
+1775, Malesherbes writes: "No prisoner should be refused material for
+reading and writing. The abuse it is pretended that they may make of it
+cannot be dangerous, confined so closely as they are. Nor should any
+refusal be made to the desire of such as may wish to devote themselves
+to other occupations, provided they do not require you to leave in their
+hands tools of which they might avail themselves to effect their escape.
+If any of them should wish to write to his family and his friends, he
+must be permitted to receive replies, and to send replies to their
+letters after having read them. In all this you must be guided by your
+prudence and your humanity." The reading of the gazettes, formerly
+rigidly forbidden, was now authorised.
+
+It must further be remarked that the number of prisoners confined in the
+Bastille was not so large as might be thought. During the whole reign of
+Louis XVI. the Bastille received no more than two hundred and forty
+prisoners, an average of sixteen a year; while it had room for forty-two
+in separate apartments.
+
+Under Louis XIV., at the period when the government was most liberal in
+dispensing its _lettres de cachet_, an average of only thirty prisoners
+a year entered the château, and their captivity was for the most part of
+short duration. Dumouriez informs us in his _Memoirs_ that during his
+detention he had never more than eighteen fellow prisoners, and that
+more than once he had only six. M. Alfred Bégis has drawn up a list of
+the prisoners detained in the Bastille from 1781 to 1789. In May, 1788,
+it contained twenty-seven prisoners, the highest figure reached during
+these eight year; in September, 1782, it contained ten; in April, 1783,
+seven; in June of the same year, seven; in December, 1788, nine; in
+February, 1789, nine; at the time of its capture, July 14, 1789, there
+were seven.
+
+True, not only men were locked up in the Bastille, but also books when
+they appeared dangerous. The royal warrant under which they were
+incarcerated was even drawn up on the model of the _lettres de cachet_.
+M. Bournon has published a specimen of these. The books were shut up in
+a closet between the towers of the Treasure and the County, over an old
+passage communicating with the bastion. In 1733 the lieutenant of police
+instructed the governor of the Bastille to receive at the château "all
+the apparatus of a clandestine printing-press which had been seized in a
+chamber of the Saint-Victor abbey: the which you will be good enough to
+have placed in the store room of the Bastille." When the books ceased to
+appear dangerous, they were set at liberty. In this way the
+_Encyclopædia_[28] was liberated after a detention of some years.
+
+We have just seen that during the reign of Louis XVI. the Bastille did
+not receive more than sixteen prisoners a year, on an average. Several
+of these were only detained for a few days. From 1783 to 1789 the
+Bastille remained almost empty, and would have been absolutely empty if
+it had not been decided to place there prisoners who should properly
+have been elsewhere. As early as February, 1784, the fortress of
+Vincennes, which served as a sort of overflow pipe to the Bastille, had
+been shut for lack of prisoners. The system of _lettres de cachet_ was
+slipping away into the past. On the other hand, the Bastille was a
+source of great expense to the King. The governor alone received 60,000
+livres annually. When you add the salaries and board of the officers of
+the garrison, the turnkeys, the physicians, the surgeon, the apothecary,
+the chaplains; when you add the food--this alone in 1774 came to 67,000
+livres--and the clothing of the prisoners, and the upkeep of the
+buildings, the total will appear outrageous, for the figures given above
+must be tripled to represent the value of the present day. So Necker,
+seeing that the Bastille was of no further utility, thought of
+suppressing it "for economy's sake,"[29] and he was not the only one in
+high places to speak of this suppression. The Carnavalet[30] museum
+possesses a scheme drawn up in 1784 by Corbet, the superintending
+architect to the city of Paris, whence the project has an official
+character: it is a scheme for a "Place Louis XVI." to be opened up on
+the site of the old fortress. We learn from Millin that other artists
+"were occupied with a scheme for erecting a monument on the site of the
+Bastille." One of these schemes deserves special mention. Seven of the
+eight towers were to be destroyed, the eighth to remain standing, but in
+a significant state of dilapidation: on the site of the demolished
+towers a monument was to be erected to the glory of Louis XVI. This
+monument was to consist of a pedestal formed by piling up chains and
+bolts taken from the state prison, above which would rise a statue of
+the king, one hand extended towards the ruined tower with the gesture of
+a deliverer. It is to be regretted, if not for the beauty, at least, for
+the picturesqueness of Paris, that this scheme was never put into
+execution. Davy de Chavigné, king's counsellor and auditor to the
+treasury, was allowed to present to the Royal Academy of Architecture,
+at its sitting on June 8, 1789, "a plan for a monument on the site of
+the Bastille, to be decreed by the States General to Louis XVI. as the
+restorer of the public liberty." On this subject the famous sculptor
+Houdon wrote to Chavigné: "I am very anxious for the plan to be adopted.
+The idea of erecting a monument to liberty on the very spot where
+slavery has reigned up to the present, appears to me particularly well
+conceived, and well calculated to inspire genius. I shall think myself
+only too fortunate to be among the artists who will celebrate the epoch
+of the regeneration of France."
+
+We have seen prints, long anterior to 1789--one of them the frontispiece
+of the edition of Linguet's _Memoirs_ that appeared in 1783--representing
+Louis XVI. extending his hand towards the lofty towers, which workmen
+are in the act of demolishing.
+
+Among the archives of the Bastille are preserved two reports drawn up in
+1788 by the king's lieutenant, Puget, the most important personage in
+the fortress after the governor. He proposes the suppression of the
+state prison, the demolition of the old château, and the sale of the
+ground for the benefit of the crown. It may be said of these schemes, as
+of the plan of the architect Corbet, that they would not have been
+propounded if they had not been approved in high places.
+
+Further, in the year 1784, an ardent supporter of the old state of
+things cried: "Oh! if our young monarch ever committed a fault so great,
+if he so far belied the most ancient usages of this government, if it
+were possible that one day he could be tempted to destroy you" (the
+author is apostrophizing the Bastille) "to raise on your ruins a
+monument to the liberator-king...." The demolition of the Bastille was
+decided on; and it would have been accomplished as a government
+undertaking but for the outbreak of the Revolution.
+
+From January 1 to July 14, 1789, that is to say for more than six
+months, only one solitary prisoner entered the Bastille; and what a
+prisoner!--Réveillon, the paper manufacturer of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine, who was shut up on May 1 at his own request, in order to
+escape the fury of the mob. The same year, the lieutenant of police, de
+Crosne, made an inspection of the Bastille, accompanied by a judge of
+the Parlement; their object was to arrange officially about the
+destruction of the state prison.
+
+Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, the Bastille no longer existed,
+though its towers were still standing.
+
+The victors of the 14th of July set free seven prisoners: four forgers
+whose arrest had been ordered by the Châtelet, whose case had been
+regularly tried, and whose proper place was an ordinary prison; two
+madmen who ought to have been at Charenton; and the Comte de Solages, a
+young nobleman who had been guilty of a monstrous crime over which it
+was desired to throw a veil out of regard for his family; he was
+maintained on a pension paid by his father. The conquerors of the
+Bastille destroyed an old fortified castle: the state prison no longer
+existed. They "broke in an open door." That was said of them even in
+1789.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LIFE IN THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Having sketched rapidly and with bold strokes the outlines of the
+history of the Bastille from its foundation to its fall, we intend to
+show how the rule to which prisoners in the fortress of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine were submitted underwent its own process of
+transformation, parallel with the transformation of the prison itself.
+To understand the facts which follow, and which are of a kind to astound
+the mind of everyone in these days, it is necessary to remember what we
+have already said as to the character of the Bastille. It was the prison
+of luxury, the aristocratic prison of the _ancien régime_, the _prison
+de luxe_ at a period when it was no dishonour, as we shall see later, to
+be confined there. We must remember the phrase of the minister of Paris
+writing to D'Argenson, in regard to a personage of but modest rank, that
+this individual did not deserve "consideration" enough to be put in the
+Bastille. Let us reflect on this observation of Mercier in his excellent
+_Pictures of Paris_: "The people fear the Châtelet more than the
+Bastille. Of the latter they have no dread, because it is almost unknown
+to them."
+
+We have shown how the Bastille, originally a military citadel, had
+become a prison of state; then, little by little, had approximated to
+the ordinary prisons, until the day when it died a natural death ere it
+could be assassinated. The same transformation took place in the
+treatment of the prisoners. Midway in the seventeenth century, the
+Bastille had none of the characteristics of a prison, but was simply a
+château in which the king caused certain of his subjects to sojourn, for
+one cause or another. They lived there just as they thought proper,
+furnishing their rooms according to their fancy with their own
+furniture, indulging their tastes in regard to food at their own
+expense, and waited on by their own servants. When a prisoner was rich
+he could live at the Bastille in princely style; when he was poor, he
+lived there very wretchedly. When the prisoner had no property at all,
+the king did not for that reason give him furniture or food; but he gave
+him money which he might use as seemed good to him in providing himself
+with furniture and food: money of which he could retain a part--a number
+of prisoners did not fail to do so--these savings becoming his own
+property. This system, the character of which it is important to
+recognize, underwent gradual modification during the course of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, approximating, without ever
+becoming identical with, the system of our modern prisons. Thus the
+king, instead of granting pensions individually to the poorest of the
+prisoners, came to endow the Bastille with a certain fixed number of
+pensions for the less fortunate prisoners. The recipients of these
+pensions continued to enjoy them for long years, and if they did not
+wish the whole of the money to be expended on their support, the balance
+was handed over to them. So we see certain individuals getting little
+fortunes together by the mere fact of their having been prisoners in the
+Bastille--a circumstance which has so much surprised historians because
+they have not sought its cause. It even happened that prisoners, when
+their liberation was announced to them, asked to remain a little longer
+in order to swell their savings, a favour which was sometimes granted
+them. In the course of the eighteenth century the money destined to the
+maintenance of the prisoners at the Bastille could not be diverted from
+its purpose; the prisoners were no longer able to appropriate a part;
+the whole sum had to be expended.
+
+It was only in the second half of the seventeenth century that the king
+had some rooms at the Bastille furnished for such prisoners as were
+without means of procuring furniture themselves. And it is very
+interesting to note that it was only at the extreme end of the century,
+under the administration of Saint-Mars, that certain apartments of the
+Bastille were arranged in the prison style with bars and bolts. Until
+then they had been simply the rooms of a stronghold.[31]
+
+Let us follow the prisoner from his entrance to his exit.
+
+When the _lettre de cachet_ had been signed, it was usually a sort of
+sheriff's officer who effected the arrest. He appeared in company with
+five or six men-at-arms, and signified the arrest by touching his quarry
+with a white staff. A coach was in waiting. The police officer politely
+begged the person he was instructed to secure to step into the coach,
+and took his place beside him. And, according to the testimony of
+various memoirs, while the vehicle was rolling along with lowered
+blinds, there was a pleasant conversational exchange of courtesies up to
+the moment of the prisoner's finding himself within the walls of the
+Bastille. A certain Lafort was living in furnished apartments with a
+young and pretty Englishwoman whom he had abducted, when one evening,
+about sunset, a police officer arrived. The coach was at the door.
+Preliminaries were settled on both sides with as much politeness as if a
+visit or an evening party had been the topic of discussion. They all got
+into the vehicle, even the young man's lackey who, beguiled by
+appearances, mounted behind. Arrived at the Bastille, the lackey lost no
+time in descending to open the door: there was general astonishment,
+especially on the part of the poor servant, when he learnt that since he
+had entered the Bastille along with his master, he must stay with him.
+
+Most often the officer and his companions surprised their quarry early
+in the morning, on rising from bed. Imagine then the coach with the
+prisoner and the police officer inside, arriving before the Bastille, in
+the first court in front of the castle keep. "Who goes there?" cries the
+sentinel. "The king's writ!" replies the officer. At this, the shops we
+have seen attached to the flanks of the château are bound at once to be
+shut. The soldiers on guard have to turn their faces to the wall, or
+perhaps to pull their hats over their eyes. The coach passes the
+outpost, a bell sounds. "Advance!" cries the officer on duty. The
+drawbridge is lowered and the coach rattles over the stout iron-clamped
+boards. For greater secrecy, spies and prisoners of war were taken in by
+a private door leading to the gardens of the Arsenal.
+
+Officers and noblemen presented themselves before the Bastille alone,
+unless they were accompanied by relatives or friends. "It is my
+intention," the king had written to them, "that you betake yourselves to
+my château of the Bastille." And no one dreamt of declining the royal
+invitation. Further, when the governor desired to transfer one of them
+from one prison to another, he contented himself with telling him so. We
+find in the Journal of Du Junca, king's lieutenant[32] at the Bastille,
+several notes like the following: "Monday, December 26, 1695, about ten
+o'clock in the morning, M. de Villars, lieutenant-colonel of the
+regiment of Vosges infantry, came and reported himself a prisoner, as
+ordered by M. Barbezieux, though he was a prisoner in the citadel of
+Grenoble, whence he came direct without being brought by anyone."[33] On
+the arrival of the prisoner, the king's lieutenant, accompanied by the
+captain of the gates, came to receive him as he got out of his carriage.
+The officers of the château at once led the new-comer into the presence
+of the governor, who received him civilly, invited him to sit down, and
+after having endorsed the _lettre de cachet_ conversed with him for some
+time. Under Louis XIV. the governor in most cases even kept his new
+guest, as well as the persons who had accompanied him, to lunch or
+dinner. Meanwhile his quarters had been got ready. We read in Du Junca's
+Journal that on January 26, 1695, a certain De Courlandon, a colonel of
+cavalry, presented himself for incarceration at the Bastille. There
+being no room ready to receive him, the governor asked him to go and
+pass the night in a neighbouring inn, at the sign of the _Crown_, and
+to return next day. "Whereupon M. de Courlandon did not fail to return
+about eleven o'clock in the morning, having dined with M. de Besmaus
+(the governor), and in the afternoon he entered the château."
+
+The reader will not be surprised at learning that the prospect of
+incarceration at the Bastille did not always strike the future prisoner
+with terror. We read in the _Memoirs_ of the Duke de Lauzun:[34]
+"Scolded for two hours on end by everybody who fancied himself entitled
+to do so, I thought I could not do better than go to Paris and await
+developments. A few hours after my arrival, I received a letter from my
+father telling me that it had been decided to put us all in the
+Bastille, and that I should probably be arrested during the night. I
+determined at least to finish gaily, so I invited some pretty girls from
+the Opera to supper, so that I might await the officer without
+impatience. Seeing that he did not arrive, I determined on the bold move
+of going to Fontainebleau and joining the king's hunt. He did not speak
+to me once during the chase, which was such a confirmation of our
+disgrace that on our return no one gave us the customary salute. But I
+did not lose heart; in the evening I was in attendance, and the king
+came to me. 'You are all,' he said, 'hotheaded rips, but funny dogs all
+the same; come along and have supper, and bring M. de Guéméné and the
+Chevalier de Luxembourg.'"
+
+Before the new arrival was installed in the chamber prepared for him, he
+was taken to the great council hall, where he was requested to empty his
+pockets. Only notorious rogues were searched. If the prisoner had upon
+him money, jewels, or other articles such as knives and scissors, the
+use of which was not allowed by the regulations, they were done up in a
+parcel which he himself sealed, with his own seal if he had one; if not,
+with the seal of the Bastille. Finally, he was conducted to the room
+reserved for him.
+
+Each of the eight towers of the Bastille contained four or five stories
+of rooms or cells. The worst of these rooms were on the lowest floor,
+and these were what were called the "cells,"--octagonal vaults, cold and
+damp, partly under ground; the walls, grey with mould, were bare from
+floor to ceiling, the latter a groined arch. A bench and a bed of straw
+covered with a paltry coverlet, formed the whole appointments. Daylight
+feebly flickered through the vent-hole opening on to the moat. When the
+Seine was in flood, the water came through the walls and swamped the
+cells; and then any prisoners who might happen to be in them were
+removed. During the reign of Louis XIV. the cells were sometimes
+occupied by prisoners of the lowest class and criminals condemned to
+death. Later, under Louis XV., the cells ceased to be used except as a
+place of punishment for insubordinate prisoners who assaulted their
+guardians or fellow-prisoners, or for turnkeys and sentinels of the
+château who had committed breaches of discipline. They stayed in the
+cells for a short time in irons. The cells had fallen into disuse by
+the time the Revolution broke out; since the first ministry of Necker,
+it had been forbidden to confine in them any one whatever, and none of
+the warders questioned on July 18 remembered having seen any one placed
+in them. The two prisoners, Tavernier and Béchade, whom the conquerors
+of the 14th of July found in one of these dungeons, had been placed
+there, at the moment of the attack, by the officers of the château, for
+fear lest amid the rain of bullets some harm should befall them.
+
+The worst rooms after the cells were the _calottes_, the rooms on the
+floor above. In summer the heat was extreme in them, and in winter the
+cold, in spite of the stoves. They were octagons whose ceilings, as the
+name implies, were shaped like a skull-cap. High enough in the centre,
+they gradually diminished in height towards the sides. It was impossible
+to stand upright except in the middle of the room.
+
+The prisoners were only placed in the cells and _calottes_ under
+exceptional circumstances. Every tower had two or three floors of lofty
+and airy chambers, and in these the prisoners lived. They were octagons
+from fifteen to sixteen feet in diameter and from fifteen to twenty feet
+high. Light entered through large windows approached by three steps. We
+have said that it was only towards the end of Louis XIV.'s reign that
+these rooms were arranged like prison cells with bars and bolts. They
+were warmed with open fireplaces or stoves. The ceiling was whitewashed,
+the floor of brick. On the walls the prisoners had chalked verses,
+mottoes, and designs.
+
+One artistic prisoner amused himself by decorating the bare walls with
+paintings. The governor, delighted at seeing him thus find relaxation,
+moved him from room to room; when he had finished filling one with his
+designs and arabesques, he was placed in another. Some of these rooms
+were decorated with portraits of Louis XIV. placed above the
+chimney-piece, a characteristic detail which helps to show what the
+Bastille was at this period: the château of the king, where the king
+received a certain number of his subjects as his willing or unwilling
+guests.
+
+The best rooms in the Bastille were those that were fitted up in the
+eighteenth century for the accommodation of the staff. These were what
+were called the "suites." In these were placed invalids and prisoners of
+distinction.
+
+At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the furniture of these
+apartments was still extremely simple: they were absolutely empty. The
+reason of this we have indicated above. "I arrived," says Madame de
+Staal, "at a room where there was nothing but four walls, very filthy,
+and daubed all over by my predecessors for want of something better to
+do. It was so destitute of furniture that someone went and got a little
+straw chair for me to sit on, and two stones to support a lighted
+faggot, and a little candle-end was neatly stuck on the wall to give me
+light."
+
+The prisoners sent to their own homes for a table, bed, and chair, or
+they hired these from the upholsterer of the Bastille. When they had
+nothing to bless themselves with, the government, as we have already
+said, did not provide them with furniture. It gave them money, sometimes
+considerable sums, which permitted them to adorn their rooms after their
+own fancy. This was the case in regard to all prisoners up to 1684. At
+this date the king ordered the administration to supply furniture to
+those of the prisoners whose detention was to be kept secret, for, by
+getting in bedding from their own houses or the houses of friends, they
+made known their arrest. D'Argenson had half a dozen of the rooms
+permanently furnished, others were furnished under Louis XV.; under
+Louis XVI., almost all were furnished. The appointments were very
+modest: a bed of green baize with curtains, one or two tables, several
+chairs, fire-dogs, a shovel, and a small pair of tongs. But after having
+undergone examination, the prisoner retained the right of getting in
+furniture from outside. And in this way the rooms of the prisoners were
+sometimes adorned with great elegance. Madame de Staal relates that she
+had hers hung with tapestry; the Marquis de Sade covered the bare walls
+with long and brilliant hangings: other prisoners ornamented their rooms
+with family portraits: they procured chests of drawers, desks, round
+tables, dressing-cases, armchairs, cushions in Utrecht velvet; the
+inventories of articles belonging to the prisoners show that they
+managed to secure everything they thought necessary. The Abbé Brigault,
+who was imprisoned at the same time as Madame de Staal and for the same
+affair, brought into the Bastille five arm-chairs, two pieces of
+tapestry, eleven serge hangings, eight chairs, a bureau, a small table,
+three pictures, &c. The list of effects taken out of the Bastille by the
+Comte de Belle-Isle when he was set at liberty includes a library
+consisting of 333 volumes and ten atlases, a complete service of fine
+linen and plate for the table, a bed furnished with gold-bordered red
+damask, four pieces of tapestry on antique subjects, two mirrors, a
+screen of gold-bordered red damask matching the bed, two folding
+screens, two armchairs with cushions, an armchair in leather, three
+chairs in tapestry, an overmantel of gilt copper, tables, drawers,
+stands, candlestick of plated copper, &c. We might multiply examples,
+even from among prisoners of middle station.
+
+It was the rule that prisoners newly arrived at the Bastille should be
+examined within twenty-four hours. It sometimes happened, however, that
+one or another remained for two or three weeks before appearing before
+the magistrate. The Châtelet commissioner, specially delegated to the
+Bastille for these examinations, founded his questions on notes supplied
+him by the lieutenant of police, who, indeed, often went in person to
+see the prisoners. A special commission was appointed for affairs of
+importance. Dumouriez says that he was examined after nine hours of
+detention by three commissioners: "The president was an old councillor
+of state named Marville, a man of intelligence, but coarse and
+sarcastic. The second was M. de Sartine, lieutenant of police and
+councillor of state, a man of polish and refinement. The third was a
+_maître des requêtes_[35] named Villevaux, a very insincere and
+disputatious fellow. The clerk, who had more intelligence than any of
+them, was an advocate named Beaumont."
+
+We have found many instances of prisoners who spoke in high terms of
+their judges. And it cannot be said that prisoners at the Bastille
+escaped judgment. A Châtelet commissioner examined them and sent the
+official report of his examination, with a statement of his opinion, to
+the lieutenant of police. He decided whether the arrest should be
+sustained. Moreover, it would be a mistake to compare the lieutenant of
+police under the _ancien régime_ with the prefect of police of to-day;
+the lieutenants of police, selected from former _maîtres des requêtes_,
+had a judicial character: the documents of the period call them
+"magistrates"; they issued decrees without appeal and pronounced penal
+sentences, even condemning to the galleys; they were at the same time
+justices of the peace with an extensive jurisdiction. In addition to the
+examination held on the entrance of a prisoner, the lieutenants of
+police, in the course of their frequent visits, addressed to the
+ministers of Paris reports on the prisoners,--reports in which they
+discussed the evidence, and which constituted veritable judgments.
+
+When the prisoner was recognized as innocent, a new _lettre de cachet_
+soon set him at liberty. The verdict of "no true bill" often supervened
+with a rapidity which the decisions of our police magistrates would do
+well to emulate. A certain Barbier, who entered the Bastille on February
+15, 1753, was found not guilty and set at liberty the next day. Of the
+279 persons imprisoned in the Bastille during the last fifteen years of
+the _ancien régime_, thirty-eight benefited by the dropping of the
+indictment.
+
+Finally--and here is a point on which the new method might well model
+itself on that of the Bastille--when a detention was recognized as
+unjust, the victim was indemnified. A great number of examples might be
+mentioned. An advocate named Subé left the Bastille on June 18, 1767,
+after a detention of eighteen days; he had been falsely accused of the
+authorship of a book against the king, and received compensation to the
+tune of 3000 livres, more than £240 of our money. A certain Pereyra,
+imprisoned in the Bastille from November 7, 1771, to April 12, 1772, and
+then from July 1 to September 26, 1774, having been found to be
+innocent, was reinstated in all his property, and received from the king
+a life pension of 1200 livres, more than £100 to-day. A certain number
+of those accused in the Canada case, when the charge was withdrawn,
+received a life pension on leaving the Bastille. At other times, the
+detention of an individual might throw his family into want. He was kept
+in the Bastille, if it was thought he deserved it, but his people were
+assisted. Under date September 3, 1763, the Duke de Choiseul writes to
+the lieutenant of police: "I have received the letter you did me the
+honour of writing to me in favour of the children of the Sieur
+Joncaire-Chabert. I have the pleasure to inform you that I have got for
+them a second subsidy of 300 livres (nearly £30 to-day) in consideration
+of the sad condition you informed me they were in." Louis XIV.
+guaranteed to Pellisson, at his liberation, a pension of 2000 crowns.
+The Regent granted to Voltaire, when he left the Bastille, a pension of
+1200 livres. Louis XVI. awarded to Latude an annuity of 400 livres, and
+to La Rocheguérault an annuity of 400 crowns. The minister Breteuil
+pensioned all the prisoners whom he set at liberty. Brun de Condamine,
+confined from 1779 to 1783, received on leaving a sum of 600 livres.
+Renneville speaks of a prisoner to whom Seignelay gave an important
+situation in compensation for his detention at the Bastille. We hear of
+one, Toussaint Socquart, a commissioner of the Châtelet and of police
+whose offices were restored to him when he came out of the Bastille. In
+fact, contrary to detention in our modern prisons, incarceration in the
+Bastille did not cast the slightest slur on the prisoner's character,
+even in the eyes of those to whom his arrest was due, and instances have
+been known of men who, on their release from the Bastille, not only
+were reinstated in public offices, but reached the highest positions.
+
+Until his examinations were quite completed, the prisoner was kept in
+close confinement. None but the officers of the château were allowed to
+communicate with him. And during this time he lived in solitude, unless
+he had brought a servant with him. The administration readily permitted
+the prisoners to avail themselves of the services of their valets, who
+were boarded at the king's expense. It even happened that the government
+sometimes gave their prisoners valets, paying not only for their board,
+but also their wages at the rate of 900 livres a year. One might cite
+prisoners of inferior rank who thus had servants to wait on them. Two or
+three prisoners were sometimes put together in one room. Prison life has
+no greater terror than solitude. In absolute solitude many of the
+prisoners became mad. In company, the hours of captivity seemed less
+tedious and oppressive. Father and son, mother and daughter, aunt and
+niece, lived together. Many might be named. On September 7, 1693, a lady
+named De la Fontaine was taken to the Bastille for the second time. The
+first time, she had been imprisoned quite alone; but this new detention
+evoked the compassion of the lieutenant of police, who, to please the
+poor lady, sent her husband to the Bastille, locked him up with her, and
+gave them a lackey to wait on them.
+
+The examinations being ended, the prisoners enjoyed a greater liberty.
+They could then enter into communication with the people of the town.
+They obtained permission to see their relatives and friends. These
+sometimes paid them visits in their rooms; but as a rule the interviews
+took place in the council-hall, in presence of one of the officers of
+the château. They were usually permitted to discuss only family affairs
+and business matters. All conversation on the Bastille and the reasons
+for their imprisonment was forbidden. The rules of the prison increased
+in severity as time went on. Towards the end of Louis XV.'s reign the
+lieutenant of police went so far as to prescribe the subjects of
+conversation which would alone be permitted in the course of the visits
+the prisoners received. "They may talk to the prisoner about the harvest
+his vineyards will yield this year, about cancelling a lease, about a
+match for his niece, about the health of his parents." But it is
+necessary to read the _Memoirs_ of Gourville, Fontaine, Bussy-Rabutin,
+Hennequin, Madame de Staal, the Duke de Richelieu, to form a general
+idea of life at the Bastille under Louis XIV. and under the Regent.
+Several prisoners were free to move about through the château wherever
+it seemed good to them; they entered the rooms of their fellow-prisoners
+at all hours of the day. The governor contented himself with locking
+them in their own rooms at night. The prisoners who had the "liberty of
+the court" organized games of bowls or _tonneau_, and hobnobbed with the
+officers of the garrison. Fontaine relates that they might have been
+seen from the top of the towers, collected fifty at a time in the inner
+court Bussy-Rabutin's room was open to all comers: his wife and friends
+visited him; he gave dinners to persons from court, plotted love
+intrigues there, and corresponded freely with his friends and relatives.
+Several prisoners even had permission to take a walk into the town on
+condition of their returning to the château in the evening. Two brothers
+were placed in the Bastille together. They went out when they pleased,
+taking turns; it was sufficient for one or other to be always at the
+château. The officers of the staff gossiped with the prisoners and gave
+them advice as to the best means of obtaining their liberty.
+
+This animated, courtly, and elegant life is described with infinite
+charm by Madame de Staal, whom we have already cited. "We all used to
+spend a part of the day with the governor. We dined with him, and after
+dinner I enjoyed a rubber of ombre with Messieurs de Pompadour and de
+Boisdavis, Ménil advising me. When it was over we returned to our own
+apartments. The company met again in my rooms before supper, for which
+we returned to the governor's, and after that we all went to bed."
+
+As to the manner in which the prisoners were fed and looked after, that
+is surprising indeed, and what we shall say about it, though rigidly
+accurate, will perhaps be regarded as an exaggeration. The governor drew
+three livres a day for the maintenance of a man of inferior rank; five
+livres for the maintenance of a tradesman; ten livres for a banker, a
+magistrate, or a man of letters; fifteen livres for a judge of the
+Parlement; thirty-six livres for a marshal of France. The Cardinal de
+Rohan had 120 francs a day spent on him. The Prince de Courlande, during
+a stay of five months at the Bastille, spent 22,000 francs. These
+figures must be doubled and trebled to give the value they would
+represent to-day.
+
+We read, too, with the greatest astonishment the description of the
+meals the prisoners made. Renneville, whose evidence is the more
+important in that his book is a pamphlet against the administration of
+the Bastille, speaks in these terms of his first meal: "The turnkey put
+one of my serviettes on the table and placed my dinner on it, which
+consisted of pea soup garnished with lettuce, well simmered and
+appetizing to look at, with a quarter of fowl to follow; in one dish
+there was a juicy beef-steak, with plenty of gravy and a sprinkling of
+parsley, in another a quarter of forcemeat pie well stuffed with
+sweetbreads, cock's combs, asparagus, mushrooms, and truffles; and in a
+third a ragoût of sheep's tongue, the whole excellently cooked; for
+dessert, a biscuit and two pippins. The turnkey insisted on pouring out
+my wine. This was good burgundy, and the bread was excellent. I asked
+him to drink, but he declared it was not permitted. I asked if I should
+pay for my food, or whether I was indebted to the king for it. He told
+me that I had only to ask freely for whatever would give me pleasure,
+that they would try to satisfy me, and that His Majesty paid for it
+all." The "most Christian" king desired that his guests should fast on
+Fridays and in Lent, but he did not treat them any the worse on that
+account. "I had," says Renneville, "six dishes, and an admirable prawn
+soup. Among the fish there was a very fine weever, a large fried sole,
+and a perch, all very well seasoned, with three other dishes." At this
+period Renneville's board cost ten francs a day; later he was reduced to
+the rate of the prisoners of a lower class. "They much reduced my usual
+fare," he says; "I had, however, a good soup with fried bread crumbs, a
+passable piece of beef, a ragoût of sheep's tongue, and two custards for
+dessert. I was treated in pretty much the same manner the whole time I
+was in this gloomy place; sometimes they gave me, after my soup, a wing
+or leg of fowl, sometimes they put two little patties on the edge of the
+dish."
+
+Towards the end of Louis XV.'s reign, Dumouriez eulogizes the cookery of
+the Bastille in almost the same terms. On the day of his entrance,
+noticing that they were serving a fish dinner, he asked for a fowl to be
+got from a neighbouring eating-house. "A fowl!" said the major, "don't
+you know that to-day is Friday?" "Your business is to look after me and
+not my conscience. I am an invalid, for the Bastille itself is a
+disease," replied the prisoner. In an hour's time the fowl was on the
+table. Subsequently he asked for his dinner and supper to be served at
+the same time, between three and four o'clock. His valet, a good cook,
+used to make him stews. "You fared very well at the Bastille; there
+were always five dishes at dinner and three at supper, without the
+dessert, and the whole being put on the table at once, appeared
+magnificent." There is a letter from the major of the Bastille addressed
+in 1764 to the lieutenant of police, discussing a prisoner named Vieilh,
+who never ate butcher's meat; so they had to feed him exclusively on
+game and poultry. Things were much the same under Louis XVI., as
+Poultier d'Elmotte testifies: "De Launey, the governor, used to come and
+have a friendly chat with me; he got them to consult my taste as regards
+food, and to supply me with anything I wished for." The bookseller
+Hardy, transferred in 1766 to the Bastille with the members of the
+Breton deputation, declares frankly that they were all treated in the
+best possible way. Finally, Linguet himself, in spite of his desire to
+paint the lot of the victims of the Bastille in the most sombre colours,
+is obliged to confess that food was supplied in abundance. Every morning
+the cook sent up to him a menu on which he marked the dishes he fancied.
+
+The account books of the Bastille confirm the testimony of former
+prisoners. The following, according to these documents, are the meals
+that La Bourdonnais enjoyed during July, 1750. Every day the menu
+contains soup, beef, veal, beans, French beans, two eggs, bread,
+strawberries, cherries, gooseberries, oranges, two bottles of red wine,
+and two bottles of beer. In addition to this regular bill of fare we
+note on July 2, a fowl and a bottle of Muscat; on the 4th, a bottle of
+Muscat; on the 7th, tea; on the 12th, a bottle of brandy; on the 13th,
+some flowers; on the 14th, some quails; on the 15th, a turkey; on the
+16th, a melon; on the 17th, a fowl; on the 18th, a young rabbit; on the
+19th, a bottle of brandy; on the 20th, a chicken and ham sausage and two
+melons; and so on.
+
+Tavernier was a prisoner of mean station, son of a doorkeeper of Paris
+de Montmartel. He was implicated in a plot against the King's life, and
+was one of the seven prisoners set free on the 14th of July. He was
+found out of his mind in his cell. After he had been led in triumph
+through the streets of Paris, he was shut up at Charenton. He was a
+martyr, people exclaimed. He was certainly not so well off in his new
+abode as he had been at the Bastille. We have an account of what was
+supplied to him at the Bastille in addition to the ordinary meals, in
+November, 1788, in March and May, 1789, three of the last months of his
+imprisonment. In November we find: tobacco, four bottles of brandy,
+sixty bottles of wine, thirty bottles of beer, two pounds of coffee,
+three pounds of sugar, a turkey, oysters, chestnuts, apples, and pears;
+in March: tobacco, four bottles of brandy, forty-four bottles of wine,
+sixty bottles of beer, coffee, sugar, fowls, cheese; in May: tobacco,
+four bottles of brandy, sixty-two bottles of wine, thirty-one bottles of
+beer, pigeons, coffee, sugar, cheese, &c. We have the menus of the
+Marquis de Sade for January, 1789: chocolate cream, a fat chicken
+stuffed with chestnuts, pullets with truffles, potted ham, apricot
+marmalade, &c.
+
+The facts we are describing were the rule. The prisoners who were
+treated with the least consideration fed very well. Only those who were
+sent down to the cells were sometimes put on bread and water, but that
+was only a temporary punishment.
+
+When a complaint was formulated by any prisoner in regard to his food, a
+reprimand to the governor soon followed. Then the lieutenant of police
+inquired of the person concerned if he was better treated than formerly.
+"His Majesty tells me," writes Pontchartrain to De Launey, "that
+complaints have been raised about the bad food of the prisoners; he
+instructs me to write to you to give the matter great attention." And
+Sartine wrote jokingly to Major de Losmes: "I am quite willing for you
+to get the clothes of Sieur Dubois enlarged, and I hope all your
+prisoners may enjoy as excellent health."
+
+Further, the king clothed those of the prisoners who were too poor to
+buy their own clothes. He did not give them a prison uniform, but
+dressing-gowns padded or lined with rabbit skin, breeches of coloured
+stuff, vests lined with silk plush and fancy coats.[36] The commissary
+at the Bastille appointed to look after the supplies took the prisoners'
+measure, and inquired about their tastes, and the colours and styles
+that suited them best. A lady prisoner named Sauvé asked to have made
+for her a dress of white silk, dotted with green flowers. The wife of
+commissary Rochebrune spent several days in going the round of the Paris
+shops, and then wrote in despair that no dressmaker had such a material,
+the nearest approach to it being a white silk with green stripes: if
+Madame Sauvé would be satisfied with that, they would send to take her
+measure. "Monsieur le major," writes a prisoner named Hugonnet, "the
+shirts they brought me yesterday are not a bit what I asked for, for I
+remember having written 'fine, and with embroidered ruffles'; instead of
+which these things are coarse, made of wretched linen, and with ruffles
+at best only fit for a turnkey; and so I shall be glad if you will send
+them back to the commissary; and let him keep them, for I declare I
+won't have them."
+
+The governor also saw that the prisoners had some means of diversion.
+The poorest he provided with pocket-money and tobacco.
+
+About the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Neapolitan named
+Vinache died at the Bastille, after founding a library there for the use
+of his fellow-prisoners. This library was gradually augmented by
+donations from the governors, by gifts from various prisoners, and even
+by the generosity of a citizen of Paris whose compassion had been
+excited for the lot of the prisoners. The books consisted of romances,
+works of science and philosophy, and religious books, light literature
+predominating. The lieutenant of police, Berryer, struck out of the
+list of books that were being sent one day to the binder a "poem on the
+greatness of God," as being on "too melancholy a subject for prisoners."
+The prisoners also procured books from outside. We have mentioned the
+Comte de Belle-Isle, who had more than three hundred books and atlases
+at the Bastille. La Beaumelle collected a library of more than 600
+volumes. The administration, moreover, never refused to get for the
+prisoners, out of the royal funds and sometimes at considerable expense,
+such works as they said were necessary to their studies. The works of
+Voltaire and Puffendorf were readily placed in their hands. Finally,
+under Louis XVI., they were allowed to read the gazettes.
+
+After the permission to have books and to write, the most coveted favour
+was that of walking exercise. Refusal of this was rare. The prisoners
+might walk, either on the towers of the Bastille, or in the inner
+courts, or lastly along the bastion, which was transformed into a
+garden. To fresh invigorating air the platform of the towers added the
+attraction of the finest view. Fontaine relates that Sacy went to the
+top of the towers every day after dinner. He there walked about in
+company with the officers, who gave him news of the town and the
+prisoners.
+
+In their rooms the prisoners amused themselves with feeding cats and
+birds and animals of all kinds: they taught dogs tricks. Some were
+allowed to have a violin or a clavecin. Pellisson was shut up with a
+Basque who used to play to him on the musette. The Duke de Richelieu
+boasts of the operatic airs he sang in parts with his neighbours in the
+Bastille, Mdlle. de Launay among them, with her head at the bars of her
+window; "we got up choruses of a sort, with fine effect."
+
+Other prisoners killed time with embroidery, weaving or knitting; some
+made ornaments for the chapel of the château. Some devoted themselves to
+carpentry, turned wood, made small articles of furniture. Artists
+painted and sketched. "The occupation of M. de Villeroi was somewhat
+singular: he had very fine clothes, which he was for ever unpicking and
+sewing together again with much cleverness." The prisoners who lived
+several in one room played at cards, chess, and backgammon. In 1788, at
+the time of the troubles in Brittany, a dozen noblemen of that country
+were shut up in the Bastille. They lived together, and asked for a
+billiard table to amuse themselves; the table was set up in the
+apartments of the major, and there these gentlemen went for their games.
+
+The prisoners who died in the Bastille were interred in the graveyard of
+St. Paul's; the funeral service was held in the church of St. Paul, and
+the burial certificate, bearing the family name of the deceased, was
+drawn up in the vestry. It is not true that the names of the deceased
+were wrongly stated in the register in order that their identity might
+be concealed from the public. The Man in the Iron Mask was inscribed on
+the register of St. Paul's under his real name. Jews, Protestants, and
+suicides were buried in the garden of the château, the prejudices of the
+period not allowing their remains to be laid in consecrated ground.
+
+Those who were liberated had a happier fate. Their dismissal was ordered
+by a _lettre de cachet_, as their incarceration had been. These orders
+for their liberation, so anxiously expected, were brought by the court
+"distributors of packets" or by the ordinary post; sometimes relatives
+and friends themselves brought the sealed envelope, in order to have the
+joy of taking away at once those whose deliverance they came to effect.
+
+The governor, or, in his absence, the king's lieutenant, came into the
+prisoner's chamber and announced that he was free. The papers and other
+effects which had been taken from him on entrance were restored to him,
+the major getting a receipt for them; then he signed a promise to reveal
+nothing of what he had seen at the château. Many of the prisoners
+refused to submit to this formality, and were liberated notwithstanding;
+others, after having signed, retailed everywhere all they knew about the
+prison, and were not interfered with. When the prisoner only recovered
+his freedom under certain conditions, he was required to give an
+undertaking to submit to the king's pleasure.
+
+All these formalities having been completed, the governor, with that
+feeling for good form which characterized the men of the _ancien
+régime_, had the man who had been his guest served for the last time
+with an excellent dinner. If the prisoner was a man of good society,
+the governor would even go so far as to invite him to his own table, and
+then, the meal over and the good-byes said, he placed his own carriage
+at the prisoner's disposal, and often entered it himself to accompany
+him to his destination.
+
+More than one prisoner thus restored to the world must have felt greatly
+embarrassed before a day was past, and have been at a loss what to do or
+where to go. The administration of the Bastille sometimes gave money to
+one and another to enable them to get along for a time. In December,
+1783, a certain Dubu de la Tagnerette, after being set at liberty, was
+lodged in the governor's house for a fortnight until he had found
+apartments that would suit him. Moreover, many of the prisoners were
+actually annoyed at being dismissed: we could cite examples of persons
+who sought to get themselves sent to the Bastille; others refused to
+accept their liberty, and others did their best to get their detention
+prolonged.
+
+"Many come out," says Renneville, "very sad at having to leave." Le
+Maistre de Sacy and Fontaine affirm that the years spent at the Bastille
+were the best years in their lives. "The innocent life we lived," says
+Renneville again, "Messieurs Hamilton, Schrader, and myself, seemed so
+pleasant to M. Hamilton that he begged me to write a description of it
+in verse." The _Memoirs_ of Madame de Staal represent her years at the
+Bastille as the happiest she ever knew. "In my heart of hearts, I was
+very far from desiring my liberty." "I stayed at the Bastille for six
+weeks," observes the Abbé Morellet, "which sped away--I chuckle still as
+I think of them--very pleasantly for me." And later, Dumouriez declares
+that at the Bastille he was happy and never felt dull.
+
+Such was the rule of the celebrated state prison. In the last century
+there was no place of detention in Europe where the prisoners were
+surrounded with so many comforts and attentions: there is no such place
+in these days.
+
+But in spite of these very real alleviations, it would be absurd to
+pretend that the prisoners were in general reconciled to their
+incarceration. Nothing is a consolation for the loss of liberty. How
+many poor wretches, in their despair, have dashed their heads against
+the thick walls while wife and children and concerns of the utmost
+gravity were summoning them from without! The Bastille was the cause of
+ruin to many; within its walls were shed tears which were never dried.
+
+An eighteenth-century writer thus defined the state prison: "A bastille
+is any house solidly built, hermetically sealed, and diligently guarded,
+where any person, of whatever rank, age, or sex, may enter without
+knowing why, remain without knowing how long, hoping to leave it, but
+not knowing how." These lines, written by an apologist for the old state
+prison, contain its condemnation, without appeal, before the modern
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.
+
+
+For two centuries no question has excited public opinion more than that
+of the Man in the Iron Mask. The books written on the subject would fill
+a library. People despaired of ever lifting the veil. "The story of the
+Iron Mask," says Michelet, "will probably remain for ever obscure," and
+Henri Martin adds: "History has no right to pronounce judgment on what
+will never leave the domain of conjecture." To-day, the doubt no longer
+exists. The problem is solved. Before disclosing the solution which
+criticism has unanimously declared correct, we propose to transcribe the
+scanty authentic documents that we possess on the masked man, and then
+to state the principal solutions which have been proposed, before
+arriving at the true solution.
+
+
+1. THE DOCUMENTS.
+
+_The Register of the Bastille._--To begin with, let us quote the text
+which is the origin and foundation of all the works published on the
+question of the Iron Mask.
+
+[Illustration: Note in Du Junca's Journal regarding the entrance to the
+Bastille (September 18, 1698) of the Man in the Iron Mask.]
+
+Etienne du Junca, king's lieutenant at the Bastille, in a journal
+which he began to keep on October 2, 1690, when he entered upon his
+office--a sort of register in which he recorded day by day the details
+concerning the arrival of the prisoners--writes, under date September
+18, 1698, these lines,[37] which the popular legend has rendered
+memorable:--
+
+"Thursday, September 18 (1698), at three o'clock in the afternoon, M. de
+Saint-Mars, governor of the château of the Bastille, made his first
+appearance, coming from his governorship of the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite-Honorat, bringing with him, in his conveyance, a
+prisoner he had formerly at Pignerol, whom he caused to be always
+masked, whose name is not mentioned; directly he got out of the carriage
+he put him in the first room of the Bazinière tower, waiting till night
+for me to take him, at nine o'clock, and put him with M. de Rosarges,
+one of the sergeants brought by the governor, alone in the third room of
+the Bertaudière tower, which I had had furnished with all necessaries
+some days before his arrival, having received orders to that effect from
+M. de Saint-Mars: the which prisoner will be looked after and waited on
+by M. de Rosarges, and maintained by the governor."
+
+In a second register, supplementary to the first, in which du Junca
+records details of the liberation or the death of the prisoners, we
+read, under date November 19, 1703:--
+
+"On the same day, November 19, 1703, the unknown prisoner, always masked
+with a mask of black velvet, whom M. de Saint-Mars, the governor,
+brought with him on coming from the Isles de Sainte-Marguerite, whom he
+had kept for a long time, the which happening to be a little ill
+yesterday on coming from mass, he died to-day, about ten o'clock at
+night, without having had a serious illness; it could not have been
+slighter. M. Giraut, our chaplain, confessed him yesterday, is surprised
+at his death. He did not receive the sacrament, and our chaplain
+exhorted him a moment before he died. And this unknown prisoner, kept
+here for so long, was buried on Tuesday at four o'clock p.m., November
+20, in the graveyard of St. Paul, our parish; on the register of burial
+he was given a name also unknown. M. de Rosarges, major, and Arreil,
+surgeon, signed the register."
+
+And in the margin:--
+
+"I have since learnt that they called him M. de Marchiel on the
+register, and that forty livres was the cost of the funeral."
+
+The registers of du Junca were preserved among the ancient archives of
+the Bastille, whence they passed to the Arsenal library, where they are
+now kept. They are drawn up in the clumsy handwriting of a soldier, with
+little skill in penmanship. The spelling is bad. But the facts are
+stated with precision, and have always proved accurate when checked.
+
+[Illustration: Notice in Du Junca's Journal of the death of the masked
+prisoner in the Bastille (November 19, 1703).]
+
+The extract from the second register shows that the mysterious
+prisoner wore, not a mask of iron, but one of black velvet.
+
+Further, the entry on the register of St. Paul's church has been
+discovered. It reads:--
+
+"On the 19th, Marchioly, aged 45 years or thereabouts, died in the
+Bastille, whose body was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul, his
+parish, the 20th of the present month, in the presence of M. Rosage
+(_sic_), major of the Bastille, and of M. Reglhe (_sic_), surgeon major
+of the Bastille, who signed.--(Signed) ROSARGES, REILHE."
+
+Such are the fundamental documents for the story of the Iron Mask; we
+shall see by and by that they are sufficient to establish the truth.
+
+_The Letter of the Governor of Sainte-Marguerite._--We have just seen,
+from the register of du Junca, that the masked man had been at the Isles
+of Sainte-Marguerite under the charge of Saint-Mars, who, on being
+appointed governor of the Bastille, had brought the prisoner with him.
+In the correspondence exchanged between Saint-Mars and the minister
+Barbezieux, occurs the following letter, dated January 6, 1696, in which
+Saint-Mars describes his method of dealing with the prisoners, and the
+masked man is referred to under the appellation "my ancient prisoner."
+
+     "MY LORD,--You command me to tell you what is the practice, when I
+     am absent or ill, as to the visits made and precautions taken daily
+     in regard to the prisoners committed to my charge. My two
+     lieutenants serve the meals at the regular hours, just as they
+     have seen me do, and as I still do very often when I am well. The
+     first of my lieutenants, who takes the keys of the prison of _my
+     ancient prisoner_, with whom we commence, opens the three doors and
+     enters the chamber of the prisoner, who politely hands him the
+     plates and dishes, put one on top of another, to give them into the
+     hands of the lieutenant, who has only to go through two doors to
+     hand them to one of my sergeants, who takes them and places them on
+     a table two steps away, where is the second lieutenant, who
+     examines everything that enters and leaves the prison, and sees
+     that there is nothing written on the plate; and after they have
+     given him the utensil, they examine his bed inside and out, and
+     then the gratings and windows of his room, and very often the man
+     himself: after having asked him very politely if he wants anything
+     else, they lock the doors and proceed to similar business with the
+     other prisoners."
+
+_The Letter of M. de Palteau._--On June 19, 1768, M. de Formanoir de
+Palteau addressed from the château of Palteau, near Villeneuve-le-Roi,
+to the celebrated Fréron, editor of the _Année Littéraire_, a letter
+which was inserted in the number for June 30, 1768. The author of this
+letter was the grand-nephew of Saint-Mars. At the time when the latter
+was appointed governor of the Bastille, the château of Palteau belonged
+to him, and he halted there with his prisoner on the way from the Isles
+of Sainte-Marguerite to Paris.
+
+"In 1698," writes M. de Palteau, "M. de Saint-Mars passed from the
+governorship of the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite to that of the Bastille.
+On his way to take up his duties, he stayed with his prisoner on his
+estate at Palteau. The masked man arrived in a conveyance which preceded
+that of M. de Saint-Mars; they were accompanied by several horsemen. The
+peasants went to meet their lord: M. de Saint-Mars ate with his
+prisoner, who had his back turned to the windows of the dining-hall
+looking on the courtyard. The peasants whom I have questioned could not
+see whether he ate with his mask on; but they observed very well that M.
+de Saint-Mars, who was opposite him at table, had two pistols beside his
+plate. They had only one footman to wait on them, and he fetched the
+dishes from an ante-room where they were brought him, carefully shutting
+the door of the dining-hall behind him. When the prisoner crossed the
+courtyard, he always had his black mask over his face; the peasants
+noticed that his lips and teeth were not covered, that he was tall and
+had white hair. M. de Saint-Mars slept in a bed that was put up for him
+near that of the masked man."
+
+This account is marked throughout with the stamp of truth. M. de
+Palteau, the writer, makes no attempt to draw inferences from it. He
+declares for none of the hypotheses then under discussion in regard to
+the identity of the mysterious unknown. He is content to report the
+testimony of those of his peasants who saw the masked man when he passed
+through their lord's estates. The only detail in the story which we are
+able to check--a characteristic detail, it is true--is that of the black
+mask of which M. de Palteau speaks: it corresponds exactly to the mask
+of black velvet mentioned in du Junca's register.
+
+The château of Palteau is still in existence. In his work on
+Superintendent Fouquet, M. Jules Lair gives a description of it. "The
+château of Palteau, situated on an eminence among woods and vines,
+presented at that time, as it does to-day, the aspect of a great lordly
+mansion in the style of the time of Henri IV. and Louis XIII. First
+there is a wide courtyard, then two wings; within, the principal
+building and the chapel. The lower story is supported on arches, and its
+lofty windows go right up into the roof, and light the place from floor
+to attic." Since the eighteenth century, however, the château has
+undergone some modifications. The room in which Saint-Mars dined with
+his prisoner is now used as a kitchen.
+
+_The Notes of Major Chevalier._--In addition to the entries in du
+Junca's Journal which we have transcribed, scholars are accustomed to
+invoke, as equally worthy of credence though later in date, the
+testimony of Father Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and that of Major
+Chevalier.
+
+The extracts from du Junca quoted above were published for the first
+time in 1769 by Father Griffet, who added the following comments: "The
+memory of the masked prisoner was still preserved among the officers,
+soldiers, and servants of the Bastille, when M. de Launey, who has long
+been the governor, came to occupy a place on the staff of the garrison.
+Those who had seen him with his mask, when he crossed the courtyard on
+his way to attend mass, said that after his death the order was given to
+burn everything he had used, such as linen, clothes, cushions,
+counterpanes, &c.: that the very walls of the room he had occupied had
+to be scraped and whitewashed again, and that all the tiles of the
+flooring were taken up and replaced by others, because they were so
+afraid that he had found the means to conceal some notes or some mark,
+the discovery of which would have revealed his name."
+
+The testimony of Father Griffet happens to be confirmed by some notes
+from the pen of a major of the Bastille named Chevalier. The major was
+not a personage of the highest rank in the administration of the
+Bastille, since above him were the governor and the king's lieutenant:
+but he was the most important personage. The whole internal
+administration, so far as the prisoners were concerned, was entrusted to
+him. Chevalier fulfilled these duties for nearly thirty-eight years,
+from 1749 to 1787. M. Fernand Bournon's estimate of him is as follows:
+"Chevalier is a type of the devoted hard-working official who has no
+ambition to rise above a rather subordinate rank. It would be impossible
+to say how much the administration of the Bastille owed to his zeal and
+to his perfect familiarity with a service of extraordinary difficulty."
+
+Among notes put together with a view to a history of the Bastille,
+Chevalier gives in condensed form the information furnished by du
+Junca's register, and adds: "This is the famous masked man whom no one
+has ever known. He was treated with great distinction by the governor,
+and was seen only by M. de Rosarges, major of the said château, who had
+sole charge of him; he was not ill except for a few hours, and died
+rather suddenly: interred at St. Paul's, on Tuesday, November 20, 1703,
+at 4 o'clock p.m., under the name of Marchiergues. He was buried in a
+new white shroud, given by the governor, and practically everything in
+his room was burnt, such as his bed, chairs, tables, and other bits of
+furniture, or else melted down, and the whole was thrown into the
+privies."
+
+These notes of Father Griffet and Major Chevalier have derived great
+force, in the eyes of historians, from their exact agreement; but a
+close examination shows that the testimony of Chevalier was the source
+of Father Griffet's information; in fact, Chevalier was major of the
+Bastille when the Jesuit compiled his work, and it is doubtless upon his
+authority that the latter depended.
+
+Documents recently published in the _Revue Bleue_ upset these
+assertions, which appeared to be based on the firmest foundations.
+
+In the Journal of du Junca, which we have already mentioned, we read
+under date April 30, 1701: "Sunday, April 30, about 9 o'clock in the
+evening, M. Aumont the younger came, bringing and handing over to us a
+prisoner named M. Maranville, alias Ricarville, who was an officer in
+the army, a malcontent, too free with his tongue, a worthless fellow:
+whom I received in obedience to the king's orders sent through the Count
+of Pontchartrain: whom I have had put along with the man Tirmon, in the
+second room of the Bertaudière tower, with the _ancient prisoner_, both
+being well locked in."
+
+The "ancient prisoner" here referred to is no other than the masked man.
+When he entered the Bastille, as we have seen, on September 18, 1698, he
+was placed in the third room of the Bertaudière tower. In 1701, the
+Bastille happened to be crowded with prisoners, and they had to put
+several together in one and the same room; so the man in the mask was
+placed with two companions. One of them, Jean-Alexandre de Ricarville,
+also called Maranville, had been denounced as a "retailer of ill speech
+against the State, finding fault with the policy of France and lauding
+that of foreigners, especially that of the Dutch." The police reports
+depict him as a beggarly fellow, poorly dressed, and about sixty years
+old. He had formerly been, as du Junca says, an officer in the royal
+troops. Maranville left the Bastille on October 19, 1708. He was
+transferred to Charenton, where he died in February, 1709. It must be
+pointed out that Charenton was then an "open" prison, where the
+prisoners associated with one another and had numerous relations with
+the outside world.
+
+The second of the fellow-prisoners of the man in the mask,
+Dominique-François Tirmont, was a servant. When he was placed in the
+Bastille, on July 30, 1700, he was nineteen years old. He was accused of
+sorcery and of debauching young girls. He was put in the second room of
+the Bertaudière tower, where he was joined by Maranville and the man in
+the mask. On December 14, 1701, he was transferred to Bicêtre. He lost
+his reason in 1703 and died in 1708.
+
+The man in the mask was taken out of the third room of the Bertaudière
+tower, in which he had been placed on his entrance to the Bastille, on
+March 6, 1701, in order to make room for a woman named Anne Randon, a
+"witch and fortune-teller," who was shut up alone in it. The masked
+prisoner was then placed in the "second Bertaudière" with Tirmont, who
+had been there, as we have just seen, since July 30, 1700. Maranville
+joined them on April 30, 1701. Not long after, the masked man was
+transferred to another room, with or without Maranville. Tirmont had
+been taken to Bicêtre in 1701. We find that on February 26, 1703, the
+Abbé Gonzel, a priest of Franche-Comté, accused of being a spy, was shut
+up alone in the "second Bertaudière."
+
+These facts are of undeniable authenticity, and one sees at a glance the
+consequences springing from them. At the time when the masked prisoner
+shared the same room with fellow-captives, other prisoners at the
+Bastille were kept rigorously isolated, in spite of the crowded state of
+the prison, so much more important did the reasons for their
+incarceration seem! The man in the mask was associated with persons of
+the lowest class, who were soon afterwards to leave and take their
+places with the ruck of prisoners at Charenton and Bicêtre. We read in a
+report of D'Argenson that there was even some talk of enlisting one of
+them, Tirmont, in the army. Such, then, was this strange personage, the
+repository of a terrible secret of which Madame Palatine[38] was already
+speaking in mysterious terms, the man who puzzled kings, Louis XV.,
+Louis XVI., who puzzled the very officers of the Bastille, and caused
+them to write stories as remote as possible from the reality!
+
+
+2. THE LEGEND.
+
+If the very officers of the Bastille indulged such wild freaks of
+imagination, what flights into dreamland might not the thoughts of the
+public be expected to take? The movement is a very curious one to
+follow. To begin with, we have the light Venetian mask transforming
+itself into an iron mask with steel articulations which the prisoner
+was never without. The consideration--imaginary, as we have seen--with
+which the prisoner is supposed to have been treated, and which is
+referred to in the notes of Major Chevalier, becomes transformed into
+marks of a boundless deference shown by the jailers towards their
+captive. The story was that Saint-Mars, the governor, a knight of St.
+Louis, never spoke to the prisoner except standing, with bared head,
+that he served him at table with his own hands and on silver plate, and
+that he supplied him with the most luxurious raiment his fancy could
+devise. Chevalier says that after his death his room at the Bastille was
+done up like new, to prevent his successor from discovering any
+tell-tale evidence in some corner. Speaking of the time when the masked
+man was at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, Voltaire relates: "One day
+the prisoner wrote with a knife on a silver dish, and threw the dish out
+of the window towards a boat moored on the shore, almost at the foot of
+the tower. A fisherman, to whom the boat belonged, picked up the dish
+and carried it to the governor. Astonished, he asked the fisherman,
+'Have you read what is written on this dish, and has anyone seen it in
+your hands?' 'I cannot read,' replied the fisher, 'I have only just
+found it, and no one has seen it.' The poor man was detained until the
+governor was assured he could not read and that no one had seen the
+dish. 'Go,' he said, 'it is lucky for you that you can't read!'"
+
+In Father Papon's _History of Provence_, linen takes the place of the
+dish. The upshot is more tragic: "I found in the citadel an officer of
+the Free Company, aged 79 years. He told me several times that a barber
+of that company saw one day, under the prisoner's window, something
+white floating on the water; he went and picked it up and carried it to
+M. de Saint-Mars. It was a shirt of fine linen, folded with no apparent
+care, and covered with the prisoner's writing. M. de Saint-Mars, after
+unfolding it and reading a few lines, asked the barber, with an air of
+great embarrassment, if he had not had the curiosity to read what was on
+it. The barber protested over and over again that he had read nothing;
+but, two days after, he was found dead in his bed."
+
+And the fact that Saint-Mars had had the body of the prisoner buried in
+a white cloth struck the imagination, and was developed in its turn into
+an extraordinary taste on the part of the prisoner for linen of the
+finest quality and for costly lace--all which was taken to prove that
+the masked man was a son of Anne of Austria, who had a very special
+love, it was declared, for valuable lace and fine linen.
+
+_A Brother of Louis XIV._--We are able to fix with precision, we
+believe, the origin of the legend which made the Iron Mask a brother of
+Louis XIV. Moreover, it was due to this suggestion, which was hinted at
+from the first, that the story of the prisoner made so great a noise.
+The glory of it belongs to the most famous writer of the eighteenth
+century. With a boldness of imagination for which to-day he would be
+envied by the cleverest journalistic inventor of sensational paragraphs,
+Voltaire started this monstrous hoax on its vigorous flight.
+
+In 1745 there had just appeared a sort of romance entitled _Notes
+towards the History of Persia_, which was attributed, not without some
+reason, to Madame de Vieux-Maisons. The book contained a story within a
+story, in which the mysterious prisoner, who was beginning to be talked
+about everywhere, was identified with the Duke de Vermandois, and to
+this fact was due the sensation which the book caused. Voltaire
+immediately saw how he could turn the circumstance to account. He had
+himself at one time been confined in the Bastille, which was one reason
+for speaking of it; but he did not dare put in circulation suddenly,
+without some preparation, the terrible story he had just conceived, and,
+with a very delicate sensitiveness to public opinion, he contented
+himself with printing the following paragraph in the first edition of
+his _Age of Louis XIV._: "A few months after the death of Mazarin there
+occurred an event which is unexampled in history, and, what is not less
+strange, has been passed over in silence by all the historians. There
+was sent with the utmost secrecy to the château of the Isle of
+Sainte-Marguerite, in the Sea of Provence, an unknown prisoner, of more
+than ordinary height, young, and with features of rare nobility and
+beauty. On the way, this prisoner wore a mask the chinpiece of which was
+fitted with springs of steel, which allowed him to eat freely with the
+mask covering his face. The order had been given to kill him if he
+uncovered. He remained in the island until an officer in whom great
+confidence was placed, named Saint-Mars, governor of Pignerol, having
+been made governor of the Bastille, came to the Isle of
+Sainte-Marguerite to fetch him, and conducted him to the Bastille,
+always masked. The Marquis de Louvois saw him in the island before his
+removal, and remained standing while he spoke to him, with a
+consideration savouring of respect." Voltaire, however, does not say who
+this extraordinary prisoner was. He observed the impression produced on
+the public by his story. Then he ventured more boldly, and in the first
+edition of his _Questions on the Encyclopædia_ insinuated that the
+motive for covering the prisoner's face with a mask was fear lest some
+too striking likeness should be recognized. He still refrained from
+giving his name, but already everyone was on tip-toe with the
+expectation of startling news. At last, in the second edition of
+_Questions on the Encyclopædia_, Voltaire intrepidly added that the man
+in the mask was a uterine brother of Louis XIV., a son of Mazarin and
+Anne of Austria, and older than the king. We know what incomparable
+agitators of public opinion the Encyclopædists were.
+
+Once hatched, the story was not long in producing a numerous progeny,
+which grew in their turn and became a monstrous brood.
+
+We read in the _Memoirs_ of the Duke de Richelieu, compiled by his
+secretary the Abbé Soulavie, that Mdlle. de Valois, the Regent's
+daughter and at this date the mistress of Richelieu, consented, at the
+instigation of the latter, to prostitute herself to her
+father--tradition has it that the Regent was enamoured of his
+daughter--in order to get sight of an account of the Iron Mask drawn up
+by Saint-Mars. According to this story, which the author of the
+_Memoirs_ prints in its entirety, Louis XIV. was born at noon, and at
+half-past eight in the evening, while the king was at supper, the queen
+was brought to bed of a second son, who was put out of sight so as to
+avoid subsequent dissensions in the state.
+
+The Baron de Gleichen goes still farther. He is at the pains to prove
+that it was the true heir to the throne who was put out of sight, to the
+profit of a child of the queen and the cardinal. Having became masters
+of the situation at the death of the king, they substituted their son
+for the Dauphin, the substitution being facilitated by a strong likeness
+between the children. One sees at a glance the consequences of this
+theory, which nullifies the legitimacy of the last Bourbons.
+
+But the career of imagination was not yet to be checked. The legend came
+into full bloom under the first empire. Pamphlets then appeared in which
+the version of Baron de Gleichen was revived. Louis XIV. had been only a
+bastard, the son of foreigners; the lawful heir had been imprisoned at
+the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, where he had married the daughter of one
+of his keepers. Of this marriage was born a child who, as soon as he was
+weaned, was sent to Corsica, and entrusted to a reliable person, as a
+child coming of "good stock," in Italian, _Buona-parte_. Of that child
+the Emperor was the direct descendant. The right of Napoleon I. to the
+throne of France established by the Iron Mask!--there is a discovery
+which the great Dumas missed. But, incredible as it seems, there were
+men who actually took these fables seriously. In a Vendéan manifesto
+circulated among the Chouans,[39] in Nivose of the year IX,[40] we read:
+"It is not wise for the Royalist party to rely on the assurances given
+by some emissaries of Napoleon, that he seized the throne only to
+restore the Bourbons; everything proves that he only awaits the general
+pacification to declare himself, and that he means to base his right on
+the birth of the children of the Iron Mask!"
+
+We shall not stay to refute the hypothesis which makes the Iron Mask a
+brother of Louis XIV. Marius Topin has already done so in the clearest
+possible manner. The notion, moreover, has long been abandoned. The last
+writers who adhered to it date from the revolutionary period.
+
+_The Successive Incarnations of the Iron Mask._--"Never has an Indian
+deity," says Paul de Saint-Victor, speaking of the Iron Mask, "undergone
+so many metempsychoses and so many avatars." It would take too long
+merely to enumerate all the individuals with whom it has been attempted
+to identify the Iron Mask: even women have not escaped. We shall cite
+rapidly the theories which have found most credence amongst the public,
+or those which have been defended in the most serious works, in order to
+arrive finally at the identification--as will be seen, it is one of
+those proposed long ago--which is beyond doubt the true one.
+
+The hypothesis which, after that of a brother of Louis XIV., has most
+powerfully excited public opinion, is that which made the mysterious
+unknown Louis, Comte de Vermandois, admiral of France, and son of the
+charming Louise de la Vallière. This was indeed the belief of Father
+Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and even of the officers of the
+staff. But the conjecture is disproved in a single line: "The Comte de
+Vermandois died at Courtrai, on November 18, 1683." A precisely similar
+fact refutes the theory identifying the Iron Mask with the Duke of
+Monmouth, the natural son of Charles II. and Lucy Walters. Monmouth
+perished on the scaffold in 1683. Lagrange-Chancel throws much ardour
+and talent into a defence of the theory which made the Iron Mask Francis
+of Vendôme, Duke de Beaufort, who, under the Fronde, was called "King of
+the Markets." The Duke de Beaufort died at the siege of Candia, June 25,
+1669.
+
+To Lagrange-Chancel succeeds the Chevalier de Taulès. "I have discovered
+the Man in the Mask," he cries, "and it is my duty to impart my
+discovery to Europe and posterity!" This discovery brings forward one
+Avedick, an Armenian patriarch of Constantinople and Jerusalem,
+kidnapped in the East at the instigation of the Jesuits, and transported
+to France. Vergennes, on entering the ministry for foreign affairs, set
+investigations on foot. They confirmed the statement that Avedick had
+actually been arrested in the circumstances indicated, but after 1706;
+and so he could not be identified with the Iron Mask.
+
+Such were the theories of the eighteenth century. We come now to those
+of our own time. Since mystery and sinister machinations were involved,
+the Jesuits could not be long left out of the business. We have just
+seen them at their tricks with the Armenian patriarch. People dreamt of
+an innocent youth thrown into a dungeon at their instigation for having
+written a couple of verses against them. But even this fancy was
+completely cast into the shade in a work published in 1885 under the
+pseudonym of "Ubalde," the author of which was unquestionably M. Anatole
+Loquin. This is his conclusion: "The more I reflect, the more I believe
+I recognize in the Man in the Iron Mask, without any elaborate theory,
+without prejudice on my part, no other than J. B. Poquelin de Molière."
+The Jesuits have got their revenge for _Tartufe_!
+
+Let us come now to the conjectures which have almost hit the truth and
+have been defended by genuine scholars.
+
+Superintendent Fouquet is the solution of the bibliophile Jacob (Paul
+Lacroix). M. Lair has shown that Fouquet died at Pignerol, of a sort of
+apoplexy, on March 23, 1680, at the very moment when there was an idea
+at court of sending him to the waters at Bourbon, as a first step
+towards his final liberation.
+
+François Ravaisson, the learned and charming keeper of the Arsenal
+library, whose work in classifying the archives of the Bastille we have
+had the honour to continue, believed for a moment that the celebrated
+prisoner might have been the young Count de Kéroualze who had fought at
+Candia under the orders of Admiral de Beaufort. Ravaisson put forth his
+theory with much hesitation, and as, in the sequel, he was himself led
+to abandon it, we need not dwell any longer upon it.
+
+M. Loiseleur, in the course of his brilliant controversy with Marius
+Topin, suggested "an obscure spy arrested by Catinat in 1681," and his
+opponent refuted him in the most piquant manner by discovering Catinat
+in the very prisoner he was said to have arrested!
+
+General Jung published a large volume in support of the claims of a
+certain Oldendorf, a native of Lorraine, a spy and poisoner, arrested on
+March 29, 1673, in a trap laid for him at one of the passages of the
+Somme. The theory was refuted by M. Loiseleur. As M. Lair pointed out,
+General Jung did not even succeed in proving that his nominee entered
+Pignerol, an essential condition to his being the Man in the Mask.
+
+Baron Carutti urged the claims of a mad Jacobin, a prisoner at Pignerol
+whose name remains unknown; but this Jacobin died at Pignerol towards
+the close of 1693.'
+
+The recent work of M. Emile Burgaud, written in collaboration with
+Commandant Bazeries, made a great sensation. He fixes on General Vivien
+Labbé de Bulonde, whom Louvois arrested for having shown dereliction of
+a general's duty before Coni. M. Geoffroy de Grandmaison published in
+the _Univers_ of January 9, 1895, two receipts signed by General de
+Bulonde, one in 1699, when the masked man was in rigorous isolation at
+the Bastille, the other in 1705, when he had been dead for two years.
+
+We come at last to the hypothesis which is the most probable of
+all--after the true hypothesis, of course. Eustache Dauger, whom M. Lair
+identifies with the masked prisoner, was a valet, who had been put into
+jail at Pignerol on July 28, 1669. But it must be noted that the masked
+prisoner was kept guarded in rigorous secrecy in the early days of his
+detention, as long as he was at Pignerol and the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite. Now, when Dauger went to Pignerol, his case seemed of
+such slight importance that Saint-Mars thought of making him into a
+servant for the other prisoners, and in fact, in 1675, Louvois gave him
+as a valet to Fouquet, who for some time past had seen the rigour of his
+confinement sensibly mitigated, receiving visits, walking freely in the
+courts and purlieus of the fortress, Dauger accompanying him. Further,
+we know that the masked man was transferred direct from Pignerol to the
+Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, whilst Dauger was transferred in 1681 to
+Exiles, whence he only went to the Isles in 1687.
+
+We now come to the correct solution.
+
+
+3. MATTIOLI.
+
+To Baron Heiss, once captain in the Alsace regiment, and one of the most
+distinguished bibliophiles of his time, belongs the honour of being the
+first, in a letter dated from Phalsbourg, June 28, 1770, and published
+by the _Journal encyclopédique_, to identify the masked prisoner with
+Count Mattioli, secretary of state to the Duke of Mantua. After him,
+Dutens, in 1783, in his _Intercepted Correspondence_; Baron de
+Chambrier, in 1795, in a Memoir presented to the Academy of Berlin;
+Roux-Fazillac, member of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, in
+a remarkable work printed in 1801; then successively, Reth, Delort,
+Ellis, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul de Saint-Victor,
+and M. Gallien, in a series of publications more or less important,
+endeavoured to prove that the Man in the Mask was the Duke of Mantua's
+secretary of state. The scholars most intimate with the history of Louis
+XIV.'s government, Depping, Chéruel, Camille Rousset, have not hesitated
+to pronounce in favour of the same view; while against them,
+singlehanded like his D'Artagnan, Alexandre Dumas resisted the efforts
+of twenty scholars, and the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_--giving a new lease
+of life to the legend about the brother of Louis XIV., put in
+circulation by Voltaire, and reinforced by the Revolution--drove back
+into their dust among the archives the documents which students had
+exhumed.
+
+We have no longer to deal with so formidable an adversary, and we hope
+that the following pages will not leave the shadow of a doubt.
+
+We know how, under the influence of Louvois, the able and insinuating
+policy directed first by Mazarin, then by Lionne, gave way to a military
+diplomacy, blunt and aggressive. Louis XIV. was master of Pignerol,
+acquired in 1632. He was induced by Louvois to cast covetous glances at
+Casal. In possession of these two places, the French armies could not
+but dominate Upper Italy, and hold the court of Turin directly at their
+mercy. The throne of Mantua was then occupied by a young duke, Charles
+IV. of Gonzago, frivolous, happy-go-lucky, dissipating his wealth at
+Venice in fêtes and pleasures. In 1677 he had pledged to the Jews the
+crown revenues for several years. Charles IV. was also Marquis of
+Montferrat, of which Casal was the capital. Noting with watchful eye the
+frivolity and financial straits of the young prince, the court of
+Versailles conceived the bold scheme of buying Casal for hard cash.
+
+At this date, one of the principal personages in Mantua was Count
+Hercules Antony Mattioli. He was born at Bologna on December 1, 1640, of
+a distinguished family. A brilliant student, he had barely passed his
+twentieth year when he was elected a professor at the University of
+Bologna. Afterwards he established himself at Mantua, where Charles
+III., whose confidence he had won, made him his secretary of state.
+Charles IV., continuing the favour of his father, not only maintained
+Mattioli in his office as minister of state, but appointed him an
+honorary senator, a dignity which was enhanced by the title of Count.
+
+Louis XIV. was employing at the capital of the Venetian republic a
+keen-witted and enterprising ambassador, the Abbé d'Estrades. He saw
+through the ambitious and intriguing nature of Mattioli, and, towards
+the end of 1677, succeeded in winning over his support for the designs
+of the French court on Casal.
+
+On January 12, 1678, Louis XIV. with his own hand wrote expressing his
+thanks to Mattioli, who by-and-by came to Paris. On December 8, the
+contract was signed, the Duke of Mantua receiving in exchange for Casal
+100,000 crowns. In a private audience, Louis XIV. presented Mattioli
+with a costly diamond and paid him the sum of a hundred double louis.
+
+Scarcely two months after Mattioli's journey to France, the courts of
+Vienna, Madrid, Turin, and the Venetian Republic were simultaneously
+informed of all that had taken place. In order to reap a double harvest
+of gold, Mattioli had cynically betrayed both his master Charles IV. and
+the King of France. Like a thunderbolt there came to Versailles the news
+of the arrest of Baron d'Asfeld, the envoy appointed by Louis XIV. to
+exchange ratifications with Mattioli. The governor of Milan had caused
+him to be seized and handed over to the Spaniards. The rage of Louis
+XIV. and of Louvois, who had urged the opening of negotiations, taken
+an active part in them, and begun preparations for the occupation of
+Casal, may well be imagined. The Abbé d'Estrades, not less irritated,
+conceived a scheme of the most daring kind, proposing to Versailles
+nothing less than the abduction of the Mantuan minister. But Louis XIV.
+was determined to have no scandal. Catinat was charged with carrying out
+the scheme in person. The Abbé d'Estrades, in his dealings with
+Mattioli, feigned ignorance of the double game the Count was playing. He
+led him to believe, on the contrary, that the balance of the sums
+promised at Versailles was about to be paid. A meeting was fixed for May
+2, 1679. On that day d'Estrades and Mattioli got into a carriage, the
+passing of which was awaited by Catinat accompanied by some dozen men.
+At two o'clock in the afternoon, Mattioli was in the fortress of
+Pignerol, in the hands of jailer Saint-Mars. When we remember the rank
+held by the Italian minister, we are confronted with one of the most
+audacious violations of international law of which history has preserved
+a record.
+
+Early in the year 1694, Mattioli was transferred to the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite; we have seen that he entered the Bastille on
+September 18, 1698, and died there on November 19, 1703.
+
+The details that we possess of the imprisonment of Mattioli at Pignerol
+and afterwards at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite show that he was at the
+outset treated with the consideration due to his rank and to the
+position he occupied at the time of his arrest. Eventually the respect
+which the prisoner had at first inspired gradually diminished: as years
+went on the attentions shown him grew less and less until the day when,
+at the Bastille, he was given a room in common with persons of the
+basest class. On the other hand, the rigour of his confinement, so far
+as the secrecy in which he was kept was concerned, was more and more
+relaxed; what it was material to conceal was the circumstances under
+which Mattioli had been arrested, and with the lapse of time this secret
+continually diminished in importance. As to the mask of black velvet
+which Mattioli had among his possessions when he was arrested, and which
+he put on, without a doubt, only for the occasion, this in reality
+constituted a relief to his captivity, for it permitted the prisoner to
+leave his room, while the other state prisoners were rigorously mewed up
+in theirs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It remains to prove that the masked prisoner was really Mattioli.
+
+1. In the despatch sent by Louis XIV. to the Abbé d'Estrades five days
+before the arrest, the king approves the scheme of his ambassador and
+authorizes him to secure Mattioli, "since you believe you can get him
+carried off without the affair giving rise to any scandal." The prisoner
+is to be conducted to Pignerol, where "instructions are being sent to
+receive him and keep him there without anybody having knowledge of it."
+The king's orders close with these words: "You must see to it that no
+one knows what becomes of this man." The capture effected, Catinat wrote
+on his part to Louvois: "It came off without any violence, and no one
+knows the name of the knave, not even the officers who helped to arrest
+him." Finally, we have a very curious pamphlet entitled _La Prudenza
+triomfante di Casale_, written in 1682, that is, little more than two
+years after the event, and--this slight detail is of capital
+importance--thirty years before there was any talk of the Man in the
+Mask. In this we read: "The secretary (Mattioli) was surrounded by ten
+or twelve horsemen, who seized him, disguised him, _masked_ him, and
+conducted him to Pignerol"--a fact, moreover, confirmed by a tradition
+which in the eighteenth century was still rife in the district, where
+scholars succeeded in culling it.
+
+Is there any need to insist on the strength of the proofs afforded by
+these three documents, taken in connection one with another?
+
+2. We know, from du Junca's register, that the masked man was shut up at
+Pignerol under the charge of Saint-Mars. In 1681, Saint-Mars gave up the
+governorship of Pignerol for that of Exiles. We can determine with
+absolute precision the number of prisoners Saint-Mars had then in his
+keeping. It was exactly five. A dispatch from Louvois, dated June 9, is
+very clear. In the first paragraph, he orders "the two prisoners in the
+lower tower" to be removed; in the second, he adds: "The rest of the
+prisoners in your charge." Here there is a clear indication of the
+"rest": what follows settles the number: "The Sieur du Chamoy has orders
+to pay two crowns a day for the board of these _three_ prisoners." This
+account, as clear as arithmetic can make it, is further confirmed by the
+letter addressed by Saint-Mars to the Abbé d'Estrades on June 25, 1681,
+when he was setting out for Exiles: "I received yesterday the warrant
+appointing me governor of Exiles: I am to keep charge of two jailbirds I
+have here, who have no other name than 'the gentlemen of the lower
+tower'; Mattioli will remain here with two other prisoners."
+
+The prisoners, then, were five in number, and the masked man is to be
+found, of necessity, among them. Now we know who these five were: (1) a
+certain La Rivière, who died at the end of December, 1686; (2) a
+Jacobin, out of his mind, who died at the end of 1693; (3) a certain
+Dubreuil, who died at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite about 1697. There
+remain Dauger and Mattioli. The Man in the Mask is, without possible
+dispute, the one or the other. We have explained above the reasons which
+lead us to discard Dauger. The mysterious prisoner, then, was Mattioli.
+The proof is mathematically exact.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Burial certificate of the masked prisoner (November 20, 1703),
+     reproduced from the facsimile in the sixth edition of _The Man in
+     the Iron Mask_, by Marius Topin, 1883. The original, in the city
+     archives of Paris, was destroyed in the conflagration of 1871.
+]
+
+3. Opposite this page will be found a facsimile reproduction of the
+death certificate of the masked prisoner as inscribed on the registers
+of the church of St. Paul. It is the very name of the Duke of Mantua's
+former secretary that is traced there: "Marchioly." It must be
+remembered that "Marchioly" would be pronounced in Italian "Markioly,"
+and that Saint-Mars, governor of the Bastille, who furnished the
+information on which the certificate was drawn up, almost always wrote
+in his correspondence--a characteristic detail--not "Mattioli," but
+"Martioly": that is the very name on the register, less distorted than
+the name of the major of the Bastille, who was called "Rosarges," and
+not "Rosage," as given on the register; and the name of the surgeon, who
+was called "Reilhe," and not "Reglhe."
+
+It has been shown above how, as time went on, the rigorous seclusion to
+which the masked prisoner had been condemned was relaxed. What it had
+been thought necessary to conceal was the manner in which Mattioli had
+been captured, and with time that secret itself had lost its importance.
+As the Duke of Mantua had declared himself very well pleased with the
+arrest of the minister by whom he, no less than Louis XIV., had been
+deceived, there was nothing to prevent the name from being inscribed on
+a register of death, where, moreover, no one would ever have thought of
+looking for it.
+
+Let us add that, in consequence of error or carelessness on the part of
+the officer who supplied the information for the register, or perhaps on
+the part of the parson or beadle who wrote it, the age is stated
+incorrectly, "forty-five years or thereabouts," while Mattioli was
+sixty-three when he died. However, the register was filled up without
+the least care, as a formality of no importance.
+
+4. The Duke de Choiseul pressed Louis XV. to reveal to him the clue to
+the enigma. The king escaped with an evasion. One day, however, he said
+to him: "If you knew all about it, you would see that it has very little
+interest;" and some time after, when Madame de Pompadour, at de
+Choiseul's instigation, pressed the king on the subject, he told her
+that the prisoner was "the minister of an Italian prince."
+
+In the _Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette_ by her
+principal lady in waiting, Madame de Campan, we read that the queen
+tormented Louis XVI., who did not know the secret, to have a search made
+among the papers of the various ministries. "I was with the queen," says
+Madame de Campan, "when the king, having finished his researches, told
+her that he had found nothing in the secret papers which had any bearing
+on the existence of this prisoner; that he had spoken on the subject to
+M. de Maurepas, whose age brought him nearer the time when the whole
+story must have been known to the ministers (Maurepas had been minister
+of the king's household as a very young man, in the early years of the
+eighteenth century, having the department of the _lettres de cachet_),
+and that M. de Maurepas had assured him that the prisoner was simply a
+man of a very dangerous character through his intriguing spirit, and a
+subject of the Duke of Mantua. He was lured to the frontier, arrested,
+and kept a prisoner, at first at Pignerol, then at the Bastille."
+
+These two pieces of evidence are of such weight that they alone would
+be sufficient to fix the truth. When they were written, there was no
+talk of Mattioli, of whose very name Madame de Campan was ignorant.
+Supposing that Madame de Campan had amused herself by inventing a
+fable--an absurd and improbable supposition, for what reason could she
+have had for so doing?--it is impossible to admit that her imagination
+could have hit upon fancies so absolutely in accord with facts.[41]
+
+And so the problem is solved. The legend, which had reared itself even
+as high as the throne of France, topples down. The satisfaction of the
+historian springs from his reflection that all serious historical works
+for more than a century, resting on far-reaching researches and
+eschewing all preoccupations foreign to science--such, for example, as
+the desire of attaining a result different from the solutions proposed
+by one's predecessors--have arrived at the same conclusion, which proves
+to be the correct solution. Heiss, Baron de Chambrier, Reth,
+Roux-Fazillac, Delort, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul
+de Saint-Victor, Camille Rousset, Chéruel, Depping, have not hesitated
+to place under the famous mask of black velvet the features of
+Mattioli. But at each new effort made by science, legend throws itself
+once more into the fray, gaining new activity from the passions produced
+by the Revolution.
+
+The truth, in history, sometimes suggests to our mind's eye those white
+or yellow flowers which float on the water among broad flat leaves; a
+breeze springs up, a wave rises and submerges them, they disappear; but
+only for a moment: then they come to the surface again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Speaking of men of letters in France under the _ancien régime_, Michelet
+calls them "the martyrs of thought"; he adds: "The world thinks, France
+speaks. And that is precisely why the Bastille of France, the Bastille
+of Paris--I would rather say, the prison-house of thought--was, among
+all bastilles, execrable, infamous, and accursed." In the course of the
+article devoted to the Bastille in the _Grande Encyclopédie_, M. Fernand
+Bournon writes: "After Louis XIV. and throughout the eighteenth century,
+the Bastille was especially employed to repress, though it could not
+stifle, that generous and majestic movement (the glory of the human
+spirit) towards ideas of emancipation and enfranchisement; it was the
+epoch when philosophers, publicists, pamphleteers, the very booksellers,
+were imprisoned there in large numbers." And to substantiate this
+eloquent apostrophe, M. Bournon cites the names of Voltaire, La
+Beaumelle, the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, and Linguet, imprisoned in the
+Bastille; and of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau placed in the
+château of Vincennes.
+
+Let us recall the story of these poor victims in turn, and trace the
+history of their martyrdom.
+
+
+VOLTAIRE.
+
+The most illustrious and the earliest in date of the writers mentioned
+by M. Bournon is Voltaire. He was sent to the Bastille on two different
+occasions. His first imprisonment began on May 17, 1717. At that date
+the poet was only twenty-two years of age and of no reputation; he did
+not even bear the name of Voltaire, which he only took after his
+discharge from the Bastille on April 14, 1718. The cause of his
+detention was not "the generous and majestic movement towards ideas of
+enfranchisement which is the glory of the human spirit," but some
+scurrilities which, to speak plainly, brought him what he deserved:
+coarse verses against the Regent and his daughter, and public utterances
+coarser still. Many authors state that Voltaire was imprisoned for
+writing the _J'ai vu_, a satire against the government of Louis XIV.,
+each stanza of which ended with the line:--
+
+    J'ai vu ces maux, et je n'ai pas vingt ans.[42]
+
+This is a mistake. Voltaire was imprisoned for having written the _Puero
+regnante_, some verses on the Regent and his daughter, the Duchess of
+Berry, which it would be impossible to translate. To these he added
+observations whose reproduction would be equally impossible. At the
+Bastille Voltaire underwent examinations in the usual way, in the course
+of which he lied with impudence; after that he was allowed considerable
+liberty. "It was at the Bastille," wrote Condorcet, "that the young poet
+made the first draft of his poem _La Ligue_, corrected his tragedy of
+_OEdipe_, and composed some very lively lines on the ill-luck of being
+there."
+
+The following are the most respectable lines of this production:--
+
+    So one fine faultless morning in the spring,
+    When Whitsun splendour brighten'd everything,
+    A strange commotion startled me from sleep.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    At last I reach'd my chamber in the keep.
+    A clownish turnkey, with an unctuous smile,
+    Of my new lodging 'gan to praise the style:
+    "What ease, what charms, what comforts here are yours!
+    For never Phoebus in his daily course
+    Will blind you here with his too brilliant rays;
+    Within these ten-foot walls you'll spend your days
+    In cool sequester'd blithefulness always."
+    Then bidding me admire my cloistral cell--
+    The triple doors, the triple locks as well,
+    The bolts, the bars, the gratings all around--
+    "'Tis but," says he, "to keep you safe and sound!"
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Behold me, then, lodged in this woful place,
+    Cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined in narrow space;
+    Sleepless by night, and starving half the day;
+    No joys, no friend, no mistress--wellaway![43]
+
+When Voltaire was set at liberty, the Regent, whom, as we have just
+said, he had reviled, made him a very handsome offer of his protection.
+The poet's reply is well known: "My lord, I thank your royal highness
+for being so good as to continue to charge yourself with my board, but
+I beseech you no longer to charge yourself with my lodging." The young
+writer thus obtained from the Regent a pension of 400 crowns, which
+later on the latter augmented to 2000 livres.
+
+Voltaire was sent to the Bastille a second time in April, 1726. For this
+new detention there was no justification whatever. He had had a violent
+quarrel, one evening at the Opera, with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot.
+On another occasion, at the Comédie Française, the poet and the nobleman
+had a warm altercation in the box of Mdlle. Lecouvreur. Rohan raised his
+stick, Voltaire put his hand on his sword, and the actress fainted. Some
+days later "the gallant chevalier, assisted by half a dozen ruffians,
+behind whom he courageously posted himself," gave our poet a thrashing
+in broad daylight. When relating the adventure later, the Chevalier said
+pleasantly: "I commanded the squad." From that moment Voltaire sought
+his revenge. "The police reports reveal curious details of the loose,
+erratic, and feverish life he lived between the insult and his arrest,"
+writes the careful biographer of Voltaire, Desnoiresterres. From one of
+these police reports we see that the young writer established relations
+with soldiers of the guard: several notorious bullies were constantly
+about him. A relative who attempted to calm him found him more irritated
+and violent in his language than ever. It appears certain that he was
+meditating some act of violence, which indeed would not have been
+without justification. But the Cardinal de Rohan contrived that he
+should be arrested on the night of April 17, 1726, and placed in the
+Bastille.
+
+Speaking of this new imprisonment Marshal de Villars writes: "The
+public, disposed to find fault all round, came to the conclusion on this
+occasion that everybody was in the wrong: Voltaire for having offended
+the Chevalier de Rohan, the latter for having dared to commit a capital
+offence in causing a citizen to be beaten, the government for not having
+punished a notorious crime, and for having sent the injured party to the
+Bastille to pacify the injurer." Nevertheless, we read in the report of
+Hérault, the lieutenant of police: "The Sieur de Voltaire was found
+armed with pocket pistols, and his family, when informed of the matter,
+unanimously and universally applauded the wisdom of an order which saves
+this young man the ill effects of some new piece of folly and the worthy
+people who compose his family the vexation of sharing his shame."
+
+Voltaire remained at the Bastille for _twelve days_: he was permitted to
+have a servant of his own choice to wait on him, who was boarded at the
+king's expense; as for himself, he took his meals whenever he pleased at
+the governor's table, going out of the Bastille, as the governor's
+residence stood outside the prison. Relatives and friends came to see
+him; his friend Thiériot dined with him; he was given pens, paper,
+books, whatever he desired in order to divert himself. "Using and
+abusing these opportunities," writes Desnoiresterres, "Voltaire believed
+that he could give audience to all Paris. He wrote to those of his
+friends who had not yet shown a sense of their duty, exhorting them to
+give him proof they were alive." "I have been accustomed to all
+misfortunes," he wrote to Thiériot, "but not yet to that of being
+utterly abandoned by you. Madame de Bernières, Madame du Deffand, the
+Chevalier des Alleurs really ought to come and see me. They only have to
+ask permission of M. Hérault or M. de Maurepas." At the time of the
+poet's entrance to the Bastille, the lieutenant of police had written to
+the governor: "The Sieur de Voltaire is of a _genius_ that requires
+humouring. His Serene Highness has approved of my writing to tell you
+that the king's intention is that you should secure for him mild
+treatment and the internal liberty of the Bastille, so far as these do
+not jeopardize the security of his detention." The warrant setting him
+at liberty was signed on April 26.
+
+
+LA BEAUMELLE.
+
+In M. Bournon's list La Beaumelle comes second. The circumstances under
+which he was put into the Bastille were as follows. After having fallen
+out at Berlin with Voltaire, whom he had compared to a monkey, La
+Beaumelle returned to Paris, whence he had been exiled. There he got
+printed a new edition of Voltaire's _Age of Louis XIV._, unknown to the
+author, and interpolated therein odes insulting to the house of Orleans.
+"La Beaumelle," exclaimed Voltaire, "is the first who dared to print
+another man's work in his lifetime. This miserable Erostrates of the
+_Age of Louis XIV._ has discovered the secret of changing into an
+infamous libel, for fifteen ducats, a work undertaken for the glory of
+the nation."
+
+La Beaumelle became an inmate of the Bastille in April, 1753, and
+remained there for six months. Writing on May 18, 1753, to M. Roques,
+Voltaire said that "there was scarcely any country where he would not
+inevitably have been punished sooner or later, and I know from a certain
+source that there are two courts where they would have inflicted a
+chastisement more signal than that which he is undergoing here."
+
+It was not long before La Beaumelle issued his edition of _Notes towards
+the History of Madame de Maintenon and that of the past century_, with
+nine volumes of correspondence. He had fabricated letters which he
+attributed to Madame de Saint-Géran and Madame de Frontenac, and
+published a correspondence of Madame de Maintenon which M. Geffroy, in a
+work recognized as authoritative, regards as full of barefaced
+falsehoods and foul and scurrilous inventions. He had inserted in his
+work the following phrase: "The court of Vienna has been long accused of
+having poisoners always in its pay."
+
+It must be observed that La Beaumelle's publication owed its great vogue
+to special circumstances. The author's reputation abroad, the very title
+of the book, lent it great importance; and France, then engaged in the
+Seven Years' War, found it necessary to keep in Austria's good graces.
+La Beaumelle was conveyed to the Bastille a second time. The lieutenant
+of police, Berryer, put him through the usual examination. La Beaumelle
+was a man of the world, so witty that in the course of their quarrels he
+drove Voltaire himself to despair. He showed himself such in his
+examination. "La Beaumelle," said Berryer to him, "this is wit you are
+giving me when what I ask of you is plain sense." On his expressing a
+wish for a companion, he was placed with the Abbé d'Estrades. The
+officers of the château had all his manuscripts brought from his house,
+so that he might continue his literary work. He had at the Bastille a
+library of 600 volumes, ranged on shelves which the governor ordered to
+be made for him. He there finished a translation of the _Annals_ of
+Tacitus and the _Odes_ of Horace. He had permission to write to his
+relatives and friends, and to receive visits from them; he had the
+liberty of walking in the castle garden, of breeding birds in his room,
+and of having brought from outside all the luxuries to which he was
+partial. The principal secretary of the lieutenant of police, Duval,
+reports the following incident: "Danry (the famous Latude) and Allègre
+(his companion in confinement and ere long in escape) found means to
+open a correspondence with all the prisoners in the Bastille. They
+lifted a stone in a closet of the chapel, and put their letters
+underneath it. La Beaumelle pretended to be a woman in his letters to
+Allègre, and as he was a man of parts and Allègre was of keen
+sensibility and an excellent writer, the latter fell madly in love with
+La Beaumelle, to such a degree that, though they mutually agreed to
+burn their letters, Allègre preserved those of his fancied mistress,
+which he had not the heart to give to the flames; with the result that,
+the letters being discovered at an inspection of his room, he was put in
+the cells for some time. The prisoner amused himself also by composing
+verses which he recited at the top of his voice. This gave much concern
+to the officers of the garrison, and Chevalier, the major, wrote to the
+lieutenant of police on the matter: "The Sieur de la Beaumelle seems to
+have gone clean out of his mind; he seems to be a maniac; he amuses
+himself by declaiming verses in his room for a part of the day: for the
+rest of the time he is quiet."
+
+This second detention lasted from August, 1756, till August, 1757.
+
+
+THE ABBÉ MORELLET.
+
+We come to the Abbé Morellet, a man of fine and fascinating mind, one of
+the best of the Encyclopædists, who died in 1819 a member of the
+Institute and the object of general esteem. He was arrested on June 11,
+1760, for having had printed and distributed, without privilege or
+permission, a pamphlet entitled: _Preface to the Philosophers' Comedy;
+or, the Vision of Charles Palissot_.[44] These are the terms in which,
+later on, Morellet himself judged his pamphlet: "I must here make my
+confession. In this work, I went far beyond the limits of a literary
+pleasantry regarding the Sieur Palissot, and to-day I am not without
+remorse for my fault." And further, as J. J. Rousseau, in whose favour
+the pamphlet had been in part composed, had to acknowledge, the Abbé
+"very impudently" insulted a young and pretty woman, Madame de Robecq,
+who was dying of decline, spitting blood, and did actually die a few
+days later.
+
+The arrest of Morellet was demanded by Malesherbes, then censor of the
+press, one of the most generous and liberal spirits of the time, the
+inspirer of the famous remonstrances of the Court of Taxation against
+_lettres de cachet_--the man who, as M. H. Monin testifies, "being
+elected censor of the press, protected philosophers and men of letters,
+and by his personal efforts facilitated the publication of the
+_Encyclopædia_." Speaking of the _Preface to the Comedy_, Malesherbes
+writes to Gabriel de Sartine, lieutenant-general of police: "It is an
+outrageous pamphlet, not only against Palissot, but against respectable
+persons whose very condition should shelter them against such insults. I
+beg you, sir, to be good enough to put a stop to this scandal. I believe
+it to be a matter of public importance that the punishment should be
+very severe, and that this punishment should not stop at the Bastille or
+the For-l'Evêque,[45] because a very wide distinction must be drawn
+between the delinquencies of men of letters tearing each other to
+pieces and the insolence of those who attack persons of the highest
+consideration in the State. I do not think that Bicêtre would be too
+severe for these last. If you have to ask M. de Saint-Florentin for the
+royal authority for your proceedings, I hope you will be good enough to
+inform him of the request I am making."
+
+It will be observed that, on Malesherbes' showing, the Bastille would
+not suffice to punish the _Preface to the Comedy_, nor even the
+For-l'Evêque; he asks for the most stringent of the prisons, Bicêtre.
+Before long, it is true, this excellent man returned to milder
+sentiments. An imprisonment at Bicêtre, he wrote, would be infamous.
+Saint-Florentin and Sartine were not hard to convince. Morellet was
+taken to the Bastille. "The warrant for his arrest," wrote one of his
+agents to Malesherbes, "was executed this morning by Inspector D'Hémery
+with all the amenities possible in so unpleasant a business. D'Hémery
+knows the Abbé Morellet, and has spoken of him to M. de Sartine in the
+most favourable terms."
+
+When he entered the Bastille the Abbé calculated that his imprisonment
+would last six months, and after acknowledging that he at that time
+viewed his detention without great distress, he adds: "I am bound to
+say, to lower the too high opinion that may be formed of me and my
+courage, that I was marvellously sustained by a thought which rendered
+my little virtue more easy. I saw some literary glory illumining the
+walls of my prison; persecuted, I must be better known. The men of
+letters whom I had avenged, and the philosophy for which I was a
+martyr, would lay the foundation of my reputation. The men of the world,
+who love satire, would receive me better than ever. A career was opening
+before me, and I should be able to pursue it at greater advantage. These
+six months at the Bastille would be an excellent recommendation, and
+would infallibly make my fortune."
+
+The Abbé remained at the Bastille, not six months, but six weeks, "which
+slipped away," he observes "--I chuckle still as I think of them--very
+pleasantly for me." He spent his time in reading romances, and, with
+admirable humour, in writing a _Treatise on the Liberty of the Press_.
+Afterwards the good Abbé informs us that the hopes which he had indulged
+were not deceived. On issuing from the Bastille he was a made man.
+Little known two months before, he now met everywhere with the reception
+he desired. The doors of the salons of Madame de Boufflers, Madame
+Necker, the Baron d'Holbach, flew open before him; women pitied him and
+admired him, and men followed their example. Why have we not to-day a
+Bastille to facilitate the career of writers of talent!
+
+
+MARMONTEL.
+
+To Marmontel his stay at the royal prison appeared as pleasant as the
+Abbé Morellet had found his. He had amused himself by reciting at Madame
+Geoffrin's a mordant satire in which the Duke d'Aumont, first groom of
+the stole to the king, was cruelly hit. The duke expostulated;
+Marmontel wrote to him declaring that he was not the author of the
+satire; but the nobleman stood his ground.
+
+"I am helpless," said the Count de Saint-Florentin, who countersigned
+the _lettre de cachet_, to Marmontel; "the Duke d'Aumont accuses you,
+and is determined to have you punished. It is a satisfaction he demands
+in recompense for his services and the services of his ancestors. The
+king has been pleased to grant him his wish. So you will go and find M.
+de Sartine; I am addressing to him the king's order; you will tell him
+that it was from my hand you received it."
+
+"I went to find M. de Sartine," writes Marmontel, "and I found with him
+the police officer who was to accompany me. M. de Sartine was intending
+that he should go to the Bastille in a separate carriage; but I myself
+declined this obliging offer, and we arrived at the Bastille, my
+introducer and myself, in the same hack.... The governor, M. d'Abadie,
+asked me if I wished my servant to be left with me.... They made a
+cursory inspection of my packets and books, and then sent me up to a
+large room furnished with two beds, two tables, a low cupboard, and
+three cane chairs. It was cold, but a jailer made us a good fire and
+brought me wood in abundance. At the same time they gave me pens, ink,
+and paper, on condition of my accounting for the use I made of them and
+the number of sheets they allowed me.
+
+"The jailer came back to ask if I was satisfied with my bed. After
+examining it I replied that the mattresses were bad and the coverlets
+dirty. In a minute all was changed. They sent to ask me what was my
+dinner hour. I replied, 'The same as everybody's.' The Bastille had a
+library: the governor sent me the catalogue, giving me free choice among
+the books. I merely thanked him for myself, but my servant asked for the
+romances of Prévost, and they were brought to him."
+
+Let us go on with Marmontel's story. "For my part," he says, "I had the
+means of escape from ennui. Having been for a long time impatient of the
+contempt shown by men of letters for Lucan's poem, which they had not
+read, and only knew in the barbarous fustian of Brébeuf's version, I had
+resolved to translate it more becomingly and faithfully into prose; and
+this work, which would occupy me without fatiguing my brain, was the
+best possible employment for the solitary leisure of my prison. So I had
+brought the _Pharsalia_ with me, and, to understand it the better, I had
+been careful to bring with it the _Commentaries_ of Cæsar. Behold me
+then at the corner of a good fire, pondering the quarrel of Cæsar and
+Pompey, and forgetting my own with the Duke d'Aumont. And there was Bury
+too (Marmontel's servant) as philosophical as myself, amusing himself by
+making our beds placed at two opposite corners of my room, which was at
+this moment lit up by the beams of a fine winter sun, in spite of the
+bars of two strong iron gratings which permitted me a view of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine.
+
+"Two hours later, the noise of the bolts of the two doors which shut me
+in startled me from my profound musings, and the two jailers, loaded
+with a dinner I believed to be mine, came in and served it in silence.
+One put down in front of the fire three little dishes covered with
+plates of common earthenware; the other laid on that one of the two
+tables which was clear a tablecloth rather coarse, indeed, but white. I
+saw him place on the table a very fair set of things, a pewter spoon and
+fork, good household bread, and a bottle of wine. Their duty done, the
+jailers retired, and the two doors were shut again with the same noise
+of locks and bolts.
+
+"Then Bury invited me to take my place, and served my soup. It was a
+Friday. The soup, made without meat, was a _purée_ of white beans, with
+the freshest butter, and a dish of the same beans was the first that
+Bury served me with. I found all this excellent. The dish of cod he gave
+me for second course was better still. It was served with a dash of
+garlic, which gave it a delicacy of taste and odour which would have
+flattered the taste of the daintiest Gascon. The wine was not
+first-rate, but passable; no sweets: of course one must expect to be
+deprived of something. On the whole, I thought that dinner in prison was
+not half bad.
+
+"As I was rising from table, and Bury was about to sit down--for there
+was enough for his dinner in what was left--lo and behold! in came my
+two jailers again, with pyramids of dishes in their hands. At this
+display of fine linen, fine china-ware, spoon and fork of silver, we
+recognized our mistake; but we made not the ghost of a sign, and when
+our jailers, having laid down their burden, had retired, 'Sir,' said
+Bury, 'you have just eaten my dinner, you will quite agree to my having
+my turn and eating yours.' 'That's fair,' I replied, and the walls of my
+room were astonished, I fancy, at the sound of laughter.
+
+"This dinner was not vegetarian; here are the details: an excellent
+soup, a juicy beef-steak, a boiled capon's leg streaming with gravy and
+melting in one's mouth, a little dish of artichokes fried in pickle, a
+dish of spinach, a very fine William pear, fresh-cut grapes, a bottle of
+old burgundy, and best Mocha coffee; this was Bury's dinner, with the
+exception of the coffee and the fruit, which he insisted on reserving
+for me.
+
+"After dinner the governor came to see me, and asked me if I found the
+fare sufficient, assuring me that I should be served from his table,
+that he would take care to cut my portions himself, and that no one
+should touch my food but himself. He suggested a fowl for my supper; I
+thanked him and told him that what was left of the fruit from my dinner
+would suffice. The reader has just seen what my ordinary fare was at the
+Bastille, and from this he may infer with what mildness, or rather
+reluctance, they brought themselves to visit on me the wrath of the Duke
+d'Aumont.
+
+"Every day I had a visit from the governor. As he had some smack of
+literature and even of Latin, he took some interest in following my
+work, in fact, enjoyed it; but soon, tearing himself away from these
+little dissipations, he said, 'Adieu, I am going to console men who are
+more unfortunate than you.'"
+
+Such was the imprisonment of Marmontel. It lasted for eleven days.
+
+
+LINGUET.
+
+Linguet, advocate and journalist, was arrested for a breach of the press
+laws and for slander. He was a man of considerable ability, but little
+character. Attorney-general Cruppi has devoted to the story of Linguet a
+work as extensive as it is eloquent. He has a wealth of indulgence for
+his hero; yet, despite the goodwill he shows for him and endeavours to
+impart to the reader, his book reveals between the lines that Linguet
+was worthy of little esteem, and that his professional brethren were
+justified in removing his name from the roll of the advocates of Paris.
+
+Linguet's captivity lasted for two years. He has left a description of
+it in his _Memoirs on the Bastille_, which made a great noise, and of
+which the success has endured down to our own day. His book, like
+everything which came from his pen, is written in a fluent style, with
+spirit and brilliance; the facts cited are for the most part correct,
+but the author, aiming at making a sensation, has cleverly presented
+them in a light which distorts their real character. "There are means,"
+says Madame de Staal, "of so distributing light and shade on the facts
+one is exhibiting, as to alter their appearance without altering the
+groundwork." Take, for instance, the description that Linguet gives of
+his belongings while in the Bastille: "Two worm-eaten mattresses, a cane
+chair the seat of which was only held to it by strings, a folding table,
+a jug for water, two earthenware pots, one of them for drinking, and two
+stone slabs to make a fire on." A contemporary could say of Linguet's
+_Memoirs_, "It is the longest lie that ever was printed." And yet, if we
+take the facts themselves which are related by the clever journalist,
+and disengage them from the deceitful mirage in which he has enwrapped
+them, we do not see that his life in the Bastille was so wretched as he
+endeavours to make us believe. He is forced to acknowledge that his food
+was always most abundant, adding, it is true, that that was because they
+wished to poison him! He owed his life, he is convinced, "only to the
+obstinate tenacity of his constitution." He marked, nevertheless, on the
+menu for the day, which was sent up every morning by the Bastille cook,
+the dishes he fancied; and later on he had his room furnished after his
+own heart. He still enjoyed, moreover, enough liberty to write during
+his imprisonment a work entitled, _The Trials of Three Kings, Louis
+XVI., Charles III., and George III._, which appeared in London in 1781.
+Let us recall once more the famous saying of Linguet to the wig-maker of
+the Bastille on the first day that he presented himself to trim the
+prisoner's beard: "To whom have I the honour of speaking?" "I am, sir,
+the barber to the Bastille." "Gad, then, why don't you raze it?"
+
+In June, 1792, some years after his liberation, Linguet was prosecuted a
+second time for breach of the press laws. The revolutionary tribunal
+condemned him to death. As he mounted the steps of the scaffold, the
+ardent pamphleteer thought, mayhap, with bitterly ironical regret, of
+that Bastille whose destruction he had so clamorously demanded.
+
+
+DIDEROT.
+
+We have still to speak of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who were
+not incarcerated at the Bastille, but at Vincennes, not in the castle
+keep, but in the château itself, which constituted a separate place of
+imprisonment. They placed in the château only prisoners guilty of minor
+offences, who were sentenced to a temporary detention, and to whom they
+wished to show some consideration. This was, as we have just said, the
+abode of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot was arrested on
+July 24, 1749. His last book, _Letters on the Blind for the Use of those
+Who Can See_, contained theories which appeared to have but little title
+to the description of "moral." But in the course of his examination he
+stoutly denied that he was its author, as also he denied the authorship
+of the _Thoughts of a Philosopher_ he had published some years before.
+The lieutenant of police gave instructions to the governor of Vincennes
+that, short of being set at liberty, Diderot was to be granted all
+possible comforts--allowed to walk in the garden and park; "that the
+king's desire was, in consideration of the literary work on which he was
+engaged (the _Encyclopædia_), to permit him to communicate freely with
+persons from without who might come for that purpose or on family
+business." And so Diderot received a visit from his wife and walked with
+her in the wood; Rousseau and D'Alembert spent their afternoons with
+him, and, as in the "good old days" of Plato and Socrates, our
+philosophers chatted of metaphysics and love, seated on the green grass
+under the shade of mighty oaks. The booksellers and printers who had
+undertaken the publication of the _Encyclopædia_ were, as we have seen,
+in constant communication with Diderot at Vincennes; he corrected in
+prison the proofs of the publication, which the court looked on with no
+favourable eye. And we know, too, that at night, with the secret
+complicity of the governor, our philosopher cleared the park walls to
+hurry to a fair lady at Paris, one Madame de Puysieux, whom he loved
+with a passion by no means platonic; ere the sun was up, the jailers
+found him safely back under lock and key. This irksome captivity lasted
+little more than three months.
+
+
+THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU.
+
+The imprisonment of Mirabeau lasted only ten days. The _lettre de
+cachet_ had been obtained by the clique of financiers, who took fright
+at the audacious conceptions of the _Theory of Taxation_. "I fancy I
+deserved my punishment," wrote the Marquis, "like the ass in the fable,
+for a clumsy and misplaced zeal." In regard to the arrest, Madame
+d'Epinay sent word to Voltaire: "Never before was a man arrested as this
+one was. The officer said to him, 'Sir, my orders do not state I am to
+hurry you: to-morrow will do, if you haven't time to-day.' 'No, sir, one
+cannot be too prompt in obeying the king's orders, I am quite ready.'
+And off he went with a bag crammed with books and papers." At Vincennes
+the Marquis had a servant with him. His wife came to see him. The king
+spent for his support fifteen livres a day, more than twenty-five
+shillings of our money. He was liberated on December 24, 1760. His
+brother, Bailie Mirabeau, speaking of this detention, wrote to him of "a
+week's imprisonment in which you were shown every possible
+consideration."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have exhausted M. Bournon's list of the writers who were victims of
+arbitrary authority. Such are the "martyrs" for whom that excellent
+historian, and Michelet and others, have shown the most affecting
+compassion. The foregoing facts do not call for comment. Men of letters
+were the spoilt children of the eighteenth century much more than of our
+own, and never has an absolute government shown a toleration equal to
+that of the monarchy under the _ancien régime_ towards writers whose
+doctrines, as events have proved, tended directly to its destruction.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LATUDE.
+
+
+Few historical figures have taken a higher place in the popular
+imagination than Masers de Latude. That celebrated prisoner seems to
+have accumulated in his life of suffering all the wrongs that spring
+from an arbitrary government. The novelists and playwrights of the
+nineteenth century have made him a hero; the poets have draped his woes
+in fine mourning robes, our greatest historians have burnt for him the
+midnight oil; numerous editions of his _Memoirs_ have appeared in quick
+succession down to our own days. Even by his contemporaries he was
+regarded as a martyr, and posterity has not plucked the shining crown of
+martyrdom from his head, hoary with the snows of long captivity. His
+legend is the creature of his own unaided brain. When in 1790 he
+dictated the story of his life, he made greater calls on his glowing
+southern imagination than on his memory; but the documents relating to
+his case in the archives of the Bastille have been preserved. At the
+present time they are to be found dispersed among various libraries, at
+the Arsenal, at Carnavalet, at St. Petersburg. Thanks to them it is
+easy to establish the truth.
+
+On March 23, 1725, at Montagnac in Languedoc, a poor girl named
+Jeanneton Aubrespy gave birth to a male child who was baptized three
+days later under the name of Jean Henri, given him by his god-parents,
+Jean Bouhour and Jeanne Boudet. Surname the poor little creature had
+none, for he was the illegitimate child of a father unknown. Jeanneton,
+who had just passed her thirtieth year, was of respectable middle-class
+family, and lived near the Lom gate in a little house which seems to
+have been her own. Several cousins of hers held commissions in the army.
+But from the day when she became a mother, her family had no more to do
+with her, and she fell into want. Happily she was a woman of stout
+heart, and by her spinning and sewing she supported her boy, who shot up
+into a lad of keen intelligence and considerable ambition. She succeeded
+in getting him some sort of education, and we find Jean Henri at the age
+of seventeen acting as assistant surgeon in the army of Languedoc.
+Surgeons, it is true, made no great figure in the eighteenth century;
+they combined the duties of barber and dentist as well as leech. But the
+situation was good enough. "Assistant surgeons in the army," wrote
+Saint-Marc the detective, "who really worked at their trade, made a good
+deal of money." At this time, being reluctant to bear his mother's name,
+the young man ingeniously transformed his double forename into Jean
+Danry, under which he is designated in a passport for Alsace, given him
+on March 25, 1743, by the general commanding the royal forces in
+Languedoc. In the same year 1743, Danry accompanied the army of Marshal
+de Noailles in its operations on the Maine and the Rhine, receiving from
+the Marshal, towards the end of the season, a certificate testifying to
+his good and faithful service throughout the campaign.
+
+Four years later we find Danry at Brussels, employed in the
+field-hospital of the army in Flanders, at a salary of 500 livres a
+month. He was present at the famous siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, the
+impregnable fortress which the French so valiantly stormed under the
+command of the Comte de Lowendal. But peace being concluded at
+Aix-la-Chapelle, the armies were disbanded, and Danry went to Paris. He
+had in his pocket a letter of recommendation to Descluzeaux, the surgeon
+of Marshal de Noailles, and a certificate signed by Guignard de La
+Garde, chief of the commissariat, testifying to the ability and good
+conduct of "the aforesaid Jean Danry, assistant surgeon." These two
+certificates formed the most substantial part of his fortune.
+
+Danry arrived in Paris about the end of the year 1748. On any afternoon
+he might have been seen strolling about the Tuileries in a grey frock
+and red waistcoat, carrying his twenty-three years with a good grace. Of
+middle height and somewhat spare figure, wearing his brown hair in a
+silk net, having keen eyes and an expression of much intelligence, he
+would probably have been thought a handsome fellow but for the marks
+which smallpox had indelibly stamped on his face. His accent had a
+decided Gascon tang, and it is obvious, from the spelling of his
+letters, not only that he could not boast of a literary education, but
+that his speech was that of a man of the people. Yet, what with his
+brisk temperament, his professional skill, and his favour with his
+superiors, he was in a fair way to attain an honourable position, which
+would have enabled him at length to support his mother, then living in
+solitary friendlessness at Montagnac, centring on him, in her forlorn
+condition, all her affection and her dearest hopes.
+
+Paris, with its gaiety and stir, dazzled the young man. Its brilliant
+and luxurious life, its rustling silks and laces, set him dreaming. He
+found the girls of Paris charming creatures, and opened his heart to
+them without stint, and his purse too; and his heart was more opulent
+than his purse. Ere long he had spent his modest savings and sunk into
+want. He fell into bad company. His best friend, an apothecary's
+assistant named Binguet, shared with him a mean garret in the Cul-de-sac
+du Coq, in the house of one Charmeleux, who let furnished lodgings. Than
+these two no greater rakes, wastrels, or thorough-paced rascals could
+have been found in all Paris. Danry in particular very soon got a name
+all over his neighbourhood for his riotous, threatening, and choleric
+temper. Dying of hunger, threatened with being ejected neck-and-crop
+from his lodging for nonpayment of rent, he was reduced at last to write
+for money to his mother, who, poor thing, had barely enough for her own
+modest wants.
+
+As yet we are a long way from the "handsome officer of engineers" who
+lives in our remembrance: we see little likeness to the brilliant
+picture which Danry drew later of those youthful years during which he
+received, "by the care of his father the Marquis de La Tude, the
+education of a gentleman destined to serve his country and his king."
+
+Having come now absolutely to the end of his resources, Danry took it
+into his head that, at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, he had been stripped
+by some soldiers of all his clothes but his shirt, and robbed of 678
+livres into the bargain. This story he worked up in a letter addressed
+to Moreau de Séchelles, commissary of the army in Flanders, hoping to
+get it corroborated by Guignard de La Garde, the commissary under whom
+he had himself served. In this letter he demanded compensation for the
+losses he had suffered while devoting himself under fire to the care of
+the wounded. But we read, in the _Memoirs_ he wrote later, that so far
+from having been stripped and robbed, he had actually purchased at
+Bergen-op-Zoom a considerable quantity of goods of all kinds when they
+were sold off cheap after the sack of the town. However that may be, his
+experiment was a failure. But Danry was a man of resource, and not many
+days had passed before he had hit on another means of raising the wind.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Cover of the explosive box sent by Danry to the Marquise de
+     Pompadour. The words almost obliterated are: "Je vous prie, Madame,
+     d'ouvrir le paquet en particulié." Below is the record and the date
+     of Danry's examination, with his signature, and that of Berryer,
+     the lieutenant of police.
+]
+
+At this time everybody was talking about the struggle between the
+king's ministers and the Marquise de Pompadour, which had just ended in
+a triumph for the lady. Maurepas was going into exile, but it was
+generally believed that he was a man who would wreak vengeance on his
+enemy, and the favourite herself openly declared that she went in fear
+of poison. A light dawned on the young surgeon's mind as he heard such
+gossip as this; he caught a sudden glimpse of himself--even he, the
+ragged outcast--arrayed in cloth of gold and rolling in his carriage
+along the Versailles road.
+
+This was his plan. On April 27, 1749, in a shop under the arcade of the
+Palais-Royal, hard by the grand staircase, he bought of a small
+tradesman six of those little bottle-shaped toys, once called Prince
+Rupert's Drops, out of which children used to get so much harmless
+amusement. They were globules of molten glass, which, on being thrown
+into cold water, had taken the shape of pears, and which, if the
+tapering end was suddenly snapped, crumbled with a loud report into
+dust. Four of these crackers Danry placed in a cardboard box, binding
+the thin ends together with a thread which he fixed in the lid. Over
+these he sprinkled some toilet powder, and this he covered with a layer
+of powdered vitriol and alum. The whole packet he then enclosed in a
+double wrapper, writing on the inner one, "I beg you, madam, to open the
+packet in private," and on the outer one, "To Madame the Marquise de
+Pompadour, at court."
+
+At eight o'clock in the evening of the next day, Danry, having seen his
+packet safely in the post, hurried off himself to Versailles. He had
+hoped to gain admittance to the favourite herself, but being stopped by
+Gourbillon, her principal valet, in a voice trembling with emotion he
+related to him a frightful story. Happening to be at the Tuileries, he
+said, he had observed two men seated in animated conversation, and on
+going close to them heard them mouthing the most horrible threats
+against Madame de Pompadour. When they rose he dogged their footsteps,
+which led direct to the post office, where they consigned a packet to
+the box. Who the men were, and what was the nature of the packet, were
+natural questions to which Danry had no answer; all he could say was
+that, devoted to the interests of the Marquise, he had instantly sped
+off to reveal to her what he had seen.
+
+To understand the impression produced by the young man's information, it
+is necessary to bear in mind the feverish excitement then prevailing at
+court. Maurepas, the witty and sprightly minister who had won Louis
+XV.'s special affection because of the charm with which he endowed mere
+business for "the man who was always bored"--Maurepas had just been
+exiled to Bourges. "Pontchartrain," the king sent word to him, "is too
+near." The struggle between the minister and the favourite had been one
+of extraordinary violence. Maurepas was for ever dashing off satirical
+verses on the girl who had reached the steps of the throne, and
+incessantly pursuing her with the cruel and insolent shafts of his wit;
+his muse indeed did not shrink from the most brutal insults. Nor was the
+Marquise a whit more tender towards her foe: she openly dubbed him liar
+and knave, and assured everybody that he was trying to get her poisoned.
+A surgeon was actually required to be in constant attendance upon her,
+and she always had an antidote within reach. At table she was careful
+never to be the first to partake of any dish, and in her box at the
+theatre she would drink no lemonade but what had been prepared by her
+surgeon.
+
+The packet which Danry had posted arrived at Versailles on April 29, and
+Quesnay, the physician to the king and the Marquise, was requested to
+open it. Having done so with infinite precaution, he recognized the
+vitriol and alum and toilet powder, and declared at once that there was
+not a pennyworth of danger in the whole contrivance. But since alum and
+vitriol were substances capable of being turned to baneful uses, he
+thought that possibly it was a case of a criminal design clumsily
+executed.
+
+There is not a shadow of doubt that Louis XV. and his mistress were
+seriously alarmed. D'Argenson himself, who had upheld Maurepas against
+the favourite, had the greatest possible interest in seeing the affair
+cleared up as soon as possible. The first move was altogether in favour
+of the informer. D'Argenson wrote to Berryer that Danry was deserving of
+a reward.
+
+No time was lost in instituting a search for the authors of the plot.
+The lieutenant of police selected the most skilful and intelligent of
+his officers, the detective Saint-Marc, who put himself in communication
+with Danry. But he had not spent two days with the assistant surgeon
+before he drew up a report demanding his arrest. "It is not unimportant
+to note that Danry is a surgeon, and his best friend an apothecary. In
+my opinion it is essential to apprehend both Danry and Binguet without
+further delay, and without letting either know of the other's arrest,
+and at the same time to search their rooms."
+
+Accordingly Danry was conveyed to the Bastille on May 1, 1749, and
+Binguet was secured the same day. Saint-Marc had taken the precaution to
+ask the assistant surgeon for a written account of his adventure. This
+document he put into the hands of an expert, who compared the
+handwriting with the address on the packet sent to Versailles. Danry was
+lost. Suspicion was but too well confirmed by the results of a search in
+his room. Being shut up in the Bastille, Danry knew nothing of all these
+proceedings, and when, on May 2, the lieutenant-general of police came
+to question him, he replied only with lies.
+
+Berryer, the lieutenant of police, was a man of much firmness, but
+honourable and kindly disposed. "He inspired one's confidence," wrote
+Danry himself, "by his urbanity and kindness." This excellent man was
+vexed at the attitude taken up by the prisoner, and pointing out the
+danger he was incurring, he besought him to tell the truth. But at a
+second examination Danry only persisted in his lies. Then all at once he
+changed his tactics and refused to answer the questions put to him.
+"Danry, here we do justice to every one," said Berryer to him, to give
+him courage. But entreaties had no better success than threats. Danry
+maintained his obstinate silence; and D'Argenson wrote to Berryer: "The
+thorough elucidation of this affair is too important for you not to
+follow up any clue which may point towards a solution."
+
+By his falsehoods, and then by his silence, Danry had succeeded in
+giving the appearance of a mysterious plot to what was really an
+insignificant piece of knavery.
+
+Not till June 15 did he make up his mind to offer a statement very near
+the truth, which was written down and sent at once to the king, who read
+it over several times and kept it in his pocket the whole day--a
+circumstance which indicates to what importance the affair had now
+swelled. Suspicions were not dispelled by the declaration of June 15.
+Danry had misrepresented the truth in his former examinations, and there
+was reason to believe that he was equally misrepresenting it in the
+third. Thus he owed his ruin to his silence and his self-contradictory
+depositions. Six months later, on October 7, 1749, when he was at
+Vincennes, Dr. Quesnay, who had shown much interest in the young
+surgeon, was sent to find out from him the name of the individual who
+had instigated the crime. On his return the doctor wrote to Berryer,
+"My journey has been utterly useless. I only saw a blockhead, who
+persisted nevertheless in adhering to his former declarations." Two
+years more had passed away when the lieutenant of police wrote to
+Quesnay:--"February 25, 1751. Danry would be very glad if you would pay
+him a visit, and your compliance might perhaps induce him to lay bare
+his secret soul, and make a frank confession to you of what up to the
+present he has obstinately concealed from me."
+
+Quesnay at once repaired to the Bastille, bearing with him a conditional
+promise of liberty. Working himself up into a frenzy, Danry swore that
+"all his answers to the lieutenant of police had been strictly true."
+When the doctor had taken his leave, Danry wrote to the minister: "M.
+Quesnay, who has been several times to see me in my wretchedness, tells
+me that your lordship is inclined to believe I had some accomplice in my
+fault whom I will not reveal, and that it is for this reason your
+lordship will not give me my liberty. I could wish, my lord, from the
+bottom of my heart, that your belief were true, for it would be much to
+my profit to put my guilt upon another, whether for having induced me to
+commit my sin or for not having prevented me from committing it."
+
+It was the opinion of the ministers that Danry had been the instrument
+of a plot against the life of the Marquise de Pompadour directed by some
+person of high rank, and that at the critical moment he had either
+taken fright, or else had made a clean breast of the matter at
+Versailles in the hope of reaping some advantage from both sides. These
+facts must be kept in mind if we are to understand the real cause of his
+confinement. Kept, then, in the Bastille, he was subjected to several
+examinations, the reports of which were regularly drawn up and signed by
+the lieutenant of police. Under the _ancien régime_, this officer was,
+as we have seen, a regular magistrate, indeed he has no other
+designation in the documents of the period; he pronounced sentence and
+awarded punishments in accordance with that body of customs which then,
+as to-day in England, constituted the law.
+
+Binguet, the apothecary, had been set at liberty immediately after
+Danry's declaration of June 15. In the Bastille, Danry was treated with
+the utmost consideration, in accordance with the formal instructions of
+Berryer. He was provided with books, tobacco, and a pipe; he was
+permitted to play on the flute; and having declared that a solitary life
+bored him, he was given two room mates. Every day he was visited by the
+officers of the fortress, and on May 25 the governor came to tell him of
+the magistrate's order: "That the utmost attention was to be shown him;
+if he needed anything he was to be requested to say so, and was to be
+allowed to want for nothing." No doubt the lieutenant of police hoped,
+by dint of kindness, to persuade him to disclose the authors of the
+unfortunate plot which was the figment of his imagination.
+
+Danry did not remain long in the prison of the Suburb Saint-Antoine; on
+July 28 Saint-Marc transferred him to Vincennes, and we see from the
+report drawn up by the detective with what astonishment the Marquis du
+Châtelet, governor of the fortress, heard "that the court had resolved
+to send him such a fellow." Vincennes, like the Bastille, was reserved
+for prisoners of good position; our hero was sent there by special
+favour, as he was told for his consolation by the surgeon who attended
+him: "Only persons of noble birth or the highest distinction are sent to
+Vincennes." Danry was indeed treated like a lord. The best apartment was
+reserved for him, and he was able to enjoy the park, where he walked for
+two hours every day. At the time of his admission to the Bastille, he
+was suffering from some sort of indisposition which later on he ascribed
+to his long confinement. At Vincennes he complained of the same illness,
+with the same plea that his troubles had made him ill. He was attended
+by a specialist as well as by the surgeon of the prison.
+
+Meantime the lieutenant came again to see him, reiterating assurances of
+his protection, and advising him to write direct to Madame de Pompadour.
+Here is what Danry wrote:--
+
+"VINCENNES, _November 4, 1749_.
+
+     "MADAM,--If wretchedness, goaded by famine, has driven me to commit
+     a fault against your dear person, it was with no design of doing
+     you any mischief. God is my witness. If the divine mercy would
+     assure you to-day, on my behalf, how my soul repents of its heinous
+     fault, and how for 188 days I have done nothing but weep at the
+     sight of my iron bars, you would have pity on me. Madam, for the
+     sake of God who is enlightening you, let your just wrath soften at
+     the spectacle of my repentance, my wretchedness, my tears. One day
+     God will recompense you for your humanity. You are all-powerful,
+     Madam; God has given you power with the greatest king on all the
+     earth, His well-beloved; he is merciful, he is not cruel, he is a
+     Christian. If the divine power moves your magnanimity to grant me
+     my freedom, I would rather die, or sustain my life on nothing but
+     roots, than jeopardize it a second time. I have staked all my hopes
+     on your Christian charity. Lend a sympathetic ear to my prayer, do
+     not abandon me to my unhappy fate. I hope in you, Madam, and God
+     will vouchsafe an abundant answer to my prayers that your dear
+     person may obtain your heart's desires.
+
+     "I have the honour to be, with a repentance worthy of pardon,
+     Madam, your very humble and very obedient servant,
+
+"DANRY."
+
+
+
+A letter which it is a pleasure to quote, for it shows to great
+advantage beside the letters written later by the prisoner. It was only
+the truth that he had no evil design on the favourite's life; but soon
+becoming more audacious, he wrote to Madame de Pompadour saying that if
+he had addressed the box to her at Versailles, it was out of pure
+devotion to her, to put her on her guard against the machinations of her
+enemies, in short, to save her life.
+
+Danry's letter was duly forwarded to the Marquise, but remained without
+effect. Losing patience, he resolved to win for himself the freedom
+denied him: on June 15, 1750, he escaped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In his _Memoirs_ Danry has related the story of this first escape in a
+manner as lively as imaginative. He really eluded his jailers in the
+simplest way in the world. Having descended to the garden at the usual
+hour for his walk, he found there a black spaniel frisking about. The
+dog happened to rear itself against the gate, and to push it with its
+paws. The gate fell open. Danry passed out and ran straight ahead,
+"till, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, he fell to the ground with
+fatigue, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Denis."
+
+There he remained until nine o'clock in the evening. Then he struck into
+the road to Paris, passing the night beside the aqueduct near the
+Saint-Denis gate. At daybreak he entered the city.
+
+We know what importance was attached at court to the safe custody of the
+prisoner: there was still hope that he would make up his mind to speak
+of the grave conspiracy of which he held the secret. D'Argenson wrote at
+once to Berryer: "Nothing is more important or more urgent than to set
+on foot at once all conceivable means of recapturing the prisoner."
+Accordingly all the police were engaged in the search; the description
+of the prisoner was printed, a large number of copies being distributed
+by Inspector Rulhière among the mounted police.
+
+Danry took up his lodging with one Cocardon, at the sign of the Golden
+Sun; but he did not venture to remain for more than two days in the same
+inn. He expected his old chum Binguet to come to his assistance, but
+Binguet was not going to have anything more to do with the Bastille. It
+was a pretty girl, Annette Benoist, whom Danry had known when he was
+lodging with Charmeleux, that devoted herself heart and soul to him. She
+knew she herself was running the risk of imprisonment, and already
+strangers of forbidding appearance had come asking at the Golden Sun who
+she was. Little she cared; she found assistance among her companions:
+the girls carried Danry's letters and undertook the search for a safe
+lodging. Meanwhile, Danry went to pass the night under the aqueducts; in
+the morning he shut himself in the lodging the girls had chosen for him,
+and there he remained for two days without leaving the house, Annette
+coming there to keep him company. Unluckily the young man had no money:
+how was he to pay his score? "What was to be done, what was to become of
+me?" he said later. "I was sure to be discovered if I showed myself; if
+I fled I ran no less risk." He wrote to Dr. Quesnay, who had shown him
+so much kindness at Vincennes; but the police got wind of the letter,
+and Saint-Marc arrived and seized the fugitive in the inn where he lay
+concealed. The unlucky wretch was haled back to the Bastille. Annette
+was arrested at the Golden Sun at the moment when she was asking for
+Danry's letters; she too was shut up in the Bastille. The warders and
+sentinels who were on duty at Vincennes on the day of the escape had
+been thrown into the cells.
+
+By his escape from Vincennes, Danry had doubled the gravity of his
+offence. The regulations demanded that he should be sent down into the
+cells reserved for insubordinate prisoners. "M. Berryer came again to
+lighten my woes; outside the prison he demanded justice and mercy for
+me, inside he sought to calm my grief, which seemed less poignant when
+he assured me that he shared it." The lieutenant of police ordered the
+prisoner to be fed as well as formerly, and to be allowed his books,
+papers, knick-knacks, and the privilege of the two hours' walk he had
+enjoyed at Vincennes. In return for these kindnesses, the assistant
+surgeon sent to the magistrate "a remedy for the gout." He asked at the
+same time to be allowed to breed little birds, whose chirping and lively
+movements would divert him. The request was granted. But instead of
+bearing his lot with patience, Danry grew more and more irritable every
+day. He gave free rein to his violent temper, raised a hubbub, shrieked,
+tore up and down his room, so that they came perforce to believe that he
+was going mad. On the books of the Bastille library, which circulated
+from room to room, he wrote ribald verses against the Marquise de
+Pompadour. In this way he prolonged his sojourn in the cells. Gradually
+his letters changed their tone. "It is a little hard to be left for
+fourteen months in prison, a whole year of the time, ending to-day, in
+one cell where I still am."
+
+Then Berryer put him back into a good room, about the end of the year
+1751. At the same time he gave him, at the king's expense, a servant to
+wait on him.
+
+As to Annette Benoist, she had been set at liberty after a fortnight's
+detention. Danry's servant fell sick; as there was no desire to deprive
+the prisoner of society, he was given a companion. This was a certain
+Antoine Allègre, who had been there since May 29, 1750. The
+circumstances which had led to his imprisonment were almost identical
+with those to which Danry owed his confinement. Allègre was keeping a
+school at Marseilles when he learnt that the enemies of the Marquise de
+Pompadour were seeking to destroy her. He fabricated a story of a
+conspiracy in which he involved Maurepas, the Archbishop of Albi, and
+the Bishop of Lodève; he sent a denunciation of this plot to Versailles,
+and, to give it some semblance of truth, addressed to the favourite's
+valet a letter in disguised handwriting, beginning with these words: "On
+the word of a gentleman, there are 100,000 crowns for you if you poison
+your mistress." He hoped by this means to obtain a good situation, or
+the success of a business project he had in hand.
+
+Intelligent, with some education, and venturesome, Danry and Allègre
+were just the men to get on well together, so much the better that the
+schoolmaster dominated the comrade to whom he was so much superior. The
+years that Danry spent in company with Allègre exercised so great an
+influence on his whole life that the lieutenant of police, Lenoir, could
+say one day: "Danry is the second volume of Allègre." The letters of the
+latter, a large number of which have been preserved, bear witness to the
+originality and energy of his mind: their style is fine and fluent, of
+the purest French; the ideas expressed have distinction and are
+sometimes remarkable without eccentricity. He worked untiringly, and was
+at first annoyed at the presence of a companion: "Give me, I beg you, a
+room to myself," he wrote to Berryer, "even without a fire: I like being
+alone, I am sufficient for myself, because I can find things to do, and
+seed to sow for the future." His temperament was naturally mystical, but
+of that cold and acrid mysticism which we sometimes find in men of
+science, and mathematicians in particular. For Allègre's principal
+studies were mathematics, mechanics, and engineering. The lieutenant of
+police procured for him works on fortification, architecture, mechanics,
+hydraulics. The prisoner used them to compile essays on the most diverse
+questions, which he sent to the lieutenant of police in the hope of
+their procuring his liberation. Those essays which we possess show the
+extent of his intelligence and his education. Danry followed his example
+by-and-by, in this as in everything else, but clumsily. Allègre was
+also very clever with his fingers, and could make, so the officials of
+the château declared, whatever he pleased.
+
+Allègre was a dangerous man: the warders were afraid of him. Some time
+after his entrance into the Bastille he fell ill, and a man was set to
+look after him; the two men did not agree at all. Allègre sent complaint
+after complaint to the lieutenant of police. An inquiry was made which
+turned out not unfavourable to the keeper, and he was left with the
+prisoner. One morning--September 8, 1751--the officers of the Bastille
+heard cries and clamour in the "Well" tower. Hastily ascending, they
+found Allègre in the act of stabbing his companion, who lay on the floor
+held down by the throat, wallowing in the blood that streamed from a
+gash in the stomach. If Allègre had not been in the Bastille, the
+Parlement would have had him broken on the wheel in the Place de Grève:
+the Bastille was his safety, though he could no longer hope for a speedy
+liberation.
+
+Danry, in his turn, wore out the patience of his guardians. Major
+Chevalier, who was kindness itself, wrote to the lieutenant of police:
+"He is no better than Allègre, but though more turbulent and choleric,
+he is much less to be feared in every respect." The physician of the
+Bastille, Dr. Boyer, a member of the Academy, wrote likewise: "I have
+good reason to distrust the man." The temper of Danry became embittered.
+He began to revile the warders. One morning they were obliged to take
+from him a knife and other sharp instruments he had concealed. He used
+the paper they gave him to open communications with other prisoners and
+with people outside. Paper was withheld: he then wrote with his blood on
+a handkerchief; he was forbidden by the lieutenant of police to write to
+him with his blood, so he wrote on tablets made of bread crumbs, which
+he passed out secretly between two plates.
+
+The use of paper was then restored to him, which did not prevent him
+from writing to Berryer: "My lord, I am writing to you with my blood on
+linen, because the officers refuse me ink and paper; it is now more than
+six times that I have asked in vain to speak to them. What are you
+about, my lord? Do not drive me to extremities. At least, do not force
+me to be my own executioner. Send a sentry to break my head for me; that
+is the very least favour you can do me." Berryer, astonished at this
+missive, remarked on it to the major, who replied: "I have not refused
+paper to Danry."
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Beginning of a letter written with blood on linen by Danry (Latude)
+     while a prisoner at Vincennes, to Rougemont, the king's lieutenant.
+]
+
+So the prisoner forced them more and more to the conclusion that he was
+a madman. On October 13, 1753, he wrote to Dr. Quesnay to tell him that
+he wished him well, but that being too poor to give him anything else,
+he was making him a present of his body, which was on the point of
+perishing, for him to make a skeleton of. To the paper on which he
+wrote, Danry had sewn a little square of cloth, adding: "God has given
+the garments of martyrs the virtue of healing all manner of diseases. It
+is now fifty-seven months since I have been suffering an enforced
+martyrdom. So there is no doubt that to-day the cloth of my coat will
+work miracles; here is a bit for you." This letter was returned to the
+lieutenant of police in December, and on it we find a marginal note in
+Berryer's hand: "A letter worth keeping, as it reveals the prisoner's
+mind." We know in what fashion madmen were wont to be treated in the
+eighteenth century.
+
+But suddenly, to the great astonishment of the officers of the château,
+our two friends amended their character and their conduct. No more
+noises were heard in their room, and they answered politely anyone who
+came to speak to them. But their behaviour was even more odd than ever.
+Allègre used to walk up and down the room half naked, "to save his
+toggery," he said, and he sent letter after letter to his brother and
+the lieutenant of police, asking them to send him things, particularly
+shirts and handkerchiefs. Danry followed suit. "This prisoner," wrote
+Chevalier to the lieutenant of police, "is asking for linen. I shall not
+make a requisition, because he has seven very good shirts, four of them
+new; he has shirts on the brain." But why decline to humour a prisoner's
+whim? So the commissary of the Bastille had two dozen expensive shirts
+made--every one cost twenty livres, more than thirty-three shillings of
+our money--and some handkerchiefs of the finest cambric.
+
+If the wardrobe-keeper of the Bastille had kept her eyes open, she would
+have noticed that the serviettes and cloths which went into the room of
+the two companions were of much smaller dimensions when they came out.
+Our friends had established communication with their neighbours above
+and below, begging twine and thread from them and giving tobacco in
+exchange. They had succeeded in loosening the iron bars which prevented
+climbing up the chimney; at night they used to mount to the platforms,
+whence they conversed down the chimneys with prisoners in the other
+towers. One of these hapless creatures believed himself to be a prophet
+of God; he heard at night the sound of a voice descending upon his cold
+hearth: he revealed the miracle to the officers, who only considered him
+still more insane than before. On the terrace Allègre and Danry found
+the tools left there in the evening by the masons and gardeners employed
+at the Bastille. Thus they got possession of a mallet, an auger, two
+sorts of pulleys, and some bits of iron taken from the gun-carriages.
+All these they concealed in the hollow between the floor of their room
+and the ceiling of the room below.
+
+Allègre and Danry escaped from the Bastille on the night of February 25,
+1756. They climbed up the chimney till they reached the platform, and
+descended by means of their famous rope ladder, fastened to a
+gun-carriage. A wall separated the Bastille moat from that of the
+Arsenal. By the aid of an iron bar they succeeded in working out a large
+stone, and they escaped through the hole thus made. Their rope ladder
+was a work of long patience and amazing skill. When in after days
+Allègre went mad, Danry appropriated the whole credit of this
+enterprise which his friend had conceived and directed.
+
+At the moment of leaving, Allègre had written on a scrap of paper, for
+the officers of the Bastille, the following note, which is an excellent
+indication of his character:--
+
+"We have done no damage to the furniture of the governor, we have only
+made use of a few rags of coverlets of no possible use; the others are
+left just as they were. If some serviettes are missing, they will be
+found at the bottom of the water in the great moat, whither we are
+taking them to wipe our feet.
+
+"_Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!_
+
+"_Scito cor nostrum et cognosce semitas nostras._"[46]
+
+Our two companions had provided themselves with a portmanteau, and they
+made haste to change their clothes as soon as they had cleared the
+precincts of the fortress. A foreman of works whom Danry knew interested
+himself in them, and conducted them to one Rouit, a tailor, who lodged
+them for some little time. Rouit even lent Danry forty-eight livres,
+which he promised to return as soon as he reached Brussels. At the end
+of a month our two friends were across the frontier.
+
+It is very difficult to follow Danry's proceedings from the time when he
+left Rouit to the moment of his reincarceration in the Bastille. He has
+left, it is true, two accounts of his sojourn in Flanders and Holland;
+but these accounts are themselves inconsistent, and both differ from
+some original documents which remain to us.
+
+The two fugitives had considered it advisable not to set out together.
+Allègre was the first to arrive at Brussels, whence he wrote an insolent
+letter to Madame de Pompadour. This letter led to his discovery. On
+reaching Brussels, Danry learnt that his friend had been arrested. He
+lost no time in making for Holland, and at Amsterdam he took service
+with one Paul Melenteau. From Rotterdam he had written to his mother,
+and the poor creature, collecting her little savings, sent him 200
+livres by post. But Saint-Marc had already struck on the track of the
+fugitive. "The burgomaster of Amsterdam readily and gladly granted the
+request made by Saint-Marc on behalf of the king, through the
+ambassador, for the arrest and extradition of Danry." Louis XV. confined
+himself to claiming him as one of his subjects. Saint-Marc, disguised as
+an Armenian merchant, discovered him in his retreat. Danry was arrested
+in Amsterdam on June 1, 1756, conducted to a cell belonging to the town
+hall, and thence brought back to France and consigned to the Bastille on
+June 9. Word came from Holland that Saint-Marc was there regarded as a
+sorcerer.
+
+By his second escape the unhappy man had succeeded in making his case
+very serious. In the eighteenth century, escape from a state prison was
+punishable with death. The English, great apostles of humanity as they
+were, were no more lenient than the French; and everyone knows what
+treatment was meted out by Frederick II. to Baron de Trenck. He was to
+have remained in prison only one year; but after his second escape he
+was chained up in a gloomy dungeon; at his feet was the grave in which
+he was to be buried, and on it his name and a death's-head had been cut.
+
+The government of Louis XV. did not punish with such rigour as this. The
+fugitive was simply put in the cells for a time. At the Bastille the
+cells were damp and chilly dungeons. Danry has left in his _Memoirs_ an
+account of the forty months spent in this dismal place,--an account
+which makes one's hair stand on end; but it is packed full of
+exaggeration. He says that he spent three years with irons on his hands
+and feet: in November, 1756, Berryer offered to remove the irons from
+either hands or feet at his choice, and we see from a marginal note by
+Major Chevalier that he chose the feet. Danry adds that he lay all
+through the winter on straw without any coverlet: he was actually so
+well supplied with coverlets that he applied to Berryer for some others.
+To believe him you would think that when the Seine was in flood the
+water rose as high as his waist: as a fact, when the water threatened to
+invade the cell, the prisoner was removed. Again, he says that he passed
+there forty months in absolute darkness: the light of his prison was
+certainly not very brilliant, but it was sufficient to enable him to
+read and write, and we learn from letters he sent to the lieutenant of
+police that he saw from his cell all that went on in the courtyard of
+the Bastille. Finally, he tells us of a variety of diseases he
+contracted at the time, and cites in this connection the opinion of an
+oculist who came to attend him. But this very report was forged by Danry
+himself, and the rest he invented to match.
+
+In this cell, where he professes to have been treated in so barbarous a
+manner, Danry, however, proved difficult enough to deal with, as we
+judge from the reports of Chevalier. "Danry has a thoroughly nasty
+temper; he sends for us at eight o'clock in the morning, and asks us to
+send warders to the market to buy him fish, saying that he never eats
+eggs, artichokes, or spinach, and that he insists on eating fish; and
+when we refuse, he flies into a furious passion." That was on fast days;
+on ordinary days it was the same. "Danry swore like a trooper, that is,
+in his usual way, and after the performance said to me: 'Major, when you
+give me a fowl, at least let it be stuffed!'" He was not one of the
+vulgar herd, he said, "one of those fellows you send to Bicêtre." And he
+demanded to be treated in a manner befitting his condition.
+
+It was just the same with regard to clothes. One is amazed at the sight
+of the lists of things the lieutenant of police got made for him. To
+give him satisfaction, the administration did not stick at the most
+unreasonable expense, and it was by selling these clothes that Danry, at
+his various escapes, procured a part of the money he was so much in
+need of. He suffered from rheumatism, so they provided him with
+dressing-gowns lined with rabbit-skin, vests lined with silk plush,
+gloves and fur hats, and first-rate leather breeches. In his _Memoirs_
+Danry lumps all these as "half-rotten rags." Rochebrune, the commissary
+charged with the prisoners' supplies, was quite unable to satisfy him.
+"You instructed me," he wrote to the major, "to get a dressing-gown made
+for the Sieur Danry, who asks for a calamanco with red stripes on a blue
+ground. I have made inquiries for such stuff of a dozen tradesmen, who
+have no such thing, and indeed would be precious careful not to have it,
+for there is no sale for that kind of calamanco. I don't see why I
+should satisfy the fantastic tastes of a prisoner who ought to be very
+well pleased at having a dressing-gown that is warm and well-fitting."
+On another occasion, the major writes: "This man Danry has never up to
+the present consented to accept the breeches that M. de Rochebrune got
+made for him, though they are excellent, lined with good leather, with
+silk garters, and in the best style." And Danry had his own pretty way
+of complaining. "I beg you," he wrote to the governor, "to have the
+goodness to tell M. de Sartine in plain terms that the four
+handkerchiefs he sent me are not fit to give to a galley-slave, and I
+will not have them on any account; but that I request him kindly to give
+me six print handkerchiefs, blue, and large, and two muslin cravats." He
+adds, "If there is no money in the treasury, go and ask Madame de
+Pompadour for some."
+
+One day Danry declared that something was wrong with his eyes.
+Grandjean, the king's oculist, came more than once to see him, ordered
+aromatic fumigations for him, gave him ointments and eye-salve; but it
+was soon seen that all that was wrong was that Danry desired to get a
+spy-glass, and to smuggle out, with the doctor's assistance, memoirs and
+letters.
+
+On September 1, 1759, Danry was removed from the cells and placed in a
+more airy chamber. He wrote at once to Bertin to thank him, and to tell
+him that he was sending him two doves. "You delight in doing good, and I
+shall have no less delight, my lord, if you favour me by accepting this
+slight mark of my great gratitude.
+
+"Tamerlaine allowed himself to be disarmed by a basket of figs presented
+to him by the inhabitants of a town he was proceeding to besiege. The
+Marquise de Pompadour is a Christian lady; I beg you to allow me to send
+her also a pair: perhaps she will allow her heart to be touched by these
+two innocent pigeons. I append a copy of the letter which will accompany
+them:--
+
+     "'MADAM,--Two pigeons used to come every day to pick grains out of
+     my straw; I kept them, and they gave me young ones. I venture to
+     take the liberty of presenting you with this pair as a mark of my
+     respect and affection. I beseech you in mercy to be good enough to
+     accept them, with as much pleasure as I have in offering them to
+     you. I have the honour to be, with the profoundest respect, Madam,
+     your very humble and obedient servant,
+
+"'DANRY, for eleven years at the Bastille.'"
+
+Why did not Danry always make so charming a use of the permission
+accorded him to write to the minister, the lieutenant of police, Madame
+de Pompadour, Dr. Quesnay, and his mother? He wrote incessantly, and we
+have letters of his in hundreds, widely differing one from another. Some
+are suppliant and pathetic: "My body is wasting away every day in tears
+and blood, I am worn out." He writes to Madame de Pompadour:--"Madam,--I
+have never wished you anything but well; be then sensible to the voice
+of tears, of my innocence, and of a poor despairing mother of sixty-six
+years. Madam, you are well aware of my martyrdom. I beg you in God's
+name to grant me my precious liberty; I am spent, I am dying, my blood
+is all on fire by reason of my groaning; twenty times in the night I am
+obliged to moisten my mouth and nostrils to get my breath." Everyone
+knows the famous letter beginning with the words, "I have been suffering
+now for 100,000 hours." He writes to Quesnay: "I present myself to you
+with a live coal upon my head, indicating my pressing necessity." The
+images he uses are not always so happy: "Listen," he says to Berryer,
+"to the voice of the just bowels with which you are arrayed"!
+
+In other letters the prisoner alters his tone; to plaints succeed cries
+of rage and fury, "he steeps his pen in the gall with which his soul is
+saturated." He no longer supplicates, he threatens. There is nothing to
+praise in the style of these epistles: it is incorrect and vulgar,
+though at times vigorous and coloured with vivid imagery. To the
+lieutenant of police he writes: "When a man is to be punished in this
+accursed prison, the air is full of it, the punishments fall quicker
+than the thunderbolt; but when it is a case of succouring a man who is
+unfortunate, I see nothing but crabs;" and he addresses to him these
+lines of Voltaire:--
+
+    "Perish those villains born, whose hearts of steel
+     No touch of ruth for others' woes can feel."
+
+He predicts terrible retribution for the ministers, the magistrates, and
+Madame de Pompadour. To her he writes: "You will see yourself one day
+like that owl in the park of Versailles; all the birds cast water upon
+him to choke him, to drown him; if the king chanced to die, before two
+hours were past someone would set five or six persons at your heels, and
+you would yourself pack to the Bastille." The accused by degrees becomes
+transformed into the accuser; he writes to Sartine: "I am neither a dog
+nor a criminal, but a man like yourself." And the lieutenant of police,
+taking pity on him, writes on one of these letters sent to the minister
+of Paris: "When Danry writes thus, it is not that he is mad, but frantic
+from long imprisonment." The magistrate counsels the prisoner "to keep
+out of his letters all bitterness, which can only do him harm." Bertin
+corrected with his own hand the petitions Danry sent to the Marquise de
+Pompadour; in the margin of one of them we read, "I should think I was
+prejudicing him and his interests if I sent on to Madame de Pompadour a
+letter in which he ventures to reproach her with having _abused his good
+faith and confidence_." Having amended the letter, the lieutenant of
+police himself carried it to Versailles.
+
+The years of captivity, far from humbling the prisoner and abasing his
+pride, only made him the more arrogant; his audacity grew from day to
+day, and he was not afraid of speaking to the lieutenants of police
+themselves, who knew his history, about his fortune which had been
+ruined, his brilliant career which had been cut short, his whole family
+plunged into despair. At first the magistrate would shrug his shoulders;
+insensibly he would be won over by these unwavering assertions, by this
+accent of conviction; and he ends actually by believing in this high
+birth, this fortune, this genius, in all which Danry had perhaps come to
+believe himself. Then Danry takes a still higher tone: he claims not
+only his freedom, but compensation, large sums of money, honours. But
+one must not think that this sprang from a sordid sentiment unworthy of
+him: "If I propose compensation, my lord, it is not for the sake of
+getting money, it is only so that I may smooth away all the obstacles
+which may delay the end of my long suffering."
+
+In return, he is very ready to give the lieutenant of police some good
+advice--to indicate the means of advancement in his career, to show him
+how to set about getting appointed secretary of state, to compose for
+him the speech he is to make to the king at his first audience. He adds:
+"This very time is extremely favourable to you; it is the auspicious
+hour: profit by it. Before they take horse on the day of rejoicing for
+the conclusion of peace, you ought to be a counsellor of state."
+
+He is very ready also to send to the king schemes conceived in his
+prison for the welfare of the realm. Now it is a suggestion to give
+sergeants and officers on the battlefield muskets instead of spontoons
+and pikes, by which the French arms would be strengthened by 25,000 good
+fusiliers. Now it is a suggestion for increasing postal facilities,
+which would augment the resources of the Treasury by several millions
+every year. He recommends the erection of public granaries in the
+principal towns, and draws up plans of battle for giving unheard-of
+strength to a column of men three deep. We might mention other and
+better suggestions. These notions were drowned in a flood of words, an
+unimaginable wealth of verbiage, with parallels drawn from the history
+of all periods and every country. His manuscripts were illustrated with
+pen and ink sketches. Danry copied and recopied them incessantly, sent
+them to all and sundry in all sorts of forms, persuaded the sentinels
+that these lofty conceptions intimately concerned the safety of the
+state and would win him an immense fortune. Thus he induced these good
+fellows to compromise their situation by carrying the papers secretly to
+ministers, members of the Parlement, marshals of France; he threw them
+from the windows of his room, and, wrapped in snowballs, from the top of
+the towers. These memoirs are the work of a man whose open and active
+mind, of incredible activity indeed, plans, constructs, invents without
+cessation or repose.
+
+Among these bundles of papers we have discovered a very touching letter
+from the prisoner's mother, Jeanneton Aubrespy, who wrote to her son
+from Montagnac on June 14, 1759:--
+
+     "Do not do me the injustice of thinking that I have forgotten you,
+     my dear son, my loving son. Could I shut you out of my thoughts,
+     you whom I bear always in my heart? I have always had a great
+     longing to see you again, but to-day I long more than ever, I am
+     constantly concerned for you, I think of nothing but you, I am
+     wholly filled with you. Do not worry, my dear son; that is the only
+     favour I ask of you. Your misfortunes will come to an end, and
+     perhaps it is not far off. I hope that Madame de Pompadour will
+     pardon you; for that I am trying to win heaven and earth over to
+     your cause. The Lord is putting my submission and yours to a long
+     test, so as to make us better realize the worth of His favour. Do
+     not distress yourself, my son. I hope to have the happiness of
+     receiving you again, and of embracing you more tenderly than ever.
+     Adieu, my son, my dear son, my loving son, I love you, and I shall
+     love you dearly to the grave. I beg you to give me news of your
+     health. I am, and always shall be, your good mother,
+
+DAUBRESPI, _widow_."
+
+
+
+Is not this letter charming in its artless pathos? The son's reply is
+equally touching; but on reading it again one feels that it was to pass
+under the eyes of the lieutenant of police; on examining it closely, one
+sees the sentiments grimacing between the lines.
+
+No one knew better than Danry how to play on the souls of others, to
+awake in them, at his will, pity or tenderness, astonishment or
+admiration. No one has surpassed him in the art, difficult in very
+truth, of posing as a hero, a genius, and a martyr, a part that we shall
+see him sustain for twenty years without faltering.
+
+In 1759 there entered upon the office of lieutenant of police a man who
+was henceforth to occupy Danry's mind almost exclusively--Gabriel de
+Sartine. He was a fine sceptic, of amiable character and pleasing
+manners. He was loved by the people of Paris, who boasted of his
+administrative abilities and his spirit of justice. He exerted himself
+in his turn to render the years of captivity less cruel to Danry. "He
+allowed me," writes the latter, "what no other State prisoner has ever
+obtained, the privilege of walking along the top of the towers, in the
+open air, to preserve my health." He cheered the prisoner with genial
+words, and urged him to behave well and no longer to fill his letters
+with insults. "Your fate," he told him, "is in your own hands." He
+looked into Danry's scheme for the construction of public granaries, and
+when he had read it said, "Really, there are excellent things, most
+excellent things in it." He visited Danry in prison and promised to do
+his utmost to obtain his liberation. He himself put into the hands of
+Madame de Pompadour the _Grand Mémoire_ which Danry had drawn up for
+her. In this memorial the prisoner told the favourite that in return for
+a service he had rendered her in sending her a "hieroglyphic symbol" to
+put her on her guard against the machinations of her enemies, she had
+caused him to suffer unjustly for twelve years. Moreover, he would now
+only accept his freedom along with an indemnity of 60,000 livres. He
+added: "Be on your guard! When your prisoners get out and publish your
+cruelties abroad, they will make you hateful to heaven and the whole
+earth!" It is not surprising that this _Grand Mémoire_ had practically
+no result. Sartine promised that he would renew his efforts on his
+behalf. "If, unhappily, you should meet with some resistance to the
+entreaties you are about to make for me," wrote Danry, "I take the
+precaution of sending you a copy of the scheme I sent to the king."
+(This was the memorial suggesting that muskets should be given to the
+officers and sergeants.) "Now the king has been putting my scheme in
+operation for five years or more, and he will continue to avail himself
+of it every time we are at war." Sartine proceeded to Versailles, this
+marvellous scheme in his pocket. He showed it to the ministers and
+pleaded on behalf of this protégé of his who, from the depths of his
+dungeon, was doing his country service. But on his return he wrote to
+the major of the Bastille a note in regard to Danry, in which we read:
+"They have not made use, as he believes, of his military scheme."
+
+Danry had asked several times to be sent to the colonies. In 1763 the
+government was largely occupied with the colonization of La Désirade. We
+find a letter of June 23, 1763, in which Sartine proposes to send Danry
+to La Désirade "with an introduction to the commanding officer." But
+nothing came of these proposals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All his life, Danry sought to compass his ends by the aid of women. He
+was well aware of all the tenderness and devotion there is in these
+light heads; he knew that sentiment is always stronger in them than
+reason: "I was always looking out for women, and wished to find young
+women, for their gentle and loving soul is more susceptible of pity;
+misfortune moves them, stirs in them a more lively interest; their
+impressionability is less quickly dulled, and so they are capable of
+greater efforts."
+
+While taking his walk on the towers of the Bastille in the fresh morning
+air, he tried by means of gestures and signals to open relations with
+the people of the neighbourhood. "One day I noticed two young persons
+working alone in a room, whose countenances struck me as pretty and
+gentle. I was not deceived. One of them having glanced in my direction,
+I wafted her with my hand a salutation which I endeavoured to make
+respectful and becoming, whereupon she told her sister, who instantly
+looked at me too. I then saluted them both in the same manner, and they
+replied to me with an appearance of interest and kindliness. From that
+moment we set up a sort of correspondence between us." The girls were
+two good-looking laundresses named Lebrun, the daughters of a wigmaker.
+And our rogue, the better to stimulate the little fools to enthusiastic
+service in his behalf, knocked at the door of their young hearts,
+willing enough to fly open. He spoke to them of youth, misfortune,
+love--and also of his fortune, prodigious, he said, the half of which he
+offered them. Glowing with ardour, the girls spared for him neither
+time, nor trouble, nor what little money they had.
+
+The prisoner had put them in possession of several of his schemes, among
+others the military one, with letters for certain writers and persons of
+importance, and in addition a "terrible" indictment of Madame de
+Pompadour for the king, in which "her birth and her shame, all her
+thefts and cruelties were laid bare." He begged the girls to have
+several copies made, which they were then to send to the addresses
+indicated. Soon large black crosses daubed on a neighbouring wall
+informed the prisoner that his instructions had been carried out. Danry
+seems no longer to have doubted that his woes were coming to an end,
+that the gates of the Bastille were about to fly open before him, and
+that he would triumphantly leave the prison only to enter a palace of
+fortune: _Parta victoria!_[47] he exclaims in a burst of happiness.
+
+And so we come to one of the most extraordinary episodes in this strange
+life.
+
+In December, 1763, the Marquise of Pompadour was taken seriously ill.
+"An officer of the Bastille came up to my room and said to me: 'Sir,
+write four words to the Marquise de Pompadour, and you may be sure that
+in less than a week you will have recovered your freedom.' I replied to
+the major that prayers and tears only hardened the heart of that cruel
+woman, and that I would not write to her. However, he came back next day
+with the same story, and I replied in the same terms as on the previous
+day. Scarcely had he gone than Daragon, my warder, came into my room and
+said: 'Believe the major when he tells you that within a week you will
+be free: if he tells you so, depend upon it he is sure of it.' Next day
+but one the officer came to me for the third time: 'Why are you so
+obstinate?' I thanked him--it was Chevalier, major of the Bastille--for
+the third time, telling him that I would sooner die than write again to
+that implacable shrew.
+
+"Six or eight days after, my two young ladies came and kissed their
+hands to me, at the same time displaying a roll of paper on which were
+written in large characters the words: 'Madame de Pompadour is dead!'
+The Marquise de Pompadour died on April 19, 1764, and two months
+afterwards, on June 19, M. de Sartine came to the Bastille and gave me
+an audience; the first thing he said was that we would say no more about
+the past, but that at the earliest moment he would go to Versailles and
+demand of the minister the justice which was my due." And we find, in
+truth, among the papers of the lieutenant of police, the following note,
+dated June 18, 1764: "M. Duval (one of the lieutenant's secretaries)--to
+propose at the first inspection that Danry be liberated and exiled to
+his own part of the country."
+
+Returning to his room, Danry reflected on these developments; for the
+lieutenant of police to show so much anxiety for his liberation was
+evidently a sign that he was afraid of him, and that his memorials had
+reached their destination and achieved their end. But he would be a
+great ass to be satisfied with a mere liberation: "100,000 livres" would
+scarcely suffice to throw oblivion over the injustices with which he had
+been overwhelmed.
+
+He revolved these thoughts in his head for several days. To accept
+freedom at the hands of his persecutors would be to pardon the past, a
+mistake he would never fall into. The door opened, the major entered,
+bearing in his hand a note written by de Sartine: "You will tell County
+Number 4 that I am working for his effectual liberation." The officer
+went out; Danry immediately sat down at his table and wrote to the
+lieutenant of police a letter replete with threats, insults, and
+obscenity. The original is lost, but we have an abstract made by Danry
+himself. He concluded with leaving to Sartine a choice: "he was either a
+mere lunatic, or else had allowed himself to be corrupted like a villain
+by the gold of the Marquis de Marigny, the Marquise de Pompadour's
+brother."
+
+"When Sartine received my letter, he wrote an answer which the major
+brought and read to me, in which these were his very words: that I was
+wrong to impute to him the length of my imprisonment, that if he had had
+his way I should long ago have been set free; and he ended by telling me
+that there was Bedlam for the mad. On which I said to the major: 'We
+shall see in a few days whether he will have the power to put me in
+Bedlam.' He did not deprive me of my walk on the towers; nine days
+after, he put me in the cells on bread and water." But Danry was not
+easily put out. No doubt they were only meaning to put his assurance to
+the test. He went down to his cell singing, and for several days
+continued to manifest the most confident gaiety.
+
+From that moment the prisoner made himself insufferable to his
+guardians. It was yells and violence from morning to night. He filled
+the whole Bastille with bursts of his "voice of thunder." Major
+Chevalier wrote to Sartine: "This prisoner would wear out the patience
+of the saintliest monk"; again: "He is full of gall and bitterness, he
+is poison pure and simple"; once more: "This prisoner is raving mad."
+
+The lieutenant of police suggested to Saint-Florentin, the minister, to
+transfer Danry to the keep of Vincennes. He was conducted there on the
+night of September 15, 1764. We are now entering on a new phase of his
+life. We shall find him still more wretched than in the past, but
+constantly swelling his demands and pretensions, and with reason, for he
+is now, mark you, a nobleman! He had learnt from a sentinel of the
+Bastille of the death of Henri Vissec de la Tude, lieutenant-colonel of
+a dragoon regiment, who had died at Sedan on January 31, 1761. From that
+day he determined that he was the son of that officer. And what were his
+reasons? Vissec de la Tude was from his own part of the country, he was
+a nobleman and rich, and he was dead. These arguments Danry considered
+excellent. He was, however, in complete ignorance of all that concerned
+his father and his new family; he did not know even the name "Vissec de
+la Tude," of which he made "Masers de la Tude"; Masers was the name of
+an estate belonging to Baron de Fontès, a relation of Henri de Vissec.
+The latter was not a marquis, as Danry believed, but simply a chevalier;
+he died leaving six sons, whilst Danry represents him as dying without
+issue. It goes without saying that all that our hero relates about his
+father in his _Memoirs_ is pure invention. The Chevalier de la Tude
+never knew of the existence of the son of Jeanneton Aubrespy, and when
+in later years Danry asked the children to recognize him as their
+natural brother, his pretensions were rejected. Nevertheless our
+gentleman will henceforth sign his letters and memoirs "Danry, or rather
+Henri Masers d'Aubrespy," then "de Masers d'Aubrespy," then "de Masers
+de la Tude." When Danry had once got an idea in his head, he never let
+it go. He repeated it unceasingly until he had forced it upon the
+conviction of all about him--pertinacity which cannot fail to excite our
+admiration. In the patent of Danry's pension of 400 livres granted by
+Louis XVI. in 1784, the king calls the son of poor Jeanneton "Vicomte
+Masers de la Tude."
+
+As may well be imagined, the Vicomte de la Tude could not accept his
+liberty on the same terms as Danry. The latter would have been satisfied
+with 60,000 livres: the viscount demands 150,000 and the cross of St.
+Louis to boot. So he writes to the lieutenant of police. Sartine was too
+sensible a man to be long obdurate to the prisoner on account of these
+extravagances. "I was transferred to the keep of Vincennes on the night
+of September 15, 1764. About nine hours after, the late M. de Guyonnet,
+king's lieutenant, came and saw me in the presence of the major and the
+three warders, and said: 'M. de Sartine has instructed me to inform you,
+on his behalf, that provided you behave yourself quietly for a short
+time, he will set you free. You have written him a very violent letter,
+and you must apologize for it.'" Danry adds: "When all is said and done,
+M. de Sartine did treat me well." He granted him for two hours every day
+"the extraordinary promenade of the moats." "When a lieutenant of
+police," says Danry, "granted this privilege to a prisoner, it was with
+the object of promptly setting him free." On November 23, 1765, Danry
+was walking thus, in company with a sentinel, outside the keep. The fog
+was dense. Turning suddenly towards his keeper, Danry said, "What do you
+think of this weather?" "It's very bad." "Well, it's just the weather to
+escape in." He took five paces and was out of sight. "I escaped from
+Vincennes," writes Danry, "without trickery; an ox would have managed it
+as well." But in the speech he delivered later in the National Assembly,
+the matter took a new complexion. "Think," he cried, "of the unfortunate
+Latude, in his third escape, pursued by twenty soldiers, and yet
+stopping and disarming under their very eyes the sentinel who had taken
+aim at him!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Latude was at large, he found himself without resources, as at his
+first escape. "I escaped with my feet in slippers and not a sou in my
+pocket; I hadn't a thing to bless myself with." He took refuge with his
+young friends, the Misses Lebrun.
+
+In their keeping he found a part of his papers, plans and projects,
+memorials and dissertations. He sent "a basketful" of these to Marshal
+de Noailles, begging him to continue to honour him with his protection,
+and imparting to him "four great discoveries he had just made; first,
+the true cause of the tides; secondly, the true cause of mountains, but
+for which the globe would be brought to a standstill and become
+speedily vitrified; thirdly, the cause of the ceaseless turning of the
+globe; fourthly, the cause of the saltness of sea-water." He wrote also
+to the Duke de Choiseul, minister of war, in order to obtain a reward
+for his military scheme; he wrote making overtures of peace to Sartine:
+in return for an advance of 10,000 crowns of the 150,000 livres due to
+him, he would overlook the past: "I was resolved," he says, "to stake
+all on one cast." In reply, he received a letter naming a house where he
+would find 1200 livres obtained for him by Dr. Quesnay. He proceeded to
+the address indicated--and was there captured.
+
+He was at once taken back to Vincennes. He declares that he was about to
+be set at liberty at the moment of his escape: and now a new detention
+was commencing. We shall not relate in detail the life he was now to
+lead. Materially he continued to be well treated, but his mind became
+affected, his rages became more and more violent, reaching at last
+paroxysms of fury. Here are some extracts from letters and memorials
+sent to Sartine: "By all the devils, this is coming it too strong. It is
+true, sir, that I'd defy the blackest devils in all hell to teach you
+anything in the way of cruelty; and that's but poor praise for you." He
+writes on another occasion: "The crime of every one of us is to have
+seen through your villainies: we are to perish, are we? how delighted
+you would be if some one told you that we had all strangled ourselves in
+our cells!" Danry reminds the lieutenant of police of the tortures of
+Enguerrand de Marigni, adding: "Remember that more than a thousand
+wretches have been broken in the Place de Grève who had not committed
+the hundredth part of your crimes."... "Not a single person would be
+astonished to see you flayed alive, your skin tanned, and your carcase
+thrown into the gutters for the dogs to eat."... "But Monsieur laughs
+at everything, Monsieur fears neither God, nor king, nor devil, Monsieur
+swills down his crimes like buttermilk!"
+
+In prison Latude wrote memoirs which he filled with calumnies on the
+ministers and the court. These memoirs are composed in the most dramatic
+style, with an inimitable accent of sincerity. It was known that the
+prisoner found a thousand means of sending them outside the walls, and
+it was feared that they might be circulated among the populace, whose
+minds--the year is 1775--were beginning to ferment. Latude had just been
+flung into a cell in consequence of a fresh outbreak against his
+jailers. "On March 19, 1775, the king's lieutenant entered, accompanied
+by the major and three warders, and said to me: 'I have obtained leave
+to let you out of the cell, but on one condition: that you hand over
+your papers.'
+
+"'Hand over my papers! I tell you, sir, I'd rather be done to death in
+this cell than show the white feather so!'
+
+"'Your trunk is upstairs in your room: I've only to say the word and the
+seals would be broken and your papers taken out.'
+
+"I replied: 'Sir, justice has formalities to which you are bound to
+conform, and you are not allowed to commit such outrages.'
+
+"He took five or six steps out of the cell, and as I did not call him
+back, he came back himself and said: 'Just hand them to me for ten days
+to examine them, and I give you my word of honour that at the end of
+that time I will have them returned to your room.'
+
+"I replied: 'I will not let you have them for two hours even.'
+
+"'All right,' he said; 'as you won't entrust them to me, you have only
+to stay where you are.'"
+
+Latude relates in his _Memoirs_ with great indignation the story of a
+flute he had made, on which he used to play, his sole diversion during
+the long hours of solitude; his jailers had the barbarity to take it
+from him. The governor of the fortress, out of compassion, offered to
+restore it. "But it will only be on condition that you play by day only,
+and not at night." At this stipulation, writes Latude in his _Rêveries_,
+"I could not refrain from bantering him, saying, 'Why, don't you know,
+sir, that forbidding a thing is just the way to make me eager for it?'"
+
+And so at Vincennes as at Paris they came to consider Danry as a madman.
+Among the books given him for his amusement there were some dealing with
+sorcery. These he read and re-read, and from that time onward he saw in
+all the incidents of his life nothing but the perpetual intervention of
+devils evoked by the witch Madame de Pompadour and her brother the
+magician, the Marquis de Marigny.
+
+Sartine came again to see the prisoner on November 8, 1772. Danry begged
+him to send a police officer to make a copy of a memorial he had drawn
+up for his own justification; to send also an advocate to assist him
+with his advice, and a doctor, to examine the state of his health. The
+police officer arrived on the 24th. On the 29th, he wrote to the
+lieutenant of police: "I have the honour to report that in pursuance of
+your orders I proceeded to the château of Vincennes on the 24th curt.,
+to hear from Danry something which, he asserts, concerns the minister:
+it is impossible to hear anything which concerns him less. He began by
+saying that to write all he had to tell me I should have to remain for
+three weeks with him. He was bound to tell me the story of 180
+sorceries, and I was to copy the story, according to him, from a heap of
+papers he drew from a bag, the writing of which is undecipherable."
+
+We know from Danry himself what passed at the visit of the advocate. He
+entered the prisoner's room about noon. Danry handed him two memorials
+he had drawn up and explained their purport. "Instantly he cut me short,
+saying, 'Sir, I have no belief whatever in witchcraft.' I did not give
+in, but said, 'Sir, I cannot show you the devil in bodily shape, but I
+am very certain I can convince you, by the contents of this memorial,
+that the late Marquise de Pompadour was a witch, and that the Marquis de
+Marigny, her brother, is at this very time still having dealings with
+the devil.'
+
+"The advocate had read but a few pages when he stopped dead, put the
+manuscript on the table, and said, as though he had been wakened out of
+a deep sleep, 'Would you not like to get out of prison?' I replied:
+'There's no doubt of that.' 'And do you intend to remain in Paris, or to
+go to your home?' 'When I am free, I shall go home.' 'But have you any
+means?' Upon this I took his hand and said: 'My dear sir, I beg you not
+to take offence at what I am going to say.' 'Speak on,' he said, 'say
+whatever you like, I shall not be offended.' 'Well then, I see very
+clearly that the devil has already got hold of you.'"
+
+In the same year, Malesherbes made his celebrated inspection of the
+prisons. "This virtuous minister came to see me at the beginning of
+August, 1775, and listened to me with the most lively interest." The
+historian who has the completest knowledge of everything relating to the
+Bastille, François Ravaisson, believed that Malesherbes left the
+wretched man in prison out of regard for his colleague Maurepas. "One
+would have thought that Maurepas' first act on resuming office would
+have been to release his old accomplice." This conjecture is destroyed
+by a letter from Malesherbes to the governor of Vincennes: "I am busy,
+sir, with the examination of the papers relating to your various
+prisoners. Danry, Thorin, and Maréchal are quite mad, according to the
+particulars furnished to me, and the two first gave indubitable marks
+of madness in my presence."
+
+In consequence, Danry was transferred to Charenton on September 27,
+1775, "on account of mental derangement, in virtue of a royal order of
+the 23rd of the said month, countersigned by Lamoignon. The king will
+pay for his keep." On entering his new abode, Latude took the precaution
+to change his name a third time, and signed the register "Danger."
+
+In passing from the fortress of Vincennes to the hospital of Charenton,
+Danry thought it was as well to rise still higher in dignity. So we see
+him henceforth styling himself "engineer, geographer, and royal
+pensioner at Charenton."
+
+His situation was sensibly changed for the better. He speaks of the
+kindnesses shown him by the Fathers of La Charité.[48] He had companions
+whose society pleased him. Halls were set apart for billiards,
+backgammon, and cards. He had company at his meals and in his walks. He
+met Allègre, his old fellow-prisoner, whom he came upon among the
+dangerous lunatics in the dungeons; Allègre had been removed in 1763
+from the Bastille, where he was shattering and destroying everything.
+His latest fancy was that he was God. As to Danry, he had taken so
+kindly to his rôle as nobleman that to see his aristocratic and
+well-to-do air, to hear his conversation, full of reminiscences of his
+family and his early life, no one could have doubted that he actually
+was the brilliant engineer officer he set up for, who had fallen in the
+prime of life a victim to the intrigues of the favourite. He hobnobbed
+with the aristocratic section of society at Charenton and struck up an
+intimacy with one of his associates, the Chevalier de Moyria, son of a
+lieutenant-colonel, and a knight of Saint-Louis.
+
+Meanwhile the Parlement, which sent a commission every year to inspect
+the Charenton asylum--a commission before which Danry appeared on two
+separate occasions--did not decide that he ought to be set at liberty.
+But one fine day in September, 1776, the prior of the Fathers, who took
+a quite exceptional interest in the lot of his pensioner, meeting him in
+the garden, said to him abruptly: "We are expecting a visit from the
+lieutenant of police; get ready a short and taking address to say to
+him." The lieutenant of police, Lenoir, saw Danry, and listened to him
+attentively, and as the prior's account of him was entirely favourable,
+the magistrate promised him his liberty. "Then Father Prudentius, my
+confessor, who was behind me, drew me by the arm to get me away, fearing
+lest, by some imprudent word, I might undo the good that had been
+decided on"--a charming incident, much to the honour of Father
+Prudentius.
+
+But on consideration it appeared dangerous to fling so suddenly upon
+society a man who would be at a loss how to live, having neither
+relatives nor fortune, having no longer the means of gaining a
+livelihood, and a man, moreover, whom there was only too much reason to
+mistrust. Lenoir asked the prisoner if, once set at liberty, he would
+find the wherewithal to assure his existence; if he had any property; if
+he could give the names of any persons willing to go bail for him.
+
+What did this mean--_if_ he had any property, _if_ he could find
+sureties? He, Masers de Latude! Why, his whole family, when the Marquise
+de Pompadour had him put in the Bastille, was occupying a brilliant
+position! Why, his mother, of whose death he had had the agony to hear,
+had left a house and considerable estates! Latude took his pen, and
+without hesitation wrote to M. Caillet, royal notary at Montagnac: "My
+dear friend, I would bet ten to one you believe me dead; see how
+mistaken you are!... You have but to say the word and before the
+carnival is over we shall eat a capital leveret together." And he speaks
+to his friend the notary of the fortune left by his mother, and of his
+family, who all of them cannot fail to be interested in him. Latude
+himself was not greatly astonished at receiving no reply to this
+epistle: but it must have passed under the eyes of the lieutenant of
+police, and what more did he want?
+
+Latude's new friend, the Chevalier de Moyria, had already been for some
+time at liberty. The prisoner hastened to send him a copy of his letter
+to the notary. "The reply is a long time coming, M. Caillet is dead,
+doubtless." What is to become of him? These twenty-eight years of
+captivity have endangered his fortune, have made him lose his friends;
+how is he to find the remnant of his scattered family? Happily there
+remains to him a friendship, a friendship still recent, but already
+strong, in which he places his whole confidence. "Chevalier, it would
+only need your intervention to deliver me, by inducing your good mother
+to write to M. Lenoir." The Chevalier de Moyria sent an amiable reply.
+Danry wrote another and more urgent letter, with such success that not
+only the Chevalier's mother, but also an old friend of the Moyria
+family, Mercier de Saint-Vigor, a colonel, and controller-general of the
+queen's household, intervened, and made applications at Versailles. "On
+June 5, 1777, King Louis XVI. restored to me my freedom; I have in my
+pocket the warrant under his own hand!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On leaving Charenton, Danry signed an undertaking to depart immediately
+for Languedoc, an undertaking which he did not trouble to fulfil. Paris
+was the only city in France where a man of his stamp could thrive. He
+was now fifty-two years old, but was still youthful in appearance, full
+of go and vigour; his hair, as abundant as it had been in youth, had not
+become white. He soon found means of borrowing some money, and then we
+see him opening a campaign, exerting himself to get in touch with the
+ministers, gaining the protection of the Prince de Beauvau, distributing
+memorials in which he claimed a reward for great services rendered, and
+launched out into invectives against his oppressors, Sartine in
+particular. Minister Amelot sent for him, and in tones of severity
+notified him that he was to leave the city at once. Latude did not wait
+for the command to be repeated. He had reached Saint-Bris, about a
+hundred miles from the capital, when he was suddenly arrested by the
+police officer Marais. Brought back to Paris, he was locked up in the
+Châtelet on July 16, 1777, and on August 1 conducted to Bicêtre. The
+first use he had made of his liberty was to introduce himself to a lady
+of quality and extort money from her by menaces. The officer found a
+considerable sum in his possession.
+
+Bicêtre was not a state prison like the Bastille and Vincennes, or an
+asylum like Charenton; it was the thieves' prison. On entering, Danry
+took the precaution of changing his name a fourth time, calling himself
+Jedor. He is, moreover, careful in his _Memoirs_ to give us the reason
+of this fresh metamorphosis: "I would not sully my father's name by
+inscribing it on the register of this infamous place." From this day
+there begins for him a truly wretched existence; huddled with criminals,
+put on bread and water, his lodging is a cell. But his long martyrdom is
+nearing its end: the hour of his apotheosis is at hand!
+
+Louis XVI. had now been on the throne for several years, and France had
+become the most impressionable country in the world. Tears flowed at the
+slightest provocation. Was it the sentimental literature, which Rousseau
+made fashionable, that produced this moving result, or contrariwise, was
+the literature successful because it hit the taste of the day? At all
+events, the time was ripe for Latude. His recent unlucky experience was
+not to dishearten him. On the contrary, it is with a greater energy, a
+more poignant emotion, and cries still more heartrending, that he
+resumes the story of his interminable sufferings. The victim of cruel
+oppressors, of cowardly foes who have their own reasons for smothering
+his voice, he will not bend his head under his abominable treatment; he
+will remain proud, self-assured, erect before those who load him with
+irons!
+
+On the birth of the Dauphin, Louis XVI. resolved to admit his wretched
+prisoners to a share of his joy and to pronounce a great number of
+pardons. A special commission, composed of eight counsellors of the
+Châtelet and presided over by Cardinal de Rohan, sat at Bicêtre. Danry
+appeared before it on May 17, 1782. His new judges, as he testifies,
+heard his story with interest. But the decision of the commission was
+not favourable to him. He was not so much surprised at this as might be
+supposed: "The impure breath of vice," he wrote to the Marquis de
+Conflans, "has never tainted my heart, but there are magistrates who
+would let off guilty men with free pardons rather than expose themselves
+to the merited reproach of having committed injustice of the most
+revolting kind in keeping innocence for thirty-three years in irons."
+
+Giving rein to the marvellous activity of his brain, he composed at
+Bicêtre new schemes, memorials, and accounts of his misfortunes. To the
+Marquis de Conflans he sends a scheme for a hydraulic press, "the
+homage of an unfortunate nobleman who has grown old in irons"; he
+induces the turnkeys to carry memorials to all who may possibly interest
+themselves in him. The first to take compassion on him was a priest, the
+Abbé Legal, of the parish of St. Roch, and curate of Bicêtre. He visited
+him, consoled him, gave him money, showed him attentions. Cardinal de
+Rohan also took much interest in him, and sent him some assistance
+through his secretary. We are coming at last to Madame Legros. This
+wonderful story is so well known that we shall tell it briefly. A
+drunken turnkey chanced to lose one of Latude's memorials at a corner of
+the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois: it was picked up and
+opened by a woman, a haberdasher in a small way. Her heart burned within
+her as she read of these horrible sufferings, depicted in strokes of
+fire. She inspired her husband with her own emotion; henceforth it was
+to be the aim in life of these worthy people to effect the unhappy man's
+deliverance, and Madame Legros devoted herself to the self-imposed task
+with indefatigable ardour, courage, and devotion. "A grand sight," cries
+Michelet, "to see this poor, ill-clad woman going from door to door,
+paying court to footmen to win entrance into mansions, to plead her
+cause before the great, to implore their support!" In many houses she
+was well received. President de Gourgues, President de Lamoignon,
+Cardinal de Rohan, aided her with their influence. Sartine himself took
+steps on behalf of the unhappy man. Two advocates of the Parlement of
+Paris, Lacroix and Comeyras, devoted themselves to his cause. Copies
+were made of the prisoner's memorials and distributed in every
+drawing-room; they penetrated even into the boudoir of the queen. All
+hearts were stirred by the accents of this harrowing voice.
+
+The Marquis de Villette, who had become celebrated through the
+hospitality he showed to Voltaire when dying, conceived a passionate
+enthusiasm for Danry. He sent his steward to Bicêtre to offer him a
+pension of 600 livres on the sole condition of the prisoner's leaving
+his case entirely in the Marquis's hands. Latude received this singular
+proposal with becoming dignity. "For two years a poor woman has been
+devoting herself to my cause. I should be an ungrateful wretch if I did
+not leave my fate in her hands." He knew that this pension would not
+escape him, and it was not for 600 livres that he would have consented
+to rob his story of the touching and romantic features it was
+increasingly assuming.
+
+Further, the French Academy actually intervenes! D'Alembert is all fire
+and flame. From this time a stream of visitors of the highest
+distinction flows through the squalid prison. At length the king himself
+is led to look into the affair. He has the documentary evidence brought
+to him and examines it carefully. With what anxiety everyone awaits his
+decision! But Louis XVI., now acquainted with the case, replies that
+Latude will be released--_never_! At this decree, to all appearance
+irrevocable, all the prisoner's friends lose heart, except Madame
+Legros. The queen and Madame Necker are on her side. In 1783, Breteuil,
+the queen's man, comes into power; on March 24, 1784, the release is
+signed! The Vicomte de Latude receives a pension of 400 livres, but is
+exiled to his own part of the country. New importunities, new
+applications; at last they succeed: Latude is free to live in Paris!
+
+This is the grandest period in the life of a great man! Latude is soon
+in occupation of a modest but decent and well-ordered suite of rooms on
+the fourth floor. He lives with his two benefactors, M. and Madame
+Legros, petted, spoilt in a thousand ways. The Duchess of Beauvau has
+obtained for Madame Legros from Calonne, out of funds intended for the
+support of distressed gentlefolk, a pension of 600 livres: the Duchess
+of Kingston[49] grants a pension of the same amount. In addition to the
+royal pension, Latude receives 500 livres a year from President Dupaty
+and 300 from the Duke d'Ayen. Moreover, a public subscription is opened,
+and the list is filled with the greatest names in France. An agreeable
+competency is assured to the Legros couple and their adopted son. At its
+sitting on March 24, the French Academy solemnly awarded the Montyon
+prize to the valiant little haberdasher. "The Dame Legros came to
+receive the medal amid the acclamations of the whole assembly."
+
+The name of Latude is on everyone's lips; he wins admiration and pity on
+all sides. Ladies of the highest society are not above mounting to the
+fourth story, accompanied by their daughters, to bring the poor man "aid
+in money, with their tears." The hero has left a complacent description
+of the throng: duchesses, marchionesses, grandees of Spain, wearers of
+the cross of St. Louis, presidents of the Parlement, all these met at
+his house. Sometimes there were six or eight persons in his room.
+Everyone listened to his story and lavished on him marks of the most
+affectionate compassion, and no one failed before going away "to leave a
+mark of his sensibility." The wives of Marshals de Luxembourg and de
+Beauvau, the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, the Countess de Guimont, were
+among the most zealous. "Indeed," says our hero, "it would be extremely
+difficult for me to tell which of these countesses, marchionesses,
+duchesses, and princesses had the most humane, the most compassionate
+heart."
+
+Thus Latude became one of the lions of Paris: strangers flocked to his
+lodging, hostesses ran off with him. At table, when he spoke, all voices
+were hushed with an air of deference and respect; in the drawing-room
+you would find him seated in a gilt chair near the fireplace where great
+logs were blazing, and surrounded by a thick cluster of bright, silky,
+rustling robes. The Chevalier de Pougens, son of the Prince de Conti,
+pressed him to come and stay at his house; Latude graciously consented.
+The American ambassador, the illustrious Jefferson, invited him to
+dinner.
+
+Latude has himself described this enchanted life: "Since I left prison,
+the greatest lords of France have done me the honour of inviting me to
+eat with them, but I have not found a single house--except that of the
+Comte d'Angevillier, where you could meet men of wit and learning in
+scores, and receive all sorts of civilities on the part of the countess;
+and that of M. Guillemot, keeper of the royal palaces, one of the most
+charming families to be found in Paris--where you are more at your ease
+than with the Marquis de Villette.
+
+"When a man has felt, as I have felt, the rage of hunger, he always
+begins by speaking of his food. The Marquis de Villette possesses a cook
+who is a match for the most skilful in his art: in a word, his table is
+first-rate. At the tables of the dukes and peers and marshals of France
+there is eternal ceremony, and everyone speaks like a book, whereas at
+that of the Marquis de Villette, men of wit and learning always form the
+majority of the company. All the first-class musicians have a cover set
+at his table, and on at least three days of the week he gives a little
+concert."
+
+On August 26, 1788, died one of the benefactresses of Latude, the
+Duchess of Kingston, who did not fail to mention her protégé in her
+will. We see him dutifully assisting at the sale of the lady's furniture
+and effects. He even bought a few things, giving a _louis d' or_ in
+payment. Next day, the sale being continued, the auctioneer handed the
+coin back to Latude: it was bad. Bad! What! did they take the Vicomte de
+Latude for a sharper? The coin bad! Who, he would like to know, had the
+insolence to make "an accusation so derogatory to his honour and his
+reputation?" Latude raised his voice, and the auctioneer threatened to
+bundle him out of the room. The insolent dog! "Bundle out rogues, not
+gentlemen!" But the auctioneer sent for the police, who put "the Sieur
+de Latude ignominiously outside." He went off calmly, and the same day
+summoned the auctioneer before the Châtelet tribunal, "in order to get a
+reparation as authoritative as the defamation had been public."
+
+In the following year (1789) Latude made a journey into England. He had
+taken steps to sue Sartine, Lenoir, and the heirs of Madame de Pompadour
+in the courts in order to obtain the damages due to him. In England, he
+drew up a memorandum for Sartine, in which he informed the late
+lieutenant of police of the conditions on which he would withdraw his
+actions. "M. de Sartine, you will give me, as compensation for all the
+harm and damage you have made me suffer unjustly, the sum of 900,000
+livres; M. Lenoir, 600,000 livres; the heirs of the late Marquise de
+Pompadour and Marquis de Menars, 100,000 crowns; in all, 1,800,000
+livres;" that is to say, about £160,000 in English money of to-day.
+
+[Illustration: LATUDE.
+
+_From the Painting by Vestier (Hôtel Carnavalet)._]
+
+The Revolution broke out. If the epoch of Louis XVI., with its mildness
+and fellow-feeling, had been favourable to our hero, the Revolution
+seems to have been ordained on purpose for him. The people rose against
+the tyranny of kings: the towers of the Bastille were overthrown.
+Latude, the victim of kings, the victim of the Bastille and arbitrary
+warrants, was about to appear in all his glory.
+
+He hastened to throw into the gutter his powdered peruque and viscount's
+frock; listen to the revolutionist, fierce, inflexible, indomitable,
+_uncompromising_: "Frenchmen, I have won the right to tell you the
+truth, and if you are free, you cannot but love to hear it.
+
+"For thirty-five years I meditated in dungeons on the audacity and
+insolence of despots; with loud cries I was calling down vengeance, when
+France in indignation rose up as one man in one sublime movement and
+levelled despotism with the dust. The will to be free is what makes a
+nation free; and you have proved it. But to preserve freedom a nation
+must make itself worthy of it, and that is what remains for you to do!"
+
+In the Salon of 1789 there were two portraits of Latude with the famous
+ropeladder. Below one of these portraits, by Vestier, a member of the
+Royal Academy, these lines were engraved:--
+
+    Instruit par ses malheurs et sa captivité
+    A vaincre des tyrans les efforts et la rage,
+    Il apprit aux Français comment le vrai courage
+            Peut conquérir la liberté.[50]
+
+In 1787 the Marquis de Beaupoil-Saint-Aulaire had written, inspired by
+Latude himself, the story of the martyr's captivity. Of this book two
+editions appeared in the same year. In 1789 Latude published the
+narrative of his escape from the Bastille, as well as his _Grand
+Mémoire_ to the Marquise de Pompadour; finally, in 1790 appeared
+_Despotism Unmasked, or the Memoirs of Henri Masers de Latude_, edited
+by the advocate Thiéry. The book was dedicated to La Fayette. On the
+first page we see a portrait of the hero, his face proud and energetic,
+one hand on the ropeladder, the other extended towards the Bastille
+which workmen are in the act of demolishing. "I swear," says the author
+at the commencement, "that I will not relate one fact which is not
+true." The work is a tissue of calumnies and lies; and what makes a most
+painful impression on the reader is to see this man disowning his
+mother, forgetting the privations she endured out of love for her son,
+and ascribing the credit of what little the poor thing could do for her
+child to a Marquis de la Tude, knight of St. Louis, and
+lieutenant-colonel of the Orleans Dragoons!
+
+But the book vibrates with an incomparable accent of sincerity and of
+that profound emotion which Latude knew so well how to infuse into all
+those with whom he had to do. In 1793, twenty editions had been
+exhausted, the work had been translated into several languages; the
+journals had no praise strong enough for the boldness and genius of the
+author; the _Mercure de France_ proclaimed that henceforth it was a
+parent's duty to teach his children to read in this sublime work; a copy
+was sent to all the departments, accompanied by a model of the Bastille
+by the architect Palloy. With good reason could Latude exclaim in the
+National Assembly: "I have not a little contributed to the Revolution
+and to its consolidation."
+
+Latude was not the man to neglect opportunities so favourable. To begin
+with, he sought to get his pension augmented, and presented to the
+Constituent Assembly a petition backed by representative Bouche. But
+Camus, "rugged Camus," president of the committee appointed to
+investigate the matter, decided on rejection; and at the sitting of
+March 13, 1791, deputy Voidel delivered a very spirited speech; his view
+was that the nation had unhappy folk to succour more worthy of their
+concern than a man whose life had begun with roguery and villainy. The
+Assembly sided with him; not only was Latude's pension not increased,
+but on consideration, the pension granted by Louis XVI. was altogether
+withdrawn.
+
+Horror and infamy! "What madness has seized on the minds of the
+representatives of the most generous nation in the world!... To slay a
+hapless wretch the mere sight of whom awakens pity and warms into life
+the most sluggish sensibility ... for death is not so terrible as the
+loss of honour!" The valiant Latude will not abide the stroke of such an
+insult. Ere long he has brought Voidel to retract; in the heart of the
+Assembly he gains an influential supporter in the Marshal de Broglie.
+The Constituent Assembly is replaced by the Legislative, and Latude
+returns to the charge. He is admitted to the bar of the House on January
+26, 1792; the matter is re-committed and gone into a second time on
+February 25. We should like to be able to quote at length the speech
+which Latude himself composed for his advocate; here is a portion of the
+peroration:--
+
+"That a man, without any outside assistance, should have been able to
+escape three times, once from the Bastille and twice from Vincennes,
+yes, gentlemen, I venture to say he could not have succeeded except by a
+miracle, or else that Latude has more than extraordinary genius. Cast
+your eyes on this ladder of rope and wood, and on all the other
+instruments which Latude constructed with a mere knife, which you see
+here in the centre of this chamber. I resolved to bring before your own
+eyes this interesting object, which will for ever win admiration from
+men of intelligence. Not a single stranger comes to Paris without going
+to see this masterpiece of intelligence and genius, as well as his
+generous deliverer, Madame Legros. We have resolved to give you,
+gentlemen, the pleasure of seeing this celebrated woman, who
+unremittingly for forty months set despotism at defiance, and vanquished
+it by dint of virtue. Behold her there at the bar with M. de Latude,
+behold that incomparable woman, for ever to be the glory and the
+ornament of her sex!"
+
+It is not surprising that the Legislative Assembly was deeply moved by
+this eloquent harangue and this exhibition of the lady, as touching as
+unexpected. It unanimously voted Latude a pension of 2000 livres,
+without prejudice to the pension of 400 livres previously awarded.
+Henceforth Latude will be able to say: "The whole nation adopted me!"
+
+However, the little mishap in the Constituent Assembly was to be the
+only check that Latude suffered in the course of his glorious martyr's
+career. Presented to the Society of "Friends of the Constitution," he
+was elected a member by acclamation, and the Society sent a deputation
+of twelve members to carry the civic crown to Madame Legros. The leader
+of the deputation said, in a voice broken by emotion, "This day is the
+grandest day of my life." A deputation from the principal theatres of
+Paris offered Latude free admission to all performances, "so that he
+might go often and forget the days of his mourning." He was surrounded
+by the highest marks of consideration; pleaders begged him to support
+their cases before the tribunals with the moral authority bestowed on
+him by his virtue. He took advantage of this to bring definitively
+before the courts his claims against the heirs of the Marquise de
+Pompadour. Citizen Mony argued the case for the first time before the
+court of the sixth arrondissement on July 16, 1793; on September 11 the
+case came again before the magistrates: Citizens Chaumette, Laurent, and
+Legrand had been designated by the Commune of Paris as counsel for the
+defence, and the whole Commune was present at the hearing. Latude
+obtained 60,000 livres, 10,000 of which were paid him in cash.
+
+And now his life became more tranquil. Madame Legros continued to lavish
+her care on him. The 50,000 livres remaining due to him from the heirs
+of the Marquise were paid in good farm lands situated in La Beauce, the
+profits of which he regularly drew.
+
+Let us hasten to add that France did not find in Latude an ungrateful
+child. The critical situation in which the nation was then struggling
+pained him deeply. He sought the means of providing a remedy, and in
+1799 brought out a "Scheme for the valuation of the eighty departments
+of France to save the Republic in less than three months," and a "Memoir
+on the means of re-establishing the public credit and order in the
+finances of France."
+
+When the estates of Madame de Pompadour were sequestrated, the farms
+Latude had received were taken from him; but he induced the Directory to
+restore them. He was less fortunate in his requisition for a licence for
+a theatre and a gaming-house. But he found consolation. The subsidies he
+went on extorting from right and left, the proceeds of his farms, the
+sale of his books, and the money brought in by the exhibition of his
+ropeladder, which was exhibited by a showman in the different towns of
+France and England, provided him with a very comfortable income.
+
+The Revolution became a thing of the past. Latude hailed the dawning
+glory of Bonaparte, and when Bonaparte became Napoleon, Latude made his
+bow to the emperor. We have a very curious letter in which he marks out
+for Napoleon I. the line of conduct he should pursue to secure his own
+welfare and the good of France. It begins as follows:--
+
+"SIRE,--I have been five times buried alive, and am well acquainted with
+misfortune. To have a heart more sympathetic than the common run of men
+it is necessary to have suffered great ills.... At the time of the
+Terror I had the delightful satisfaction of saving the lives of
+twenty-two poor wretches.... To petition Fouquet d'Etinville on behalf
+of the royalists was to persuade him that I was one myself. When I
+braved death in order to save the lives of twenty-two citizens, judge,
+great Emperor, if my heart can do ought but take great interest in you,
+the saviour of my beloved country."
+
+We are given some details of the last years of Latude's life in the
+_Memoirs_ of his friend, the Chevalier de Pougens, and in the _Memoirs_
+of the Duchess d'Abrantès. The Chevalier tells us that at the age of
+seventy-five years he still enjoyed good health; he was "active and gay,
+and appeared to enjoy to the full the delights of existence. Every day
+he took long walks in Paris without experiencing the least fatigue.
+People were amazed to find _no trace_ of the cruel sufferings he had
+undergone in the cells during a captivity of thirty-five years." His
+popularity suffered no diminution under the Empire. Junot awarded him a
+pension from funds at his disposal. One day the general presented him
+to his wife, along with Madame Legros, whose side Latude never left.
+"When he arrived," says the Duchess d'Abrantès, "I went to greet him
+with a respect and an emotion that must have been truly edifying. I took
+him by the hand, conducted him to a chair, and put a cushion under his
+feet; in fact, he might have been my grandfather, whom I could not have
+treated better. At table I placed him on my right. But," adds the
+Duchess, "my enchantment was of short duration. He talked of nothing but
+his own adventures with appalling loquacity."
+
+At the age of eighty, a few months before his death, Latude wrote in the
+most familiar terms to his protector, the Chevalier de Pougens, a member
+of the Institute: "Now I assure you in the clearest possible words, that
+if within ten days of the present time, the 11th Messidor, you have not
+turned up in Paris (the Chevalier was staying at his country estate), I
+shall start the next day and come to you with the hunger of a giant and
+the thirst of a cabby, and when I have emptied your cellar and eaten you
+out of house and home you will see me play the second act of the comedy
+of _Jocrisse_[51]; you will see me run off with your plates, and dishes,
+and tankards, and bottles--empty, you may be sure--and fling all your
+furniture out of the window!"
+
+On July 20, 1804, Latude compiled one more circular, addressed to the
+sovereigns of Europe: the kings of Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, the
+Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor; and to the President of the
+United States. To each of them he sent a copy of his _Memoirs_,
+accompanied by the famous scheme for replacing with muskets the pikes
+with which the sergeants were armed. He explained to each of the
+sovereigns that as the country he ruled was profiting by this child of
+his genius, it was only just that he should reap some benefit.
+
+Jean Henri, surnamed Danry, alias Danger, alias Jedor, alias Masers
+d'Aubrespy, alias De Masers de Latude, died of pneumonia at Paris, on
+January 1, 1805, aged eighty years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY.
+
+
+In the remarkable book entitled _Paris during the Revolution_, M.
+Adolphe Schmidt writes: "All the purely revolutionary events, the events
+of the Fourteenth of July, of October 5 and 6, 1789, were the work of an
+obscure minority of reckless and violent revolutionists. If they
+succeeded, it was only because the great majority of the citizens
+avoided the scene of operations or were mere passive spectators there,
+attracted by curiosity, and giving in appearance an enhanced importance
+to the movement." Further on he says: "After the fall of the
+Gironde,[52] Dutard expressed himself in these terms: 'If, out of 50,000
+Moderates, you succeed in collecting a compact body of no more than
+3000, I shall be much astonished; and if out of these 3000 there are to
+be found only 500 who are agreed, and courageous enough to express their
+opinion, I shall be still more astonished. And these, in truth, must
+expect to be Septembrised.'[53] 'Twelve maniacs, with their blood well
+up, at the head of the Sansculotte section,' writes Dutard in another
+report, 'would put to flight the other forty-seven sections of Paris.'
+Mercier, after the fall of the Gironde, thus expresses himself in regard
+to the reign of Terror: 'Sixty brigands deluged France with blood:
+500,000 men within our walls were witnesses of their atrocities, and
+were not brave enough to oppose them.'"
+
+To enable the reader to understand the extraordinary and improbable
+event which is the subject of this chapter, it would be necessary to
+begin by explaining the circumstances and describing the material and
+moral state of things in which it happened; and that, unhappily, would
+occupy much space. Let us take the two principal facts, see what they
+led to, and then come to the events of the Fourteenth of July.
+
+For its task of governing France, the royal power had in its hands no
+administrative instrument, or, at any rate, administrative instruments
+of a very rudimentary character. It ruled through tradition and
+sentiment. The royal power had been created by the affection and
+devotion of the nation, and in this devotion and affection lay its whole
+strength.
+
+What, actually and practically, were the means of government in the
+hands of the king? "Get rid of _lettres de cachet_," observed
+Malesherbes, "and you deprive the king of all his authority, for the
+_lettre de cachet_ is the only means he possesses of enforcing his will
+in the kingdom." Now, for several years past, the royal power had
+practically renounced _lettres de cachet_. On the other hand, during the
+course of the eighteenth century, the sentiments of affection and
+devotion of which we have spoken had become enfeebled, or at least had
+changed their character. So it was that on the eve of the Revolution the
+royal power, which stood in France for the entire administration, had,
+if the expression may be allowed, melted into thin air.
+
+Below the royal power, the lords in the country, the upper ten in the
+towns, constituted the second degree in the government. The same remarks
+apply here also. And unhappily it is certain that, over the greater part
+of France, the territorial lords had forgotten the duties which their
+privileges and their station imposed. The old attachment of the
+labouring classes to them had almost everywhere disappeared, and in many
+particulars had given place to feelings of hostility.
+
+Thus on the eve of '89 the whole fabric of the state had no longer any
+real existence: at the first shock it was bound to crumble into dust.
+And as, behind the fragile outer wall, there was no solid structure--no
+administrative machine, with its numerous, diverse, and nicely-balanced
+parts, like that which in our time acts as a buffer against the shocks
+of political crises,--the first blow aimed at the royal power was bound
+to plunge the whole country into a state of disorganization and
+disorder from which the tyranny of the Terror, brutal, blood-stained,
+overwhelming as it was, alone could rescue it.
+
+Such is the first of the two facts we desire to make clear. We come now
+to the second. Ever since the year 1780, France had been almost
+continually in a state of famine. The rapidity and the abundance of the
+international exchanges which in our days supply us constantly from the
+remotest corners of the world with the necessaries of life, prevent our
+knowing anything of those terrible crises which in former days swept
+over the nations. "The dearth," writes Taine, "permanent, prolonged,
+having already lasted ten years, and aggravated by the very outbreaks
+which it provoked, went on adding fuel to all the passions of men till
+they reached a blaze of madness." "The nearer we come to the Fourteenth
+of July," says an eye witness, "the greater the famine becomes." "In
+consequence of the bad harvest," writes Schmidt, "the price of bread had
+been steadily rising from the opening of the year 1789. This state of
+things was utilized by the agitators who aimed at driving the people
+into excesses: these excesses in turn paralyzed trade. Business ceased,
+and numbers of workers found themselves without bread."
+
+A few words should properly be said in regard to brigandage under the
+_ancien régime_. The progress of manners and especially the development
+of executive government have caused it utterly to disappear. The
+reader's imagination will supply all we have not space to say. He will
+recollect the lengths of daring to which a man like Cartouche[54] could
+go, and recall what the forest of Bondy[55] was at the gates of Paris.
+
+So grew up towards the end of the _ancien régime_ what Taine has so
+happily called a spontaneous anarchy. In the four months preceding the
+capture of the Bastille, one can count more than three hundred riots in
+France. At Nantes, on January 9, 1789, the town hall was invaded, and
+the bakers' shops pillaged. All this took place to the cries of "Vive le
+roi!" At Bray-sur-Seine, on May 1, peasants armed with knives and clubs
+forced the farmers to lower the price of corn. At Rouen, on May 28, the
+corn in the market place was plundered. In Picardy, a discharged
+carabineer put himself at the head of an armed band which attacked the
+villages and carried off the corn. On all sides houses were looted from
+roof to cellar. At Aupt, M. de Montferrat, defending himself, was "cut
+into little pieces." At La Seyne, the mob brought a coffin in front of
+the house of one of the principal burgesses; he was told to prepare for
+death, and they would do him the honour to bury him. He escaped, and his
+house was sacked. We cull these facts haphazard from among hundreds of
+others.
+
+The immediate neighbourhood of Paris was plunged in terror. The batches
+of letters, still unpublished, preserved in the National Archives throw
+the most vivid light on this point. Bands of armed vagabonds scoured the
+country districts, pillaging the villages and plundering the crops.
+These were the "Brigands," a term which constantly recurs in the
+documents, and more and more frequently as we approach the 14th of July.
+These armed bands numbered three, four, five hundred men. At Cosne, at
+Orleans, at Rambouillet, it was the same story of raids on the corn. In
+different localities of the environs of Paris, the people organized
+themselves on a military basis. Armed burghers patrolled the streets
+against the "brigands." From all sides the people rained on the king
+demands for troops to protect them. Towns like Versailles, in dread of
+an invasion by these ruffians, implored the king for protection: the
+letters of the municipal council preserved in the National Archives are
+in the highest degree instructive.
+
+At this moment there had collected in the outskirts of Paris those
+troops whose presence was in the sequel so skilfully turned to account
+by the orators of the Palais-Royal. True, the presence of the troops
+made them uneasy. So far were the soldiers from having designs against
+the Parisians that in the secret correspondence of Villedeuil we find
+the court constantly urging that they should be reserved for the
+safeguarding of the adjoining districts, which were every day exposed to
+attack, and for the safe conduct of the convoys of corn coming up to
+Versailles and Paris. Bands mustered around the capital. In the first
+weeks of May, near Villejuif, a troop of from five to six hundred
+ruffians met intending to storm Bicêtre and march on Saint-Cloud. They
+came from distances of thirty, forty, and fifty leagues, and the whole
+mass surged around Paris and was swallowed up there as into a sewer.
+During the last days of April the shopmen saw streaming through the
+barriers "a terrific number of men, ill clad and of sinister aspect." By
+the first days of May, it was noticed that the appearance of the mob had
+altogether changed. There was now mingled with it "a number of strangers
+from all the country parts, most of them in rags, and armed with huge
+clubs, the mere aspect of them showing what was to be feared." In the
+words of a contemporary, "one met such physiognomies as one never
+remembered having seen in the light of day." To provide occupation for a
+part of these ill-favoured unemployed, whose presence everybody felt to
+be disquieting, workshops were constructed at Montmartre, where from
+seventeen to eighteen thousand men were employed on improvised tasks at
+twenty sous a day.
+
+Meanwhile the electors chosen to nominate deputies to the National
+Assembly had been collecting. On April 22, 1789, Thiroux de Crosne, the
+lieutenant of police, speaking of the tranquillity with which the
+elections were being carried on, added: "But I constantly have my eye on
+the bakers."
+
+On April 23, de Crosne referred to the irritation which was showing
+itself among certain groups of workmen in the Suburb Saint-Antoine
+against two manufacturers, Dominique Henriot, the saltpetre-maker, and
+Réveillon, the manufacturer of wall-papers. Henriot was known, not only
+for his intelligence, but for his kindliness; in years of distress he
+had sacrificed a portion of his fortune for the support of the workmen;
+as to Réveillon, he was at this date one of the most remarkable
+representatives of Parisian industry. A simple workman to begin with, he
+was in 1789 paying 200,000 livres a year in salaries to 300 workers;
+shortly before, he had carried off the prize founded by Necker for the
+encouragement of useful arts. Henriot and Réveillon were said to have
+made offensive remarks against the workmen in the course of the recent
+electoral assemblies. They both denied, however, having uttered the
+remarks attributed to them, and there is every reason to believe that
+their denials were genuine.
+
+During the night of April 27 and the next day, howling mobs attacked the
+establishments of Henriot and Réveillon, which were thoroughly
+plundered. Commissary Gueullette, in his report of May 3, notes that a
+wild and systematic devastation was perpetrated. Only the walls were
+left standing. What was not stolen was smashed into atoms. The
+"brigands"--the expression used by the Commissary--threw a part of the
+plant out of the windows into the street, where the mob made bonfires of
+it. Part of the crowd were drunk; nevertheless they flung themselves
+into the cellars, and the casks were stove in. When casks and bottles
+were empty, the rioters attacked the flasks containing colouring
+matter; this they absorbed in vast quantities, and reeled about with
+fearful contortions, poisoned. When these cellars were entered next day,
+they presented a horrible spectacle, for the wretches had come to
+quarrelling and cutting each other's throats. "The people got on to the
+roofs," writes Thiroux de Crosne, "whence they rained down upon the
+troops a perfect hailstorm of tiles, stones, &c.; they even set rolling
+down fragments of chimneys and bits of timber; and although they were
+fired upon several times and some persons were killed, it was quite
+impossible to master them."
+
+The riot was not quelled by the troops until 10 o'clock that night; more
+than a hundred persons were left dead in the street. M. Alexandre Tuetey
+has devoted some remarkable pages to Réveillon's affair; he has
+carefully studied the interrogatories of rioters who were arrested. The
+majority, he says, had been drunk all day. Réveillon, as is well known,
+only found safety by taking refuge in the Bastille. He was the only
+prisoner whom the Bastille received throughout the year 1789.
+
+In the night following these bacchanalian orgies, the agents of the
+Marquis du Châtelet, colonel of the Gardes Françaises, having crept
+along one of the moats, "saw a crowd of brigands" collected on the
+further side of the Trône gate. Their leader was mounted on a table,
+haranguing them.
+
+We come upon them again in the report of Commissary Vauglenne, quoted by
+M. Alexandre Tuetey. "On April 29, Vauglenne took the depositions of
+bakers, confectioners, and pork butchers of the Marais, who had been
+robbed by veritable bands of highwaymen, who proceed by burglary and
+violence; they may possibly be starving men, but they look and act
+uncommonly like gentlemen of the road."
+
+Meanwhile, in the garden of the Palais-Royal, Camille Desmoulins was
+haranguing groups of the unemployed and ravenous outcasts, who were
+pressing round him with wide glaring eyes. Desmoulins vociferates: "The
+beast is in the trap; now to finish him!... Never a richer prey has ever
+been offered to conquerors! Forty thousand palaces, mansions, châteaux,
+two-fifths of the wealth of France will be the prize of valour. Those
+who have set up as our masters will be mastered in their turn, the
+nation will be purged!" It is easy to understand that in Paris the alarm
+had become as acute as in the country; everyone was in terror of the
+"brigands." On June 25 it was decided to form a citizen militia for the
+protection of property. "The notoriety of these disorders," we read in
+the minutes of the electors, "and the excesses committed by several mobs
+have decided the general assembly to re-establish without delay the
+militia of Paris." But a certain time was necessary for the organization
+of this civil guard. On June 30, the doors of the Abbaye, where some
+Gardes Françaises had been locked up, some for desertion, others for
+theft, were broken in by blows from hatchets and hammers. The prisoners
+were led in triumph to the Palais-Royal, where they were fêted in the
+garden. The extent of the disorders was already so great that the
+government, powerless to repress them, had perforce to grant a general
+pardon. From that day there was no longer any need to capture the
+Bastille, the _ancien régime_ was lost.
+
+The disturbances at the Palais-Royal, the rendezvous of idlers, light
+women, and hot-headed fools, were becoming ever more violent. They began
+to talk of setting fire to the place. If some honest citizen plucked up
+courage to protest he was publicly whipped, thrown into the ponds, and
+rolled in the mud.
+
+On July 11, Necker was dismissed from the ministry and replaced by
+Breteuil. At this time Necker was very popular; Breteuil was not, though
+he ought to have been, particularly in the eyes of supporters of a
+revolutionary movement. Of all the ministers of the _ancien régime_, and
+of all the men of his time, Breteuil was the one who had done most for
+the suppression of _lettres de cachet_ and of state prisons. It was he
+who had closed Vincennes and the Châtimoine tower of Caen, who had got
+the demolition of the Bastille decided on, who had set Latude at
+liberty, and how many other prisoners! who had drawn up and made
+respected, even in the remotest parts of the kingdom, those admirable
+circulars which will immortalize his name, by which he ordered the
+immediate liberation of all prisoners whose detention was not absolutely
+justified, and laid down such rigorous formalities for the future, that
+the arbitrary character of _lettres de cachet_ may be said to have been
+destroyed by them. Nevertheless the orators of the Palais-Royal
+succeeded in persuading many people that the advent of Breteuil to the
+ministry presaged a "St. Bartholomew of patriots." The agitation became
+so vehement, the calumnies against the court and the government were
+repeated with so much violence, that the court, in order to avoid the
+slightest risk of the outbreak of a "St. Bartholomew," ordered all the
+troops to be withdrawn and Paris to be left to itself.
+
+Meanwhile, Camille Desmoulins was continuing to thunder forth: "I have
+just sounded the people. My rage against the despots was turned to
+despair. I did not see the crowds, although keenly moved and dismayed,
+strongly enough disposed to insurrection.... I was rather lifted on to
+the table than mounted there myself. Scarcely was I there than I saw
+myself surrounded by an immense throng. Here is my short address, which
+I shall never forget: 'Citizens! there is not a moment to lose. I come
+from Versailles; M. Necker is dismissed; this dismissal is the alarm
+bell of a St. Bartholomew of patriots; this evening all the Swiss and
+German battalions will march from the Champ de Mars to cut our throats.
+Only one resource remains to us: we must fly to arms!'"
+
+The Parisians were in an abject state of fright, but it was not the
+Swiss and German battalions which terrified them. The author of the
+_Memorable Fortnight_, devoted heart and soul as he was to the
+revolutionary movement, acknowledges that during the days from the 12th
+to the 14th of July, all respectable people shut themselves up in their
+houses. And while the troops and decent people were retiring, the dregs
+were coming to the surface. During the night of July 12, the majority of
+the toll gates, where the town dues were collected, were broken open,
+plundered, and set on fire. "Brigands," armed with pikes and clubs,
+scoured the streets, threatening the houses in which the trembling and
+agitated citizens had shut themselves. Next day, July 13, the shops of
+the bakers and wine merchants were rifled. "Girls snatched the earrings
+from women who went by; if the ring resisted, the ear was torn in two."
+"The house of the lieutenant of police was ransacked, and Thiroux de
+Crosne had the utmost difficulty in escaping from the bands armed with
+clubs and torches. Another troop, with murderous cries, arrived at the
+Force, where prisoners for debt were confined: the prisoners were set
+free. The Garde-Meuble was ransacked. One gang broke in with their axes
+the door of the Lazarists, smashed the library, the cupboards, the
+pictures, the windows, the physical laboratory, dived into the cellar,
+stove in the wine-casks and got gloriously drunk. Twenty-four hours
+afterwards some thirty dead and dying were found there, men and women,
+one of the latter on the point of childbirth. In front of the house the
+street was full of débris and of brigands, who held in their hands, some
+eatables, others a pitcher, forcing wayfarers to drink and filling for
+all and sundry. Wine flowed in torrents." Some had possessed themselves
+of ecclesiastical robes, which they put on, and in this attire yelled
+and gesticulated down the street. In the minute books of the electors we
+read at this date: "On information given to the committee that the
+brigands who had been dispersed showed some disposition to reassemble
+for the purpose of attacking and pillaging the Royal Treasury and the
+Bank, the committee ordered these two establishments to be guarded." On
+the same day, they luckily succeeded in disarming more than a hundred
+and fifty of these roisterers, who, drunk with wine and brandy, had
+fallen asleep inside the Hôtel de Ville. Meanwhile the outskirts of
+Paris were no safer than the city itself, and from the top of the towers
+of the Bastille they could see the conflagrations which were started in
+various quarters.
+
+The organization of the citizen militia against these disorders was
+becoming urgent. When evening came, the majority of the districts set
+actively to work. Twelve hundred good citizens mustered in the Petit
+Saint-Antoine district. It was a motley crew: tradesmen and artisans,
+magistrates and doctors, writers and scholars, cheek by jowl with
+navvies and carpenters. The future minister of Louis XVI., Champion de
+Villeneuve, filled the post of secretary. The twelve hundred citizens,
+as we read in the minutes, "compelled to unite by the too well founded
+alarm inspired in all the citizens by the danger which seems to threaten
+them each individually, and by the imminent necessity of taking prompt
+measures to avert its effects, considering that a number of
+individuals, terrified perhaps by the rumours which doubtless
+evil-disposed persons have disseminated, are traversing, armed and in
+disorder, all the streets of the capital, and that the ordinary town
+guard either mingles with them or remains a passive spectator of the
+disorder it cannot arrest; considering also that the prison of the Force
+has been burst into and opened for the prisoners, and that it is
+threatened to force open in the same way the prisons which confine
+vagabonds, vagrants, and convicts ... in consequence, the assembled
+citizens decide to organize themselves into a citizen militia. Every man
+will carry while on duty whatever arms he can procure, save and except
+pistols, which are forbidden as dangerous weapons.... There will always
+be two patrols on duty at a time, and two others will remain at the
+place fixed for headquarters." Most of the other districts imitated the
+proceedings of the Petit-Saint-Antoine. They sent delegates to the Hôtel
+des Invalides to ask for arms. The delegates were received by Besenval,
+who would have been glad to grant them what they requested; but he must
+have proper instructions. He writes in his _Memoirs_ that the delegates
+were in a great state of fright, saying that the "brigands" were
+threatening to burn and pillage their houses. The author of the
+_Memorable Fortnight_ dwells on the point that the militia of Paris was
+formed in self-defence against the excesses of the brigands. Speaking of
+the minute book of the Petit-Saint-Antoine district, an excellent
+authority, M. Charavay, writes: "The burgesses of Paris, less alarmed
+at the plans of the court than at the men to whom the name of _brigands_
+had already been given, organized themselves into a militia to resist
+them: that was their only aim. The movement which on the next day swept
+away the Bastille might perhaps have been repressed by the National
+Guard if its organization had had greater stability." The fact could not
+have been better put.
+
+The Hôtel de Ville was attacked, and one of the electors, Legrand, only
+cleared it of the hordes who were filling it with their infernal uproar
+by ordering six barrels of powder to be brought up, and threatening to
+blow the place up if they did not retire.
+
+During the night of July 13, the shops of the bakers and wine-sellers
+were pillaged. The excellent Abbé Morellet, one of the Encyclopædists,
+who, as we have seen, was locked up in the Bastille under Louis XV.,
+writes: "I spent a great part of the night of the 13th at my windows,
+watching the scum of the population armed with muskets, pikes, and
+skewers, as they forced open the doors of the houses and got themselves
+food and drink, money and arms." Mathieu Dumas also describes in his
+_Souvenirs_ these ragged vagabonds, several almost naked, and with
+horrible faces. During these two days and nights, writes Bailly, Paris
+ran great risk of pillage, and was only saved by the National Guard.
+
+The proceedings of these bandits and the work of the National Guard are
+described in a curious letter from an English doctor, named Rigby, to
+his wife. "It was necessary not only to give arms to those one could
+rely on, but to disarm those of whom little protection could be expected
+and who might become a cause of disorder and harm. This required a good
+deal of skill. Early in the afternoon we began to catch a glimpse here
+and there among the swarms of people, where we saw signs of an
+irritation which might soon develop into excesses, of a man of decent
+appearance, carrying a musket with a soldierly air. These slowly but
+surely increased in number; their intention was evidently to pacify and
+at the same time to disarm the irregular bands. They had for the most
+part accomplished their task before nightfall. Then the citizens who had
+been officially armed occupied the streets almost exclusively: they were
+divided into several sections, some mounting guard at certain points,
+others patrolling the streets, all under the leadership of captains.
+When night came, only very few of those who had armed themselves the
+evening before could be seen. Some, however, had refused to give up
+their arms, and during the night it was seen how well founded had been
+the fears they had inspired, for they started to pillage. But it was too
+late to do so with impunity. The looters were discovered and seized, and
+we learnt next morning that several of these wretches, taken redhanded,
+had been executed." Indeed, the repressive measures of the citizens were
+not wanting in energy. Here and there brigands were strung up to the
+lamp-posts, and then despatched, as they hung there, with musket shots.
+
+The author of the _Authentic History_, who left the best of the
+contemporary accounts of the taking of the Bastille which we possess,
+says rightly enough: "The riot began on the evening of July 12." There
+was thus a combination of disorders and "brigandage" in which the
+capture of the Bastille, though it stands out more prominently than the
+other events, was only a part, and cannot be considered by itself.
+
+The morning of the Fourteenth dawned bright and sunny. A great part of
+the population had remained up all night, and daylight found them still
+harassed with anxiety and alarm. To have arms was the desire of all; the
+citizens and supporters of order, so as to protect themselves; the
+brigands, a part of whom had been disarmed, in order to procure or
+recover the means of assault and pillage. There was a rush to the
+Invalides, where the magazines of effective arms were. This was the
+first violent action of the day. The mob carried off 28,000 muskets and
+twenty-four cannon. And as it was known that other munitions of war were
+deposited in the Bastille, the cry of "To the Invalides!" was succeeded
+by the cry "To the Bastille!"
+
+We must carefully distinguish between the two elements of which the
+throng flocking to the Bastille was composed. On the one hand, a horde
+of nameless vagabonds, those whom the contemporary documents invariably
+style the "brigands"; and, on the other hand, the respectable
+citizens--these certainly formed the minority--who desired arms for the
+equipment of the civil guard. The sole motive impelling this band to
+the Bastille was the wish to procure arms. On this point all documents
+of any value and all the historians who have studied the matter closely
+are in agreement. There was no question of liberty or of tyranny, of
+setting free the prisoners or of protesting against the royal authority.
+The capture of the Bastille was effected amid cries of "Vive le roi!"
+just as, for several months past in the provinces, the granaries had
+been plundered.
+
+About 8 o'clock in the morning, the electors at the Hôtel de Ville
+received some inhabitants of the Suburb Saint-Antoine who came to
+complain that the district was threatened by the cannon trained on it
+from the towers of the Bastille. These cannon were used for firing
+salutes on occasions of public rejoicing, and were so placed that they
+could do no harm whatever to the adjacent districts. But the electors
+sent some of their number to the Bastille, where the governor, de
+Launey, received the deputation with the greatest affability, kept them
+to lunch, and at their request withdrew the cannon from the embrasures.
+To this deputation there succeeded another, which, however, was quite
+unofficial, consisting of three persons, with the advocate Thuriot de la
+Rosière at the head. They were admitted as their predecessors had been.
+Thuriot was the eloquent spokesman, "in the name of the nation and the
+fatherland." He delivered an ultimatum to the governor and harangued the
+garrison, consisting of 95 Invalides and 30 Swiss soldiers. Some
+thousand men were thronging round the Bastille, vociferating wildly. The
+garrison swore not to fire unless they were attacked. De Launey said
+that without orders he could do no more than withdraw the cannon from
+the embrasures, but he went so far as to block up these embrasures with
+planks. Then Thuriot took his leave and returned to the Hôtel de Ville,
+the crowd meanwhile becoming more and more threatening.
+
+[Illustration: THE CAPTURE OF THE BASTILLE.
+
+_From an anonymous contemporary painting now in the Hôtel Carnavalet._]
+
+"The entrance to the first courtyard, that of the barracks, was open,"
+says M. Fernand Bournon in his admirable account of the events of this
+day; "but de Launey had ordered the garrison to retire within the
+enclosure, and to raise the outer drawbridge by which the court of the
+governor was reached, and which in the ordinary way used to be lowered
+during the day. Two daring fellows dashed forward and scaled the roof of
+the guard-house, one of them a soldier named Louis Tournay: the name of
+the other is unknown. They shattered the chains of the drawbridge with
+their axes, and it fell."
+
+It has been said in a recent work, in which defects of judgment and
+criticism are scarcely masked by a cumbrous parade of erudition, that
+Tournay and his companion performed their feat under the fire of the
+garrison. At this moment the garrison did not fire a single shot,
+contenting themselves with urging the besiegers to retire. "While M. de
+Launey and his officers contented themselves with threats, these two
+vigorous champions succeeded in breaking in the doors and in lowering
+the outer drawbridge; then the horde of brigands advanced in a body and
+dashed towards the second bridge, which they wished to capture, firing
+at the troops as they ran. It was then for the first time that M. de
+Launey, perceiving his error in allowing the operations at the first
+bridge to be managed so quietly, ordered the soldiers to fire, which
+caused a disorderly stampede on the part of the rabble, which was more
+brutal than brave; and it is at this point that the calumnies against
+the governor begin. Transposing the order of events, it has been
+asserted that he had sent out a message of peace, that the people had
+advanced in reliance on his word, and that many citizens were
+massacred." This alleged treachery of de Launey, immediately hawked
+about Paris, was one of the events of the day. It is contradicted not
+only by all the accounts of the besieged, but by the besiegers
+themselves, and is now rejected by all historians.
+
+A wine-seller named Cholat, aided by one Baron, nicknamed La Giroflée,
+had brought into position a piece of ordnance in the long walk of the
+arsenal. They fired, but the gun's recoil somewhat seriously wounded the
+two artillerymen, and they were its only victims. As these means were
+insufficient to overturn the Bastille, the besiegers set about devising
+others. A pretty young girl named Mdlle. de Monsigny, daughter of the
+captain of the company of Invalides at the Bastille, had been
+encountered in the barrack yard. Some madmen imagined that she was
+Mdlle. de Launey. They dragged her to the edge of the moat, and gave the
+garrison to understand by their gestures that they were going to burn
+her alive if the place was not surrendered. They had thrown the unhappy
+child, who had fainted, upon a mattress, to which they had already set
+light. M. de Monsigny saw the hideous spectacle from a window of the
+towers, and, desperately rushing down to save his child, he was killed
+by two shots. These were tricks in the siege of strongholds of which
+Duguesclin would never have dreamed. A soldier named Aubin Bonnemère
+courageously interposed and succeeded in saving the girl.
+
+A detachment of Gardes Françaises, coming up with two pieces of
+artillery which the Hôtel de Ville had allowed to be removed, gave a
+more serious aspect to the siege. But the name of Gardes Françaises must
+not give rise to misapprehension: the soldiers of the regular army under
+the _ancien régime_ must not be compared with those of the present day.
+The regiment of Gardes Françaises in particular had fallen into a
+profound state of disorganization and degradation. The privates were
+permitted to follow a trade in the city, by this means augmenting their
+pay. It is certain that in the majority of cases the trade they followed
+was that of the bully. "Almost all the soldiers in the Guards belong to
+this class," we read in the _Encyclopédie méthodique_, "and many men
+indeed only enlist in the corps in order to live on the earnings of
+these unfortunates." The numerous documents relating to the Gardes
+Françaises preserved in the archives of the Bastille give the most
+precise confirmation to this statement. We see, for example, that the
+relatives of the engraver Nicolas de Larmessin requested a _lettre de
+cachet_ ordering their son to be locked up in jail, where they would pay
+for his keep, "because he had threatened to enlist in the Gardes
+Françaises."
+
+From the fifteen cannon placed on the towers, not a single shot was
+fired during the siege. Within the château, three guns loaded with grape
+defended the inner drawbridge; the governor had only one of them fired,
+and that only once. Not wishing to massacre the mob, de Launey
+determined to blow up the Bastille and find his grave among the ruins.
+The Invalides Ferrand and Béquart flung themselves upon him to prevent
+him from carrying out his intention. "The Bastille was not captured by
+main force," says Elie, whose testimony cannot be suspected of
+partiality in favour of the defenders; "it surrendered before it was
+attacked, on my giving my word of honour as a French officer that all
+should escape unscathed if they submitted."
+
+We know how this promise was kept, in spite of the heroic efforts of
+Elie and Hulin, to whom posterity owes enthusiastic homage. Is the mob
+to be reproached for these atrocious crimes? It was a savage horde, the
+scum of the population. De Launey, whose confidence and kindness had
+never faltered, was massacred with every circumstance of horror. "The
+Abbé Lefèvre," says Dusaulx, "was an involuntary witness of his last
+moments: 'I saw him fall,' he told me, 'without being able to help him;
+he defended himself like a lion, and if only ten men had behaved as he
+did at the Bastille, it would not have been taken.'" His murderers
+slowly severed his head from his trunk with a penknife. The operation
+was performed by a cook's apprentice named Desnot, "who knew, as he
+afterwards proudly said, how to manage a joint." The deposition of this
+brute should be read. It has been published by M. Guiffrey in the _Revue
+historique_. To give himself courage, Desnot had gulped down brandy
+mixed with gunpowder, and he added that what he had done was done in the
+hope of obtaining a medal.
+
+"We learnt by-and-by," continues Dusaulx, "of the death of M. de
+Losme-Salbray, which all good men deplored." De Losme had been the good
+angel of the prisoners during his term of office as major of the
+Bastille: there are touching details showing to what lengths he carried
+his kindliness and delicacy of feeling. At the moment when the mob was
+hacking at him, there happened to pass the Marquis de Pelleport, who had
+been imprisoned in the Bastille for several years; he sprang forward to
+save him: "Stop!" he cried, "you are killing the best of men." But he
+fell badly wounded, as also did the Chevalier de Jean, who had joined
+him in the attempt to rescue the unfortunate man from the hands of the
+mob. The adjutant Miray, Person the lieutenant of the Invalides, and
+Dumont, one of the Invalides, were massacred. Miray was led to the
+Grève, where the mob had resolved to execute him. Struck with fists and
+clubs, stabbed with knives, he crawled along in his death agony. He
+expired, "done to death with pin-pricks," before arriving at the place
+of execution. The Invalides Asselin and Béquart were hanged. It was
+Béquart who had prevented de Launey from blowing up the Bastille. "He
+was gashed with two sword-strokes," we read in the _Moniteur_, "and a
+sabre cut had lopped off his wrist. They carried the hand in triumph
+through the streets of the city--the very hand to which so many citizens
+owed their safety." "After I had passed the arcade of the Hôtel de
+Ville," says Restif de la Bretonne, who has left so curious a page about
+the 14th of July, "I came upon some cannibals: one--I saw him with my
+own eyes--brought home to me the meaning of a horrible word heard so
+often since: he was carrying at the end of a _taille-cime_[56] the
+bleeding entrails of a victim of the mob's fury, and this horrible
+top-knot caused no one to turn a hair. Farther on I met the captured
+Invalides and Swiss: from young and pretty lips--I shudder at it
+still--came screams of 'Hang them! Hang them!'"
+
+Further, they massacred Flesselles, the provost of the guilds, accused
+of a treacherous action as imaginary as that of de Launey. They cut the
+throat of Foulon, an old man of seventy-four years, who, as Taine tells
+us, had spent during the preceding winter 60,000 francs in order to
+provide the poor with work. They assassinated Berthier, one of the
+distinguished men of the time. Foulon's head was cut off; they tore
+Berthier's heart from his body to carry it in procession through
+Paris--charming touch!--in a bouquet of white carnations. For the fun
+was growing fast and furious. De Launey's head was borne on a pike to
+the Palais Royal, then to the new bridge, where it was made to do
+obeisance three times to the statue of Henri IV., with the words,
+"Salute thy master!" At the Palais Royal, two of the conquerors had
+merrily set themselves down at a dining-table in an entresol. As we
+garnish our tables with flowers, so these men had placed on the table a
+trunkless head and gory entrails; but as the crowd below cried out for
+them, they shot them gaily out of the window.
+
+Those who had remained in front of the Bastille had dashed on in quest
+of booty. As at the pillage of the warehouses of Réveillon and Henriot,
+and of the convent of the Lazarists, the first impulse of the conquerors
+was to bound forward to the cellar. "This rabble," writes the author of
+the _Authentic History_, "were so blind drunk that they made in one body
+for the quarters of the staff, breaking the furniture, doors, and
+windows. All this time their comrades, taking the pillagers for some of
+the garrison, were firing on them."
+
+No one gave a thought to the prisoners, but the keys were secured and
+carried in triumph through Paris. The doors of the rooms in which the
+prisoners were kept had to be broken in. The wretched men, terrified by
+the uproar, were more dead than alive. These victims of arbitrary power
+were exactly seven in number. Four were forgers, Béchade, Laroche, La
+Corrège, and Pujade; these individuals had forged bills of exchange, to
+the loss of two Parisian bankers: while their case was being dealt with
+in regular course at the Châtelet, they were lodged in the Bastille,
+where they consulted every day with their counsel. Then there was the
+young Comte de Solages, who was guilty of monstrous crimes meriting
+death; he was kept in the Bastille out of regard for his family, who
+defrayed his expenses. Finally there were two lunatics, Tavernier and de
+Whyte. We know what immense progress has been made during the past
+century in the methods of treating lunatics. In those days they locked
+them up. Tavernier and de Whyte were before long transferred to
+Charenton, where assuredly they were not so well treated as they had
+been at the Bastille.
+
+Such were the seven martyrs who were led in triumphant procession
+through the streets, amid the shouts of a deeply moved people.
+
+Of the besiegers, ninety-eight dead were counted, some of whom had met
+their death through the assailants' firing on one another. Several had
+been killed by falling into the moat. Of this total, only nineteen were
+married, and only five had children. These are details of some interest.
+
+There was no thought of burying either the conquerors or the conquered.
+At midnight on Wednesday the 15th, the presence of the corpses of the
+officers of the Bastille, still lying in the Place de Grève, was
+notified to the commissaries of the Châtelet. In his admirable work M.
+Furnand Bournon has published the ghastly report that was drawn up on
+that night. It is a fitting crown to the work of the great day: "We, the
+undersigned commissaries, duly noted down the declaration of the said
+Sieur Houdan, and having then gone down into the courtyard of the
+Châtelet (whither the corpses had just been carried), we found there
+seven corpses of the male sex, the first without a head, clothed in a
+coat, vest, breeches, and black silk stockings, with a fine shirt, but
+no shoes; the second also without a head, clothed in a vest of red
+stuff, breeches of nankeen with regimental buttons, blue silk stockings
+with a small black pattern worked in; the third also headless, clothed
+in a shirt, breeches, and white cotton stockings; the fourth also
+headless, clothed in a blood-stained shirt, breeches, and black
+stockings; the fifth clad in a shirt, blue breeches, and white gaiters,
+with brown hair, apparently about forty years old, and having part of
+his forearm cut off and severe bruises on his throat; the sixth clothed
+in breeches and white gaiters, with severe bruises on his throat; and
+the seventh, clothed in a shirt, breeches, and black silk stockings,
+disfigured beyond recognition."
+
+Meanwhile the majority of the victors, the first moments of intoxication
+having passed, were hiding themselves like men who had committed a
+crime. The disorder in the city was extreme. "The commissioners of the
+districts," writes the Sicilian ambassador, "seeing the peril in which
+the inhabitants were placed before this enormous number of armed men,
+including brigands and men let out of prison on the previous days,
+formed patrols of the National Guard. They proclaimed martial law, or
+rather, they issued one solitary law declaring that whoever robbed or
+set fire to a house would be hanged. Indeed, not a day passed without
+five and even as many as ten persons suffering this penalty. To this
+salutary expedient we owe our lives and the safety of our houses."
+
+More than one conqueror of the Bastille was hanged in this way, which
+was a great pity, for two days later his glorious brow might have been
+crowned with laurels and flowers!
+
+It has been said that the Bastille was captured by the people of Paris.
+But the number of the besiegers amounted to no more than a thousand,
+among whom, as Marat has already brought to our notice, there were many
+provincials and foreigners. As to the Parisians, they had come in great
+numbers, as they always do, to see what was going on. We have this too
+on the testimony of Marat. "I was present at the taking of the
+Bastille," writes the Chancellor de Pasquier also: "what has been called
+the 'fight' was not serious, and of resistance there was absolutely
+none. A few musket shots were fired to which there was no reply, and
+four or five cannon shots. We know the results of this boasted victory,
+which has brought a shower of compliments upon the heads of the
+so-called conquerors: the truth is that this great fight did not give a
+moment's uneasiness to the numerous spectators who had hurried up to see
+the result. Among them there was many a pretty woman; they had left
+their carriages at a distance in order to approach more easily. I was
+leaning on the end of the barrier which closed in the garden skirting
+Beaumarchais' garden in the direction of the Place de la Bastille. By my
+side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Comédie Française: we stayed to the end,
+and I gave her my arm to her carriage. As pretty as any woman could be,
+Mdlle. Contat added to the graces of her person an intelligence of the
+most brilliant order."
+
+By next day there was quite another story. The Bastille had been
+"stormed" in a formidable and heroic assault lasting a quarter of an
+hour. The guns of the assailants had made a breach in its walls. These,
+it is true, were still standing intact; but that did not signify, the
+guns had made a breach, unquestionably! The seven prisoners who had been
+set free had been a disappointment, for the best will in the world could
+not make them anything but scoundrels and lunatics; some one invented an
+eighth, the celebrated Comte de Lorges, the white-headed hero and
+martyr. This Comte de Lorges had no existence; but that fact also is
+nothing to the purpose: he makes an admirable and touching story. There
+was talk of instruments of torture that had been discovered: "an iron
+corslet, invented to hold a man fast by all his joints, and fix him in
+eternal immobility:" it was really a piece of knightly armour dating
+from the middle ages, taken from the magazine of obsolete arms which was
+kept at the Bastille. Some one discovered also a machine "not less
+destructive, which was brought to the light of day, but no one could
+guess its name or its special use"; it was a secret printing-press
+seized in the house of one François Lenormand in 1786. Finally, while
+digging in the bastion, some one came upon the bones of Protestants who
+had once been buried there, the prejudices of the time not allowing
+their remains to be laid in the consecrated ground of the cemetery: the
+vision of secret executions in the deepest dungeons of the Bastille was
+conjured up in the mind of the discoverers, and Mirabeau sent these
+terrible words echoing through France: "The ministers were lacking in
+foresight, they forgot to eat the bones!"
+
+The compilation of the roll of the conquerors of the Bastille was a
+laborious work. A great number of those who had been in the thick of the
+fray did not care to make themselves known: they did not know but that
+their laurel-crowned heads might be stuck aloft! It is true that these
+bashful heroes were speedily replaced by a host of fine fellows
+who--from the moment when it was admitted that the conquerors were
+heroes, deserving of honours, pensions, and medals--were fully persuaded
+that they had sprung to the assault, and in the very first rank. The
+final list contained 863 names.
+
+Victor Fournel in a charming book has sung the epic, at once ludicrous
+and lachrymose, of the men of the 14th of July. The book, which ought to
+be read, gives a host of delightful episodes it is impossible to
+abridge. In the sequel these founders of liberty did not shine either
+through the services they rendered to the Republic, or through their
+fidelity to the immortal principles. The Hulins--Hulin, however, had
+done nobly in trying to save de Launey--the Palloys, the Fourniers, the
+Latudes, and how many others! were the most servile lackeys of the
+Empire, and those of them who survived were the most assiduous servants
+of the Restoration. Under the Empire, the conquerors of the Bastille
+tried to secure the Legion of Honour for the whole crew. They went about
+soliciting pensions even up to 1830, and at that date, after forty-three
+years, there were still 401 conquerors living. In 1848 the conquerors
+made another appearance. There was still mention of pensions for the
+conquerors of the Bastille in the budget of 1874--let us save the
+ladder, the ladder of Latude!
+
+This is the amusing side of their story. But there is a painful side
+too: their rivalries with the Gardes Françaises, who charged them with
+filching the glory from them, and with the "volunteers of the Bastille."
+The heroes were acquainted with calumny and opprobrium. There were, too,
+deadly dissensions among their own body. There were the true conquerors,
+and others who, while they were true conquerors, were nevertheless not
+true: there were always "traitors" among the conquerors, as well as
+"patriots." On July 1, 1790, two of the conquerors were found beaten to
+death near Beaumarchais' garden, in front of the theatre of their
+exploits. Next day there was a violent quarrel between four conquerors
+and some soldiers. In December two others were assassinated near the
+Champs de Mars. Early in 1791 two were wounded, and a third was
+discovered with his neck in a noose, in a ditch near the military
+school. Such were the nocturnal doings on the barriers.
+
+It remains to explain this amazing veering round of opinion, this
+legend, of all things the least likely, which transformed into great men
+the "brigands" of April, June, and July, 1789.
+
+The first reason is explained in the following excellent passage from
+_Rabagas_[57]:--
+
+     _Carle._--But how then do you distinguish a riot from a revolution?
+
+     _Boubard._--A riot is when the mob is defeated ... they are all
+     curs. A revolution is when the mob is the stronger: they are all
+     heroes!
+
+During the night of July 14, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld woke Louis
+XVI. to announce to him the capture of the Bastille. "It's a revolt
+then," said the king. "Sire," replied the duke, "it is a revolution."
+
+The day on which the royal power, in its feebleness and irresolution,
+abandoned Paris to the mob, was the day of its abdication. The Parisians
+attempted to organize themselves into a citizen militia in order to
+shoot down the brigands. The movement on the Bastille was a stroke of
+genius on the part of the latter--instinctive, no doubt, but for all
+that a stroke of genius. The people now recognized its masters, and with
+its usual facility it hailed the new régime with adulation. "From that
+moment," said a deputy, "there was an end of liberty, even in the
+Assembly; France was dumb before thirty factionaries."
+
+What rendered the national enthusiasm for the conquerors more easy was
+precisely all those legends to which credence was given, in all
+sincerity, by the most intelligent people in France--the legends on the
+horrors of the Bastille and the cruelties of arbitrary power. For fifty
+years they had been disseminated throughout the kingdom, and had taken
+firm root. The pamphlets of Linguet and Mirabeau, the recent stupendous
+success of the _Memoirs of Latude_, had given these stories renewed
+strength and vigour. Compelled to bow before the triumphant mob, people
+preferred to regard themselves--so they silenced their conscience--as
+hailing a deliverer. There was some sincerity in this movement of
+opinion, too. The same districts which on July 13 took arms against the
+brigands could exclaim, after the crisis had passed: "The districts
+applaud the capture of a fortress which, regarded hitherto as the seat
+of despotism, dishonoured the French name under a popular king."
+
+In his edition of the _Memoirs of Barras_, M. George Duruy has well
+explained the transformation of opinion. "In the _Memoirs_, the capture
+of the Bastille is merely the object of a brief and casual mention.
+Barras only retained and transmits to us one single detail. He saw
+leaving the dungeons the 'victims of arbitrary power, saved at last from
+rack and torture and from living tombs.' Such a dearth of information is
+the more likely to surprise us in that Barras was not only a spectator
+of the event, but composed, in that same year 1789, an account of it
+which has now been discovered. Now his narrative of 1789 is as
+interesting as the passage in the _Memoirs_ is insignificant. The
+impression left by these pages, written while the events were vividly
+pictured in his mind, is, we are bound to say, that the famous capture
+of the Bastille was after all only a horrible and sanguinary saturnalia.
+There is no word of heroism in this first narrative: nothing about
+'victims of arbitrary power' snatched from 'torture and living tombs';
+but on the other hand, veritable deeds of cannibalism perpetrated by the
+victors. That is what Barras saw, and what he recorded on those pages
+where, at that period of his life, he noted down day by day the events
+of which he was a witness. Thirty years slip by. Barras has sat on the
+benches of the 'Montagne.'[58] He has remained an inflexible
+revolutionist. He gathers his notes together in view of _Memoirs_ he
+intends to publish. At this time, the revolutionist version of the
+capture of the Bastille is officially established. It is henceforth
+accepted that the Bastille fell before an impulse of heroism on the part
+of the people of Paris, and that its fall brought to light horrible
+mysteries of iniquity. This legend, which has so profoundly distorted
+the event, was contemporary with the event itself, a spontaneous fruit
+of the popular imagination. And Barras, having to speak of the capture
+in his _Memoirs_, discovers his old narrative among his papers, and
+reads it, I imagine, with a sort of stupefaction. What! the capture of
+the Bastille was no more than that!--and he resolutely casts it aside."
+
+In the provinces, the outbreak had a violent counterpart. "There
+instantly arose," writes Victor Fournel, "a strange, extraordinary,
+grotesque panic, which swept through the greater part of France like a
+hurricane of madness, and which many of us have heard our grand-fathers
+tell stories about under the name of the 'day of the brigands' or 'the
+day of the fear.' It broke out everywhere in the second fortnight of
+July, 1789. Suddenly, one knew not whence, an awful rumour burst upon
+the town or village: the brigands are here, at our very gates: they are
+advancing in troops of fifteen or twenty thousand, burning the standing
+crops, ravaging everything! Dust-stained couriers appear, spreading the
+terrible news. An unknown horseman goes through at the gallop, with
+haggard cheeks and dishevelled hair: 'Up, to arms, they are here!' Some
+natives rush up: it is only too true: they have seen them, the bandits
+are no more than a league or two away! The alarm bell booms out, the
+people fly to arms, line up in battle order, start off to reconnoitre.
+In the end, nothing happens, but their terrors revive. The brigands have
+only turned aside: every man must remain under arms." In the frontier
+provinces, there were rumours of foreign enemies. The Bretons and
+Normans shook in fear of an English descent: in Champagne and Lorraine
+a German invasion was feared.
+
+Along with these scenes of panic must be placed the deeds of violence,
+the assassinations, plunderings, burnings, which suddenly desolated the
+whole of France. In a book which sheds a flood of light on these facts,
+Gustave Bord gives a thrilling picture of them. The châteaux were
+invaded, and the owner, if they could lay hands on him, was roasted on
+the soles of his feet. At Versailles the mob threw themselves on the
+hangman as he was about to execute a parricide, and the criminal was set
+free: the state of terror in which the town was plunged is depicted in
+the journals of the municipal assembly. On July 23, the governor of
+Champagne sends word that the rising is general in his district. At
+Rennes, at Nantes, at Saint-Malo, at Angers, at Caen, at Bordeaux, at
+Strasburg, at Metz, the mob engaged in miniature captures of the
+Bastille more or less accompanied with pillage and assassination. Armed
+bands went about cutting down the woods, breaking down the dikes,
+fishing in the ponds.[59] The disorganization was complete.
+
+Nothing could more clearly show the character of the government under
+the _ancien régime:_ it was wholly dependent on traditions. Nowhere was
+there a concrete organization to secure the maintenance of order and
+the enforcement of the king's decrees. France was a federation of
+innumerable republics, held together by a single bond, the sentiment of
+loyalty every citizen felt towards the crown. One puff of wind sent the
+crown flying, and then disorder and panic bewilderment dominated the
+whole nation. The door was open to all excesses, and the means of
+checking them miserably failed. Under the _ancien régime_, devotion to
+the king was the whole government, the whole administration, the whole
+life of the state. And thus arose the necessity for the domination of
+the Terror, and the legislative work of Napoleon.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Allègre, Latude's fellow prisoner, 154, 185-192, 217.
+
+Ameilhon, city librarian, 55.
+
+Argenson, D', 60, 72, 95, 175, 182.
+
+Arsenal library, 55, 56.
+
+Atrocities of the mob, 258-266.
+
+Avedick, Armenian patriarch, 133.
+
+
+Barras, 272.
+
+Bastille, its situation, 47;
+  appearance, 48;
+  repute, 49, 50;
+  archives, 50-56;
+  origin, 57;
+  site, 58;
+  construction, 59, 60;
+  additions to, 61;
+  appearance in later days, 61, 62;
+  early uses, 63;
+  becomes state prison, 63, 64;
+  prisoners, 65;
+  its administration, 66;
+  gradual transformation, 67;
+  character of prisoners, 68, 69;
+  secretary, 70;
+  office of lieutenant of police, 71;
+  his duties, 71, 72;
+  becomes like modern prisons, 77, 78;
+  abolition of torture, 78;
+  duration of prisoners' detention, 80;
+  expenses, 81;
+  plans for altering, 81-83;
+  a _prison de luxe_, 85;
+  treatment of prisoners, 86;
+  the rooms, 87;
+  manner of prisoners' entrance, 88, 89;
+  cells, 92, 93;
+  tower rooms, 93, 94;
+  furniture, 95, 96;
+  examination of prisoners, 96, 97;
+  indemnified if innocent, 98, 99;
+  allowed companions, 100, 101;
+  prison fare, 102-107;
+  clothes, 107, 108;
+  books, 108, 109;
+  exercise, 109;
+  diversions, 109, 110;
+  funerals, 110, 111;
+  liberation, 111, 112;
+  the Iron Mask, 114-146;
+  men of letters, 147-165;
+  capture, 238-272.
+
+Berryer, 175, 176, 178, 184, 188, 189, 193.
+
+Besmaus, de, 70.
+
+Binguet, 171, 179.
+
+Bread riots, 242, 243.
+
+Breteuil, 78, 248.
+
+Brigands, 241, 245, 250.
+
+Burgaud, 135.
+
+
+Campan, Madame de, 144, 145.
+
+Carutti's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+Cellamare conspiracy, 72, 73.
+
+Character of French government and society, 239-241.
+
+Chevalier, major, 49, 51, 120, 121, 187, 189, 194.
+
+Citizen militia, 251-253.
+
+Clothes of prisoners, 107, 108.
+
+Crosne, de, lieutenant of police, 244-246.
+
+
+D'Aubrespy, Jeanneton, 169, 201.
+
+Dauger suggested as Iron Mask, 135.
+
+Desmoulins, 247, 249.
+
+Diderot, 165.
+
+Diversions of prisoners, 109, 110.
+
+Du Junca's journal, 69, 89, 90, 114-116, 122.
+
+Dusaulx, 51.
+
+
+Encyclopædia, 80.
+
+Estrades, Abbé d', 138-142.
+
+
+Food of prisoners, 102-107.
+
+Funerals, 110.
+
+
+Games of prisoners, 101, 102.
+
+Gleichen, baron, 130.
+
+Griffet, Father, 120.
+
+
+Heiss, Baron, first to suggest true solution of Iron Mask, 136.
+
+Henriot, 245.
+
+Houdon, sculptor, 82.
+
+
+July 14th, 255-276.
+
+Jung's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+
+Kingston, Duchess of, 225, 227.
+
+
+La Beaumelle, 152-155.
+
+Lagrange-Chancel, 132.
+
+La Reynie, 71.
+
+Latude, 168-237.
+
+Launay, Mdlle. de, _see_ Staal, Madame de.
+
+Launey, de, governor, 256, 258, 260.
+
+Lauzun, 91.
+
+Legros, Madame de, 223-226, 232, 233.
+
+Lenoir, lieutenant of police, 186.
+
+_Lettres de cachet_, 240.
+
+Lieutenancy of police created, 97.
+
+Linguet, 163-165.
+
+Loiseleur's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+Loquin's theory of Iron Mask, 133.
+
+Losme, de, 261.
+
+Louis XIV. and Iron Mask, 137-140.
+
+Louis XV. and Iron Mask, 144.
+
+Louis XVI. and Iron Mask, 144.
+
+Louvois, 70, 141.
+
+
+Maisonrouge, king's lieutenant, 73-76.
+
+Malesherbes, 78, 156, 216.
+
+Man in the Iron Mask, documents, 114-125;
+  legends, 125-136;
+  true solution, 136-146.
+
+Marmontel, 158-163.
+
+Mattioli, the Iron Mask, 136-146.
+
+Maurepas, 144, 173-175.
+
+Mirabeau, 166, 167.
+
+Morellet, 155-158, 253.
+
+Moyria, de, 218-220.
+
+
+Necker, 248.
+
+
+Palatine, Madame, 125.
+
+Palteau, M. de, 118, 119.
+
+Papon's theory of Iron Mask, 127.
+
+Parlement, 76, 77.
+
+Pensions to prisoners, 98, 99.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, 173, 206.
+
+Pontchartrain, 69.
+
+Puget, king's lieutenant, 83.
+
+
+Quesnay, Dr., 175, 177, 178.
+
+
+Ravaisson, librarian, 54, 55, 134.
+
+Register of St. Paul's church, 117, 142, 143.
+
+Regnier's lines, 59.
+
+Renneville's meals, 103, 104.
+
+Réveillon, 245, 246.
+
+Ricarville, companion of the Iron Mask, 123, 124.
+
+Richelieu, Cardinal, 63-66.
+
+Richelieu, Duke de, 76, 129, 130.
+
+Rigby, Dr., 253, 254.
+
+Risings in the provinces, 273.
+
+Rochebrune, commissary, 195.
+
+Rohan, Cardinal de, 222.
+
+
+Sade, Marquis de, 95.
+
+Saint-Mars, governor, 87, 115-119, 127, 142.
+
+Saint-Marc, detective, 169, 176, 180, 183, 192.
+
+Sartine, de, 49, 202, 203, 207, 210, 215.
+
+Sauvé, Madame de, her dress, 108.
+
+Solages, de, 84.
+
+Staal, Madame de, 73-76, 94, 95, 102.
+
+
+Taulès, de, 132.
+
+Tavernier, 106.
+
+Theories on Iron Mask, 125-136.
+
+Thuriot de la Rosière, 256.
+
+Tirmont, companion of Iron Mask, 123, 124.
+
+
+Vieux-Maisons, Madame de, 128.
+
+Villette, Marquis de, 224.
+
+Vinache's library, 109.
+
+Vincennes, 165-167, 180.
+
+Voltaire, 99, 126, 128, 129, 148-152.
+
+LONDON:
+
+GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LD.
+
+ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, CLERKENWELL, E.C.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The castle of Tours, 147 miles south-west of Paris, which Louis XI.
+made his favourite residence. See Scott's _Quentin Durward_.--T.
+
+[2] Jean Balue (1471-1491), chaplain to Louis XI. For traitorously
+divulging the king's schemes to his enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, he was
+for eleven years shut up in the castle of Loches, in an iron-bound
+wooden cage.--T.
+
+[3] A French author (1624-1693) who was involved in the fall of Louis
+XIV.'s dishonest finance minister, Fouquet, in 1661, and was imprisoned
+for five years in the Bastille, amusing himself with reading the Fathers
+of the Church and taming a spider. See Kitchin's _History of France_,
+iii. 155-157.--T.
+
+[4] Antoine de Caumont, duc de Lauzun (1633-1723), a courtier of Louis
+XIV., whose favours to the Duke made Louvois, the minister, his bitter
+enemy. He was twice imprisoned in the Bastille, the second time at the
+instance of Madame de Montespan. He commanded the French auxiliaries of
+James II. in Ireland. See Macaulay's _History_, Chaps. IX., XII.,
+XV.--T.
+
+[5] A game played with a sort of box, in the top of which are cut holes
+of equal size, and with metal discs or balls, the object being to pitch
+the balls into the holes from a distance. A similar game may be seen at
+any English country fair.--T.
+
+[6] The famous president of the Cour des Aides and Minister of the
+Interior, renowned for his consistent support of the people against
+oppression. He was banished in 1771 for remonstrating against the abuses
+of law; but returning to Paris to oppose the execution of Louis XVI., he
+was guillotined in 1794.--T.
+
+[7] Antonio del Giudice, prince de Cellamare (1657-1733), the Spanish
+ambassador, was the instigator of a plot against the Regent in 1718. See
+Kitchin, _ib._ iii. 474.--T.
+
+[8] The Hôtel des Invalides, residence of pensioned soldiers, &c. still
+a well-known building of Paris.--T.
+
+[9] A château, four miles east of Paris, notable as the place where St.
+Louis, the royal lawgiver of France, dispensed justice. The _donjon_
+still exists, serving now as a soldier's barracks.--T.
+
+[10] One of the first prisons on the system of solitary confinement in
+cells erected in Paris. It dates from 1850.--T.
+
+[11] The Abbé de Buquoy (1653-1740) owed his imprisonment originally to
+having been found in company with dealers in contraband salt when the
+_gabelle_, or salt-tax, compelled the French people to buy salt, whether
+they wanted it or not, at a price _two thousand times_ its true value.
+He was a man of very eccentric views, one of which was that woman was
+man's chief evil, and that was why, when the patriarch Job was stripped
+of children, flocks, herds, &c., his wife was left to him!--T.
+
+[12] The madhouse, eight miles east of Paris.--T.
+
+[13] A château originally outside Paris, now included in the city
+itself, once used as a hospital and jail, now a hospital for aged and
+indigent poor and for lunatics. The first experiments with the
+guillotine were tried there.--T.
+
+[14] See _infra_, p. 83.
+
+[15] The title rôle in a comedy by Henri Mounier, entitled _Grandeur et
+décadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme_ (1852). He is a writing-master, very
+vain, given (like Mr. Micawber) to tall talk and long-winded periods. He
+has become typical of "much cry and little wool." As an officer of the
+National Guard he says, "This sabre constitutes the finest day in my
+life! I accept it, and if ever I find myself at the head of your
+phalanxes, I shall know how to use it in defence of our
+institutions--and, if need arise, to fight for them!"--T.
+
+[16] In the early days of the Revolution, Paris was divided into
+sections or wards, and as the _pike_ had played a great part in the
+recent disturbances, one of the wards was known as the "Pike"
+section.--T.
+
+[17] A disciple of the Marquis de Sade (see p. 35), a notorious
+debauchee, whose book _Justine_ was a disgusting mixture of brutality
+and obscenity.--T.
+
+[18] The pseudonym of Beffroy de Reigny (1757-1811), author of farces,
+and of a _Précis historique de la prise de la Bastille_.--T.
+
+[19] The name given to the constitutional struggles of the nobles and
+the Parlement of Paris against Mazarin and the royal power (1648-1654).
+The name is derived from _fronde_, a sling. A wit of the Parlement, one
+Bachaumont, "told the lawyers of that august body that they were like
+schoolboys playing in the town ditches with their slings, who run away
+directly the watchman appears, and begin again when his back is turned."
+See Kitchin, iii. pp. 102-128.--T.
+
+[20] See _Monte-Cristo_.--T.
+
+[21] Delivered to the French Association for the Advancement of Science
+in 1893.
+
+[22] The battle fought on August 10, 1557, in which Egmont with a
+combined force of Spaniards, Flemish, and English (sent by Queen Mary)
+routed Constable Montmorency and the finest chivalry of France. It was
+in commemoration of this victory that Philip II. built the palace of the
+Escurial, shaped like a gridiron because the battle was fought on St.
+Lawrence's day.--T.
+
+[23] The following unpublished letter from Pontchartrain to Bernaville,
+intimating his probable nomination as governor of the Bastille, shows
+exactly what Louis XIV.'s government demanded of the head of the great
+state prison:-
+
+"Versailles, September 28, 1707.
+
+     "I have received your letter of yesterday. I can only repeat what I
+     have already written: to pay constant attention to what goes on in
+     the Bastille; to neglect none of the duties of a good governor; to
+     maintain order and discipline among the soldiers of the garrison,
+     seeing that they keep watch with all the necessary exactitude, and
+     that their wages are regularly paid; to take care that the
+     prisoners are well fed and treated with kindness, preventing them,
+     however, from having any communication with people outside and from
+     writing letters; finally, to be yourself especially prompt in
+     informing me of anything particular that may happen at the
+     Bastille. You will understand that in following such a line of
+     action you cannot but please the king, and perhaps induce him to
+     grant you the post of governor; on my part, you may count on my
+     neglecting no means of representing your services to His Majesty in
+     the proper light.
+
+"I am, &c.,
+
+"PONTCHARTRAIN."
+
+
+
+
+
+[24] The appellation of the eldest brother of the reigning king.--T.
+
+[25] Under the _ancien régime_, there being no Minister of the Interior
+(Home Secretary), each of the ministers (the War Minister, Minister for
+Foreign Affairs, &c.) had a part of France under his charge. The
+Minister of Paris was usually what we should call the Lord
+Chamberlain.--T.
+
+[26] The court which up to the time of the Revolution was the seat of
+justice, presided over by the Provost of Paris. It held its sittings in
+the castle known as the Châtelet.--T.
+
+[27] A judicial, not a legislative body. It was constantly in antagonism
+to the king.--T.
+
+[28] The famous Encyclopædia edited by D'Alembert and Diderot. It
+occupied twenty years of the life of the latter, and went through many
+vicissitudes; its free criticism of existing institutions provoking the
+enmity of the government. Voltaire was one of its largest
+contributors.--T.
+
+[29] This raised Linguet's indignation. "The consideration of this
+enormous expense has given to some ministers, among others to M. Necker,
+a notion of reform; if this should come to anything, it would be very
+disgraceful to spring from no other cause. 'Suppress the Bastille out of
+economy!' said on this subject, a few days ago, one of the youngest and
+most eloquent orators of England."
+
+[30] The Hôtel Carnavalet, museum in Paris, where a large number of
+documents and books are preserved relating to the history of the
+city.--T.
+
+[31] It may be noted that the different escapes contributed to the
+gradual tightening of the rules of the Bastille. After the escape of the
+Comte de Bucquoy, such ornaments as the prisoners could attach cords to
+were at once removed, and knives were taken from them; after the escape
+of Allègre and Latude, bars of iron were placed in the chimneys, and so
+forth.
+
+[32] The second of the four principal officers of the Bastille. The
+officers were: (1) the governor; (2) the king's lieutenant; (3) the
+major; (4) the adjutant. There was also a doctor, a surgeon, a
+confessor, &c. The garrison consisted of Invalides.--T.
+
+[33] The most surprising instance is that of an Englishman, who returned
+spontaneously from England to become a prisoner in the Bastille. "On
+Thursday, May 22, 1693, at nightfall, M. de Jones, an Englishman,
+returned from England, having come back to prison for reasons concerning
+the king's service. He was located outside the château, in a little room
+where M. de Besmaus keeps his library, above his office, and he is not
+to appear for some days for his examination, and is to be taken great
+care of."--Du Junca's Journal.
+
+[34] This was not the Lauzun already mentioned, but his nephew, Armand
+Louis de Gontaut, duke de Biron (1747-1793), who was notorious
+throughout Europe for his gallantries.--T.
+
+[35] An official of the royal council, whose function originally was to
+examine and report on petitions to the king. He became a sort of
+superior magistrate's clerk.--T.
+
+[36] "1751, March 2. I have received a letter from Dr. Duval (secretary
+to the lieutenant of police), in which he tells me that M. Berryer
+(lieutenant of police) is struck with the cost of the clothes supplied
+to the prisoners for some time past; but, as you know, I only supply
+things when ordered by M. Berryer, and I try to supply good clothes, so
+that they may last and give the prisoners satisfaction."--Letter from
+Rochebrune, commissary to the Bastille, to Major Chevalier.
+
+[37] These extracts are translated literally, in order to preserve the
+clumsy constructions of the unlettered official.--T.
+
+[38] Step-sister of Louis XIV. The following extracts from her
+correspondence show how, even in circles that might have been expected
+to be well informed, the legend had already seized on people's
+imaginations:--
+
+"Marly, October 10, 1711. A man remained long years in the Bastille, and
+has died there, masked. At his side he had two musketeers ready to kill
+him if he took off his mask. He ate and slept masked. No doubt there was
+some reason for this, for otherwise he was well treated and lodged, and
+given everything he wished for. He went to communion masked; he was very
+devout and read continually. No one has ever been able to learn who he
+was."
+
+"Versailles, October 22, 1711. I have just learnt who the masked man
+was, who died in the Bastille. His wearing a mask was not due to
+cruelty. He was an English lord who had been mixed up in the affair of
+the Duke of Berwick (natural son of James II.) against King William. He
+died there so that the king might never know what became of him."
+
+[39] The insurgents who rose for the king against the Revolutionists in
+Brittany: see Balzac's famous novel. The movement smouldered for a great
+many years.--T.
+
+[40] The Gregorian calendar was abolished by the National Convention in
+1793, who decreed that September 22, 1792, should be regarded as the
+first day of a new era. The year was divided into twelve months, with
+names derived from natural phenomena. Nivose (snowy) was the fourth of
+these months. Thus, the period mentioned in the text includes from
+December 21, 1800, to January 19, 1801.--T.
+
+[41] Since M. Funck-Brentano's book was published, his conclusions have
+been corroborated by Vicomte Maurice Boutry in a study published in the
+_Revue des Etudes historiques_ (1899, p. 172). The Vicomte furnishes an
+additional proof. He says that the Duchess de Créquy, in the third book
+of her _Souvenirs_, gives a _résumé_ of a conversation on the Iron Mask
+between Marshal de Noailles, the Duchess de Luynes, and others, and
+adds: "The most considerable and best informed persons of my time always
+thought that the famous story had no other foundation than the capture
+and captivity of the Piedmontese Mattioli."--T.
+
+[42] "I have seen these ills, and I am not twenty yet."
+
+[43] These verses were, of course, in Latin.--T.
+
+[44] Palissot was a dramatist and critic who in his comedy _Les
+Philosophes_ had bitterly attacked Rousseau, Diderot, and the
+Encyclopædists generally.--T.
+
+[45] The old prison of Paris. It was the debtors' prison, famous also
+for the number of actors who were imprisoned there under the _ancien
+régime_. It was demolished in 1780.--T.
+
+[46] "Not unto us, O Lord, but unto Thy name give glory!
+
+"Know our heart and search out our ways."
+
+[47] "The victory is won!"--T.
+
+[48] Charenton was under the direction of a religious order known as the
+_Frères de la Charité_, who undertook the care of sick and weak-minded
+poor.--T.
+
+[49] This was Elizabeth Chudleigh (1720-1788), the notorious beauty who
+privately married the Hon. Augustus Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol,
+separated from him after three years, and became the mistress of the
+second Duke of Kingston, whom she bigamously married. After his death
+she was tried by the House of Lords for bigamy, and fled to France to
+escape punishment. Her gallantries and eccentricities were the talk of
+Europe.--T.
+
+[50] Instructed by his misfortunes and his captivity how to vanquish the
+efforts and the rage of tyrants, he taught the French how true courage
+can win liberty.
+
+[51] Jocrisse is the stock French type of the booby, and as such is a
+character in many comedies. He breaks a plate, for instance; his master
+asks him how he managed to be so clumsy, and he instantly smashes
+another, saying, "_Just like that!_" His master asks him to be sure and
+wake him early in the morning; Jocrisse answers: "Right, sir, depend on
+me; _but of course you'll ring_!"--T.
+
+[52] The Girondists (so called from Gironde, a district of Bordeaux)
+were the more sober republican party in the Assembly, who were forced by
+circumstances to join the Jacobins against Louis XVI. With their fall
+from power in the early summer of 1792 the last hope of the monarchy
+disappeared.--T.
+
+[53] Referring to the horrible massacres of September, 1792, when about
+1400 victims perished.--T.
+
+[54] The French Dick Turpin. Of good education, he formed when quite a
+youth a band of robbers, and became the terror of France. Like Turpin,
+he is the subject of dramas and stories.--T.
+
+[55] A forest near Paris, on the line to Avricourt. It was a famous
+haunt of brigands. There is a well-known story of a dog which attacked
+and killed the murderer of its master there.--T.
+
+[56] Literally "cut-top": we have no equivalent in English.--T.
+
+[57] A five-act comedy by Victorien Sardou.
+
+[58] The nickname given to the Jacobins, the extreme revolutionists, who
+sat on the highest seats on the left in the National Assembly.--T.
+
+[59] Which were the strict preserves of the aristocrats: to fish in them
+was as great a crime as to shoot a landlord's rabbit was, a few years
+ago, in England.--T.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Legends of the Bastille, by Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
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+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 43231 ***</div>
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+Project Gutenberg's Legends of the Bastille, by Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Legends of the Bastille
+
+Author: Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
+Translator: George Maidment
+
+Release Date: July 16, 2013 [EBook #43231]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE ***
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+     =MEDICINE AND THE MIND.= Translated from the French of MAURICE DE
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+
+
+
+                        LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE
+
+[Illustration: MODEL OF THE BASTILLE, CARVED IN ONE OF THE STONES OF THE
+FORTRESS.
+
+_One of these models, made by the instructions of the architect Palloy,
+was sent to the chief-town of every department in France._]
+
+
+
+
+                               Legends of
+                              the Bastille
+
+                                   BY
+                         FRANTZ FUNCK-BRENTANO
+
+               _WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIEN SARDOU_
+
+                       AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
+                            GEORGE MAIDMENT
+
+                        WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                 LONDON
+                          DOWNEY & CO. LIMITED
+                                  1899
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+     _Legendes et Archives de la Bastille._ Paris: Hachette et Cie.,
+     1898; second edition, 1899. Crowned by the French Academy.
+
+     _Die Bastille in der Legende und nach historischen Documenten._
+     German translation by Oscar Marschall von Bieberstein. Breslau:
+     Schottlaender, 1899.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+In his own entertaining way, Mr. Andrew Lang has recently been taking
+the scientific historian to task, and giving him a very admirable lesson
+on "history as she ought to be wrote." But though the two professors to
+whom he mainly addresses himself are Frenchmen, it would be doing an
+injustice to France to infer that she is the _alma mater_ of the modern
+dryasdust. The exact contrary is the case: France is rich in historical
+writers like the Comte d'Haussonville, M. de Maulde la Clavi�re, M.
+Gaston Boissier, to name only a few, who know how to be accurate without
+being dull.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano, whom I have the honour of introducing here to the
+English public, belongs to the same class. Of literary parentage and
+connections--his uncle is Professor Lujo Brentano, whose work on the
+English trade gilds is a standard--he entered in his twentieth year the
+�cole des Chartes, the famous institution which trains men in the
+methods of historical research. At the end of his three years' course,
+he was appointed to succeed Fran�ois Ravaisson in the work of
+classifying the archives of the Bastille in the Arsenal Library,--a work
+which occupied him for more than ten years. One fruit of it is to be
+seen in the huge catalogue of more than one thousand pages, printed
+under official auspices and awarded the Prix Le Dissez de Penanrum by
+the Acad�mie des Sciences morales et politiques. Another is the present
+work, which has been crowned by the French Academy. Meanwhile M.
+Funck-Brentano had been pursuing his studies at the Sorbonne and at
+Nancy, and his French thesis for the doctorate in letters was a volume
+on the origins of the Hundred Years' War, which obtained for him the
+highest possible distinction for a work of erudition in France, the
+Grand Prix Gobert. This volume he intends to follow up with two others,
+completing a social rather than a military history of the war, and this
+no doubt he regards as his _magnum opus_. He is known also as a lecturer
+in Belgium and Alsace as well as in Paris, and being general secretary
+of the Soci�t� des Etudes historiques and deputy professor of history at
+the College of France as well as sub-librarian of the Arsenal Library,
+he leads a busy life.
+
+Trained in the rigorous methods of the �cole des Chartes and inspired by
+the examples of Fustel de Coulanges and M. Paul Meyer, M. Funck-Brentano
+has developed a most interesting and conscientious method of his own. He
+depends on original sources, and subjects these to the most searching
+critical tests; but this is a matter of course: his individuality
+appears in regard to the publication of the results of his researches.
+When he has discoveries of importance to communicate, he gives them to
+the world first in the form of articles or studies in reviews of
+standing, thus preparing public opinion, and at the same time affording
+opportunities for the search-light of criticism to play on his work.
+Some of the chapters of this book thus appeared in the various _revues_,
+and have subsequently gone through a severe process of pruning and
+amending. It is now eleven years since the first appearance, in the
+pages of the _Revue des deux Mondes_, of the study of Latude which, in a
+much altered shape, now forms one of the most interesting portions of
+this book. The coming autumn will see the publication in France of a
+striking work by M. Funck-Brentano on the amazing poison-dramas at Louis
+XIV.'s court, and of this book also the several sections have been
+appearing at intervals for several years past.
+
+The present work, as I have already said, is the fruit of many years of
+research. Its startling revelations, so well summarized in M. Victorien
+Sardou's Introduction, have revolutionized public opinion in France, and
+in particular the solution of the old problem of the identity of the Man
+in the Iron Mask has been accepted as final by all competent critics.
+The _Athen�um_, in reviewing the book in its French form the other day,
+said that it must be taken cautiously as an ingenious bit of special
+pleading, and that the Bastille appears in M. Funck-Brentano's pages in
+altogether too roseate hues, suggesting further that no such results
+could be obtained without prejudice from the same archives as those on
+which Charpentier founded his _La Bastille d�voil�e_ in 1789. This
+criticism seems to me to ignore several important points. Charpentier's
+book, written in the heat of the revolutionary struggle, is not a
+history, but a political pamphlet, which, in the nature of the case, was
+bound to represent the Bastille as a horror. Moreover, Charpentier could
+only have depended superficially on the archives, which, as M.
+Funck-Brentano shows, were thrown into utter disorder on the day of the
+capture of the Bastille. The later writer, on the other hand, approached
+the subject when the revolutionary ardours had quite burnt out, and with
+the independent and dispassionate mind of a trained official. He spent
+thirteen years in setting the rediscovered archives in order, after his
+predecessor Ravaisson had already spent a considerable time at the same
+work. He was able, further (as Charpentier certainly was not), to
+complete and check the testimony of the archives by means of the memoirs
+of prisoners--the Abb� Morellet, Marmontel, Renneville, Dumouriez, and a
+host of others. In these circumstances it would be surprising if his
+conclusions were not somewhat different from those of Charpentier a
+hundred years ago.
+
+The gravamen of the _Athen�un's_ objection is that M. Funck-Brentano's
+description of the treatment of prisoners in the Bastille applies only
+to the favoured few, the implication being that M. Funck-Brentano has
+shut his eyes to the cases of the larger number. But surely the reviewer
+must have read the book too rapidly. M. Funck-Brentano shows, by means
+of existing and accessible documents, that the fact of being sent to the
+Bastille at all was itself, in the eighteenth century at least, a mark
+of favour. Once at the Bastille, the prisoner, whoever he might be, was
+treated without severity, unless he misbehaved. Prisoners of no social
+importance, such as Renneville, Latude (a servant's love-child),
+Tavernier (son of a house-porter), were fed and clothed and cared for
+much better than they would have been outside the prison walls. A young
+man named Estival de Texas, who was being exiled to Canada because he
+was a disgrace to his family, wrote to the minister of Paris on June 22,
+1726, from the roadstead of La Rochelle: "Your lordship is sending me to
+a wild country, huddled with mean wretches, and condemned to a fare very
+different from what your lordship granted me in the Bastille." Here was
+a friendless outcast looking back regretfully on his prison fare! On
+February 6, 1724, one of the king's ministers wrote to the lieutenant
+of police: "I have read to the duke of Bourbon the letter you sent me
+about the speeches of M. Qu�h�on, and his royal highness has instructed
+me to send you an order and a _lettre de cachet_ authorizing his removal
+to the Bastille. But as he thinks that this is _an honour the fellow
+little deserves_, he wishes you to postpone the execution of the warrant
+for three days, in order to see if Qu�h�on will not take the hint and
+leave Paris as he was commanded." It is on such documents as these,
+which are to be seen in hundreds at the Arsenal Library in Paris, that
+M. Funck-Brentano has founded his conclusions. Anyone who attacks him on
+his own ground is likely to come badly off.
+
+With M. Funck-Brentano's permission, I have omitted the greater part of
+his footnotes, which are mainly references to documents inaccessible to
+the English reader. On the other hand, I have ventured to supply a few
+footnotes in explanation of such allusions as the Englishman not reading
+French (and the translation is intended for no others) might not
+understand. On the same principle I have attempted rhymed renderings of
+two or three scraps of verse quoted from Regnier and Voltaire, to whom I
+make my apologies. The proofs have had the advantage of revision by M.
+Funck-Brentano, who is, however, in no way responsible for any
+shortcomings. The Index appears in the English version alone.
+
+The portrait of Latude and the views of the Bastille are reproduced from
+photographs of the originals specially taken by M. A. Bresson, of 40 Rue
+de Passy, Paris.
+
+GEORGE MAIDMENT.
+
+_August, 1899._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                           1
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ARCHIVES                                                          47
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE                                               57
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LIFE IN THE BASTILLE                                                  85
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK                                             114
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE                                       147
+
+  I. VOLTAIRE                                                        148
+
+ II. LA BEAUMELLE                                                    152
+
+III. THE ABB� MORELLET                                               155
+
+ IV. MARMONTEL                                                       158
+
+  V. LINGUET                                                         163
+
+ VI. DIDEROT                                                         165
+
+VII. THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU                                         166
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LATUDE                                                               168
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY                                               238
+
+INDEX                                                                277
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Model of the Bastille                                      _Frontispiece_
+
+Facsimile of Du Junca's note regarding the
+entry of the Iron Mask                                 _Facing page_ 115
+
+Facsimile of Du Junca's note regarding the
+death of the Iron Mask                                     "         116
+
+Facsimile of the Iron Mask's burial certificate            "         142
+
+Facsimile of the cover of Latude's explosive box           "         173
+
+Facsimile of Latude's writing with blood on linen          "         188
+
+Portrait of Latude                                         "         229
+
+The Capture of the Bastille                                "         257
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+At the great Exhibition of 1889 I visited, in company with some friends,
+the reproduction of the Bastille, calculated to give all who saw it--and
+the whole world must have seen it--an entirely false impression.
+
+You had barely cleared the doorway when you saw, in the gloom, an old
+man enveloped in a long white beard, lying on the "sodden straw" of
+tradition, rattling his chains and uttering doleful cries. And the guide
+said to you, not without emotion, "You see here the unfortunate Latude,
+who remained in this position, with both arms thus chained behind his
+back, for thirty-five years!"
+
+This information I completed by adding in the same tone: "And it was in
+this attitude that he so cleverly constructed the ladder, a hundred and
+eighty feet long, which enabled him to escape."
+
+The company looked at me with surprise, the guide with a scowl, and I
+slipped away.
+
+The same considerations that prompted my intervention have suggested to
+M. Funck-Brentano this work on the Bastille, in which he has set the
+facts in their true light, and confronted the legends which everyone
+knows with the truth of which many are in ignorance.
+
+For in spite of all that has been written on the subject by Ravaisson,
+in the introduction to his _Archives of the Bastille_, by Victor
+Fournel, in his _Men of the Fourteenth of July_, and by other writers,
+the popular idea of the internal administration of the Bastille in 1789
+holds by the description of Louis Blanc: "Iron cages, recalling
+Plessis-les-Tours[1] and the tortures of Cardinal La Balue![2]--underground
+dungeons, the loathsome haunts of toads, lizards, enormous rats,
+spiders--the whole furniture consisting of one huge stone covered with a
+little straw, where the prisoner breathed poison in the very air....
+Enveloped in the shades of mystery, kept in absolute ignorance of the
+crime with which he was charged, and the kind of punishment awaiting
+him, he ceased to belong to the earth!"
+
+If this Bastille of melodrama ever had any existence, the Bastille of
+the eighteenth century bore the least possible resemblance to it. In
+1789, these dungeons on the ground floor of the fortress, with windows
+looking on the moats, were no longer reserved, as under Louis XV., for
+prisoners condemned to death, dangerous madmen, or prisoners who had
+been insolent, obstreperous, or violent; nor for warders guilty of
+breaches of discipline. At the time of Necker's first ministry, the use
+of these dungeons had been abolished altogether.
+
+The prisoner, put through an interrogation in the early days of his
+detention, was never left in ignorance of the "delinquency" with which
+he was charged, and had no reason to be concerned about the kind of
+punishment awaiting him; for there had been neither torture nor
+punishment of any kind at the Bastille for a hundred years.
+
+Instead of a dungeon or a cage of iron, every prisoner occupied a room
+of fair size, its greatest defect being that it was rather poorly
+lighted by a narrow window, secured by bars, some of them projecting
+inwards. It was sufficiently furnished; and there was nothing to hinder
+the prisoner from getting in more furniture from outside. Moreover, he
+could procure whatever clothing and linen he desired, and if he had no
+means to pay for them, money was supplied. Latude complained of
+rheumatism, and furs were at once given him. He wanted a dressing-gown
+of "red-striped calamanco"; the shops were ransacked to gratify him. A
+certain Hugonnet complained that he had not received the shirts "with
+embroidered ruffles" which he had asked for. A lady named Sauv� wanted a
+dress of white silk spotted with green flowers. In all Paris there was
+only a white dress with green stripes to be found, with which it was
+hoped that she would be satisfied.
+
+Every room was provided with a fireplace or a stove. Firewood was
+supplied, and light; the prisoner could have as many candles as he
+pleased. Paper, pens, and ink were at his disposal; though he was
+deprived of them temporarily if he made bad use of them, like Latude,
+who scribbled all day long only to heap insults in his letters on the
+governor and the lieutenant of police. He could borrow books from the
+library, and was at liberty to have books sent in from outside. La
+Beaumelle had six hundred volumes in his room. He might breed birds,
+cats, and dogs--by no means being reduced to taming the legendary spider
+of Pellisson,[3] which figures also in the story of Lauzun,[4] and,
+indeed, of all prisoners in every age. Instruments of music were
+allowed. Renneville played the fiddle, and Latude the flute. There were
+concerts in the prisoners' rooms and in the apartments of the governor.
+
+Every prisoner could work at embroidery, at the turning lathe, or the
+joiner's bench, at pleasure. All whose conduct was irreproachable were
+allowed to come and go, to pay each other visits, to play at
+backgammon, cards, or chess in their rooms; at skittles, bowls, or
+_tonneau_[5] in the courtyard. La Rou�rie asked for a billiard table for
+himself and his friends, and he got it.
+
+The prisoners were permitted to walk on the platform of the fortress,
+from which they could see the people passing up and down the Rue
+Saint-Antoine and the vicinity, and watch the animated crowds on the
+boulevard at the hours when fashionable people were accustomed to take
+their drives. By the aid of telescopes and big letters written on boards
+they were able to communicate with the people of the neighbourhood, and,
+like Latude, to keep up a secret correspondence with the grisettes of
+the district. Michelet, with too obvious a design, declares that under
+Louis XVI. the regulations of the prison were more severe than under
+Louis XV., and that this promenade on the platform was done away with.
+There is not a word of truth in it. The promenade was forbidden only to
+those prisoners who, like the Marquis de Sade, took advantage of it to
+stir up riots among the passers-by; and from the accession of Louis
+XVI. and the visitation of Malesherbes,[6] the rule of the prison grew
+milder day by day.
+
+Certain of the prisoners were invited to dine with the governor, and to
+walk in his gardens, in excellent company. Some were allowed to leave
+the fortress, on condition of returning in the evening; others were even
+allowed to remain out all night!
+
+Those who had servants could have them in attendance if the servants
+were willing to share their captivity. Or they had room-mates, as was
+the case with Latude and All�gre.
+
+In regard to food, the prisoners are unanimous in declaring that it was
+abundant and good. "I had five dishes at dinner," says Dumouriez, "and
+five at supper, without reckoning dessert." The Provost de Beaumont
+declared that he had quitted the Bastille with regret, because there he
+had been able to eat and drink to his heart's content. Poultier
+d'Elmotte says: "M. de Launey had many a friendly chat with me, and
+sent me what dishes I wished for." Baron Hennequin, a hypochondriac who
+found fault with everything, confesses nevertheless that they gave him
+more meat than he could eat. The Abb� de Buquoy affirms that he fared
+sumptuously, and that it was the king's intention that the prisoners
+should be well fed. The splenetic Linguet owns, in his pamphlet, that he
+had three good meals a day, and that meat was supplied to him in such
+quantities that his suspicions were aroused: "They meant to poison me!"
+he says. But he omits to say that de Launey sent him every morning the
+menu for the day, on which he marked down with his own hand the dishes
+he fancied, "choosing always the most dainty, and in sufficient
+quantities to have satisfied five or six epicures."
+
+In Louis XIV.'s time, Renneville drew up the following list of dishes
+served to him: "Oysters, prawns, fowls, capons, mutton, veal, young
+pigeons; forcemeat pies and patties; asparagus, cauliflower, green peas,
+artichokes; salmon, soles, pike, trout, every kind of fish whether
+fresh-water or salt; pastry, and fruits in their season." We find Latude
+complaining that the fowls given him were not stuffed! M.
+Funck-Brentano tells the amusing story of Marmontel's eating by mistake
+the dinner intended for his servant, and finding it excellent.
+
+Mdlle. de Launay, afterwards Madame de Staal, who was imprisoned for
+complicity in the Cellamare[7] plot, relates that on the first evening
+of her sojourn in the Bastille, she and her maid were both terrified by
+the strange and prolonged sound, beneath their feet, of a mysterious
+machine, which conjured up visions of an instrument of torture. When
+they came to inquire, they found that their room was over the kitchen,
+and the terrible machine was the roasting-jack!
+
+The prisoners were not only allowed to receive visits from their
+relations and friends, but to keep them to dinner or to make up a
+rubber. Thus Madame de Staal held receptions in the afternoon, and in
+the evening there was high play. "And this time," she says, "was the
+happiest in my life."
+
+Bussy-Rabutin received the whole court, and all his friends--especially
+those of the fair sex. M. de Bonrepos--an assumed name--was so
+comfortable in the Bastille that when he was directed to retire to the
+Invalides,[8] he could only be removed by force.
+
+"I there spent six weeks," says Morellet, "so pleasantly, that I chuckle
+to this day when I think of them." And when he left, he exclaimed: "God
+rest those jolly tyrants!"
+
+Voltaire remained there for twelve days, with a recommendation from the
+lieutenant of police that he should be treated with all the
+consideration "due to his genius."
+
+The objection may be raised that these cases are all of great lords or
+men of letters, towards whom the government of those days was
+exceptionally lenient. (How delightful to find writers put on the same
+footing with peers!) But the objection is groundless.
+
+I have referred to Renneville and Latude, prisoners of very little
+account. The one was a spy; the other a swindler. In the three-volume
+narrative left us by Renneville, you hear of nothing but how he kept
+open house and made merry with his companions. They gambled and smoked,
+ate and drank, fuddled and fought, gossiped with their neighbours of
+both sexes, and passed one another pastry and excellent wine through the
+chimneys. How gladly the prisoners in our jails to-day would accommodate
+themselves to such a life! Renneville, assuredly, was not treated with
+the same consideration as Voltaire; but, frankly, would you have wished
+it?
+
+As to Latude--who was supplied with dressing-gowns to suit his
+fancy--the reader will see from M. Funck-Brentano's narrative that no
+one but himself was to blame if he did not dwell at Vincennes[9] or in
+the Bastille on the best of terms--or even leave his prison at the
+shortest notice, by the front gate, and with a well-lined pocket.
+
+For that was one of the harsh measures of this horrible Bastille--to
+send away the poor wretches, when their time was expired, with a few
+hundred livres in their pockets, and to compensate such as were found to
+be innocent! See what M. Funck-Brentano says of Sub�, who, for a
+detention of eighteen days, received 3000 livres (�240 to-day), or of
+others, who, after an imprisonment of two years, were consoled with an
+annual pension of 2400 francs of our reckoning. Voltaire spent twelve
+days in the Bastille, and was assured of an annual pension of 1200
+livres for life. What is to be said now of our contemporary justice,
+which, after some months of imprisonment on suspicion, dismisses the
+poor fellow, arrested by mistake, with no other indemnity than the
+friendly admonition: "Go! and take care we don't catch you again!"
+
+Some wag will be sure to say that I am making out the Bastille to have
+been a palace of delight. We can spare him his little jest. A prison is
+always a prison, however pleasant it may be; and the best of cheer is no
+compensation for the loss of liberty. But there is a wide difference, it
+will be granted, between the reality and the notion generally
+held--between this "hotel for men of letters," as some one called it,
+and the hideous black holes of our system of solitary confinement. I
+once said that I should prefer three years in the Bastille to three
+months at Mazas.[10] I do not retract.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Linguet and Latude, unquestionably, were the two men whose habit of
+drawing the long bow has done most to propagate the fables about the
+Bastille, the falsity of which is established by incontrovertible
+documents. Party spirit has not failed to take seriously the interested
+calumnies of Linguet, who used his spurious martyrdom to advertise
+himself, and the lies of Latude, exploiting to good purpose a captivity
+which he had made his career.
+
+Let us leave Linguet, who, after having so earnestly urged the
+demolition of the Bastille, had reason to regret it at the Conciergerie
+at the moment of mounting the revolutionary tumbril, and speak a little
+of the other, this captive who was as ingenious in escaping from prison,
+when locked up, as in hugging his chains when offered the means of
+release.
+
+For the bulk of mankind, thirty-five years of captivity was the price
+Latude paid for a mere practical joke: the sending to Madame de
+Pompadour of a harmless powder that was taken for poison. The punishment
+is regarded as terrific: I do not wonder at it. But if, instead of
+relying on the gentleman's own fanfaronades, the reader will take the
+trouble to look at the biography written by M. Funck-Brentano and amply
+supported by documents, he will speedily see that if Latude remained in
+prison for thirty-five years, it was entirely by his own choice; and
+that his worst enemy, his most implacable persecutor, the author of all
+his miseries was--himself.
+
+If, after the piece of trickery which led to his arrest, he had followed
+the advice of the excellent Berryer, who counselled patience and
+promised his speedy liberation, he might have got off with a few months
+of restraint at Vincennes, where his confinement was so rigorous that he
+had only to push the garden gate to be free!
+
+That was the first folly calculated to injure his cause, for the new
+fault was more serious than the old. He was caught; he was locked in the
+cells of the Bastille: but the kind-hearted Berryer soon removed him.
+Instead of behaving himself quietly, however, our man begins to grow
+restless, to harangue, to abuse everybody, and on the books lent him to
+scribble insulting verses on the Pompadour. But they allow him an
+apartment, then give him a servant, then a companion, All�gre. And then
+comes the famous escape. One hardly knows which to wonder at the most:
+the ingenuity of the two rogues, or the guileless management of this
+prison which allows them to collect undisturbed a gimlet, a saw, a
+compass, a pulley, fourteen hundred feet of rope, a rope ladder 180 feet
+long, with 218 wooden rungs; to conceal all these between the floor and
+the ceiling below, without anyone ever thinking to look there; and,
+after having cut through a wall four and a half feet thick, to get clear
+away without firing a shot!
+
+They were not the first to get across those old walls. Renneville
+mentions several escapes, the most famous being that of the Abb� de
+Buquoy.[11] But little importance seems to have been attached to them.
+
+With All�gre and Latude it was a different matter. The passers-by must
+have seen, in the early morning, the ladder swinging from top to bottom
+of the wall, and the escape was no longer a secret. The Bastille is
+discredited. It is possible, then, to escape from it. The chagrined
+police are on their mettle. There will be laughter at their expense. The
+fugitives are both well known, too. They will take good care to spread
+the story of their escape, with plenty of gibes against the governor,
+the lieutenant of police, the ministry, the favourite, the king! This
+scandal must be averted at any cost; the fugitives must be caught!
+
+And we cannot help pitying these two wretches who, after a flight so
+admirably contrived, got arrested so stupidly: All�gre at Brussels,
+through an abusive letter written to the Pompadour; Latude in Holland,
+through a letter begging help from his mother.
+
+Latude is again under lock and key, and this time condemned to a
+stricter confinement. And then the hubbub begins again: outcries,
+demands, acts of violence, threats! He exasperates and daunts men who
+had the best will in the world to help him. He is despatched to the
+fortress of Vincennes, and promised his liberty if he will only keep
+quiet. His liberation, on his own showing, was but a matter of days. He
+is allowed to walk on the bank of the moat. He takes advantage of it to
+escape again!
+
+Captured once more, he is once more lodged at Vincennes, and the whole
+business begins over again. But they are good enough to consider him a
+little mad, and after a stay at Charenton,[12] where he was very well
+treated, he at last gets his dismissal, with the recommendation to
+betake himself to his own part of the country quietly. Ah, that would
+not be like Latude! He scampers over Paris, railing against De Sartine,
+De Marigny; hawking his pamphlets; claiming 150,000 livres as
+damages!--and, finally, extorting money from a charitable lady by
+menaces!
+
+This is the last straw. Patience is exhausted, and he is clapped into
+Bic�tre[13] as a dangerous lunatic. Imagine his fury and disgust!
+
+Let us be just. Suppose, in our own days, a swindler, sentenced to a few
+months' imprisonment, insulting the police, the magistrates, the court,
+the president; sentenced on this account to a longer term, escaping
+once, twice, a third time; always caught, put in jail again, sentenced
+to still longer terms: then when at last released, after having done his
+time, scattering broadcast insulting libels against the chief of police,
+the ministers, the parliament, and insisting on the President of the
+Republic paying him damages to the tune of 150,000 francs; to crown it
+all, getting money out of some good woman by working on her fears! You
+will agree with me that such a swaggering blade would not have much
+difficulty in putting together thirty-five years in jail!
+
+But these sentences would of course be public, and provide no soil for
+the growth of those legends to which closed doors always give rise. Yet
+in all that relates to the causes and the duration of the man's
+imprisonment, his case would be precisely that of Latude--except that
+for him there would be no furs, no promenading in the gardens, no
+stuffed fowls for his lunch!
+
+Besides some fifty autograph letters from Latude, addressed from Bic�tre
+to his good angel, Madame Legros, in which he shows himself in his true
+character, an intriguing, vain, insolent, bragging, insupportable
+humbug, I have one, written to M. de Sartine, which Latude published as
+a pendant to the pamphlet with which he hoped to move Madame de
+Pompadour to pity, and in which every phrase is an insult. This letter
+was put up at public auction, and these first lines of it were
+reproduced in the catalogue:--
+
+"I am supporting with patience the loss of my best years and of my
+fortune. I am enduring my rheumatism, the weakness of my arm, and a ring
+of iron around my body for the rest of my life!"
+
+A journalist, one of those who learn their history from Louis Blanc, had
+a vision of Latude for ever riveted by a ring of iron to a pillar in
+some underground dungeon, and exclaimed with indignation: "A ring of
+iron! How horrible!"
+
+And it was only a linen band!
+
+That fabulous iron collar is a type of the whole legend of the
+unfortunate Latude!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everything connected with the Bastille has assumed a fabulous character.
+
+What glorious days were those of the 13th and 14th of July, as the
+popular imagination conjures them up in reliance on Michelet, who, in a
+vivid, impassioned, picturesque, dramatic, admirable style, has
+written, not the history, but the romance of the French Revolution!
+
+Look at his account of the 13th. He shows you all Paris in revolt
+against Versailles, and with superb enthusiasm running to arms to try
+issues with the royal army. It is fine as literature. Historically, it
+is pure fiction.
+
+The Parisians were assuredly devoted to the "new ideas," that is, the
+suppression of the abuses and the privileges specified in the memorials
+of the States General; in a word, to the reforms longed for by the whole
+of France. But they had no conception of gaining them without the
+concurrence of the monarchy, to which they were sincerely attached. That
+crowd of scared men running to the H�tel de Ville to demand arms, who
+are represented by the revolutionary writers as exasperated by the
+dismissal of Necker and ready to undermine the throne for the sake of
+that Genevan, were much less alarmed at what was hatching at Versailles
+than at what was going on in Paris. If they wished for arms, it was for
+their own security. The dissolution of the National Assembly, which was
+regarded as certain, was setting all minds in a ferment, and
+ill-designing people took advantage of the general uneasiness and
+agitation to drive matters to the worst extremities, creating disorder
+everywhere. The police had disappeared; the streets were in the hands of
+the mob. Bands of ruffians--among them those ill-favoured rascals who
+since the month of May had been flocking, as at a word of command, into
+Paris from heaven knows where, and who had already been seen at work,
+pillaging R�veillon's[14] establishment--roamed in every direction,
+insulting women, stripping wayfarers, looting the shops, opening the
+prisons, burning the barriers. On July 13 the electors of Paris resolved
+on the formation of a citizen militia for the protection of the town,
+and the scheme was adopted on the same day by every district, with
+articles of constitution, quoted by M. Funck-Brentano, which specify the
+intentions of the signatories. It was expressly in self-defence against
+the "Brigands," as they were called, that the citizen militia was
+formed: "To protect the citizens," ran the minutes of the
+Petit-Saint-Antoine district, "against the dangers which threaten them
+each individually." "In a word," says M. Victor Fournel, "the
+dominating sentiment was fear. Up till the 14th of July, the Parisian
+middle-classes showed far more concern at the manifold excesses
+committed by the populace after Necker's dismissal than at the schemes
+of the court." And M. Jacques Charavay, who was the first to publish the
+text of the minutes in question, says not a word too much when he draws
+from them this conclusion: "The movement which next day swept away the
+Bastille might possibly have been stifled by the National Guard, if its
+organization had had greater stability."
+
+All that was wanting to these good intentions was direction, a man at
+the helm, and particularly the support of Besenval. But his conduct was
+amazing! He left Versailles with 35,000 men and an order signed by the
+king--obtained not without difficulty--authorizing him "to repel force
+by force." Now let us see a summary of his military operations:--
+
+On the 13th, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, a skirmish of the
+German regiment on the Place Vend�me, where it came into collision with
+the "demonstration"--as we should say to-day--which was displaying busts
+of Necker and the Duke of Orleans, and dispersed it.
+
+At six o'clock, a march of the same horse soldiers to the
+swinging-bridge of the Tuileries, where they had five or six chairs
+thrown at their head; and the massacre, by M. de Lambesc, of the
+legendary grey-beard who, an hour after, was describing his tragic end
+at the Palais-Royal!
+
+At nine o'clock, a military promenade of the same regiment along the
+boulevards. A volley from the Gardes Fran�aises slew two of their
+number, and the regiment beat a retreat without returning fire, to the
+great surprise of M. de Maleissye, officer of the Guards. For, by his
+own confession, if the cavalry had charged, it would easily have routed
+the Gardes Fran�aises "in the state of drunkenness in which they then
+were."
+
+And Besenval, terrified at such a resistance, assembled all his troops,
+shut himself up with them in the Champ de Mars, and did not move another
+step!
+
+We ask ourselves, "Was he a fool? or was he a traitor?" He was a fool,
+for he thought he had "three hundred thousand men" in front of him, took
+every excited person for a rebel, and did not understand that out of
+every hundred Parisians there were ninety who were relying on him to
+bring the mutineers to reason.
+
+He had no confidence in his troops, he said.
+
+It was rather for them to have no confidence in him, and to lose heart
+utterly at such a spectacle of cowardice. But he was slandering them.
+One solitary regiment showed disloyalty. And if he had only given the
+Swiss the word to march, their conduct on August 10 gives ample proof
+that they could have been depended on.
+
+"And then," says he again, "I was fearful of letting loose civil war!"
+
+Indeed! And so a soldier going to suppress a revolt is not to run the
+risk of fighting!
+
+Last reason of all: "I requested orders from Versailles--and did not get
+them!"
+
+What, then, had he in his pocket?
+
+Finally, after having sent word to Flesselles and De Launey to maintain
+their position till he arrived, and after having allowed the arms of the
+Invalides to be looted under his eyes without a single effort to save
+them, he waited till the Bastille was taken before making up his mind to
+leave the Champ de Mars, and to return quietly to Versailles with his
+35,000 men, who had not fired a shot!
+
+Ah! those were the days for rioting!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"On July 13," says Michelet, "Paris was defending herself." (Against
+whom?) "On the 14th, she attacked! A voice wakened her and cried, 'On,
+and take the Bastille!' And that day was the day of the entire People!"
+
+Admirable poetry; but every word a lie!
+
+Listen to Marat, who is not open to suspicion, and who saw things at
+closer quarters. "The Bastille, badly defended, was captured by a
+handful of soldiers and a gang of wretches for the most part Germans and
+provincials. The Parisians, those everlasting star-gazers, came there
+out of curiosity!"
+
+In reality, Michelet's "entire people" reduces itself to a bare thousand
+assailants, of whom three hundred at most took part in the fight: Gardes
+Fran�aises and deserters of all arms, lawyers' clerks, and citizens who
+had lost their heads: fine fellows who thought themselves engaged in
+meritorious work in rushing on these inoffensive walls; bandits
+attracted by the riot which promised them theft and murder with
+impunity. And a number of mere spectators--spectators above all!
+
+"I was present," says Chancellor Pasquier, "at the taking of the
+Bastille. What is called the fight was not serious. The resistance was
+absolutely nil. The truth is, that this grand fight did not cause an
+instant's alarm to the spectators, who had flocked up to see the result.
+Among them there were many ladies of the greatest elegance. In order to
+get more easily to the front they had left their carriages at a
+distance. By my side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Com�die Fran�aise. We
+stayed to see the finish, and then I escorted her on my arm to her
+carriage in the Place Royale."
+
+"The Bastille was not taken; truth must be told, it surrendered." It is
+Michelet himself who makes this statement, and he adds: "what ruined it
+was its own evil conscience!"
+
+It would be too simple to acknowledge that it was the incapacity of its
+governor.
+
+There is no connoisseur in old prints but is acquainted with those
+last-century views which represent the taking of the Bastille. The
+platform of the fortress bristles with cannon all firing together,
+"belching forth death,"--without the slightest attention on the part of
+the assailants, for all the balls from this artillery, passing over
+their heads, would only kill inoffensive wayfarers without so much as
+scratching a single one of the besiegers!
+
+And the Bastille did not fire a single shot in self-defence!
+
+In the morning, at the request of Thuriot de la Rozi�re, De Launey had
+readily consented to the withdrawal of the fifteen cannon of the
+platform from their embrasures, and had blocked up the embrasures with
+planks. Of the three guns which later on he ranged batterywise before
+the entrance gate, not one was effective, and the discharge attributed
+to one of them came from a piece of ordnance on the wall.
+
+He placed such absolute reliance on succour from Besenval that, on
+evacuating the arsenal and getting the whole garrison together into the
+Bastille--eighty-two Invalides and M. de Flue's thirty-two Swiss--he had
+forgotten to increase his stock of provisions. Now, the Bastille had no
+reserve of provisions. Every morning, like a good housewife, it received
+the goods ordered the night before, brought by the different purveyors;
+on this day, they were intercepted. So it happened that at three o'clock
+in the afternoon the garrison was without its usual rations, and the
+Invalides, who had been for a week past going in and out of all the inns
+in the neighbourhood, and were disposed to open the doors to their good
+friends of the suburbs, used the scantiness of their rations as a
+pretext for mutiny, for refusing to fight, and for muddling the brains,
+never very clear, of the unhappy De Launey.
+
+"On the day of my arrival," says De Flue, "I was able to take this man's
+measure from the absolutely imbecile preparations which he made for the
+defence of his position. I saw clearly that we should be very poorly led
+in case of attack. He was so struck with terror at the idea of it that,
+when night came on, he took the shadows of trees for enemies! Incapable,
+irresolute, devoting all his attention to trifles and neglecting
+important duties--such was the man."
+
+Abandoned by Besenval, instead of cowing his Invalides into obedience by
+his energy, and maintaining his position to famishing point behind walls
+over which the balls of the besiegers flew without killing more than
+one man, De Launey lost his head, made a feint of firing the powder
+magazine, capitulated, and opened his gates to men who, as Chateaubriand
+says, "could never have cleared them if he had only kept them shut."
+
+If this poor creature had done his duty, and Besenval had done his,
+things would have had quite a different complexion. That is not to say
+that the Revolution would have been averted--far from it! The Revolution
+was legitimate, desirable, and, under the generous impulse of a whole
+nation, irresistible. But it would have followed another bent, and would
+have triumphed at a slighter cost, with less ruin and less bloodshed.
+The consequences of the 14th of July were disastrous. The mere words,
+"The Bastille is taken!" were the signal for the most frightful
+disorders throughout France. It seemed as though those old walls were
+dragging down with them in their fall all authority, all respect, all
+discipline; as though the floodgates were being opened to every kind of
+excess. Peasants went about in bands, ravaging, pillaging, firing the
+ch�teaux, the burghers' houses, and burning alive those who fell into
+their hands. The soldiers mutinied, insulted their chiefs, and fell to
+carousing with the malefactors whom they set free. There was not a town
+or village where the mob did not put on menacing airs, where decent
+people were not molested by the brawlers of the clubs and the
+street-corners. Such violence led to a rapid reaction, and there were
+numerous defections--of men who, on the very eve of the outbreak, among
+the magistracy, the army, the clergy, the nobility, though sympathizing
+with the new ideas, abruptly cut themselves loose from the movement,
+like the good Duke de la Rochefoucauld, who exclaimed, "Liberty is not
+entered by such a door as this!" Hovering between the desire and the
+fear of granting the promised reforms, urged on one side to resistance,
+on the other to submission, and more than ever destitute of all
+political acumen and all will power, the king went to Paris, and,
+bending before the revolt, approved of the assassination of his most
+faithful servants--and took, on that fatal day, his first step towards
+the scaffold! Henceforth, under the pressure of the populace, to whom
+its first success had shown the measure of its strength, and who became
+every day more exacting, more threatening, the Revolution was to go on
+in its perverse course, stumbling at every step, until it came to the
+orgy of '93, which, properly speaking, was only the systematizing of
+brigandage. Malouet was right indeed: what we symbolize in our festival
+of the 14th of July is not the rising sun, the dawn of Liberty; it is
+the first lurid lightning flash of the Terror!
+
+Doctor Rigby, after having walked up and down the whole afternoon in the
+Jardin Monceau without the least idea of what was going on in the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine, returned in the evening to his house near the
+Palais-Royal. He saw the mob reeling in drunkenness. Men and women were
+laughing, crying, and embracing one another: "The Bastille is taken! At
+last we are free!" And not the least enthusiastic were those very men of
+the citizen militia who, ready yesterday to fight the insurrection, were
+to-day hailing its triumph! The first sabre brandished by the first
+national guard was in point of fact that of Joseph Prudhomme![15]
+
+All at once this delirious crowd shudders, parts asunder with cries of
+horror!
+
+Down the Rue Saint-Honor� comes a yelling mob of wine-soaked
+malefactors, bearing along, at the ends of two pikes, the still bleeding
+heads of De Launey and De Flesselles!
+
+And the silly folk, so madly rejoiced by the fall of an imaginary
+tyranny which has not even the wits to defend itself, go their several
+ways, struck dumb with consternation.
+
+For here the Real is making its entrance!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Do not fancy that because the Bastille has opened its gates, the legends
+which give it so cruel a name are going to vanish into thin air, like
+the phantoms of an ancient ch�teau when light is let in.
+
+While Michelet's "entire Paris" is making short work of the Invalides
+who surrendered the place; cutting in pieces the man who prevented its
+blowing up; slaughtering Major de Losme, the friend and benefactor of
+the prisoners; torturing the hapless De Launey, who, from the Bastille
+to the H�tel de Ville, stabbed, slashed, hacked with sabres and pikes
+and bayonets, is finally decapitated by the aid of a short knife--an
+episode which Michelet skilfully slurs over--while all the criminals of
+the district, crowding along in the wake of the combatants, are rushing
+to the official buildings, looting, smashing, throwing into the moats
+furniture, books, official papers, archives, the remnants of which will
+be collected with such difficulty--some good people are saying to
+themselves: "But come now, there are some prisoners! Suppose we go and
+set them free?"
+
+Here let us see what Louis Blanc has to say:--
+
+"Meanwhile the doors of the cells" (he insists on the cells) "were burst
+in with a mighty effort; the prisoners were free! Alas! for three of
+them it was too late! The first, whose name was the Comte de Solages, a
+victim for seven years of the incomprehensible vengeance of an
+implacable father, found neither relatives who would consent to
+acknowledge him, nor his property, which had become the prey of covetous
+collateral heirs! The second was called Whyte. Of what crime was he
+guilty, accused, of, at any rate, suspected? No one has ever known! The
+man himself was questioned in vain. In the Bastille he had lost his
+reason. The third, Tavernier, at the sight of his deliverers, fancied he
+saw his executioners coming, and put himself on the defensive. Throwing
+their arms round his neck they undeceived him; but next day he was met
+roaming through the town, muttering wild and whirling words. He was
+mad!"
+
+As many wilful errors as there are words!
+
+The Comte de Solages was an execrable libertine, confined at the request
+of his family for "atrocious and notorious crimes." His relatives
+nevertheless had the humanity to take him in after his deliverance, and
+it was with them that he died in 1825.
+
+Whyte and Tavernier did not go mad in the Bastille. They were in the
+Bastille because they were mad; and the second was, further, implicated
+in an assassination. Finding shelter with a perruquier of the
+neighbourhood, he set about smashing all his host's belongings, which
+necessitated his banishment to Charenton, where Whyte soon rejoined him.
+It was not worth the trouble of changing their quarters!
+
+Four other prisoners who were set free, Corr�ge, B�chade, Pujade, and
+Laroche, were imprisoned for forgery. And so Louis Blanc is careful
+silently to pass them over!
+
+Ten days before, another victim of tyranny had been groaning in
+irons--the Marquis de Sade, who, from the height of the platform, used
+to provoke the passers-by with the aid of a speaking trumpet. De Launey
+was compelled to transfer him to Vincennes, thus depriving the victors
+of the glory of liberating the future author of _Justine_. The Republic
+took its revenge in making him later secretary of the "Pike" ward,[16]
+an office for which he was marked out by his virtues!
+
+But of all these prisoners the most celebrated, the most popular, the
+man whose misfortunes all Paris deplored, was the famous Comte de
+Lorges, who, according to the biographical sketch devoted to him by the
+unknown author of his deliverance, had been shut up for thirty-two
+years. The story must be read in the pamphlet of Citizen Rousselet,
+conqueror of the Bastille: "The tide of humanity penetrates into ways
+narrowed by mistrust. An iron door opens: what does one see? Is this a
+man? Good heavens! this old man loaded with irons! the splendour of his
+brow, the whiteness of his beard hanging over his breast! What majesty!
+the fire still flashing from his eyes seems to shed a gentle light in
+this lugubrious abode!"
+
+Surprised at seeing so many armed men, he asks them if Louis XV. is
+still alive. They set him free, they lead him to the H�tel de Ville.
+
+For fifteen days all Paris went to visit the black dungeon in which this
+unhappy wretch had been shut up for so many years without other light
+than that which escaped "from his eyes"! A stone from that dungeon had a
+place in the Curtius Museum. His portrait was published. A print
+represents him at the moment when his chains were broken, seated on a
+chair in his cell, a pitcher of water by his side!
+
+And this hapless greybeard--he was never seen! He never existed!
+
+In reality there were in the Bastille, on the 14th of July, only seven
+prisoners--two madmen, a _Sadique_,[17] and four forgers. But about
+their number and their right to imprisonment Michelet remains dumb: to
+discuss that would spoil his epic! And he excels in making the most of
+everything that can support his case, and in ignoring everything that
+damages it. And so he contents himself with speaking of the two who had
+"gone mad"!--a prevarication worthy of Louis Blanc, nay, unworthy even
+of him!
+
+The conquerors were somewhat surprised at the small number of victims,
+more surprised still to find them comfortably installed in rooms, some
+of which were furnished with arm-chairs in Utrecht velvet! The author of
+_The Bastille Unmasked_ exclaims: "What! No corpses! No skeletons! No
+men in chains!" "The taking of the Bastille," said "Cousin Jacques,"[18]
+"has opened the eyes of the public on the kind of captivity experienced
+there."
+
+But in this he was greatly mistaken. Legends die hard! A Bastille
+without cells, dungeons, cages of iron! Public opinion did not admit
+that it could have been deceived on that point.
+
+"Several prisoners," says the _History of Remarkable Events_, "were set
+at liberty; but some, and perhaps the greater number, had already died
+of hunger, because men could not find their way about this monstrous
+prison. Some of these prisoners confined within four walls received food
+only through holes cut in the wall. A party of prisoners was found
+starved to death, because their cells were not discovered till several
+days had elapsed!"
+
+Another pamphlet on the underground cells discovered in the Bastille,
+resuscitating an old fable which had already done duty for the Cardinal
+de Richelieu, shows us a prisoner taken from his cell and led by the
+governor into "a room which had nothing sinister in its appearance. It
+was lit by more than fifty candles. Sweet-scented flowers filled it with
+a delicious perfume. The tyrant chatted amicably with his prisoner....
+Then he gave the horrible signal: a bascule let into the floor opened,
+and the wretched man disappeared, falling upon a wheel stuck with razors
+and set in motion by invisible hands." And the author winds up with this
+magnificent reflection:--"Such a punishment, so basely contrived, is not
+even credible--and yet it was at Paris, in that beautiful and
+flourishing city, that this took place!"
+
+Dorat-Cubi�res, who was one of the literary disgraces of the eighteenth
+century, goes further! He saw, with his own eyes, one of those dens
+where the captive, shut up with enough bread to last him a week, had
+thereafter nothing else to subsist on but his own flesh. "In this den,"
+he says, "we came upon a horrible skeleton, the sight of which made me
+shrink back with horror!"
+
+And the popular picture-mongers did not fail to propagate these
+insanities. I have an engraving of the time nicely calculated to stir
+sensitive hearts. Upon the steps of a gloomy cellar the conquerors are
+dragging along a man whom his uniform shows to be one of the defenders
+of the Bastille, and are pointing out to him an old man being carried
+away, another being cut down from the ceiling where he is hanging by the
+arms; yet others lying on a wheel furnished with iron teeth, chained to
+it, twisted into horrible contortions by abominable machines; and in a
+recess behind a grating appears the skeleton--which Dorat-Cubi�res never
+saw!
+
+The non-existence of these dungeons and holes with skeletons was too
+great a shock to settled beliefs. This Bastille _must_ contain concealed
+below ground some unknown cells where its victims were moaning! And
+naturally enough, when one bent down the ear, one heard their despairing
+appeals! But after having pierced through vaults, sunk pits, dug,
+sounded everywhere, there was no help for it but to give up these
+fancies, though--an agreeable thing to have to say!--with regret.
+
+They fell back then on instruments of torture. For though the rack had
+been abolished for a hundred years, how was it possible to conceive of
+the Bastille without some slight instruments of torture?
+
+They had no difficulty in finding them--"chains," says Louis Blanc,
+"which the hands of many innocent men had perhaps worn, machines of
+which no one could guess the use: an old iron corslet which seemed to
+have been invented to reduce man to everlasting immobility!"
+
+As a matter of fact, these chains belonged to two statuettes of
+prisoners which stood on either side of the great clock in the
+courtyard. The machines, the use of which no one could guess, were the
+fragments of a clandestine printing-press that had been pulled to
+pieces. And the iron corslet was a piece of fifteenth-century armour!
+
+Skeletons, too, were missing, though indeed some bones were found in the
+apartment of the surgeon of the fortress; but the utmost bad faith could
+not but be compelled to acknowledge that these were anatomical
+specimens. Happily for the legend, a more serious discovery was made:
+"two skeletons, chained to a cannon-ball," as the register of the
+district of Saint-Louis la Culture declared.
+
+They both came to light in the rubbish dug out during the construction
+of the bastion afterwards turned into a garden for the governor. "One,"
+says the report of Fourcroy, Vicq-d'Azyr, and Sabatier, instructed to
+examine them, "was found turned head downwards on the steps of a steep
+staircase, entirely covered with earth, and appears to be that of a
+workman who had fallen by accident down this dark staircase, where he
+was not seen by the men working at the embankment. The other, carefully
+buried in a sort of ditch, had evidently been laid there a long time
+previously, before there was any idea of filling up the bastion."
+
+As to the cannon-ball, it must have dated back to the Fronde.[19]
+
+But skeletons were necessary! They had found some: they might as well
+profit by them!
+
+The demolisher of the Bastille, that charlatan Palloy, exhibited them to
+the veneration of the faithful in a cellar by the light of a funereal
+lamp, after which they were honoured with a magnificent funeral, with
+drums, clergy, a procession of working men, between two lines of
+National Guards, from the Bastille to the Church of St. Paul. And
+finally, in the graveyard adjoining the church, they raised to them,
+amid four poplars, a monument of which a contemporary print has
+preserved the likeness.
+
+After such a ceremony, dispute if you dare the authenticity of the
+relics!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The memory of the Man in the Iron Mask is so closely bound up with the
+story of the Bastille that M. Funck-Brentano could not neglect this
+great enigma about which for two hundred years so much ink has been
+spilt. He strips off this famous mask--which, by the way, was of
+velvet--and shows us the face which the world has been so anxious to
+see: the face of Mattioli, the confidant of the Duke of Mantua and the
+betrayer of both Louis XIV. and his own master.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano's demonstration is so convincing as to leave no room
+for doubt. But one dare not hope that the good public will accept his
+conclusions as final. To the public, mystery is ever more attractive
+than the truth. There is a want of prestige about Mattioli; while about
+a twin brother of Louis XIV.--ah, _there_ is something that appeals to
+the imagination!
+
+And then there are the guides, the showmen, to reckon with--those
+faithful guardians of legends, whose propaganda is more aggressive than
+that of scholars. When you reflect that every day, at the Isles of
+Saint-Marguerite, the masked man's cell is shown to visitors by a good
+woman who retails all the traditional fables about the luxurious life of
+the prisoner, his lace, his plate, and the attentions shown him by M.
+de Saint-Mars, you will agree that a struggle with this daily discourse
+would be hopeless. And you would not come off with a whole skin!
+
+I was visiting the Ch�teau d'If before the new buildings were erected.
+The show-woman of the place, another worthy dame, pointed out to us the
+ruined cells of the Abb� Faria and Edmond Dant�s.[20] And the spectators
+were musing on the story as they contemplated the ruins.
+
+"It seems to me," I said, "that these cells are rather near one another,
+but surely Alexandre Dumas put them a little farther apart!"
+
+"Oh, well!" replied the good creature, withering me with a glance of
+contempt, "if, when I'm relating gospel truth, the gentleman begins
+quoting a novelist--!"
+
+To come nearer home. Follow, one of these days, a batch of Cook's
+tourists at Versailles, shown round by an English cicerone. You will see
+him point out the window from which Louis XVI. issued, on a flying
+bridge, to reach his scaffold, erected in the marble court! The guide is
+no fool. He knows well enough that the Place de la Concorde would not
+appeal to the imagination of his countrymen; while it is quite natural
+to them to draw a parallel in their minds between the scaffold of Louis
+XVI. at Versailles and that of Charles I. at Whitehall.
+
+And the conclusion of the whole matter is this: that whatever may be
+said or written, nothing will prevail against the popular beliefs that
+the Bastille was "the hell of living men," and that it was taken by
+storm. Legends are the history of the people, especially those which
+flatter their instincts, prejudices, and passions. You will never
+convince them of their falsity.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano must also expect to be treated as a "reactionary," for
+such is, to many people, any one who does not unreservedly decry the
+_ancien r�gime_. It had, assuredly, its vices and abuses, which the
+Revolution swept away--to replace them by others, much more tolerable,
+to be sure; but that is no reason for slandering the past and painting
+it blacker than it really was. The fanatical supporters of the
+Revolution have founded in its honour a sort of cult whose intolerance
+is often irritating. To hear them you would fancy that before its birth
+there was nothing but darkness, ignorance, iniquity, and wretchedness!
+And so we are to give it wholehearted admiration, and palliate its
+errors and its crimes; even gilding, as Chateaubriand said, the iron of
+its guillotine. These idolaters of the Revolution are very injudicious.
+By endeavouring to compel admiration for all that it effected, good and
+ill without distinction, they provoke the very unreasonable inclination
+to regard its whole achievement with abhorrence. It could well dispense
+with such a surplusage of zeal, for it is strong enough to bear the
+truth; and its work, after all, is great enough to need no justification
+or glorification by means of legends.
+
+VICTORIEN SARDOU.
+
+
+
+
+LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ARCHIVES.
+
+
+"The Bastille," wrote Sainte-Foix, "is a castle which, without being
+strong, is one of the most formidable in Europe, and about it I shall
+say nothing." "Silence is safer than speech on that subject," was the
+saying in Paris.
+
+At the extremity of the Rue Saint-Antoine, as one entered the suburb,
+appeared the eight lofty towers, sombre, massive, plunging their
+moss-grown feet into pools of muddy water. Their walls were pierced at
+intervals with narrow, iron-barred windows: they were crowned with
+battlements. Situated not far from the Marais, the blithe and wealthy
+quarter, and quite near to the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where industry
+raised its perpetual hum, the Bastille, charged with gloom and silence,
+formed an impressive contrast.
+
+The common impression it made is conveyed by Restif de la Bretonne in
+his _Nights of Paris_: "It was a nightmare, that awesome Bastille, on
+which, as I passed each evening along the Rue Saint-Gilles, I never
+dared to turn my eyes."
+
+The towers had an air of mystery, harsh and melancholy, and the royal
+government threw mystery like a cloud around them. At nightfall, when
+the shutters were closed, a cab would cross the drawbridge, and from
+time to time, in the blackness of night, funeral processions, vague
+shadows which the light of a torch set flickering on the walls, would
+make their silent exit. How many of those who had entered there had ever
+been seen again? And if perchance one met a former prisoner, to the
+first question he would reply that on leaving he had signed a promise to
+reveal nothing of what he had seen. This former prisoner had, as a
+matter of fact, never seen anything to speak of. Absolute silence was
+imposed upon the warders. "There is no exchanging of confidences in this
+place," writes Madame de Staal, "and the people you come across have all
+such freezing physiognomies that you would think twice before asking the
+most trifling question." "The first article of their code," says
+Linguet, "is the impenetrable mystery which envelops all their
+operations."
+
+We know how legends are formed. Sometimes you see them open out like
+flowers brilliant under the sun's bright beams, you see them blossom
+under the glorious radiance that lights up the life of heroes. The man
+himself has long gone down into the tomb; the legend survives; it
+streams across the ages, like a meteor leaving its trail of light; it
+grows, broadens out, with ever-increasing lustre and glow: in this light
+we see Themistocles, Leonidas, Alexander, C�sar, Charlemagne, Napoleon.
+
+Or may be, on the contrary, the legend is born in some remote corner,
+covered with shade and silence. There men have lived their lives, there
+it has been their lot to suffer. Their moans have risen in solitude and
+confinement, and the only ears that heard them were harder than their
+stone walls. These moans, heard by no compassionate soul, the great
+resounding soul of the people catches up, swelling them with all its
+might. Soon, among the mass of the people, there passes a blast
+irresistible in its strength, like the tempest that upheaves the
+restless waves. Then is the sea loosed from its chains: the tumultuous
+breakers dash upon the affrighted shore: the sea-walls are all swept
+away!
+
+In a letter written by Chevalier, the major of the Bastille, to Sartine,
+the chief of the police, he spoke of the common gossip on the Bastille
+that was going about. "Although utterly false," he said, "I think it
+very dangerous on account of its dissemination through the kingdom, and
+that has now been going on for several years." No attention was paid to
+Chevalier's warning. Mystery continued to be the rule at the Bastille
+and in all that related to it. "The mildness of manners and of the
+government," writes La Harpe, "had caused needlessly harsh measures in
+great part to disappear. They lived on in the imagination of the
+people, augmented and strengthened by the tales which credulity and hate
+seize upon." Ere long the _Memoirs_ of Latude and of Linguet appeared.
+Latude concealed his grievous faults, to paint his long sufferings in
+strokes of fire. Linguet, with his rare literary talent, made of the
+Bastille a picture dark in the extreme, compressing the gist of his
+pamphlet into the sentence: "Except perhaps in hell, there are no
+tortures to approach those of the Bastille." At the same period, the
+great Mirabeau was launching his powerful plea against _lettres de
+cachet_, "arbitrary orders." These books produced a mighty
+reverberation. The Revolution broke out like a clap of thunder. The
+Bastille was disembowelled. The frowning towers crumbled stone by stone
+under the picks of the demolishers, and, as if they had been the
+pedestal of the _ancien r�gime_, that too toppled over with a crash.
+
+One of the halls of the Bastille contained, in boxes carefully arranged,
+the entire history of the celebrated fortress from the year 1659, at
+which date the foundation of this precious store of archives had been
+begun. There were collected the documents concerning, not only the
+prisoners of the Bastille, but all the persons who had been lodged
+there, either under sentence of exile, or simply arrested within the
+limits of the generality of Paris in virtue of a _lettre de cachet_.
+
+The documents in this store-room had been in charge of archivists, who
+throughout the eighteenth century had laboured with zeal and
+intelligence at putting in order papers which, on the eve of the
+Revolution, were counted by hundreds of thousands. The whole mass was
+now in perfect order, classified and docketed. The major of the ch�teau,
+Chevalier, had even been commissioned to make these documents the basis
+of a history of the prisoners.
+
+The Bastille was taken. In the disorder, what was the fate of the
+archives? The ransacking of the papers continued for two days, writes
+Dusaulx, one of the commissioners elected by the Assembly for the
+preservation of the archives of the Bastille. "When, on Thursday the
+16th, my colleagues and myself went down into the sort of cellar where
+the archives were, we found the boxes in very orderly arrangement on the
+shelves, but they were already empty. The most important documents had
+been carried off: the rest were strewn on the floor, scattered about the
+courtyard, and even in the moats. However, the curious still found some
+gleanings there." The testimony of Dusaulx is only too well confirmed.
+"I went to see the siege of the Bastille," writes Restif de la Bretonne;
+"when I arrived it was all over, the place was taken. Infuriated men
+were throwing papers, documents of great historical value, from the top
+of the towers into the moats." Among these papers, some had been burnt,
+some torn, registers had been torn to shreds and trailed in the mud. The
+mob had invaded the halls of the ch�teau: men of learning and mere
+curiosity hunters strove eagerly to get possession of as many of these
+documents as possible, in which they thought they were sure to find
+startling revelations. "There is talk of the son of a celebrated
+magistrate," writes Gabriel Brizard, "who went off with his carriage
+full of them." Villenave, then twenty-seven years of age and already a
+collector, gathered a rich harvest for his study, and Beaumarchais, in
+the course of a patriotic ramble through the interior of the captured
+fortress, was careful to get together a certain number of these papers.
+
+The papers purloined from the archives on the day of the capture and the
+day following became dispersed throughout France and Europe. A large
+packet came into the hands of Pierre Lubrowski, an attach� in the
+Russian embassy. Sold in 1805, with his whole collection, to the Emperor
+Alexander, the papers were deposited in the Hermitage Palace. To-day
+they are preserved in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg.
+
+Fortunately, the custody of the captured fortress was entrusted on July
+15 to the company of arquebusiers, which received orders to prevent the
+removal of any more papers. On July 16 one of the members present at a
+sitting of the Electoral Assembly, sprang forward to the table and
+cried, "Ah, gentlemen, let us save the papers! It is said that the
+papers of the Bastille are being plundered; let us hasten to collect the
+remnants of these old title-deeds of an intolerable despotism, so that
+we may inspire our latest posterity with their horror!" There was
+rapturous applause. A committee was nominated, consisting of Dusaulx, De
+Chamseru, Gorneau, and Cailleau. Let us follow the style of the period:
+"Before the Bastille the commissioners received a triumphant reception.
+Amid the cheers of the people, who had been informed of their mission,
+ten distinguished men of letters besought them to lead the commissioners
+into the heart of that famous fortress, so long detested." When they got
+into the Bastille, the commissioners were not long in perceiving that
+they were a little behind the fair: "Many boxes were empty, and there
+was an immense heap of papers in complete disorder."
+
+The question of the papers of the Bastille grew day by day
+extraordinarily popular. The Electoral Assembly had just appointed
+commissioners to collect them; La Fayette, commander of the National
+Guards, imposed a similar duty on the St. Elizabeth district; Bailly,
+the mayor of Paris, delegated Dusaulx to the same office. In the
+Constituent Assembly, the Comte de Ch�tenay-Lanty proposed that the
+municipality of Paris should be instructed to get together the papers
+found at the Bastille, so that they might be arranged, and that extracts
+from them might be printed and published, "in order to keep for ever
+alive in the hearts of Frenchmen, by means of this reading, the
+detestation of arbitrary orders and the love of liberty"! This book was
+to be the preface to the constitution. Finally, the district of St. Roch
+took the initiative in calling upon the electors to restore to the
+nation the papers carried off from the Bastille by Beaumarchais.
+
+In the sitting of July 24, the Electoral Assembly passed a resolution
+enjoining such citizens as were in possession of papers from the
+Bastille to bring them back to the H�tel de Ville. The appeal was
+responded to, and the restitutions were numerous.
+
+When the pillage and destruction had been stopped and possession had
+been regained of a part of the stolen documents, the papers were
+consigned to three different depositories; but it was not long before
+they were deposited all together in the convent of St. Louis la Culture.
+At length, on November 2, 1791, the Commune of Paris resolved to have
+the precious documents placed in the city library. The decision was so
+much the more happy in that the transfer, while placing the papers under
+the guardianship of trained men and genuine librarians, did not
+necessitate removal, since the city library at that date occupied the
+same quarters as the archives of the Bastille, namely, the convent of
+St. Louis la Culture.
+
+To the revolutionary period succeeded times of greater calm. The
+archives of the Bastille, after being the object of so much discussion,
+and having occupied the Constituent Assembly, the Electoral Assembly,
+the Paris Commune, the press, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, all Paris,
+the whole of France, fell into absolute oblivion. They were lost from
+sight; the very recollection of them was effaced. In 1840, a young
+librarian named Fran�ois Ravaisson discovered them in the Arsenal
+library at the bottom of a veritable dungeon. How had they got stranded
+there?
+
+Ameilhon, the city librarian, had been elected on April 22, 1797, keeper
+of the Arsenal library. Anxious to enrich the new depository of which he
+had become the head, he obtained a decree handing over the papers of the
+Bastille to the Arsenal library. The librarians recoiled in dismay
+before this invasion of documents, more than 600,000 in number and in
+the most admired disorder. Then, having put their heads together, they
+had the papers crammed into a dusty back-room, putting off the sorting
+of them from day to day. Forty years slipped away. And if it happened
+that some old antiquary, curious and importunate, asked to be allowed to
+consult the documents he had heard spoken of in his youth, he was
+answered--no doubt in perfect good faith--that they did not know what he
+was talking about.
+
+In 1840 Fran�ois Ravaisson had to get some repairs done in his kitchen
+at the Arsenal library. The slabs of the flooring were raised, when
+there came to view, in the yawning hole, a mass of old papers. It
+happened by the merest chance that, as he drew a leaf out of the heap,
+Ravaisson laid his hand on a _lettre de cachet_. He understood at once
+that he had just discovered the lost treasure. Fifty years of laborious
+effort have now restored the order which the victors of the 14th of July
+and successive removals had destroyed. The archives of the Bastille
+still constitute, at the present day, an imposing collection, in spite
+of the gaps made by fire and pillage in 1789, for ever to be regretted.
+The administration of the Arsenal library has acquired copies of the
+documents coming from the Bastille which are preserved at St.
+Petersburg. The archives of the Bastille are now open to inspection by
+any visitor to the Arsenal library, in rooms specially fitted up for
+them. Several registers had holes burnt in them on the day of the
+capture of the Bastille, their binding is scorched black, their leaves
+are yellow. In the boxes the documents are now numbered, and they are
+daily consulted by men of letters. The catalogue has been compiled and
+published recently, through the assiduity of the minister of public
+instruction.
+
+It is by the light of these documents, of undeniable genuineness and
+authority, that the black shade which so long brooded over the Bastille
+has at length been dispelled. The legends have melted away in the clear
+light of history, as the thick cloak of mist with which night covers the
+earth is dissipated by the morning sun; and enigmas which mankind,
+wearied of fruitless investigations, had resigned itself to declare
+insoluble, have now at last been solved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Julius C�sar describes a structure three stories high which his
+legionaries used rapidly to erect in front of towns they were besieging.
+Such was the remote origin of the "bastides" or "bastilles," as these
+movable fortresses were called in the Middle Ages. Froissart, speaking
+of a place that was being invested, says that "bastides were stationed
+on the roads and in the open country" in such a manner that the town
+could get no food supplies. It was not long before the designation was
+applied to the fixed towers erected on the ramparts for the defence of
+the towns, and more particularly to those which were constructed at the
+entrance gates.
+
+In 1356, the chroniclers mention some important works that had been done
+on the circumvallations of Paris. These were constructions interrupting
+the wall at intervals, and so placed as to protect either an entrance
+gate or the wall itself. The special designations of _eschiffles_,
+_gu�rites_, or _barbacanes_ were applied to such of these buildings as
+rose between two gates of the city, while the _bastilles_ or _bastides_
+were those which defended the gates. The first stone of the edifice
+which for more than four centuries was to remain famous under the name
+of the Bastille was laid on April 22, 1370, by the mayor of Paris in
+person, Hugh Aubriot, the object being to strengthen the defences of the
+city against the English. To reproach the king, Charles V., with the
+construction of a cruel prison would be almost as reasonable as to
+reproach Louis-Philippe with the construction of the fortress of Mont
+Val�rien. We borrow these details from M. Fernand Bournon's excellent
+work on the Bastille in the _Histoire g�n�rale de Paris_.
+
+"The Bastille," writes M. Bournon, "at the time of its capture on July
+14, 1789, was still identical, except in some trifling particulars, with
+the work of the architects of the fourteenth century." The Place de la
+Bastille of the present day does not correspond exactly to the site of
+the fortress. Mentally to restore that site it is necessary to take away
+the last houses of the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV.;
+the ground they occupy was then covered with the ch�teau and its glacis.
+The round towers, however, must have extended considerably in advance of
+the line of the houses and have encroached upon the pavement. The plan
+reproducing the site exactly is to-day marked by lines of white stones,
+by means of which all Parisians may get some notion of it if they go to
+the Place de la Bastille.
+
+M. Aug� de Lassus, who drew so largely upon the works of M. Bournon and
+ourselves for his lecture on the Bastille,[21] will permit us in our
+turn to borrow from him the description he gave of the Bastille, so far
+as its construction is concerned. Prints of the commonest kind which
+have circulated in thousands, the more recent reconstruction which in
+1889 gave Paris so much entertainment, have familiarized us with the
+aspect of the Bastille, whose eight circular towers, connected by
+curtains of equal height, give us the impression of a box all of a
+piece, or, if you prefer it, an enormous sarcophagus. The eight towers
+all had their names. There were the Corner, the Chapel, and the Well
+towers, names readily accounted for by their position or by details of
+their construction. Then came the Bertaudi�re and Bazini�re towers,
+baptized by the names of two former prisoners. The Treasure tower was so
+called because it had received on many occasions, notably under Henri
+IV., the custody of the public money. The excellent poet Mathurin
+Regnier alludes to this fact in these oft-quoted lines:--
+
+    "Now mark these parsons, sons of ill-got gain,
+     Whose grasping sires for years have stolen amain,
+     Whose family coffers vaster wealth conceal,
+     Than fills that royal store-house, the Bastille."
+
+The seventh tower was known as the County tower, owing its name, as M.
+Bournon conjectures, to the feudal dignity called the County of Paris.
+"The hypothesis," he adds, "derives the greater weight from the fact
+that the mayors of Paris were called, up to the end of the _ancien
+r�gime_, mayors of the town and viscounty of Paris." The eighth tower
+bore a name which, for the tower of a prison, is very remarkable. It was
+called the Tower of Liberty. This odd appellation had come to it from
+the circumstance that it had been the part of the Bastille where
+prisoners were lodged who enjoyed exceptionally favourable treatment,
+those who had the "liberty" of walking during the day in the courtyards
+of the ch�teau. These prisoners were said to be "in the liberty of the
+court"; the officers of the ch�teau called them the "prisoners of the
+liberty" in contradistinction to the prisoners "in durance"; and that
+one of the eight towers in which they were lodged was thus, quite
+naturally, called "the Tower of Liberty."
+
+The towers of the Chapel and the Treasure, which were the oldest, had
+flanked the original gateway, but this was soon walled up, leaving
+however in the masonry the outline of its arch, and even the statues of
+saints and crowned princes that had been the only ornaments of its bare
+walls. "In accordance with custom," says M. Aug� de Lassus, "the
+entrance to the Bastille was single and double at the same time; the
+gate for vehicles, defended by its drawbridge, was flanked by a smaller
+gate reserved for foot passengers, and this, too, was only accessible
+when a small drawbridge was lowered."
+
+In the first of the two courtyards of the Bastille, D'Argenson had
+placed a monumental clock held up by large sculptured figures
+representing prisoners in chains. The heavy chains fell in graceful
+curves around the clock-face, as a kind of ornamentation. D'Argenson and
+his artists had a ferocious taste.
+
+On the morrow of the defeat at St. Quentin,[22] the fear of invasion
+decided Henri II., under the advice of Coligny, to strengthen the
+Bastille. It was then, accordingly, that there was constructed, in front
+of the Saint-Antoine gate, the bastion which was at a later date to be
+adorned with a garden for the prisoners to walk in.
+
+Around the massive and forbidding prison, in the course of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, quite a little town sprang up and
+flourished, as in the Middle Ages happened around lofty and impressive
+cathedrals. Barbers, cobblers, drink-sellers, poulterers, cheesemongers,
+and general dealers had their shops there. These new buildings
+encroached on the Rue Saint-Antoine, and extended as far as the convent
+of the Visitation, the chapel of which, converted into a Protestant
+place of worship, still exists.
+
+"In its latter days," writes M. de Lassus, "the Bastille with its
+appendages presented an appearance somewhat as follows:--On the Rue
+Saint-Antoine, a gateway of considerable size, and, with its trophies of
+arms, making some pretensions to a triumphal arch, gave access to a
+first court skirted with shops, and open, at least during the day, to
+all comers. People might pass through it freely, but were not allowed to
+loiter there. Then appeared a second entrance, a double one for horse
+and foot traffic, each gate defended by its drawbridge. Admittance
+through this was more difficult, and the sentry's instructions more
+rigorous; this was the outer guard. As soon as this entrance was passed,
+one came to the court of the governor, who received the more or less
+voluntary visitor. On the right stretched the quarters of the governor
+and his staff, contiguous to the armoury. Then there were the moats,
+originally supplied by the waters of the Seine--at that time people
+frequently fell in and were drowned, the moats not being protected by
+any railing--in later times they were for the most part dry. Then rose
+the lofty towers of the citadel, encircled, nearly a hundred feet up, by
+their crown of battlements; and then one found the last drawbridge, most
+often raised, at any rate before the carriage gate, the door for foot
+passengers alone remaining accessible, under still more rigorous
+conditions."
+
+These conditions, so rigorous for contemporaries--the Czar Peter the
+Great himself found them inflexible--are removed for the historian:
+thanks to the numerous memoirs left by prisoners, thanks to the
+documents relating to the administration of the Bastille now in the
+Arsenal library, and to the correspondence of the lieutenants of police,
+we shall penetrate into the interior of these well-fenced precincts and
+follow the life of the prisoners day by day.
+
+In its early days, then, the Bastille was not a prison, though it became
+such as early as the reign of Charles VI. Yet for two centuries it kept
+its character as a military citadel. Sometimes the kings gave lodgment
+there to great personages who were passing through Paris. Louis XI. and
+Francis I. held brilliant f�tes there, of which the chroniclers speak
+with admiration.
+
+It is Richelieu who must be considered the founder of the Bastille--the
+Bastille, that is, as a royal prison, the Bastille of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries. Before him, imprisonment in the old fortress
+was merely casual; it is to him that we must trace the conception of the
+state prison as an instrument of government. Here we shall be arrested
+by the question, what is to be understood by a state prison? The term,
+vague and open to discussion, is explained by M. Bournon. "By a state
+prison--taking the Bastille as a particular instance--must be understood
+a prison for those who have committed a crime or misdemeanour not
+provided for by the common law; for those who, rightly or wrongly, have
+appeared dangerous to the safety of the state, whether the nation itself
+is concerned, or its head, or a body more or less considerable of
+citizens, a body sometimes no larger than the family of the suspect. If
+we add to this class of prisoners personages too conspicuous to be
+punished for a crime at common law on equal terms with the ordinary
+malefactor, and for whom it would appear inevitable that an exceptional
+prison should be reserved, we shall have passed in review the different
+kinds of delinquents who expiated their misdeeds at the Bastille from
+the time of Richelieu to the Revolution."
+
+The administration of the Bastille, which, up to the reign of Louis
+XIII., was entrusted to great lords, dukes, constables, marshals of
+France--the Marshal de Bassompierre, the Constable de Luynes, the
+Marshal de Vitry, the Duke of Luxemburg, to mention only the last of
+them--was placed by Richelieu in the hands of a real jailer, Leclerc du
+Tremblay, brother of P�re Joseph.[23]
+
+Documents throwing any light on the Bastille at the time when the Red
+Man, as Victor Hugo named Richelieu, was supreme, are however very
+rare. An advocate, Maton de la Varenne, published in 1786, in his
+_Revolutions of Paris_, a letter which ostensibly had been written on
+December 1, 1642, to Richelieu, at that time ill. In it we read: "I,
+whom you are causing to rot in the Bastille for having disobeyed your
+commandment, which would have brought upon my soul condemnation to
+eternal hell, and would have made me appear in eternity with hands
+stained with blood----" It is impossible to guarantee the authenticity
+of this document. To us it appears suspicious, the text having been
+published at a time when many apocryphal documents were produced as
+coming from the archives of the Bastille. More worthy of arresting our
+attention is the "return of the prisoners who are in the ch�teau of the
+Bastille," a document of Richelieu's time which M. Bournon discovered in
+the archives of the Foreign Office. This catalogue, containing
+fifty-three names, is the oldest list of prisoners of the Bastille known
+up to the present time. Among the prisoners several are suspected or
+convicted of evil designs against "Monsieur le cardinal," some are
+accused of an intention to "complot," that is, to conspire against the
+throne, or of being spies. There is an "extravagant" priest, a monk who
+had "opposed Cluni's election," three hermits, three coiners, the
+Marquis d'Assigny, condemned to death, but whose punishment had been
+commuted to perpetual imprisonment, a score or so of lords designated as
+"madmen, vile scoundrels, evil wretches," or accused of some definite
+crime, theft or murder; finally, those whose name is followed by the
+simple note, "Queen-mother," or "Monsieur,"[24] whence we may conclude
+that the clerk had no exact information about the prisoners of the
+cardinal. We shall give later the list of the prisoners in the Bastille
+on the day of its capture, July 14, 1789; and the comparison between the
+two lists at the two periods, the remotest and the most recent that we
+could select, will be instructive. We have also, to assist us in forming
+a judgment of the Bastille in Richelieu's time, the memoirs of
+Bassompierre and of Laporte, which transport us into a state prison,
+elegant, we might almost say luxurious, reserved for prisoners of birth
+and breeding, where they lived observing all social usages in their
+mutual relations, paying and returning calls. But the Bastille preserved
+its military character for many more years, and among the prisoners we
+find especially a number of officers punished for breaches of
+discipline. Prisoners of war were confined there, and foreign personages
+of high rank arrested by way of reprisal, secret agents and spies
+employed in France by hostile nations; finally, powerful lords who had
+incurred the king's displeasure. The court intrigues under Richelieu and
+Mazarin contributed to the diversion of the Bastille from its original
+intention: they began to incarcerate there _valets de chambre_ who had
+somehow become mixed up in the plots of sovereigns.
+
+Religious persecution was revived by the government of Louis XIV., and
+ere long a whole world of gazetteers and "novelists," the journalists of
+the period, were seen swarming like flies in the sun. Louis XIV. was not
+precisely a stickler for the liberty of the press, but on the other hand
+he shrank from cooping up men of letters, Jansenists and Protestants
+convinced of the truth of their beliefs, pell-mell with the vagabonds
+and thiefs confined at Bic�tre, Saint-Lazare, and the other prisons of
+Paris. He threw open to them, too generously no doubt, the portals of
+his ch�teau in the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where they mixed with young men
+of family undergoing a mild course of the Bastille at the request of
+their parents, and with quarrelsome nobles whom the marshals of France,
+anxious to avoid duels, used to send there to forget their animosities.
+Further, the reign of Louis XIV. was marked by some great trials which
+produced a strange and appalling impression, and threw around the
+accused a halo of mystery--trials for magic and sorcery, cases of
+poisoning and base coining. The accused parties in these cases were
+confined in the Bastille. And here we encounter a fresh departure from
+the primitive character of the old fortress; prisoners were sent there
+whose cases were tried by the regularly constituted judges. Henceforth
+prisoners who appeared before the court of the Arsenal were divided
+between the Bastille and the fortress of Vincennes.
+
+This is the grand epoch in the history of the Bastille: it is now a
+veritable prison of state. Writers can speak of its "nobleness." It
+shows itself to us in colours at once charming and awe-inspiring,
+brilliant, majestic, now filled with sounds of merriment, now veiled
+with an appalling silence. From the gloomy regions within the massive
+walls there come to us the sounds of song and laughter mingled with
+cries of despair, with sobs and tears. This is the period of the Iron
+Mask: the period when the governor receives mysterious letters from the
+court. "I beg you, sir, to see that, if anyone comes to ask for news of
+the prisoner whom Desgrez conducted to the Bastille this morning by
+order of the king, nothing be said about him, and that, if possible, in
+accordance with the intention of His Majesty and the accompanying
+instructions, no one may get to know him or even his name." "M. de
+Bernaville (the name of one of the governors of the Bastille), having
+given orders for the conveyance of an important prisoner to the prison
+of my ch�teau of the Bastille, I send this letter to inform you of my
+intention that you receive him there and keep him closely guarded until
+further orders, warning you not to permit him, under any pretext
+whatever, to hold communication with any person, either by word of mouth
+or in writing." The prisoners surrounded with so absolute a silence
+almost all belonged to the same category, namely, distinguished spies,
+who seem to have been rather numerous in France at the full tide of
+Louis XIV.'s wars, and who were hunted down with an eagerness which grew
+in proportion as fortune frowned on the royal armies. We read in the
+Journal kept by the King's lieutenant, Du Junca: "On Wednesday,
+December 22, about ten o'clock in the morning, M. de la Coste, provost
+of the King's armies, came here, bringing and leaving in our custody a
+prisoner whom for greater secrecy he caused to enter by our new gate,
+which allows us to pass into or out of the garden of the Arsenal at all
+hours--the which prisoner, M. d'Estingen by name, a German, but married
+in England, was received by the governor by order of the King sent by
+the hand of the Marquis de Barbezieux, with explicit instructions to
+keep the prisoner's presence a secret and to prevent him from holding
+communication with anyone, in speech or writing: the which prisoner is a
+widower, without children, a man of intelligence, and doing a brisk
+trade in news of what is happening in France, sending his information to
+Germany, England, and Holland: a gentlemanly spy." On February 10, 1710,
+Pontchartrain wrote to Bernaville, governor of the Bastille: "I cannot
+refrain from telling you that you and the Chevalier de la Croix speak a
+good deal too much and too openly about the foreign prisoners you have.
+Secrecy and mystery is one of your first duties, as I must ask you to
+remember. Neither D'Argenson nor any other than those I have apprized
+you of should see these prisoners. Give explicit warning to the Abb�
+Renaudot and to de la Croix of the necessity of maintaining an
+inviolable and impenetrable secrecy."
+
+It happened also at that period that a prisoner remained in complete
+ignorance of the reason of his incarceration: "The prisoner at the
+Bastille named J. J. du Vacquay," writes Louvois to the governor, "has
+complained to the King that he has been kept there for thirteen years
+without knowing the reason: be good enough to let me know what minister
+signed the warrant under which he is detained, so that I may report to
+His Majesty."
+
+As the greater part of the papers relating to the arrest were destroyed
+as soon as the incarceration was effected, it sometimes happened that in
+certain cases the reasons were not known even in the offices of the
+ministers. Thus Seignelay writes to the governor, M. de Besmaus: "The
+King has commanded me to write and ask you who is a certain prisoner
+named Dumesnil, how long he has been at the Bastille, and for what
+reason he was placed there." "The demoiselle de Mirail, a prisoner at
+the Bastille, having demanded her liberty of the King, His Majesty has
+instructed me to write and ask you the reason of her detention; if you
+know it, be good enough to inform me at your earliest convenience."
+Again, we find Louvois writing to the same effect: "I am sending you a
+letter from M. Coquet, in regard to which the King has commanded me to
+ask who signed the warrant under which he was sent to the Bastille, and
+whether you know the reason of his being sent there." "Sir, I am writing
+a line merely to ask you to let me know who is Piat de la Fontaine, who
+has been five years at the Bastille, and whether you do not remember why
+he was placed there."
+
+Letters of this kind are, it is true, very rare; yet if one compares the
+state of things they disclose with the extraordinary comfort and luxury
+with which the prisoners were surrounded, they help to characterize the
+celebrated prison at this epoch of its history, namely, the seventeenth
+century.
+
+In 1667 the office of lieutenant of police had been created. The first
+to hold the title was Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, a man of the
+greatest worth. It is very important to note that under the _ancien
+r�gime_ the lieutenant of police had a double function, being at the
+same time a subordinate of the minister of Paris[25] and a member of the
+Ch�telet.[26] His duties were thus of a twofold nature, administrative
+and judicial. Now the Bastille, as a state prison, was more especially
+an administrative institution; but gradually, owing to the character of
+the persons brought there as prisoners, it became difficult to avoid
+turning it also into a judicial institution, and the minister of Paris
+became accustomed to delegate his subordinate, the lieutenant of police,
+to conduct the examination of the prisoners at the Bastille. Though La
+Reynie took practically the whole responsibility of the administration
+of the Bastille, his visits to the prison itself were nevertheless
+relatively rare, and on every occasion a permit signed by Louis XIV. or
+by Colbert was necessary.
+
+La Reynie was succeeded by D'Argenson. Under him the powers of the
+lieutenant of police were very largely extended, and the Bastille was
+comprised within his jurisdiction. Henceforth the lieutenant of police
+will enter the state prison whenever it seems good to him, as lord and
+master, accompanied by his subordinates at the Ch�telet, clerks and
+inspectors of police; the prisoners will be in direct and constant
+communication with him, and he will make an inspection of all the
+chambers at least once a year. We find that at every change in the
+lieutenancy of police, it sufficed for the minister of Paris to send the
+name of the new officer to the governor. Dating from this period, the
+prison in the Suburb Saint-Antoine remained under the authority of a
+magistrate.
+
+The Regency was a transition period between the reigns of Louis XIV. and
+Louis XV., and there was a corresponding transition period in the
+history of the Bastille. The incarcerations were less numerous and less
+rigorous, but the rule of the prison lost something of that aristocratic
+air which had characterized it. The most important episode in the
+history of the Bastille during the Regency was the incarceration of
+those who were accused of complicity in the Cellamare conspiracy. Among
+these was Mdlle de Launay, later to be known as Madame de Staal. She
+has left some charming pages about her imprisonment, in which we find,
+related with a fluent and subtle pen, the little romance which we
+proceed to outline.
+
+Mdlle de Launay was secretary to the Duchess of Maine. She had had some
+part in drawing up the scheme of the Cellamare conspiracy, which, if it
+had succeeded, would have placed the king of Spain on the throne of
+France. On December 10, 1718, the Regent sent her, with several of her
+accomplices, to the Bastille, less with the idea of punishing her for
+machinations against the state than to obtain from her details of the
+conspiracy. At that period of her life she was of but moderate fortune
+and rank, and it would not have been strange if she had been treated
+with rigour. She found at the Bastille, on the contrary, unexpected
+comfort and consideration. In her _Memoirs_, she writes that her sojourn
+at the Bastille was the pleasantest time of her life. Her maid, Rondel,
+was permitted to live with her. She was installed in a veritable suite
+of rooms. She complained of the mice there, and a cat was given her, to
+drive out the mice and provide some amusement. By and by there were
+kittens, and the sportive tricks of the numerous little family cheered
+her wonderfully, she said. Mdlle de Launay was regularly invited to dine
+with the governor; she spent her days in writing and card-playing. The
+king's lieutenant, Maisonrouge, a man well on in years, who held, after
+the governor, the first place in the administration of the ch�teau,
+conceived a profound and pathetic passion for the fair prisoner. He
+declared that nothing would give him greater happiness than to make her
+his wife. His apartments happened to be near those of Mdlle de Launay.
+Unhappily for the king's lieutenant, there was in the neighbourhood a
+third suite, occupied by a young and brilliant nobleman, the Chevalier
+de M�nil, who also was implicated in the Cellamare affair. The fair
+prisoner was not acquainted with him. Maisonrouge impresses us as a man
+of great dignity, and rare nobility of character. He spoke to the two
+young prisoners about each other, hoping, by bringing them into
+communication, to provide them with fresh distractions, more
+particularly the lady, whom he loved. The Chevalier de M�nil and Mdlle
+de Launay could not see each other; they had never met. They began by
+exchanging epistles in verse. Like everything that came from her pen,
+the verses of Mdlle de Launay were full of animation and charm. The good
+Maisonrouge played post between them, happy to see his little friend's
+delight in the diversion she owed to him. It was not long before the
+verses carried from one room to the other by Maisonrouge began to speak
+of love, and this love--surprising as it may seem, but not difficult to
+understand in the sequestered life of the Bastille--ere long became real
+in the consciousness of the young people, who saw each other in
+imagination under the most charming colours. Maisonrouge was soon
+induced to contrive an interview between them. It is a delightful
+moment. The two captives had never seen each other, yet loved each
+other passionately: what will their mutual impressions be? Mdlle de
+Launay's impression, when she saw the gay chevalier, was of unmixed
+enthusiasm; the chevalier's, maybe, was more subdued; but if it is true,
+as someone has said, that to nuns the gardener represents mankind, to a
+prisoner every young woman must be an exquisite creature. The interviews
+continued under the benevolent eye of Maisonrouge, who watched the
+development of Mdlle de Launay's love for M�nil--the love of the girl
+whom he himself loved intensely, but whose happiness he preferred to his
+own. There are delightful details which may be found delightfully
+described in Mdlle de Launay's _Memoirs_. It is M. Bournon's opinion
+that, according to the testimony of Mdlle de Launay herself, this idyll
+of the Bastille had "the d�nouement that might have been foretold." We
+have caught no hint of the sort in the _Memoirs_ of Madame de Staal, but
+then, M. Bournon is no doubt the better psychologist. At any rate, the
+governor of the Bastille got wind of the diversions of the lovers. He
+put his foot down. M�nil was transferred to a distant tower, Mdlle de
+Launay shed tears, and, incredible as it seems, Maisonrouge, while
+redoubling his efforts to please her, sympathized with her lot to the
+point of arranging fresh and more difficult interviews with the sparkish
+chevalier. Mdlle de Launay left the prison in the spring of 1720, after
+having sent to the Regent a detailed statement of the facts of the
+conspiracy, which hitherto she had refused to furnish. Once at liberty,
+she vainly implored the Chevalier de M�nil to fulfil his pledges and
+make her his wife. Maisonrouge died in the following year, of
+disappointment, says the gay coquette, at his failure to get from her,
+during her imprisonment, the promise of marriage which now she would
+have been glad enough to fulfil.
+
+It seems as though under the Regency everything at the Bastille turned
+on love--a reflection of the epoch itself. The young Duke de Richelieu
+was locked up there because he did not love his wife. The brilliant
+nobleman was kept under lock and key for several weeks, "in solitude and
+gloom," he says, when suddenly the door of his room flew open and Madame
+de Richelieu appeared, a wonder of grace, brightness and charm: "The
+fair angel," writes the duke, "who flew from heaven to earth to set
+Peter free was not so radiant."
+
+We have seen how the Bastille had been transformed from a military
+citadel into a prison of state. We shall now witness, under the
+government of the Duke of Orleans, another transformation, betokened by
+an event which is of little apparent importance. The Duke de Richelieu
+was imprisoned in the Bastille a second time as the result of a duel: a
+judge of the Parlement went there to question him and the Parlement
+tried his case. The Parlement[27] at the Bastille, in the prison of the
+king! From that moment the fortress continued year by year to grow more
+like our modern prisons. "Under the Cardinal de Fleury," writes La
+Harpe, "this famous ch�teau was inhabited by hardly any but Jansenist
+writers: it then became the enforced residence of champions of
+philosophy and authors of clandestine satires, and acted as a foil to
+their obscurity and shame." It became increasingly the practice to
+confine there accused persons whose cases were regularly tried at the
+Ch�telet or even before the Parlement. By the second half of the
+eighteenth century accused persons had come to be incarcerated in the
+Bastille by direct order of the Ch�telet, which would have seemed
+incredible to a contemporary of Louis XIV. The summoning officer would
+post himself before the towers, and there, while the prisoner pressed
+his head close against the bars of the window, the officer would shout
+the terms of the writ at him across the moat. The advocates defending
+the accused obtained permission to go and consult their clients, and
+they were the only persons who were permitted to interview the prisoners
+in private. On the appointed day the prisoner was transferred to the law
+courts quietly and by night to avoid the curiosity of the crowd.
+
+Under Louis XVI. the judges of the Parlement visited the Bastille as
+they visited the other prisons; at length the minister Breteuil sent
+instructions to the officials informing them that no more _lettres de
+cachet_ would be issued without stating the duration of the penalty to
+which the guilty person was condemned and the grounds for his
+punishment. The Bastille was now merely a prison like the others,
+except that the prisoners were better treated there.
+
+In 1713 Voysin, the Secretary of State, wrote to D'Argenson:
+"Beaumanielle is not sufficiently deserving of consideration to warrant
+his removal from the Ch�telet to the Bastille." La Harpe has well
+described the transformation which from this time came over the great
+state prison by saying that, from the beginning of the century, none of
+the prisoners who had been placed there "had merited the honour." His
+remark receives corroboration from Linguet: "It is not, in these latter
+days especially, for criminals of state that the Bastille is reserved:
+it has become in some sort the antichambre of the conciergerie."
+
+If the glories of the Bastille paled as it grew older, on the other hand
+torture, which, it is true, had never been applied except by order of
+the courts, had completely disappeared. From the beginning of the
+eighteenth century, the cells and chains were merely a temporary
+punishment reserved for insubordinate prisoners: from the accession of
+Louis XVI. they had fallen into disuse. Breteuil forbade any person
+whatever to be placed in the cells, which were the rooms on the lowest
+floor of each tower, a sort of damp and gloomy vaults. On September 11,
+1775, Malesherbes writes: "No prisoner should be refused material for
+reading and writing. The abuse it is pretended that they may make of it
+cannot be dangerous, confined so closely as they are. Nor should any
+refusal be made to the desire of such as may wish to devote themselves
+to other occupations, provided they do not require you to leave in their
+hands tools of which they might avail themselves to effect their escape.
+If any of them should wish to write to his family and his friends, he
+must be permitted to receive replies, and to send replies to their
+letters after having read them. In all this you must be guided by your
+prudence and your humanity." The reading of the gazettes, formerly
+rigidly forbidden, was now authorised.
+
+It must further be remarked that the number of prisoners confined in the
+Bastille was not so large as might be thought. During the whole reign of
+Louis XVI. the Bastille received no more than two hundred and forty
+prisoners, an average of sixteen a year; while it had room for forty-two
+in separate apartments.
+
+Under Louis XIV., at the period when the government was most liberal in
+dispensing its _lettres de cachet_, an average of only thirty prisoners
+a year entered the ch�teau, and their captivity was for the most part of
+short duration. Dumouriez informs us in his _Memoirs_ that during his
+detention he had never more than eighteen fellow prisoners, and that
+more than once he had only six. M. Alfred B�gis has drawn up a list of
+the prisoners detained in the Bastille from 1781 to 1789. In May, 1788,
+it contained twenty-seven prisoners, the highest figure reached during
+these eight year; in September, 1782, it contained ten; in April, 1783,
+seven; in June of the same year, seven; in December, 1788, nine; in
+February, 1789, nine; at the time of its capture, July 14, 1789, there
+were seven.
+
+True, not only men were locked up in the Bastille, but also books when
+they appeared dangerous. The royal warrant under which they were
+incarcerated was even drawn up on the model of the _lettres de cachet_.
+M. Bournon has published a specimen of these. The books were shut up in
+a closet between the towers of the Treasure and the County, over an old
+passage communicating with the bastion. In 1733 the lieutenant of police
+instructed the governor of the Bastille to receive at the ch�teau "all
+the apparatus of a clandestine printing-press which had been seized in a
+chamber of the Saint-Victor abbey: the which you will be good enough to
+have placed in the store room of the Bastille." When the books ceased to
+appear dangerous, they were set at liberty. In this way the
+_Encyclop�dia_[28] was liberated after a detention of some years.
+
+We have just seen that during the reign of Louis XVI. the Bastille did
+not receive more than sixteen prisoners a year, on an average. Several
+of these were only detained for a few days. From 1783 to 1789 the
+Bastille remained almost empty, and would have been absolutely empty if
+it had not been decided to place there prisoners who should properly
+have been elsewhere. As early as February, 1784, the fortress of
+Vincennes, which served as a sort of overflow pipe to the Bastille, had
+been shut for lack of prisoners. The system of _lettres de cachet_ was
+slipping away into the past. On the other hand, the Bastille was a
+source of great expense to the King. The governor alone received 60,000
+livres annually. When you add the salaries and board of the officers of
+the garrison, the turnkeys, the physicians, the surgeon, the apothecary,
+the chaplains; when you add the food--this alone in 1774 came to 67,000
+livres--and the clothing of the prisoners, and the upkeep of the
+buildings, the total will appear outrageous, for the figures given above
+must be tripled to represent the value of the present day. So Necker,
+seeing that the Bastille was of no further utility, thought of
+suppressing it "for economy's sake,"[29] and he was not the only one in
+high places to speak of this suppression. The Carnavalet[30] museum
+possesses a scheme drawn up in 1784 by Corbet, the superintending
+architect to the city of Paris, whence the project has an official
+character: it is a scheme for a "Place Louis XVI." to be opened up on
+the site of the old fortress. We learn from Millin that other artists
+"were occupied with a scheme for erecting a monument on the site of the
+Bastille." One of these schemes deserves special mention. Seven of the
+eight towers were to be destroyed, the eighth to remain standing, but in
+a significant state of dilapidation: on the site of the demolished
+towers a monument was to be erected to the glory of Louis XVI. This
+monument was to consist of a pedestal formed by piling up chains and
+bolts taken from the state prison, above which would rise a statue of
+the king, one hand extended towards the ruined tower with the gesture of
+a deliverer. It is to be regretted, if not for the beauty, at least, for
+the picturesqueness of Paris, that this scheme was never put into
+execution. Davy de Chavign�, king's counsellor and auditor to the
+treasury, was allowed to present to the Royal Academy of Architecture,
+at its sitting on June 8, 1789, "a plan for a monument on the site of
+the Bastille, to be decreed by the States General to Louis XVI. as the
+restorer of the public liberty." On this subject the famous sculptor
+Houdon wrote to Chavign�: "I am very anxious for the plan to be adopted.
+The idea of erecting a monument to liberty on the very spot where
+slavery has reigned up to the present, appears to me particularly well
+conceived, and well calculated to inspire genius. I shall think myself
+only too fortunate to be among the artists who will celebrate the epoch
+of the regeneration of France."
+
+We have seen prints, long anterior to 1789--one of them the frontispiece
+of the edition of Linguet's _Memoirs_ that appeared in 1783--representing
+Louis XVI. extending his hand towards the lofty towers, which workmen
+are in the act of demolishing.
+
+Among the archives of the Bastille are preserved two reports drawn up in
+1788 by the king's lieutenant, Puget, the most important personage in
+the fortress after the governor. He proposes the suppression of the
+state prison, the demolition of the old ch�teau, and the sale of the
+ground for the benefit of the crown. It may be said of these schemes, as
+of the plan of the architect Corbet, that they would not have been
+propounded if they had not been approved in high places.
+
+Further, in the year 1784, an ardent supporter of the old state of
+things cried: "Oh! if our young monarch ever committed a fault so great,
+if he so far belied the most ancient usages of this government, if it
+were possible that one day he could be tempted to destroy you" (the
+author is apostrophizing the Bastille) "to raise on your ruins a
+monument to the liberator-king...." The demolition of the Bastille was
+decided on; and it would have been accomplished as a government
+undertaking but for the outbreak of the Revolution.
+
+From January 1 to July 14, 1789, that is to say for more than six
+months, only one solitary prisoner entered the Bastille; and what a
+prisoner!--R�veillon, the paper manufacturer of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine, who was shut up on May 1 at his own request, in order to
+escape the fury of the mob. The same year, the lieutenant of police, de
+Crosne, made an inspection of the Bastille, accompanied by a judge of
+the Parlement; their object was to arrange officially about the
+destruction of the state prison.
+
+Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, the Bastille no longer existed,
+though its towers were still standing.
+
+The victors of the 14th of July set free seven prisoners: four forgers
+whose arrest had been ordered by the Ch�telet, whose case had been
+regularly tried, and whose proper place was an ordinary prison; two
+madmen who ought to have been at Charenton; and the Comte de Solages, a
+young nobleman who had been guilty of a monstrous crime over which it
+was desired to throw a veil out of regard for his family; he was
+maintained on a pension paid by his father. The conquerors of the
+Bastille destroyed an old fortified castle: the state prison no longer
+existed. They "broke in an open door." That was said of them even in
+1789.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LIFE IN THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Having sketched rapidly and with bold strokes the outlines of the
+history of the Bastille from its foundation to its fall, we intend to
+show how the rule to which prisoners in the fortress of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine were submitted underwent its own process of
+transformation, parallel with the transformation of the prison itself.
+To understand the facts which follow, and which are of a kind to astound
+the mind of everyone in these days, it is necessary to remember what we
+have already said as to the character of the Bastille. It was the prison
+of luxury, the aristocratic prison of the _ancien r�gime_, the _prison
+de luxe_ at a period when it was no dishonour, as we shall see later, to
+be confined there. We must remember the phrase of the minister of Paris
+writing to D'Argenson, in regard to a personage of but modest rank, that
+this individual did not deserve "consideration" enough to be put in the
+Bastille. Let us reflect on this observation of Mercier in his excellent
+_Pictures of Paris_: "The people fear the Ch�telet more than the
+Bastille. Of the latter they have no dread, because it is almost unknown
+to them."
+
+We have shown how the Bastille, originally a military citadel, had
+become a prison of state; then, little by little, had approximated to
+the ordinary prisons, until the day when it died a natural death ere it
+could be assassinated. The same transformation took place in the
+treatment of the prisoners. Midway in the seventeenth century, the
+Bastille had none of the characteristics of a prison, but was simply a
+ch�teau in which the king caused certain of his subjects to sojourn, for
+one cause or another. They lived there just as they thought proper,
+furnishing their rooms according to their fancy with their own
+furniture, indulging their tastes in regard to food at their own
+expense, and waited on by their own servants. When a prisoner was rich
+he could live at the Bastille in princely style; when he was poor, he
+lived there very wretchedly. When the prisoner had no property at all,
+the king did not for that reason give him furniture or food; but he gave
+him money which he might use as seemed good to him in providing himself
+with furniture and food: money of which he could retain a part--a number
+of prisoners did not fail to do so--these savings becoming his own
+property. This system, the character of which it is important to
+recognize, underwent gradual modification during the course of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, approximating, without ever
+becoming identical with, the system of our modern prisons. Thus the
+king, instead of granting pensions individually to the poorest of the
+prisoners, came to endow the Bastille with a certain fixed number of
+pensions for the less fortunate prisoners. The recipients of these
+pensions continued to enjoy them for long years, and if they did not
+wish the whole of the money to be expended on their support, the balance
+was handed over to them. So we see certain individuals getting little
+fortunes together by the mere fact of their having been prisoners in the
+Bastille--a circumstance which has so much surprised historians because
+they have not sought its cause. It even happened that prisoners, when
+their liberation was announced to them, asked to remain a little longer
+in order to swell their savings, a favour which was sometimes granted
+them. In the course of the eighteenth century the money destined to the
+maintenance of the prisoners at the Bastille could not be diverted from
+its purpose; the prisoners were no longer able to appropriate a part;
+the whole sum had to be expended.
+
+It was only in the second half of the seventeenth century that the king
+had some rooms at the Bastille furnished for such prisoners as were
+without means of procuring furniture themselves. And it is very
+interesting to note that it was only at the extreme end of the century,
+under the administration of Saint-Mars, that certain apartments of the
+Bastille were arranged in the prison style with bars and bolts. Until
+then they had been simply the rooms of a stronghold.[31]
+
+Let us follow the prisoner from his entrance to his exit.
+
+When the _lettre de cachet_ had been signed, it was usually a sort of
+sheriff's officer who effected the arrest. He appeared in company with
+five or six men-at-arms, and signified the arrest by touching his quarry
+with a white staff. A coach was in waiting. The police officer politely
+begged the person he was instructed to secure to step into the coach,
+and took his place beside him. And, according to the testimony of
+various memoirs, while the vehicle was rolling along with lowered
+blinds, there was a pleasant conversational exchange of courtesies up to
+the moment of the prisoner's finding himself within the walls of the
+Bastille. A certain Lafort was living in furnished apartments with a
+young and pretty Englishwoman whom he had abducted, when one evening,
+about sunset, a police officer arrived. The coach was at the door.
+Preliminaries were settled on both sides with as much politeness as if a
+visit or an evening party had been the topic of discussion. They all got
+into the vehicle, even the young man's lackey who, beguiled by
+appearances, mounted behind. Arrived at the Bastille, the lackey lost no
+time in descending to open the door: there was general astonishment,
+especially on the part of the poor servant, when he learnt that since he
+had entered the Bastille along with his master, he must stay with him.
+
+Most often the officer and his companions surprised their quarry early
+in the morning, on rising from bed. Imagine then the coach with the
+prisoner and the police officer inside, arriving before the Bastille, in
+the first court in front of the castle keep. "Who goes there?" cries the
+sentinel. "The king's writ!" replies the officer. At this, the shops we
+have seen attached to the flanks of the ch�teau are bound at once to be
+shut. The soldiers on guard have to turn their faces to the wall, or
+perhaps to pull their hats over their eyes. The coach passes the
+outpost, a bell sounds. "Advance!" cries the officer on duty. The
+drawbridge is lowered and the coach rattles over the stout iron-clamped
+boards. For greater secrecy, spies and prisoners of war were taken in by
+a private door leading to the gardens of the Arsenal.
+
+Officers and noblemen presented themselves before the Bastille alone,
+unless they were accompanied by relatives or friends. "It is my
+intention," the king had written to them, "that you betake yourselves to
+my ch�teau of the Bastille." And no one dreamt of declining the royal
+invitation. Further, when the governor desired to transfer one of them
+from one prison to another, he contented himself with telling him so. We
+find in the Journal of Du Junca, king's lieutenant[32] at the Bastille,
+several notes like the following: "Monday, December 26, 1695, about ten
+o'clock in the morning, M. de Villars, lieutenant-colonel of the
+regiment of Vosges infantry, came and reported himself a prisoner, as
+ordered by M. Barbezieux, though he was a prisoner in the citadel of
+Grenoble, whence he came direct without being brought by anyone."[33] On
+the arrival of the prisoner, the king's lieutenant, accompanied by the
+captain of the gates, came to receive him as he got out of his carriage.
+The officers of the ch�teau at once led the new-comer into the presence
+of the governor, who received him civilly, invited him to sit down, and
+after having endorsed the _lettre de cachet_ conversed with him for some
+time. Under Louis XIV. the governor in most cases even kept his new
+guest, as well as the persons who had accompanied him, to lunch or
+dinner. Meanwhile his quarters had been got ready. We read in Du Junca's
+Journal that on January 26, 1695, a certain De Courlandon, a colonel of
+cavalry, presented himself for incarceration at the Bastille. There
+being no room ready to receive him, the governor asked him to go and
+pass the night in a neighbouring inn, at the sign of the _Crown_, and
+to return next day. "Whereupon M. de Courlandon did not fail to return
+about eleven o'clock in the morning, having dined with M. de Besmaus
+(the governor), and in the afternoon he entered the ch�teau."
+
+The reader will not be surprised at learning that the prospect of
+incarceration at the Bastille did not always strike the future prisoner
+with terror. We read in the _Memoirs_ of the Duke de Lauzun:[34]
+"Scolded for two hours on end by everybody who fancied himself entitled
+to do so, I thought I could not do better than go to Paris and await
+developments. A few hours after my arrival, I received a letter from my
+father telling me that it had been decided to put us all in the
+Bastille, and that I should probably be arrested during the night. I
+determined at least to finish gaily, so I invited some pretty girls from
+the Opera to supper, so that I might await the officer without
+impatience. Seeing that he did not arrive, I determined on the bold move
+of going to Fontainebleau and joining the king's hunt. He did not speak
+to me once during the chase, which was such a confirmation of our
+disgrace that on our return no one gave us the customary salute. But I
+did not lose heart; in the evening I was in attendance, and the king
+came to me. 'You are all,' he said, 'hotheaded rips, but funny dogs all
+the same; come along and have supper, and bring M. de Gu�m�n� and the
+Chevalier de Luxembourg.'"
+
+Before the new arrival was installed in the chamber prepared for him, he
+was taken to the great council hall, where he was requested to empty his
+pockets. Only notorious rogues were searched. If the prisoner had upon
+him money, jewels, or other articles such as knives and scissors, the
+use of which was not allowed by the regulations, they were done up in a
+parcel which he himself sealed, with his own seal if he had one; if not,
+with the seal of the Bastille. Finally, he was conducted to the room
+reserved for him.
+
+Each of the eight towers of the Bastille contained four or five stories
+of rooms or cells. The worst of these rooms were on the lowest floor,
+and these were what were called the "cells,"--octagonal vaults, cold and
+damp, partly under ground; the walls, grey with mould, were bare from
+floor to ceiling, the latter a groined arch. A bench and a bed of straw
+covered with a paltry coverlet, formed the whole appointments. Daylight
+feebly flickered through the vent-hole opening on to the moat. When the
+Seine was in flood, the water came through the walls and swamped the
+cells; and then any prisoners who might happen to be in them were
+removed. During the reign of Louis XIV. the cells were sometimes
+occupied by prisoners of the lowest class and criminals condemned to
+death. Later, under Louis XV., the cells ceased to be used except as a
+place of punishment for insubordinate prisoners who assaulted their
+guardians or fellow-prisoners, or for turnkeys and sentinels of the
+ch�teau who had committed breaches of discipline. They stayed in the
+cells for a short time in irons. The cells had fallen into disuse by
+the time the Revolution broke out; since the first ministry of Necker,
+it had been forbidden to confine in them any one whatever, and none of
+the warders questioned on July 18 remembered having seen any one placed
+in them. The two prisoners, Tavernier and B�chade, whom the conquerors
+of the 14th of July found in one of these dungeons, had been placed
+there, at the moment of the attack, by the officers of the ch�teau, for
+fear lest amid the rain of bullets some harm should befall them.
+
+The worst rooms after the cells were the _calottes_, the rooms on the
+floor above. In summer the heat was extreme in them, and in winter the
+cold, in spite of the stoves. They were octagons whose ceilings, as the
+name implies, were shaped like a skull-cap. High enough in the centre,
+they gradually diminished in height towards the sides. It was impossible
+to stand upright except in the middle of the room.
+
+The prisoners were only placed in the cells and _calottes_ under
+exceptional circumstances. Every tower had two or three floors of lofty
+and airy chambers, and in these the prisoners lived. They were octagons
+from fifteen to sixteen feet in diameter and from fifteen to twenty feet
+high. Light entered through large windows approached by three steps. We
+have said that it was only towards the end of Louis XIV.'s reign that
+these rooms were arranged like prison cells with bars and bolts. They
+were warmed with open fireplaces or stoves. The ceiling was whitewashed,
+the floor of brick. On the walls the prisoners had chalked verses,
+mottoes, and designs.
+
+One artistic prisoner amused himself by decorating the bare walls with
+paintings. The governor, delighted at seeing him thus find relaxation,
+moved him from room to room; when he had finished filling one with his
+designs and arabesques, he was placed in another. Some of these rooms
+were decorated with portraits of Louis XIV. placed above the
+chimney-piece, a characteristic detail which helps to show what the
+Bastille was at this period: the ch�teau of the king, where the king
+received a certain number of his subjects as his willing or unwilling
+guests.
+
+The best rooms in the Bastille were those that were fitted up in the
+eighteenth century for the accommodation of the staff. These were what
+were called the "suites." In these were placed invalids and prisoners of
+distinction.
+
+At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the furniture of these
+apartments was still extremely simple: they were absolutely empty. The
+reason of this we have indicated above. "I arrived," says Madame de
+Staal, "at a room where there was nothing but four walls, very filthy,
+and daubed all over by my predecessors for want of something better to
+do. It was so destitute of furniture that someone went and got a little
+straw chair for me to sit on, and two stones to support a lighted
+faggot, and a little candle-end was neatly stuck on the wall to give me
+light."
+
+The prisoners sent to their own homes for a table, bed, and chair, or
+they hired these from the upholsterer of the Bastille. When they had
+nothing to bless themselves with, the government, as we have already
+said, did not provide them with furniture. It gave them money, sometimes
+considerable sums, which permitted them to adorn their rooms after their
+own fancy. This was the case in regard to all prisoners up to 1684. At
+this date the king ordered the administration to supply furniture to
+those of the prisoners whose detention was to be kept secret, for, by
+getting in bedding from their own houses or the houses of friends, they
+made known their arrest. D'Argenson had half a dozen of the rooms
+permanently furnished, others were furnished under Louis XV.; under
+Louis XVI., almost all were furnished. The appointments were very
+modest: a bed of green baize with curtains, one or two tables, several
+chairs, fire-dogs, a shovel, and a small pair of tongs. But after having
+undergone examination, the prisoner retained the right of getting in
+furniture from outside. And in this way the rooms of the prisoners were
+sometimes adorned with great elegance. Madame de Staal relates that she
+had hers hung with tapestry; the Marquis de Sade covered the bare walls
+with long and brilliant hangings: other prisoners ornamented their rooms
+with family portraits: they procured chests of drawers, desks, round
+tables, dressing-cases, armchairs, cushions in Utrecht velvet; the
+inventories of articles belonging to the prisoners show that they
+managed to secure everything they thought necessary. The Abb� Brigault,
+who was imprisoned at the same time as Madame de Staal and for the same
+affair, brought into the Bastille five arm-chairs, two pieces of
+tapestry, eleven serge hangings, eight chairs, a bureau, a small table,
+three pictures, &c. The list of effects taken out of the Bastille by the
+Comte de Belle-Isle when he was set at liberty includes a library
+consisting of 333 volumes and ten atlases, a complete service of fine
+linen and plate for the table, a bed furnished with gold-bordered red
+damask, four pieces of tapestry on antique subjects, two mirrors, a
+screen of gold-bordered red damask matching the bed, two folding
+screens, two armchairs with cushions, an armchair in leather, three
+chairs in tapestry, an overmantel of gilt copper, tables, drawers,
+stands, candlestick of plated copper, &c. We might multiply examples,
+even from among prisoners of middle station.
+
+It was the rule that prisoners newly arrived at the Bastille should be
+examined within twenty-four hours. It sometimes happened, however, that
+one or another remained for two or three weeks before appearing before
+the magistrate. The Ch�telet commissioner, specially delegated to the
+Bastille for these examinations, founded his questions on notes supplied
+him by the lieutenant of police, who, indeed, often went in person to
+see the prisoners. A special commission was appointed for affairs of
+importance. Dumouriez says that he was examined after nine hours of
+detention by three commissioners: "The president was an old councillor
+of state named Marville, a man of intelligence, but coarse and
+sarcastic. The second was M. de Sartine, lieutenant of police and
+councillor of state, a man of polish and refinement. The third was a
+_ma�tre des requ�tes_[35] named Villevaux, a very insincere and
+disputatious fellow. The clerk, who had more intelligence than any of
+them, was an advocate named Beaumont."
+
+We have found many instances of prisoners who spoke in high terms of
+their judges. And it cannot be said that prisoners at the Bastille
+escaped judgment. A Ch�telet commissioner examined them and sent the
+official report of his examination, with a statement of his opinion, to
+the lieutenant of police. He decided whether the arrest should be
+sustained. Moreover, it would be a mistake to compare the lieutenant of
+police under the _ancien r�gime_ with the prefect of police of to-day;
+the lieutenants of police, selected from former _ma�tres des requ�tes_,
+had a judicial character: the documents of the period call them
+"magistrates"; they issued decrees without appeal and pronounced penal
+sentences, even condemning to the galleys; they were at the same time
+justices of the peace with an extensive jurisdiction. In addition to the
+examination held on the entrance of a prisoner, the lieutenants of
+police, in the course of their frequent visits, addressed to the
+ministers of Paris reports on the prisoners,--reports in which they
+discussed the evidence, and which constituted veritable judgments.
+
+When the prisoner was recognized as innocent, a new _lettre de cachet_
+soon set him at liberty. The verdict of "no true bill" often supervened
+with a rapidity which the decisions of our police magistrates would do
+well to emulate. A certain Barbier, who entered the Bastille on February
+15, 1753, was found not guilty and set at liberty the next day. Of the
+279 persons imprisoned in the Bastille during the last fifteen years of
+the _ancien r�gime_, thirty-eight benefited by the dropping of the
+indictment.
+
+Finally--and here is a point on which the new method might well model
+itself on that of the Bastille--when a detention was recognized as
+unjust, the victim was indemnified. A great number of examples might be
+mentioned. An advocate named Sub� left the Bastille on June 18, 1767,
+after a detention of eighteen days; he had been falsely accused of the
+authorship of a book against the king, and received compensation to the
+tune of 3000 livres, more than �240 of our money. A certain Pereyra,
+imprisoned in the Bastille from November 7, 1771, to April 12, 1772, and
+then from July 1 to September 26, 1774, having been found to be
+innocent, was reinstated in all his property, and received from the king
+a life pension of 1200 livres, more than �100 to-day. A certain number
+of those accused in the Canada case, when the charge was withdrawn,
+received a life pension on leaving the Bastille. At other times, the
+detention of an individual might throw his family into want. He was kept
+in the Bastille, if it was thought he deserved it, but his people were
+assisted. Under date September 3, 1763, the Duke de Choiseul writes to
+the lieutenant of police: "I have received the letter you did me the
+honour of writing to me in favour of the children of the Sieur
+Joncaire-Chabert. I have the pleasure to inform you that I have got for
+them a second subsidy of 300 livres (nearly �30 to-day) in consideration
+of the sad condition you informed me they were in." Louis XIV.
+guaranteed to Pellisson, at his liberation, a pension of 2000 crowns.
+The Regent granted to Voltaire, when he left the Bastille, a pension of
+1200 livres. Louis XVI. awarded to Latude an annuity of 400 livres, and
+to La Rochegu�rault an annuity of 400 crowns. The minister Breteuil
+pensioned all the prisoners whom he set at liberty. Brun de Condamine,
+confined from 1779 to 1783, received on leaving a sum of 600 livres.
+Renneville speaks of a prisoner to whom Seignelay gave an important
+situation in compensation for his detention at the Bastille. We hear of
+one, Toussaint Socquart, a commissioner of the Ch�telet and of police
+whose offices were restored to him when he came out of the Bastille. In
+fact, contrary to detention in our modern prisons, incarceration in the
+Bastille did not cast the slightest slur on the prisoner's character,
+even in the eyes of those to whom his arrest was due, and instances have
+been known of men who, on their release from the Bastille, not only
+were reinstated in public offices, but reached the highest positions.
+
+Until his examinations were quite completed, the prisoner was kept in
+close confinement. None but the officers of the ch�teau were allowed to
+communicate with him. And during this time he lived in solitude, unless
+he had brought a servant with him. The administration readily permitted
+the prisoners to avail themselves of the services of their valets, who
+were boarded at the king's expense. It even happened that the government
+sometimes gave their prisoners valets, paying not only for their board,
+but also their wages at the rate of 900 livres a year. One might cite
+prisoners of inferior rank who thus had servants to wait on them. Two or
+three prisoners were sometimes put together in one room. Prison life has
+no greater terror than solitude. In absolute solitude many of the
+prisoners became mad. In company, the hours of captivity seemed less
+tedious and oppressive. Father and son, mother and daughter, aunt and
+niece, lived together. Many might be named. On September 7, 1693, a lady
+named De la Fontaine was taken to the Bastille for the second time. The
+first time, she had been imprisoned quite alone; but this new detention
+evoked the compassion of the lieutenant of police, who, to please the
+poor lady, sent her husband to the Bastille, locked him up with her, and
+gave them a lackey to wait on them.
+
+The examinations being ended, the prisoners enjoyed a greater liberty.
+They could then enter into communication with the people of the town.
+They obtained permission to see their relatives and friends. These
+sometimes paid them visits in their rooms; but as a rule the interviews
+took place in the council-hall, in presence of one of the officers of
+the ch�teau. They were usually permitted to discuss only family affairs
+and business matters. All conversation on the Bastille and the reasons
+for their imprisonment was forbidden. The rules of the prison increased
+in severity as time went on. Towards the end of Louis XV.'s reign the
+lieutenant of police went so far as to prescribe the subjects of
+conversation which would alone be permitted in the course of the visits
+the prisoners received. "They may talk to the prisoner about the harvest
+his vineyards will yield this year, about cancelling a lease, about a
+match for his niece, about the health of his parents." But it is
+necessary to read the _Memoirs_ of Gourville, Fontaine, Bussy-Rabutin,
+Hennequin, Madame de Staal, the Duke de Richelieu, to form a general
+idea of life at the Bastille under Louis XIV. and under the Regent.
+Several prisoners were free to move about through the ch�teau wherever
+it seemed good to them; they entered the rooms of their fellow-prisoners
+at all hours of the day. The governor contented himself with locking
+them in their own rooms at night. The prisoners who had the "liberty of
+the court" organized games of bowls or _tonneau_, and hobnobbed with the
+officers of the garrison. Fontaine relates that they might have been
+seen from the top of the towers, collected fifty at a time in the inner
+court Bussy-Rabutin's room was open to all comers: his wife and friends
+visited him; he gave dinners to persons from court, plotted love
+intrigues there, and corresponded freely with his friends and relatives.
+Several prisoners even had permission to take a walk into the town on
+condition of their returning to the ch�teau in the evening. Two brothers
+were placed in the Bastille together. They went out when they pleased,
+taking turns; it was sufficient for one or other to be always at the
+ch�teau. The officers of the staff gossiped with the prisoners and gave
+them advice as to the best means of obtaining their liberty.
+
+This animated, courtly, and elegant life is described with infinite
+charm by Madame de Staal, whom we have already cited. "We all used to
+spend a part of the day with the governor. We dined with him, and after
+dinner I enjoyed a rubber of ombre with Messieurs de Pompadour and de
+Boisdavis, M�nil advising me. When it was over we returned to our own
+apartments. The company met again in my rooms before supper, for which
+we returned to the governor's, and after that we all went to bed."
+
+As to the manner in which the prisoners were fed and looked after, that
+is surprising indeed, and what we shall say about it, though rigidly
+accurate, will perhaps be regarded as an exaggeration. The governor drew
+three livres a day for the maintenance of a man of inferior rank; five
+livres for the maintenance of a tradesman; ten livres for a banker, a
+magistrate, or a man of letters; fifteen livres for a judge of the
+Parlement; thirty-six livres for a marshal of France. The Cardinal de
+Rohan had 120 francs a day spent on him. The Prince de Courlande, during
+a stay of five months at the Bastille, spent 22,000 francs. These
+figures must be doubled and trebled to give the value they would
+represent to-day.
+
+We read, too, with the greatest astonishment the description of the
+meals the prisoners made. Renneville, whose evidence is the more
+important in that his book is a pamphlet against the administration of
+the Bastille, speaks in these terms of his first meal: "The turnkey put
+one of my serviettes on the table and placed my dinner on it, which
+consisted of pea soup garnished with lettuce, well simmered and
+appetizing to look at, with a quarter of fowl to follow; in one dish
+there was a juicy beef-steak, with plenty of gravy and a sprinkling of
+parsley, in another a quarter of forcemeat pie well stuffed with
+sweetbreads, cock's combs, asparagus, mushrooms, and truffles; and in a
+third a rago�t of sheep's tongue, the whole excellently cooked; for
+dessert, a biscuit and two pippins. The turnkey insisted on pouring out
+my wine. This was good burgundy, and the bread was excellent. I asked
+him to drink, but he declared it was not permitted. I asked if I should
+pay for my food, or whether I was indebted to the king for it. He told
+me that I had only to ask freely for whatever would give me pleasure,
+that they would try to satisfy me, and that His Majesty paid for it
+all." The "most Christian" king desired that his guests should fast on
+Fridays and in Lent, but he did not treat them any the worse on that
+account. "I had," says Renneville, "six dishes, and an admirable prawn
+soup. Among the fish there was a very fine weever, a large fried sole,
+and a perch, all very well seasoned, with three other dishes." At this
+period Renneville's board cost ten francs a day; later he was reduced to
+the rate of the prisoners of a lower class. "They much reduced my usual
+fare," he says; "I had, however, a good soup with fried bread crumbs, a
+passable piece of beef, a rago�t of sheep's tongue, and two custards for
+dessert. I was treated in pretty much the same manner the whole time I
+was in this gloomy place; sometimes they gave me, after my soup, a wing
+or leg of fowl, sometimes they put two little patties on the edge of the
+dish."
+
+Towards the end of Louis XV.'s reign, Dumouriez eulogizes the cookery of
+the Bastille in almost the same terms. On the day of his entrance,
+noticing that they were serving a fish dinner, he asked for a fowl to be
+got from a neighbouring eating-house. "A fowl!" said the major, "don't
+you know that to-day is Friday?" "Your business is to look after me and
+not my conscience. I am an invalid, for the Bastille itself is a
+disease," replied the prisoner. In an hour's time the fowl was on the
+table. Subsequently he asked for his dinner and supper to be served at
+the same time, between three and four o'clock. His valet, a good cook,
+used to make him stews. "You fared very well at the Bastille; there
+were always five dishes at dinner and three at supper, without the
+dessert, and the whole being put on the table at once, appeared
+magnificent." There is a letter from the major of the Bastille addressed
+in 1764 to the lieutenant of police, discussing a prisoner named Vieilh,
+who never ate butcher's meat; so they had to feed him exclusively on
+game and poultry. Things were much the same under Louis XVI., as
+Poultier d'Elmotte testifies: "De Launey, the governor, used to come and
+have a friendly chat with me; he got them to consult my taste as regards
+food, and to supply me with anything I wished for." The bookseller
+Hardy, transferred in 1766 to the Bastille with the members of the
+Breton deputation, declares frankly that they were all treated in the
+best possible way. Finally, Linguet himself, in spite of his desire to
+paint the lot of the victims of the Bastille in the most sombre colours,
+is obliged to confess that food was supplied in abundance. Every morning
+the cook sent up to him a menu on which he marked the dishes he fancied.
+
+The account books of the Bastille confirm the testimony of former
+prisoners. The following, according to these documents, are the meals
+that La Bourdonnais enjoyed during July, 1750. Every day the menu
+contains soup, beef, veal, beans, French beans, two eggs, bread,
+strawberries, cherries, gooseberries, oranges, two bottles of red wine,
+and two bottles of beer. In addition to this regular bill of fare we
+note on July 2, a fowl and a bottle of Muscat; on the 4th, a bottle of
+Muscat; on the 7th, tea; on the 12th, a bottle of brandy; on the 13th,
+some flowers; on the 14th, some quails; on the 15th, a turkey; on the
+16th, a melon; on the 17th, a fowl; on the 18th, a young rabbit; on the
+19th, a bottle of brandy; on the 20th, a chicken and ham sausage and two
+melons; and so on.
+
+Tavernier was a prisoner of mean station, son of a doorkeeper of Paris
+de Montmartel. He was implicated in a plot against the King's life, and
+was one of the seven prisoners set free on the 14th of July. He was
+found out of his mind in his cell. After he had been led in triumph
+through the streets of Paris, he was shut up at Charenton. He was a
+martyr, people exclaimed. He was certainly not so well off in his new
+abode as he had been at the Bastille. We have an account of what was
+supplied to him at the Bastille in addition to the ordinary meals, in
+November, 1788, in March and May, 1789, three of the last months of his
+imprisonment. In November we find: tobacco, four bottles of brandy,
+sixty bottles of wine, thirty bottles of beer, two pounds of coffee,
+three pounds of sugar, a turkey, oysters, chestnuts, apples, and pears;
+in March: tobacco, four bottles of brandy, forty-four bottles of wine,
+sixty bottles of beer, coffee, sugar, fowls, cheese; in May: tobacco,
+four bottles of brandy, sixty-two bottles of wine, thirty-one bottles of
+beer, pigeons, coffee, sugar, cheese, &c. We have the menus of the
+Marquis de Sade for January, 1789: chocolate cream, a fat chicken
+stuffed with chestnuts, pullets with truffles, potted ham, apricot
+marmalade, &c.
+
+The facts we are describing were the rule. The prisoners who were
+treated with the least consideration fed very well. Only those who were
+sent down to the cells were sometimes put on bread and water, but that
+was only a temporary punishment.
+
+When a complaint was formulated by any prisoner in regard to his food, a
+reprimand to the governor soon followed. Then the lieutenant of police
+inquired of the person concerned if he was better treated than formerly.
+"His Majesty tells me," writes Pontchartrain to De Launey, "that
+complaints have been raised about the bad food of the prisoners; he
+instructs me to write to you to give the matter great attention." And
+Sartine wrote jokingly to Major de Losmes: "I am quite willing for you
+to get the clothes of Sieur Dubois enlarged, and I hope all your
+prisoners may enjoy as excellent health."
+
+Further, the king clothed those of the prisoners who were too poor to
+buy their own clothes. He did not give them a prison uniform, but
+dressing-gowns padded or lined with rabbit skin, breeches of coloured
+stuff, vests lined with silk plush and fancy coats.[36] The commissary
+at the Bastille appointed to look after the supplies took the prisoners'
+measure, and inquired about their tastes, and the colours and styles
+that suited them best. A lady prisoner named Sauv� asked to have made
+for her a dress of white silk, dotted with green flowers. The wife of
+commissary Rochebrune spent several days in going the round of the Paris
+shops, and then wrote in despair that no dressmaker had such a material,
+the nearest approach to it being a white silk with green stripes: if
+Madame Sauv� would be satisfied with that, they would send to take her
+measure. "Monsieur le major," writes a prisoner named Hugonnet, "the
+shirts they brought me yesterday are not a bit what I asked for, for I
+remember having written 'fine, and with embroidered ruffles'; instead of
+which these things are coarse, made of wretched linen, and with ruffles
+at best only fit for a turnkey; and so I shall be glad if you will send
+them back to the commissary; and let him keep them, for I declare I
+won't have them."
+
+The governor also saw that the prisoners had some means of diversion.
+The poorest he provided with pocket-money and tobacco.
+
+About the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Neapolitan named
+Vinache died at the Bastille, after founding a library there for the use
+of his fellow-prisoners. This library was gradually augmented by
+donations from the governors, by gifts from various prisoners, and even
+by the generosity of a citizen of Paris whose compassion had been
+excited for the lot of the prisoners. The books consisted of romances,
+works of science and philosophy, and religious books, light literature
+predominating. The lieutenant of police, Berryer, struck out of the
+list of books that were being sent one day to the binder a "poem on the
+greatness of God," as being on "too melancholy a subject for prisoners."
+The prisoners also procured books from outside. We have mentioned the
+Comte de Belle-Isle, who had more than three hundred books and atlases
+at the Bastille. La Beaumelle collected a library of more than 600
+volumes. The administration, moreover, never refused to get for the
+prisoners, out of the royal funds and sometimes at considerable expense,
+such works as they said were necessary to their studies. The works of
+Voltaire and Puffendorf were readily placed in their hands. Finally,
+under Louis XVI., they were allowed to read the gazettes.
+
+After the permission to have books and to write, the most coveted favour
+was that of walking exercise. Refusal of this was rare. The prisoners
+might walk, either on the towers of the Bastille, or in the inner
+courts, or lastly along the bastion, which was transformed into a
+garden. To fresh invigorating air the platform of the towers added the
+attraction of the finest view. Fontaine relates that Sacy went to the
+top of the towers every day after dinner. He there walked about in
+company with the officers, who gave him news of the town and the
+prisoners.
+
+In their rooms the prisoners amused themselves with feeding cats and
+birds and animals of all kinds: they taught dogs tricks. Some were
+allowed to have a violin or a clavecin. Pellisson was shut up with a
+Basque who used to play to him on the musette. The Duke de Richelieu
+boasts of the operatic airs he sang in parts with his neighbours in the
+Bastille, Mdlle. de Launay among them, with her head at the bars of her
+window; "we got up choruses of a sort, with fine effect."
+
+Other prisoners killed time with embroidery, weaving or knitting; some
+made ornaments for the chapel of the ch�teau. Some devoted themselves to
+carpentry, turned wood, made small articles of furniture. Artists
+painted and sketched. "The occupation of M. de Villeroi was somewhat
+singular: he had very fine clothes, which he was for ever unpicking and
+sewing together again with much cleverness." The prisoners who lived
+several in one room played at cards, chess, and backgammon. In 1788, at
+the time of the troubles in Brittany, a dozen noblemen of that country
+were shut up in the Bastille. They lived together, and asked for a
+billiard table to amuse themselves; the table was set up in the
+apartments of the major, and there these gentlemen went for their games.
+
+The prisoners who died in the Bastille were interred in the graveyard of
+St. Paul's; the funeral service was held in the church of St. Paul, and
+the burial certificate, bearing the family name of the deceased, was
+drawn up in the vestry. It is not true that the names of the deceased
+were wrongly stated in the register in order that their identity might
+be concealed from the public. The Man in the Iron Mask was inscribed on
+the register of St. Paul's under his real name. Jews, Protestants, and
+suicides were buried in the garden of the ch�teau, the prejudices of the
+period not allowing their remains to be laid in consecrated ground.
+
+Those who were liberated had a happier fate. Their dismissal was ordered
+by a _lettre de cachet_, as their incarceration had been. These orders
+for their liberation, so anxiously expected, were brought by the court
+"distributors of packets" or by the ordinary post; sometimes relatives
+and friends themselves brought the sealed envelope, in order to have the
+joy of taking away at once those whose deliverance they came to effect.
+
+The governor, or, in his absence, the king's lieutenant, came into the
+prisoner's chamber and announced that he was free. The papers and other
+effects which had been taken from him on entrance were restored to him,
+the major getting a receipt for them; then he signed a promise to reveal
+nothing of what he had seen at the ch�teau. Many of the prisoners
+refused to submit to this formality, and were liberated notwithstanding;
+others, after having signed, retailed everywhere all they knew about the
+prison, and were not interfered with. When the prisoner only recovered
+his freedom under certain conditions, he was required to give an
+undertaking to submit to the king's pleasure.
+
+All these formalities having been completed, the governor, with that
+feeling for good form which characterized the men of the _ancien
+r�gime_, had the man who had been his guest served for the last time
+with an excellent dinner. If the prisoner was a man of good society,
+the governor would even go so far as to invite him to his own table, and
+then, the meal over and the good-byes said, he placed his own carriage
+at the prisoner's disposal, and often entered it himself to accompany
+him to his destination.
+
+More than one prisoner thus restored to the world must have felt greatly
+embarrassed before a day was past, and have been at a loss what to do or
+where to go. The administration of the Bastille sometimes gave money to
+one and another to enable them to get along for a time. In December,
+1783, a certain Dubu de la Tagnerette, after being set at liberty, was
+lodged in the governor's house for a fortnight until he had found
+apartments that would suit him. Moreover, many of the prisoners were
+actually annoyed at being dismissed: we could cite examples of persons
+who sought to get themselves sent to the Bastille; others refused to
+accept their liberty, and others did their best to get their detention
+prolonged.
+
+"Many come out," says Renneville, "very sad at having to leave." Le
+Maistre de Sacy and Fontaine affirm that the years spent at the Bastille
+were the best years in their lives. "The innocent life we lived," says
+Renneville again, "Messieurs Hamilton, Schrader, and myself, seemed so
+pleasant to M. Hamilton that he begged me to write a description of it
+in verse." The _Memoirs_ of Madame de Staal represent her years at the
+Bastille as the happiest she ever knew. "In my heart of hearts, I was
+very far from desiring my liberty." "I stayed at the Bastille for six
+weeks," observes the Abb� Morellet, "which sped away--I chuckle still as
+I think of them--very pleasantly for me." And later, Dumouriez declares
+that at the Bastille he was happy and never felt dull.
+
+Such was the rule of the celebrated state prison. In the last century
+there was no place of detention in Europe where the prisoners were
+surrounded with so many comforts and attentions: there is no such place
+in these days.
+
+But in spite of these very real alleviations, it would be absurd to
+pretend that the prisoners were in general reconciled to their
+incarceration. Nothing is a consolation for the loss of liberty. How
+many poor wretches, in their despair, have dashed their heads against
+the thick walls while wife and children and concerns of the utmost
+gravity were summoning them from without! The Bastille was the cause of
+ruin to many; within its walls were shed tears which were never dried.
+
+An eighteenth-century writer thus defined the state prison: "A bastille
+is any house solidly built, hermetically sealed, and diligently guarded,
+where any person, of whatever rank, age, or sex, may enter without
+knowing why, remain without knowing how long, hoping to leave it, but
+not knowing how." These lines, written by an apologist for the old state
+prison, contain its condemnation, without appeal, before the modern
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.
+
+
+For two centuries no question has excited public opinion more than that
+of the Man in the Iron Mask. The books written on the subject would fill
+a library. People despaired of ever lifting the veil. "The story of the
+Iron Mask," says Michelet, "will probably remain for ever obscure," and
+Henri Martin adds: "History has no right to pronounce judgment on what
+will never leave the domain of conjecture." To-day, the doubt no longer
+exists. The problem is solved. Before disclosing the solution which
+criticism has unanimously declared correct, we propose to transcribe the
+scanty authentic documents that we possess on the masked man, and then
+to state the principal solutions which have been proposed, before
+arriving at the true solution.
+
+
+1. THE DOCUMENTS.
+
+_The Register of the Bastille._--To begin with, let us quote the text
+which is the origin and foundation of all the works published on the
+question of the Iron Mask.
+
+[Illustration: Note in Du Junca's Journal regarding the entrance to the
+Bastille (September 18, 1698) of the Man in the Iron Mask.]
+
+Etienne du Junca, king's lieutenant at the Bastille, in a journal
+which he began to keep on October 2, 1690, when he entered upon his
+office--a sort of register in which he recorded day by day the details
+concerning the arrival of the prisoners--writes, under date September
+18, 1698, these lines,[37] which the popular legend has rendered
+memorable:--
+
+"Thursday, September 18 (1698), at three o'clock in the afternoon, M. de
+Saint-Mars, governor of the ch�teau of the Bastille, made his first
+appearance, coming from his governorship of the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite-Honorat, bringing with him, in his conveyance, a
+prisoner he had formerly at Pignerol, whom he caused to be always
+masked, whose name is not mentioned; directly he got out of the carriage
+he put him in the first room of the Bazini�re tower, waiting till night
+for me to take him, at nine o'clock, and put him with M. de Rosarges,
+one of the sergeants brought by the governor, alone in the third room of
+the Bertaudi�re tower, which I had had furnished with all necessaries
+some days before his arrival, having received orders to that effect from
+M. de Saint-Mars: the which prisoner will be looked after and waited on
+by M. de Rosarges, and maintained by the governor."
+
+In a second register, supplementary to the first, in which du Junca
+records details of the liberation or the death of the prisoners, we
+read, under date November 19, 1703:--
+
+"On the same day, November 19, 1703, the unknown prisoner, always masked
+with a mask of black velvet, whom M. de Saint-Mars, the governor,
+brought with him on coming from the Isles de Sainte-Marguerite, whom he
+had kept for a long time, the which happening to be a little ill
+yesterday on coming from mass, he died to-day, about ten o'clock at
+night, without having had a serious illness; it could not have been
+slighter. M. Giraut, our chaplain, confessed him yesterday, is surprised
+at his death. He did not receive the sacrament, and our chaplain
+exhorted him a moment before he died. And this unknown prisoner, kept
+here for so long, was buried on Tuesday at four o'clock p.m., November
+20, in the graveyard of St. Paul, our parish; on the register of burial
+he was given a name also unknown. M. de Rosarges, major, and Arreil,
+surgeon, signed the register."
+
+And in the margin:--
+
+"I have since learnt that they called him M. de Marchiel on the
+register, and that forty livres was the cost of the funeral."
+
+The registers of du Junca were preserved among the ancient archives of
+the Bastille, whence they passed to the Arsenal library, where they are
+now kept. They are drawn up in the clumsy handwriting of a soldier, with
+little skill in penmanship. The spelling is bad. But the facts are
+stated with precision, and have always proved accurate when checked.
+
+[Illustration: Notice in Du Junca's Journal of the death of the masked
+prisoner in the Bastille (November 19, 1703).]
+
+The extract from the second register shows that the mysterious
+prisoner wore, not a mask of iron, but one of black velvet.
+
+Further, the entry on the register of St. Paul's church has been
+discovered. It reads:--
+
+"On the 19th, Marchioly, aged 45 years or thereabouts, died in the
+Bastille, whose body was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul, his
+parish, the 20th of the present month, in the presence of M. Rosage
+(_sic_), major of the Bastille, and of M. Reglhe (_sic_), surgeon major
+of the Bastille, who signed.--(Signed) ROSARGES, REILHE."
+
+Such are the fundamental documents for the story of the Iron Mask; we
+shall see by and by that they are sufficient to establish the truth.
+
+_The Letter of the Governor of Sainte-Marguerite._--We have just seen,
+from the register of du Junca, that the masked man had been at the Isles
+of Sainte-Marguerite under the charge of Saint-Mars, who, on being
+appointed governor of the Bastille, had brought the prisoner with him.
+In the correspondence exchanged between Saint-Mars and the minister
+Barbezieux, occurs the following letter, dated January 6, 1696, in which
+Saint-Mars describes his method of dealing with the prisoners, and the
+masked man is referred to under the appellation "my ancient prisoner."
+
+     "MY LORD,--You command me to tell you what is the practice, when I
+     am absent or ill, as to the visits made and precautions taken daily
+     in regard to the prisoners committed to my charge. My two
+     lieutenants serve the meals at the regular hours, just as they
+     have seen me do, and as I still do very often when I am well. The
+     first of my lieutenants, who takes the keys of the prison of _my
+     ancient prisoner_, with whom we commence, opens the three doors and
+     enters the chamber of the prisoner, who politely hands him the
+     plates and dishes, put one on top of another, to give them into the
+     hands of the lieutenant, who has only to go through two doors to
+     hand them to one of my sergeants, who takes them and places them on
+     a table two steps away, where is the second lieutenant, who
+     examines everything that enters and leaves the prison, and sees
+     that there is nothing written on the plate; and after they have
+     given him the utensil, they examine his bed inside and out, and
+     then the gratings and windows of his room, and very often the man
+     himself: after having asked him very politely if he wants anything
+     else, they lock the doors and proceed to similar business with the
+     other prisoners."
+
+_The Letter of M. de Palteau._--On June 19, 1768, M. de Formanoir de
+Palteau addressed from the ch�teau of Palteau, near Villeneuve-le-Roi,
+to the celebrated Fr�ron, editor of the _Ann�e Litt�raire_, a letter
+which was inserted in the number for June 30, 1768. The author of this
+letter was the grand-nephew of Saint-Mars. At the time when the latter
+was appointed governor of the Bastille, the ch�teau of Palteau belonged
+to him, and he halted there with his prisoner on the way from the Isles
+of Sainte-Marguerite to Paris.
+
+"In 1698," writes M. de Palteau, "M. de Saint-Mars passed from the
+governorship of the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite to that of the Bastille.
+On his way to take up his duties, he stayed with his prisoner on his
+estate at Palteau. The masked man arrived in a conveyance which preceded
+that of M. de Saint-Mars; they were accompanied by several horsemen. The
+peasants went to meet their lord: M. de Saint-Mars ate with his
+prisoner, who had his back turned to the windows of the dining-hall
+looking on the courtyard. The peasants whom I have questioned could not
+see whether he ate with his mask on; but they observed very well that M.
+de Saint-Mars, who was opposite him at table, had two pistols beside his
+plate. They had only one footman to wait on them, and he fetched the
+dishes from an ante-room where they were brought him, carefully shutting
+the door of the dining-hall behind him. When the prisoner crossed the
+courtyard, he always had his black mask over his face; the peasants
+noticed that his lips and teeth were not covered, that he was tall and
+had white hair. M. de Saint-Mars slept in a bed that was put up for him
+near that of the masked man."
+
+This account is marked throughout with the stamp of truth. M. de
+Palteau, the writer, makes no attempt to draw inferences from it. He
+declares for none of the hypotheses then under discussion in regard to
+the identity of the mysterious unknown. He is content to report the
+testimony of those of his peasants who saw the masked man when he passed
+through their lord's estates. The only detail in the story which we are
+able to check--a characteristic detail, it is true--is that of the black
+mask of which M. de Palteau speaks: it corresponds exactly to the mask
+of black velvet mentioned in du Junca's register.
+
+The ch�teau of Palteau is still in existence. In his work on
+Superintendent Fouquet, M. Jules Lair gives a description of it. "The
+ch�teau of Palteau, situated on an eminence among woods and vines,
+presented at that time, as it does to-day, the aspect of a great lordly
+mansion in the style of the time of Henri IV. and Louis XIII. First
+there is a wide courtyard, then two wings; within, the principal
+building and the chapel. The lower story is supported on arches, and its
+lofty windows go right up into the roof, and light the place from floor
+to attic." Since the eighteenth century, however, the ch�teau has
+undergone some modifications. The room in which Saint-Mars dined with
+his prisoner is now used as a kitchen.
+
+_The Notes of Major Chevalier._--In addition to the entries in du
+Junca's Journal which we have transcribed, scholars are accustomed to
+invoke, as equally worthy of credence though later in date, the
+testimony of Father Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and that of Major
+Chevalier.
+
+The extracts from du Junca quoted above were published for the first
+time in 1769 by Father Griffet, who added the following comments: "The
+memory of the masked prisoner was still preserved among the officers,
+soldiers, and servants of the Bastille, when M. de Launey, who has long
+been the governor, came to occupy a place on the staff of the garrison.
+Those who had seen him with his mask, when he crossed the courtyard on
+his way to attend mass, said that after his death the order was given to
+burn everything he had used, such as linen, clothes, cushions,
+counterpanes, &c.: that the very walls of the room he had occupied had
+to be scraped and whitewashed again, and that all the tiles of the
+flooring were taken up and replaced by others, because they were so
+afraid that he had found the means to conceal some notes or some mark,
+the discovery of which would have revealed his name."
+
+The testimony of Father Griffet happens to be confirmed by some notes
+from the pen of a major of the Bastille named Chevalier. The major was
+not a personage of the highest rank in the administration of the
+Bastille, since above him were the governor and the king's lieutenant:
+but he was the most important personage. The whole internal
+administration, so far as the prisoners were concerned, was entrusted to
+him. Chevalier fulfilled these duties for nearly thirty-eight years,
+from 1749 to 1787. M. Fernand Bournon's estimate of him is as follows:
+"Chevalier is a type of the devoted hard-working official who has no
+ambition to rise above a rather subordinate rank. It would be impossible
+to say how much the administration of the Bastille owed to his zeal and
+to his perfect familiarity with a service of extraordinary difficulty."
+
+Among notes put together with a view to a history of the Bastille,
+Chevalier gives in condensed form the information furnished by du
+Junca's register, and adds: "This is the famous masked man whom no one
+has ever known. He was treated with great distinction by the governor,
+and was seen only by M. de Rosarges, major of the said ch�teau, who had
+sole charge of him; he was not ill except for a few hours, and died
+rather suddenly: interred at St. Paul's, on Tuesday, November 20, 1703,
+at 4 o'clock p.m., under the name of Marchiergues. He was buried in a
+new white shroud, given by the governor, and practically everything in
+his room was burnt, such as his bed, chairs, tables, and other bits of
+furniture, or else melted down, and the whole was thrown into the
+privies."
+
+These notes of Father Griffet and Major Chevalier have derived great
+force, in the eyes of historians, from their exact agreement; but a
+close examination shows that the testimony of Chevalier was the source
+of Father Griffet's information; in fact, Chevalier was major of the
+Bastille when the Jesuit compiled his work, and it is doubtless upon his
+authority that the latter depended.
+
+Documents recently published in the _Revue Bleue_ upset these
+assertions, which appeared to be based on the firmest foundations.
+
+In the Journal of du Junca, which we have already mentioned, we read
+under date April 30, 1701: "Sunday, April 30, about 9 o'clock in the
+evening, M. Aumont the younger came, bringing and handing over to us a
+prisoner named M. Maranville, alias Ricarville, who was an officer in
+the army, a malcontent, too free with his tongue, a worthless fellow:
+whom I received in obedience to the king's orders sent through the Count
+of Pontchartrain: whom I have had put along with the man Tirmon, in the
+second room of the Bertaudi�re tower, with the _ancient prisoner_, both
+being well locked in."
+
+The "ancient prisoner" here referred to is no other than the masked man.
+When he entered the Bastille, as we have seen, on September 18, 1698, he
+was placed in the third room of the Bertaudi�re tower. In 1701, the
+Bastille happened to be crowded with prisoners, and they had to put
+several together in one and the same room; so the man in the mask was
+placed with two companions. One of them, Jean-Alexandre de Ricarville,
+also called Maranville, had been denounced as a "retailer of ill speech
+against the State, finding fault with the policy of France and lauding
+that of foreigners, especially that of the Dutch." The police reports
+depict him as a beggarly fellow, poorly dressed, and about sixty years
+old. He had formerly been, as du Junca says, an officer in the royal
+troops. Maranville left the Bastille on October 19, 1708. He was
+transferred to Charenton, where he died in February, 1709. It must be
+pointed out that Charenton was then an "open" prison, where the
+prisoners associated with one another and had numerous relations with
+the outside world.
+
+The second of the fellow-prisoners of the man in the mask,
+Dominique-Fran�ois Tirmont, was a servant. When he was placed in the
+Bastille, on July 30, 1700, he was nineteen years old. He was accused of
+sorcery and of debauching young girls. He was put in the second room of
+the Bertaudi�re tower, where he was joined by Maranville and the man in
+the mask. On December 14, 1701, he was transferred to Bic�tre. He lost
+his reason in 1703 and died in 1708.
+
+The man in the mask was taken out of the third room of the Bertaudi�re
+tower, in which he had been placed on his entrance to the Bastille, on
+March 6, 1701, in order to make room for a woman named Anne Randon, a
+"witch and fortune-teller," who was shut up alone in it. The masked
+prisoner was then placed in the "second Bertaudi�re" with Tirmont, who
+had been there, as we have just seen, since July 30, 1700. Maranville
+joined them on April 30, 1701. Not long after, the masked man was
+transferred to another room, with or without Maranville. Tirmont had
+been taken to Bic�tre in 1701. We find that on February 26, 1703, the
+Abb� Gonzel, a priest of Franche-Comt�, accused of being a spy, was shut
+up alone in the "second Bertaudi�re."
+
+These facts are of undeniable authenticity, and one sees at a glance the
+consequences springing from them. At the time when the masked prisoner
+shared the same room with fellow-captives, other prisoners at the
+Bastille were kept rigorously isolated, in spite of the crowded state of
+the prison, so much more important did the reasons for their
+incarceration seem! The man in the mask was associated with persons of
+the lowest class, who were soon afterwards to leave and take their
+places with the ruck of prisoners at Charenton and Bic�tre. We read in a
+report of D'Argenson that there was even some talk of enlisting one of
+them, Tirmont, in the army. Such, then, was this strange personage, the
+repository of a terrible secret of which Madame Palatine[38] was already
+speaking in mysterious terms, the man who puzzled kings, Louis XV.,
+Louis XVI., who puzzled the very officers of the Bastille, and caused
+them to write stories as remote as possible from the reality!
+
+
+2. THE LEGEND.
+
+If the very officers of the Bastille indulged such wild freaks of
+imagination, what flights into dreamland might not the thoughts of the
+public be expected to take? The movement is a very curious one to
+follow. To begin with, we have the light Venetian mask transforming
+itself into an iron mask with steel articulations which the prisoner
+was never without. The consideration--imaginary, as we have seen--with
+which the prisoner is supposed to have been treated, and which is
+referred to in the notes of Major Chevalier, becomes transformed into
+marks of a boundless deference shown by the jailers towards their
+captive. The story was that Saint-Mars, the governor, a knight of St.
+Louis, never spoke to the prisoner except standing, with bared head,
+that he served him at table with his own hands and on silver plate, and
+that he supplied him with the most luxurious raiment his fancy could
+devise. Chevalier says that after his death his room at the Bastille was
+done up like new, to prevent his successor from discovering any
+tell-tale evidence in some corner. Speaking of the time when the masked
+man was at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, Voltaire relates: "One day
+the prisoner wrote with a knife on a silver dish, and threw the dish out
+of the window towards a boat moored on the shore, almost at the foot of
+the tower. A fisherman, to whom the boat belonged, picked up the dish
+and carried it to the governor. Astonished, he asked the fisherman,
+'Have you read what is written on this dish, and has anyone seen it in
+your hands?' 'I cannot read,' replied the fisher, 'I have only just
+found it, and no one has seen it.' The poor man was detained until the
+governor was assured he could not read and that no one had seen the
+dish. 'Go,' he said, 'it is lucky for you that you can't read!'"
+
+In Father Papon's _History of Provence_, linen takes the place of the
+dish. The upshot is more tragic: "I found in the citadel an officer of
+the Free Company, aged 79 years. He told me several times that a barber
+of that company saw one day, under the prisoner's window, something
+white floating on the water; he went and picked it up and carried it to
+M. de Saint-Mars. It was a shirt of fine linen, folded with no apparent
+care, and covered with the prisoner's writing. M. de Saint-Mars, after
+unfolding it and reading a few lines, asked the barber, with an air of
+great embarrassment, if he had not had the curiosity to read what was on
+it. The barber protested over and over again that he had read nothing;
+but, two days after, he was found dead in his bed."
+
+And the fact that Saint-Mars had had the body of the prisoner buried in
+a white cloth struck the imagination, and was developed in its turn into
+an extraordinary taste on the part of the prisoner for linen of the
+finest quality and for costly lace--all which was taken to prove that
+the masked man was a son of Anne of Austria, who had a very special
+love, it was declared, for valuable lace and fine linen.
+
+_A Brother of Louis XIV._--We are able to fix with precision, we
+believe, the origin of the legend which made the Iron Mask a brother of
+Louis XIV. Moreover, it was due to this suggestion, which was hinted at
+from the first, that the story of the prisoner made so great a noise.
+The glory of it belongs to the most famous writer of the eighteenth
+century. With a boldness of imagination for which to-day he would be
+envied by the cleverest journalistic inventor of sensational paragraphs,
+Voltaire started this monstrous hoax on its vigorous flight.
+
+In 1745 there had just appeared a sort of romance entitled _Notes
+towards the History of Persia_, which was attributed, not without some
+reason, to Madame de Vieux-Maisons. The book contained a story within a
+story, in which the mysterious prisoner, who was beginning to be talked
+about everywhere, was identified with the Duke de Vermandois, and to
+this fact was due the sensation which the book caused. Voltaire
+immediately saw how he could turn the circumstance to account. He had
+himself at one time been confined in the Bastille, which was one reason
+for speaking of it; but he did not dare put in circulation suddenly,
+without some preparation, the terrible story he had just conceived, and,
+with a very delicate sensitiveness to public opinion, he contented
+himself with printing the following paragraph in the first edition of
+his _Age of Louis XIV._: "A few months after the death of Mazarin there
+occurred an event which is unexampled in history, and, what is not less
+strange, has been passed over in silence by all the historians. There
+was sent with the utmost secrecy to the ch�teau of the Isle of
+Sainte-Marguerite, in the Sea of Provence, an unknown prisoner, of more
+than ordinary height, young, and with features of rare nobility and
+beauty. On the way, this prisoner wore a mask the chinpiece of which was
+fitted with springs of steel, which allowed him to eat freely with the
+mask covering his face. The order had been given to kill him if he
+uncovered. He remained in the island until an officer in whom great
+confidence was placed, named Saint-Mars, governor of Pignerol, having
+been made governor of the Bastille, came to the Isle of
+Sainte-Marguerite to fetch him, and conducted him to the Bastille,
+always masked. The Marquis de Louvois saw him in the island before his
+removal, and remained standing while he spoke to him, with a
+consideration savouring of respect." Voltaire, however, does not say who
+this extraordinary prisoner was. He observed the impression produced on
+the public by his story. Then he ventured more boldly, and in the first
+edition of his _Questions on the Encyclop�dia_ insinuated that the
+motive for covering the prisoner's face with a mask was fear lest some
+too striking likeness should be recognized. He still refrained from
+giving his name, but already everyone was on tip-toe with the
+expectation of startling news. At last, in the second edition of
+_Questions on the Encyclop�dia_, Voltaire intrepidly added that the man
+in the mask was a uterine brother of Louis XIV., a son of Mazarin and
+Anne of Austria, and older than the king. We know what incomparable
+agitators of public opinion the Encyclop�dists were.
+
+Once hatched, the story was not long in producing a numerous progeny,
+which grew in their turn and became a monstrous brood.
+
+We read in the _Memoirs_ of the Duke de Richelieu, compiled by his
+secretary the Abb� Soulavie, that Mdlle. de Valois, the Regent's
+daughter and at this date the mistress of Richelieu, consented, at the
+instigation of the latter, to prostitute herself to her
+father--tradition has it that the Regent was enamoured of his
+daughter--in order to get sight of an account of the Iron Mask drawn up
+by Saint-Mars. According to this story, which the author of the
+_Memoirs_ prints in its entirety, Louis XIV. was born at noon, and at
+half-past eight in the evening, while the king was at supper, the queen
+was brought to bed of a second son, who was put out of sight so as to
+avoid subsequent dissensions in the state.
+
+The Baron de Gleichen goes still farther. He is at the pains to prove
+that it was the true heir to the throne who was put out of sight, to the
+profit of a child of the queen and the cardinal. Having became masters
+of the situation at the death of the king, they substituted their son
+for the Dauphin, the substitution being facilitated by a strong likeness
+between the children. One sees at a glance the consequences of this
+theory, which nullifies the legitimacy of the last Bourbons.
+
+But the career of imagination was not yet to be checked. The legend came
+into full bloom under the first empire. Pamphlets then appeared in which
+the version of Baron de Gleichen was revived. Louis XIV. had been only a
+bastard, the son of foreigners; the lawful heir had been imprisoned at
+the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, where he had married the daughter of one
+of his keepers. Of this marriage was born a child who, as soon as he was
+weaned, was sent to Corsica, and entrusted to a reliable person, as a
+child coming of "good stock," in Italian, _Buona-parte_. Of that child
+the Emperor was the direct descendant. The right of Napoleon I. to the
+throne of France established by the Iron Mask!--there is a discovery
+which the great Dumas missed. But, incredible as it seems, there were
+men who actually took these fables seriously. In a Vend�an manifesto
+circulated among the Chouans,[39] in Nivose of the year IX,[40] we read:
+"It is not wise for the Royalist party to rely on the assurances given
+by some emissaries of Napoleon, that he seized the throne only to
+restore the Bourbons; everything proves that he only awaits the general
+pacification to declare himself, and that he means to base his right on
+the birth of the children of the Iron Mask!"
+
+We shall not stay to refute the hypothesis which makes the Iron Mask a
+brother of Louis XIV. Marius Topin has already done so in the clearest
+possible manner. The notion, moreover, has long been abandoned. The last
+writers who adhered to it date from the revolutionary period.
+
+_The Successive Incarnations of the Iron Mask._--"Never has an Indian
+deity," says Paul de Saint-Victor, speaking of the Iron Mask, "undergone
+so many metempsychoses and so many avatars." It would take too long
+merely to enumerate all the individuals with whom it has been attempted
+to identify the Iron Mask: even women have not escaped. We shall cite
+rapidly the theories which have found most credence amongst the public,
+or those which have been defended in the most serious works, in order to
+arrive finally at the identification--as will be seen, it is one of
+those proposed long ago--which is beyond doubt the true one.
+
+The hypothesis which, after that of a brother of Louis XIV., has most
+powerfully excited public opinion, is that which made the mysterious
+unknown Louis, Comte de Vermandois, admiral of France, and son of the
+charming Louise de la Valli�re. This was indeed the belief of Father
+Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and even of the officers of the
+staff. But the conjecture is disproved in a single line: "The Comte de
+Vermandois died at Courtrai, on November 18, 1683." A precisely similar
+fact refutes the theory identifying the Iron Mask with the Duke of
+Monmouth, the natural son of Charles II. and Lucy Walters. Monmouth
+perished on the scaffold in 1683. Lagrange-Chancel throws much ardour
+and talent into a defence of the theory which made the Iron Mask Francis
+of Vend�me, Duke de Beaufort, who, under the Fronde, was called "King of
+the Markets." The Duke de Beaufort died at the siege of Candia, June 25,
+1669.
+
+To Lagrange-Chancel succeeds the Chevalier de Taul�s. "I have discovered
+the Man in the Mask," he cries, "and it is my duty to impart my
+discovery to Europe and posterity!" This discovery brings forward one
+Avedick, an Armenian patriarch of Constantinople and Jerusalem,
+kidnapped in the East at the instigation of the Jesuits, and transported
+to France. Vergennes, on entering the ministry for foreign affairs, set
+investigations on foot. They confirmed the statement that Avedick had
+actually been arrested in the circumstances indicated, but after 1706;
+and so he could not be identified with the Iron Mask.
+
+Such were the theories of the eighteenth century. We come now to those
+of our own time. Since mystery and sinister machinations were involved,
+the Jesuits could not be long left out of the business. We have just
+seen them at their tricks with the Armenian patriarch. People dreamt of
+an innocent youth thrown into a dungeon at their instigation for having
+written a couple of verses against them. But even this fancy was
+completely cast into the shade in a work published in 1885 under the
+pseudonym of "Ubalde," the author of which was unquestionably M. Anatole
+Loquin. This is his conclusion: "The more I reflect, the more I believe
+I recognize in the Man in the Iron Mask, without any elaborate theory,
+without prejudice on my part, no other than J. B. Poquelin de Moli�re."
+The Jesuits have got their revenge for _Tartufe_!
+
+Let us come now to the conjectures which have almost hit the truth and
+have been defended by genuine scholars.
+
+Superintendent Fouquet is the solution of the bibliophile Jacob (Paul
+Lacroix). M. Lair has shown that Fouquet died at Pignerol, of a sort of
+apoplexy, on March 23, 1680, at the very moment when there was an idea
+at court of sending him to the waters at Bourbon, as a first step
+towards his final liberation.
+
+Fran�ois Ravaisson, the learned and charming keeper of the Arsenal
+library, whose work in classifying the archives of the Bastille we have
+had the honour to continue, believed for a moment that the celebrated
+prisoner might have been the young Count de K�roualze who had fought at
+Candia under the orders of Admiral de Beaufort. Ravaisson put forth his
+theory with much hesitation, and as, in the sequel, he was himself led
+to abandon it, we need not dwell any longer upon it.
+
+M. Loiseleur, in the course of his brilliant controversy with Marius
+Topin, suggested "an obscure spy arrested by Catinat in 1681," and his
+opponent refuted him in the most piquant manner by discovering Catinat
+in the very prisoner he was said to have arrested!
+
+General Jung published a large volume in support of the claims of a
+certain Oldendorf, a native of Lorraine, a spy and poisoner, arrested on
+March 29, 1673, in a trap laid for him at one of the passages of the
+Somme. The theory was refuted by M. Loiseleur. As M. Lair pointed out,
+General Jung did not even succeed in proving that his nominee entered
+Pignerol, an essential condition to his being the Man in the Mask.
+
+Baron Carutti urged the claims of a mad Jacobin, a prisoner at Pignerol
+whose name remains unknown; but this Jacobin died at Pignerol towards
+the close of 1693.'
+
+The recent work of M. Emile Burgaud, written in collaboration with
+Commandant Bazeries, made a great sensation. He fixes on General Vivien
+Labb� de Bulonde, whom Louvois arrested for having shown dereliction of
+a general's duty before Coni. M. Geoffroy de Grandmaison published in
+the _Univers_ of January 9, 1895, two receipts signed by General de
+Bulonde, one in 1699, when the masked man was in rigorous isolation at
+the Bastille, the other in 1705, when he had been dead for two years.
+
+We come at last to the hypothesis which is the most probable of
+all--after the true hypothesis, of course. Eustache Dauger, whom M. Lair
+identifies with the masked prisoner, was a valet, who had been put into
+jail at Pignerol on July 28, 1669. But it must be noted that the masked
+prisoner was kept guarded in rigorous secrecy in the early days of his
+detention, as long as he was at Pignerol and the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite. Now, when Dauger went to Pignerol, his case seemed of
+such slight importance that Saint-Mars thought of making him into a
+servant for the other prisoners, and in fact, in 1675, Louvois gave him
+as a valet to Fouquet, who for some time past had seen the rigour of his
+confinement sensibly mitigated, receiving visits, walking freely in the
+courts and purlieus of the fortress, Dauger accompanying him. Further,
+we know that the masked man was transferred direct from Pignerol to the
+Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, whilst Dauger was transferred in 1681 to
+Exiles, whence he only went to the Isles in 1687.
+
+We now come to the correct solution.
+
+
+3. MATTIOLI.
+
+To Baron Heiss, once captain in the Alsace regiment, and one of the most
+distinguished bibliophiles of his time, belongs the honour of being the
+first, in a letter dated from Phalsbourg, June 28, 1770, and published
+by the _Journal encyclop�dique_, to identify the masked prisoner with
+Count Mattioli, secretary of state to the Duke of Mantua. After him,
+Dutens, in 1783, in his _Intercepted Correspondence_; Baron de
+Chambrier, in 1795, in a Memoir presented to the Academy of Berlin;
+Roux-Fazillac, member of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, in
+a remarkable work printed in 1801; then successively, Reth, Delort,
+Ellis, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul de Saint-Victor,
+and M. Gallien, in a series of publications more or less important,
+endeavoured to prove that the Man in the Mask was the Duke of Mantua's
+secretary of state. The scholars most intimate with the history of Louis
+XIV.'s government, Depping, Ch�ruel, Camille Rousset, have not hesitated
+to pronounce in favour of the same view; while against them,
+singlehanded like his D'Artagnan, Alexandre Dumas resisted the efforts
+of twenty scholars, and the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_--giving a new lease
+of life to the legend about the brother of Louis XIV., put in
+circulation by Voltaire, and reinforced by the Revolution--drove back
+into their dust among the archives the documents which students had
+exhumed.
+
+We have no longer to deal with so formidable an adversary, and we hope
+that the following pages will not leave the shadow of a doubt.
+
+We know how, under the influence of Louvois, the able and insinuating
+policy directed first by Mazarin, then by Lionne, gave way to a military
+diplomacy, blunt and aggressive. Louis XIV. was master of Pignerol,
+acquired in 1632. He was induced by Louvois to cast covetous glances at
+Casal. In possession of these two places, the French armies could not
+but dominate Upper Italy, and hold the court of Turin directly at their
+mercy. The throne of Mantua was then occupied by a young duke, Charles
+IV. of Gonzago, frivolous, happy-go-lucky, dissipating his wealth at
+Venice in f�tes and pleasures. In 1677 he had pledged to the Jews the
+crown revenues for several years. Charles IV. was also Marquis of
+Montferrat, of which Casal was the capital. Noting with watchful eye the
+frivolity and financial straits of the young prince, the court of
+Versailles conceived the bold scheme of buying Casal for hard cash.
+
+At this date, one of the principal personages in Mantua was Count
+Hercules Antony Mattioli. He was born at Bologna on December 1, 1640, of
+a distinguished family. A brilliant student, he had barely passed his
+twentieth year when he was elected a professor at the University of
+Bologna. Afterwards he established himself at Mantua, where Charles
+III., whose confidence he had won, made him his secretary of state.
+Charles IV., continuing the favour of his father, not only maintained
+Mattioli in his office as minister of state, but appointed him an
+honorary senator, a dignity which was enhanced by the title of Count.
+
+Louis XIV. was employing at the capital of the Venetian republic a
+keen-witted and enterprising ambassador, the Abb� d'Estrades. He saw
+through the ambitious and intriguing nature of Mattioli, and, towards
+the end of 1677, succeeded in winning over his support for the designs
+of the French court on Casal.
+
+On January 12, 1678, Louis XIV. with his own hand wrote expressing his
+thanks to Mattioli, who by-and-by came to Paris. On December 8, the
+contract was signed, the Duke of Mantua receiving in exchange for Casal
+100,000 crowns. In a private audience, Louis XIV. presented Mattioli
+with a costly diamond and paid him the sum of a hundred double louis.
+
+Scarcely two months after Mattioli's journey to France, the courts of
+Vienna, Madrid, Turin, and the Venetian Republic were simultaneously
+informed of all that had taken place. In order to reap a double harvest
+of gold, Mattioli had cynically betrayed both his master Charles IV. and
+the King of France. Like a thunderbolt there came to Versailles the news
+of the arrest of Baron d'Asfeld, the envoy appointed by Louis XIV. to
+exchange ratifications with Mattioli. The governor of Milan had caused
+him to be seized and handed over to the Spaniards. The rage of Louis
+XIV. and of Louvois, who had urged the opening of negotiations, taken
+an active part in them, and begun preparations for the occupation of
+Casal, may well be imagined. The Abb� d'Estrades, not less irritated,
+conceived a scheme of the most daring kind, proposing to Versailles
+nothing less than the abduction of the Mantuan minister. But Louis XIV.
+was determined to have no scandal. Catinat was charged with carrying out
+the scheme in person. The Abb� d'Estrades, in his dealings with
+Mattioli, feigned ignorance of the double game the Count was playing. He
+led him to believe, on the contrary, that the balance of the sums
+promised at Versailles was about to be paid. A meeting was fixed for May
+2, 1679. On that day d'Estrades and Mattioli got into a carriage, the
+passing of which was awaited by Catinat accompanied by some dozen men.
+At two o'clock in the afternoon, Mattioli was in the fortress of
+Pignerol, in the hands of jailer Saint-Mars. When we remember the rank
+held by the Italian minister, we are confronted with one of the most
+audacious violations of international law of which history has preserved
+a record.
+
+Early in the year 1694, Mattioli was transferred to the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite; we have seen that he entered the Bastille on
+September 18, 1698, and died there on November 19, 1703.
+
+The details that we possess of the imprisonment of Mattioli at Pignerol
+and afterwards at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite show that he was at the
+outset treated with the consideration due to his rank and to the
+position he occupied at the time of his arrest. Eventually the respect
+which the prisoner had at first inspired gradually diminished: as years
+went on the attentions shown him grew less and less until the day when,
+at the Bastille, he was given a room in common with persons of the
+basest class. On the other hand, the rigour of his confinement, so far
+as the secrecy in which he was kept was concerned, was more and more
+relaxed; what it was material to conceal was the circumstances under
+which Mattioli had been arrested, and with the lapse of time this secret
+continually diminished in importance. As to the mask of black velvet
+which Mattioli had among his possessions when he was arrested, and which
+he put on, without a doubt, only for the occasion, this in reality
+constituted a relief to his captivity, for it permitted the prisoner to
+leave his room, while the other state prisoners were rigorously mewed up
+in theirs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It remains to prove that the masked prisoner was really Mattioli.
+
+1. In the despatch sent by Louis XIV. to the Abb� d'Estrades five days
+before the arrest, the king approves the scheme of his ambassador and
+authorizes him to secure Mattioli, "since you believe you can get him
+carried off without the affair giving rise to any scandal." The prisoner
+is to be conducted to Pignerol, where "instructions are being sent to
+receive him and keep him there without anybody having knowledge of it."
+The king's orders close with these words: "You must see to it that no
+one knows what becomes of this man." The capture effected, Catinat wrote
+on his part to Louvois: "It came off without any violence, and no one
+knows the name of the knave, not even the officers who helped to arrest
+him." Finally, we have a very curious pamphlet entitled _La Prudenza
+triomfante di Casale_, written in 1682, that is, little more than two
+years after the event, and--this slight detail is of capital
+importance--thirty years before there was any talk of the Man in the
+Mask. In this we read: "The secretary (Mattioli) was surrounded by ten
+or twelve horsemen, who seized him, disguised him, _masked_ him, and
+conducted him to Pignerol"--a fact, moreover, confirmed by a tradition
+which in the eighteenth century was still rife in the district, where
+scholars succeeded in culling it.
+
+Is there any need to insist on the strength of the proofs afforded by
+these three documents, taken in connection one with another?
+
+2. We know, from du Junca's register, that the masked man was shut up at
+Pignerol under the charge of Saint-Mars. In 1681, Saint-Mars gave up the
+governorship of Pignerol for that of Exiles. We can determine with
+absolute precision the number of prisoners Saint-Mars had then in his
+keeping. It was exactly five. A dispatch from Louvois, dated June 9, is
+very clear. In the first paragraph, he orders "the two prisoners in the
+lower tower" to be removed; in the second, he adds: "The rest of the
+prisoners in your charge." Here there is a clear indication of the
+"rest": what follows settles the number: "The Sieur du Chamoy has orders
+to pay two crowns a day for the board of these _three_ prisoners." This
+account, as clear as arithmetic can make it, is further confirmed by the
+letter addressed by Saint-Mars to the Abb� d'Estrades on June 25, 1681,
+when he was setting out for Exiles: "I received yesterday the warrant
+appointing me governor of Exiles: I am to keep charge of two jailbirds I
+have here, who have no other name than 'the gentlemen of the lower
+tower'; Mattioli will remain here with two other prisoners."
+
+The prisoners, then, were five in number, and the masked man is to be
+found, of necessity, among them. Now we know who these five were: (1) a
+certain La Rivi�re, who died at the end of December, 1686; (2) a
+Jacobin, out of his mind, who died at the end of 1693; (3) a certain
+Dubreuil, who died at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite about 1697. There
+remain Dauger and Mattioli. The Man in the Mask is, without possible
+dispute, the one or the other. We have explained above the reasons which
+lead us to discard Dauger. The mysterious prisoner, then, was Mattioli.
+The proof is mathematically exact.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Burial certificate of the masked prisoner (November 20, 1703),
+     reproduced from the facsimile in the sixth edition of _The Man in
+     the Iron Mask_, by Marius Topin, 1883. The original, in the city
+     archives of Paris, was destroyed in the conflagration of 1871.
+]
+
+3. Opposite this page will be found a facsimile reproduction of the
+death certificate of the masked prisoner as inscribed on the registers
+of the church of St. Paul. It is the very name of the Duke of Mantua's
+former secretary that is traced there: "Marchioly." It must be
+remembered that "Marchioly" would be pronounced in Italian "Markioly,"
+and that Saint-Mars, governor of the Bastille, who furnished the
+information on which the certificate was drawn up, almost always wrote
+in his correspondence--a characteristic detail--not "Mattioli," but
+"Martioly": that is the very name on the register, less distorted than
+the name of the major of the Bastille, who was called "Rosarges," and
+not "Rosage," as given on the register; and the name of the surgeon, who
+was called "Reilhe," and not "Reglhe."
+
+It has been shown above how, as time went on, the rigorous seclusion to
+which the masked prisoner had been condemned was relaxed. What it had
+been thought necessary to conceal was the manner in which Mattioli had
+been captured, and with time that secret itself had lost its importance.
+As the Duke of Mantua had declared himself very well pleased with the
+arrest of the minister by whom he, no less than Louis XIV., had been
+deceived, there was nothing to prevent the name from being inscribed on
+a register of death, where, moreover, no one would ever have thought of
+looking for it.
+
+Let us add that, in consequence of error or carelessness on the part of
+the officer who supplied the information for the register, or perhaps on
+the part of the parson or beadle who wrote it, the age is stated
+incorrectly, "forty-five years or thereabouts," while Mattioli was
+sixty-three when he died. However, the register was filled up without
+the least care, as a formality of no importance.
+
+4. The Duke de Choiseul pressed Louis XV. to reveal to him the clue to
+the enigma. The king escaped with an evasion. One day, however, he said
+to him: "If you knew all about it, you would see that it has very little
+interest;" and some time after, when Madame de Pompadour, at de
+Choiseul's instigation, pressed the king on the subject, he told her
+that the prisoner was "the minister of an Italian prince."
+
+In the _Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette_ by her
+principal lady in waiting, Madame de Campan, we read that the queen
+tormented Louis XVI., who did not know the secret, to have a search made
+among the papers of the various ministries. "I was with the queen," says
+Madame de Campan, "when the king, having finished his researches, told
+her that he had found nothing in the secret papers which had any bearing
+on the existence of this prisoner; that he had spoken on the subject to
+M. de Maurepas, whose age brought him nearer the time when the whole
+story must have been known to the ministers (Maurepas had been minister
+of the king's household as a very young man, in the early years of the
+eighteenth century, having the department of the _lettres de cachet_),
+and that M. de Maurepas had assured him that the prisoner was simply a
+man of a very dangerous character through his intriguing spirit, and a
+subject of the Duke of Mantua. He was lured to the frontier, arrested,
+and kept a prisoner, at first at Pignerol, then at the Bastille."
+
+These two pieces of evidence are of such weight that they alone would
+be sufficient to fix the truth. When they were written, there was no
+talk of Mattioli, of whose very name Madame de Campan was ignorant.
+Supposing that Madame de Campan had amused herself by inventing a
+fable--an absurd and improbable supposition, for what reason could she
+have had for so doing?--it is impossible to admit that her imagination
+could have hit upon fancies so absolutely in accord with facts.[41]
+
+And so the problem is solved. The legend, which had reared itself even
+as high as the throne of France, topples down. The satisfaction of the
+historian springs from his reflection that all serious historical works
+for more than a century, resting on far-reaching researches and
+eschewing all preoccupations foreign to science--such, for example, as
+the desire of attaining a result different from the solutions proposed
+by one's predecessors--have arrived at the same conclusion, which proves
+to be the correct solution. Heiss, Baron de Chambrier, Reth,
+Roux-Fazillac, Delort, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul
+de Saint-Victor, Camille Rousset, Ch�ruel, Depping, have not hesitated
+to place under the famous mask of black velvet the features of
+Mattioli. But at each new effort made by science, legend throws itself
+once more into the fray, gaining new activity from the passions produced
+by the Revolution.
+
+The truth, in history, sometimes suggests to our mind's eye those white
+or yellow flowers which float on the water among broad flat leaves; a
+breeze springs up, a wave rises and submerges them, they disappear; but
+only for a moment: then they come to the surface again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Speaking of men of letters in France under the _ancien r�gime_, Michelet
+calls them "the martyrs of thought"; he adds: "The world thinks, France
+speaks. And that is precisely why the Bastille of France, the Bastille
+of Paris--I would rather say, the prison-house of thought--was, among
+all bastilles, execrable, infamous, and accursed." In the course of the
+article devoted to the Bastille in the _Grande Encyclop�die_, M. Fernand
+Bournon writes: "After Louis XIV. and throughout the eighteenth century,
+the Bastille was especially employed to repress, though it could not
+stifle, that generous and majestic movement (the glory of the human
+spirit) towards ideas of emancipation and enfranchisement; it was the
+epoch when philosophers, publicists, pamphleteers, the very booksellers,
+were imprisoned there in large numbers." And to substantiate this
+eloquent apostrophe, M. Bournon cites the names of Voltaire, La
+Beaumelle, the Abb� Morellet, Marmontel, and Linguet, imprisoned in the
+Bastille; and of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau placed in the
+ch�teau of Vincennes.
+
+Let us recall the story of these poor victims in turn, and trace the
+history of their martyrdom.
+
+
+VOLTAIRE.
+
+The most illustrious and the earliest in date of the writers mentioned
+by M. Bournon is Voltaire. He was sent to the Bastille on two different
+occasions. His first imprisonment began on May 17, 1717. At that date
+the poet was only twenty-two years of age and of no reputation; he did
+not even bear the name of Voltaire, which he only took after his
+discharge from the Bastille on April 14, 1718. The cause of his
+detention was not "the generous and majestic movement towards ideas of
+enfranchisement which is the glory of the human spirit," but some
+scurrilities which, to speak plainly, brought him what he deserved:
+coarse verses against the Regent and his daughter, and public utterances
+coarser still. Many authors state that Voltaire was imprisoned for
+writing the _J'ai vu_, a satire against the government of Louis XIV.,
+each stanza of which ended with the line:--
+
+    J'ai vu ces maux, et je n'ai pas vingt ans.[42]
+
+This is a mistake. Voltaire was imprisoned for having written the _Puero
+regnante_, some verses on the Regent and his daughter, the Duchess of
+Berry, which it would be impossible to translate. To these he added
+observations whose reproduction would be equally impossible. At the
+Bastille Voltaire underwent examinations in the usual way, in the course
+of which he lied with impudence; after that he was allowed considerable
+liberty. "It was at the Bastille," wrote Condorcet, "that the young poet
+made the first draft of his poem _La Ligue_, corrected his tragedy of
+_OEdipe_, and composed some very lively lines on the ill-luck of being
+there."
+
+The following are the most respectable lines of this production:--
+
+    So one fine faultless morning in the spring,
+    When Whitsun splendour brighten'd everything,
+    A strange commotion startled me from sleep.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    At last I reach'd my chamber in the keep.
+    A clownish turnkey, with an unctuous smile,
+    Of my new lodging 'gan to praise the style:
+    "What ease, what charms, what comforts here are yours!
+    For never Phoebus in his daily course
+    Will blind you here with his too brilliant rays;
+    Within these ten-foot walls you'll spend your days
+    In cool sequester'd blithefulness always."
+    Then bidding me admire my cloistral cell--
+    The triple doors, the triple locks as well,
+    The bolts, the bars, the gratings all around--
+    "'Tis but," says he, "to keep you safe and sound!"
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Behold me, then, lodged in this woful place,
+    Cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined in narrow space;
+    Sleepless by night, and starving half the day;
+    No joys, no friend, no mistress--wellaway![43]
+
+When Voltaire was set at liberty, the Regent, whom, as we have just
+said, he had reviled, made him a very handsome offer of his protection.
+The poet's reply is well known: "My lord, I thank your royal highness
+for being so good as to continue to charge yourself with my board, but
+I beseech you no longer to charge yourself with my lodging." The young
+writer thus obtained from the Regent a pension of 400 crowns, which
+later on the latter augmented to 2000 livres.
+
+Voltaire was sent to the Bastille a second time in April, 1726. For this
+new detention there was no justification whatever. He had had a violent
+quarrel, one evening at the Opera, with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot.
+On another occasion, at the Com�die Fran�aise, the poet and the nobleman
+had a warm altercation in the box of Mdlle. Lecouvreur. Rohan raised his
+stick, Voltaire put his hand on his sword, and the actress fainted. Some
+days later "the gallant chevalier, assisted by half a dozen ruffians,
+behind whom he courageously posted himself," gave our poet a thrashing
+in broad daylight. When relating the adventure later, the Chevalier said
+pleasantly: "I commanded the squad." From that moment Voltaire sought
+his revenge. "The police reports reveal curious details of the loose,
+erratic, and feverish life he lived between the insult and his arrest,"
+writes the careful biographer of Voltaire, Desnoiresterres. From one of
+these police reports we see that the young writer established relations
+with soldiers of the guard: several notorious bullies were constantly
+about him. A relative who attempted to calm him found him more irritated
+and violent in his language than ever. It appears certain that he was
+meditating some act of violence, which indeed would not have been
+without justification. But the Cardinal de Rohan contrived that he
+should be arrested on the night of April 17, 1726, and placed in the
+Bastille.
+
+Speaking of this new imprisonment Marshal de Villars writes: "The
+public, disposed to find fault all round, came to the conclusion on this
+occasion that everybody was in the wrong: Voltaire for having offended
+the Chevalier de Rohan, the latter for having dared to commit a capital
+offence in causing a citizen to be beaten, the government for not having
+punished a notorious crime, and for having sent the injured party to the
+Bastille to pacify the injurer." Nevertheless, we read in the report of
+H�rault, the lieutenant of police: "The Sieur de Voltaire was found
+armed with pocket pistols, and his family, when informed of the matter,
+unanimously and universally applauded the wisdom of an order which saves
+this young man the ill effects of some new piece of folly and the worthy
+people who compose his family the vexation of sharing his shame."
+
+Voltaire remained at the Bastille for _twelve days_: he was permitted to
+have a servant of his own choice to wait on him, who was boarded at the
+king's expense; as for himself, he took his meals whenever he pleased at
+the governor's table, going out of the Bastille, as the governor's
+residence stood outside the prison. Relatives and friends came to see
+him; his friend Thi�riot dined with him; he was given pens, paper,
+books, whatever he desired in order to divert himself. "Using and
+abusing these opportunities," writes Desnoiresterres, "Voltaire believed
+that he could give audience to all Paris. He wrote to those of his
+friends who had not yet shown a sense of their duty, exhorting them to
+give him proof they were alive." "I have been accustomed to all
+misfortunes," he wrote to Thi�riot, "but not yet to that of being
+utterly abandoned by you. Madame de Berni�res, Madame du Deffand, the
+Chevalier des Alleurs really ought to come and see me. They only have to
+ask permission of M. H�rault or M. de Maurepas." At the time of the
+poet's entrance to the Bastille, the lieutenant of police had written to
+the governor: "The Sieur de Voltaire is of a _genius_ that requires
+humouring. His Serene Highness has approved of my writing to tell you
+that the king's intention is that you should secure for him mild
+treatment and the internal liberty of the Bastille, so far as these do
+not jeopardize the security of his detention." The warrant setting him
+at liberty was signed on April 26.
+
+
+LA BEAUMELLE.
+
+In M. Bournon's list La Beaumelle comes second. The circumstances under
+which he was put into the Bastille were as follows. After having fallen
+out at Berlin with Voltaire, whom he had compared to a monkey, La
+Beaumelle returned to Paris, whence he had been exiled. There he got
+printed a new edition of Voltaire's _Age of Louis XIV._, unknown to the
+author, and interpolated therein odes insulting to the house of Orleans.
+"La Beaumelle," exclaimed Voltaire, "is the first who dared to print
+another man's work in his lifetime. This miserable Erostrates of the
+_Age of Louis XIV._ has discovered the secret of changing into an
+infamous libel, for fifteen ducats, a work undertaken for the glory of
+the nation."
+
+La Beaumelle became an inmate of the Bastille in April, 1753, and
+remained there for six months. Writing on May 18, 1753, to M. Roques,
+Voltaire said that "there was scarcely any country where he would not
+inevitably have been punished sooner or later, and I know from a certain
+source that there are two courts where they would have inflicted a
+chastisement more signal than that which he is undergoing here."
+
+It was not long before La Beaumelle issued his edition of _Notes towards
+the History of Madame de Maintenon and that of the past century_, with
+nine volumes of correspondence. He had fabricated letters which he
+attributed to Madame de Saint-G�ran and Madame de Frontenac, and
+published a correspondence of Madame de Maintenon which M. Geffroy, in a
+work recognized as authoritative, regards as full of barefaced
+falsehoods and foul and scurrilous inventions. He had inserted in his
+work the following phrase: "The court of Vienna has been long accused of
+having poisoners always in its pay."
+
+It must be observed that La Beaumelle's publication owed its great vogue
+to special circumstances. The author's reputation abroad, the very title
+of the book, lent it great importance; and France, then engaged in the
+Seven Years' War, found it necessary to keep in Austria's good graces.
+La Beaumelle was conveyed to the Bastille a second time. The lieutenant
+of police, Berryer, put him through the usual examination. La Beaumelle
+was a man of the world, so witty that in the course of their quarrels he
+drove Voltaire himself to despair. He showed himself such in his
+examination. "La Beaumelle," said Berryer to him, "this is wit you are
+giving me when what I ask of you is plain sense." On his expressing a
+wish for a companion, he was placed with the Abb� d'Estrades. The
+officers of the ch�teau had all his manuscripts brought from his house,
+so that he might continue his literary work. He had at the Bastille a
+library of 600 volumes, ranged on shelves which the governor ordered to
+be made for him. He there finished a translation of the _Annals_ of
+Tacitus and the _Odes_ of Horace. He had permission to write to his
+relatives and friends, and to receive visits from them; he had the
+liberty of walking in the castle garden, of breeding birds in his room,
+and of having brought from outside all the luxuries to which he was
+partial. The principal secretary of the lieutenant of police, Duval,
+reports the following incident: "Danry (the famous Latude) and All�gre
+(his companion in confinement and ere long in escape) found means to
+open a correspondence with all the prisoners in the Bastille. They
+lifted a stone in a closet of the chapel, and put their letters
+underneath it. La Beaumelle pretended to be a woman in his letters to
+All�gre, and as he was a man of parts and All�gre was of keen
+sensibility and an excellent writer, the latter fell madly in love with
+La Beaumelle, to such a degree that, though they mutually agreed to
+burn their letters, All�gre preserved those of his fancied mistress,
+which he had not the heart to give to the flames; with the result that,
+the letters being discovered at an inspection of his room, he was put in
+the cells for some time. The prisoner amused himself also by composing
+verses which he recited at the top of his voice. This gave much concern
+to the officers of the garrison, and Chevalier, the major, wrote to the
+lieutenant of police on the matter: "The Sieur de la Beaumelle seems to
+have gone clean out of his mind; he seems to be a maniac; he amuses
+himself by declaiming verses in his room for a part of the day: for the
+rest of the time he is quiet."
+
+This second detention lasted from August, 1756, till August, 1757.
+
+
+THE ABB� MORELLET.
+
+We come to the Abb� Morellet, a man of fine and fascinating mind, one of
+the best of the Encyclop�dists, who died in 1819 a member of the
+Institute and the object of general esteem. He was arrested on June 11,
+1760, for having had printed and distributed, without privilege or
+permission, a pamphlet entitled: _Preface to the Philosophers' Comedy;
+or, the Vision of Charles Palissot_.[44] These are the terms in which,
+later on, Morellet himself judged his pamphlet: "I must here make my
+confession. In this work, I went far beyond the limits of a literary
+pleasantry regarding the Sieur Palissot, and to-day I am not without
+remorse for my fault." And further, as J. J. Rousseau, in whose favour
+the pamphlet had been in part composed, had to acknowledge, the Abb�
+"very impudently" insulted a young and pretty woman, Madame de Robecq,
+who was dying of decline, spitting blood, and did actually die a few
+days later.
+
+The arrest of Morellet was demanded by Malesherbes, then censor of the
+press, one of the most generous and liberal spirits of the time, the
+inspirer of the famous remonstrances of the Court of Taxation against
+_lettres de cachet_--the man who, as M. H. Monin testifies, "being
+elected censor of the press, protected philosophers and men of letters,
+and by his personal efforts facilitated the publication of the
+_Encyclop�dia_." Speaking of the _Preface to the Comedy_, Malesherbes
+writes to Gabriel de Sartine, lieutenant-general of police: "It is an
+outrageous pamphlet, not only against Palissot, but against respectable
+persons whose very condition should shelter them against such insults. I
+beg you, sir, to be good enough to put a stop to this scandal. I believe
+it to be a matter of public importance that the punishment should be
+very severe, and that this punishment should not stop at the Bastille or
+the For-l'Ev�que,[45] because a very wide distinction must be drawn
+between the delinquencies of men of letters tearing each other to
+pieces and the insolence of those who attack persons of the highest
+consideration in the State. I do not think that Bic�tre would be too
+severe for these last. If you have to ask M. de Saint-Florentin for the
+royal authority for your proceedings, I hope you will be good enough to
+inform him of the request I am making."
+
+It will be observed that, on Malesherbes' showing, the Bastille would
+not suffice to punish the _Preface to the Comedy_, nor even the
+For-l'Ev�que; he asks for the most stringent of the prisons, Bic�tre.
+Before long, it is true, this excellent man returned to milder
+sentiments. An imprisonment at Bic�tre, he wrote, would be infamous.
+Saint-Florentin and Sartine were not hard to convince. Morellet was
+taken to the Bastille. "The warrant for his arrest," wrote one of his
+agents to Malesherbes, "was executed this morning by Inspector D'H�mery
+with all the amenities possible in so unpleasant a business. D'H�mery
+knows the Abb� Morellet, and has spoken of him to M. de Sartine in the
+most favourable terms."
+
+When he entered the Bastille the Abb� calculated that his imprisonment
+would last six months, and after acknowledging that he at that time
+viewed his detention without great distress, he adds: "I am bound to
+say, to lower the too high opinion that may be formed of me and my
+courage, that I was marvellously sustained by a thought which rendered
+my little virtue more easy. I saw some literary glory illumining the
+walls of my prison; persecuted, I must be better known. The men of
+letters whom I had avenged, and the philosophy for which I was a
+martyr, would lay the foundation of my reputation. The men of the world,
+who love satire, would receive me better than ever. A career was opening
+before me, and I should be able to pursue it at greater advantage. These
+six months at the Bastille would be an excellent recommendation, and
+would infallibly make my fortune."
+
+The Abb� remained at the Bastille, not six months, but six weeks, "which
+slipped away," he observes "--I chuckle still as I think of them--very
+pleasantly for me." He spent his time in reading romances, and, with
+admirable humour, in writing a _Treatise on the Liberty of the Press_.
+Afterwards the good Abb� informs us that the hopes which he had indulged
+were not deceived. On issuing from the Bastille he was a made man.
+Little known two months before, he now met everywhere with the reception
+he desired. The doors of the salons of Madame de Boufflers, Madame
+Necker, the Baron d'Holbach, flew open before him; women pitied him and
+admired him, and men followed their example. Why have we not to-day a
+Bastille to facilitate the career of writers of talent!
+
+
+MARMONTEL.
+
+To Marmontel his stay at the royal prison appeared as pleasant as the
+Abb� Morellet had found his. He had amused himself by reciting at Madame
+Geoffrin's a mordant satire in which the Duke d'Aumont, first groom of
+the stole to the king, was cruelly hit. The duke expostulated;
+Marmontel wrote to him declaring that he was not the author of the
+satire; but the nobleman stood his ground.
+
+"I am helpless," said the Count de Saint-Florentin, who countersigned
+the _lettre de cachet_, to Marmontel; "the Duke d'Aumont accuses you,
+and is determined to have you punished. It is a satisfaction he demands
+in recompense for his services and the services of his ancestors. The
+king has been pleased to grant him his wish. So you will go and find M.
+de Sartine; I am addressing to him the king's order; you will tell him
+that it was from my hand you received it."
+
+"I went to find M. de Sartine," writes Marmontel, "and I found with him
+the police officer who was to accompany me. M. de Sartine was intending
+that he should go to the Bastille in a separate carriage; but I myself
+declined this obliging offer, and we arrived at the Bastille, my
+introducer and myself, in the same hack.... The governor, M. d'Abadie,
+asked me if I wished my servant to be left with me.... They made a
+cursory inspection of my packets and books, and then sent me up to a
+large room furnished with two beds, two tables, a low cupboard, and
+three cane chairs. It was cold, but a jailer made us a good fire and
+brought me wood in abundance. At the same time they gave me pens, ink,
+and paper, on condition of my accounting for the use I made of them and
+the number of sheets they allowed me.
+
+"The jailer came back to ask if I was satisfied with my bed. After
+examining it I replied that the mattresses were bad and the coverlets
+dirty. In a minute all was changed. They sent to ask me what was my
+dinner hour. I replied, 'The same as everybody's.' The Bastille had a
+library: the governor sent me the catalogue, giving me free choice among
+the books. I merely thanked him for myself, but my servant asked for the
+romances of Pr�vost, and they were brought to him."
+
+Let us go on with Marmontel's story. "For my part," he says, "I had the
+means of escape from ennui. Having been for a long time impatient of the
+contempt shown by men of letters for Lucan's poem, which they had not
+read, and only knew in the barbarous fustian of Br�beuf's version, I had
+resolved to translate it more becomingly and faithfully into prose; and
+this work, which would occupy me without fatiguing my brain, was the
+best possible employment for the solitary leisure of my prison. So I had
+brought the _Pharsalia_ with me, and, to understand it the better, I had
+been careful to bring with it the _Commentaries_ of C�sar. Behold me
+then at the corner of a good fire, pondering the quarrel of C�sar and
+Pompey, and forgetting my own with the Duke d'Aumont. And there was Bury
+too (Marmontel's servant) as philosophical as myself, amusing himself by
+making our beds placed at two opposite corners of my room, which was at
+this moment lit up by the beams of a fine winter sun, in spite of the
+bars of two strong iron gratings which permitted me a view of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine.
+
+"Two hours later, the noise of the bolts of the two doors which shut me
+in startled me from my profound musings, and the two jailers, loaded
+with a dinner I believed to be mine, came in and served it in silence.
+One put down in front of the fire three little dishes covered with
+plates of common earthenware; the other laid on that one of the two
+tables which was clear a tablecloth rather coarse, indeed, but white. I
+saw him place on the table a very fair set of things, a pewter spoon and
+fork, good household bread, and a bottle of wine. Their duty done, the
+jailers retired, and the two doors were shut again with the same noise
+of locks and bolts.
+
+"Then Bury invited me to take my place, and served my soup. It was a
+Friday. The soup, made without meat, was a _pur�e_ of white beans, with
+the freshest butter, and a dish of the same beans was the first that
+Bury served me with. I found all this excellent. The dish of cod he gave
+me for second course was better still. It was served with a dash of
+garlic, which gave it a delicacy of taste and odour which would have
+flattered the taste of the daintiest Gascon. The wine was not
+first-rate, but passable; no sweets: of course one must expect to be
+deprived of something. On the whole, I thought that dinner in prison was
+not half bad.
+
+"As I was rising from table, and Bury was about to sit down--for there
+was enough for his dinner in what was left--lo and behold! in came my
+two jailers again, with pyramids of dishes in their hands. At this
+display of fine linen, fine china-ware, spoon and fork of silver, we
+recognized our mistake; but we made not the ghost of a sign, and when
+our jailers, having laid down their burden, had retired, 'Sir,' said
+Bury, 'you have just eaten my dinner, you will quite agree to my having
+my turn and eating yours.' 'That's fair,' I replied, and the walls of my
+room were astonished, I fancy, at the sound of laughter.
+
+"This dinner was not vegetarian; here are the details: an excellent
+soup, a juicy beef-steak, a boiled capon's leg streaming with gravy and
+melting in one's mouth, a little dish of artichokes fried in pickle, a
+dish of spinach, a very fine William pear, fresh-cut grapes, a bottle of
+old burgundy, and best Mocha coffee; this was Bury's dinner, with the
+exception of the coffee and the fruit, which he insisted on reserving
+for me.
+
+"After dinner the governor came to see me, and asked me if I found the
+fare sufficient, assuring me that I should be served from his table,
+that he would take care to cut my portions himself, and that no one
+should touch my food but himself. He suggested a fowl for my supper; I
+thanked him and told him that what was left of the fruit from my dinner
+would suffice. The reader has just seen what my ordinary fare was at the
+Bastille, and from this he may infer with what mildness, or rather
+reluctance, they brought themselves to visit on me the wrath of the Duke
+d'Aumont.
+
+"Every day I had a visit from the governor. As he had some smack of
+literature and even of Latin, he took some interest in following my
+work, in fact, enjoyed it; but soon, tearing himself away from these
+little dissipations, he said, 'Adieu, I am going to console men who are
+more unfortunate than you.'"
+
+Such was the imprisonment of Marmontel. It lasted for eleven days.
+
+
+LINGUET.
+
+Linguet, advocate and journalist, was arrested for a breach of the press
+laws and for slander. He was a man of considerable ability, but little
+character. Attorney-general Cruppi has devoted to the story of Linguet a
+work as extensive as it is eloquent. He has a wealth of indulgence for
+his hero; yet, despite the goodwill he shows for him and endeavours to
+impart to the reader, his book reveals between the lines that Linguet
+was worthy of little esteem, and that his professional brethren were
+justified in removing his name from the roll of the advocates of Paris.
+
+Linguet's captivity lasted for two years. He has left a description of
+it in his _Memoirs on the Bastille_, which made a great noise, and of
+which the success has endured down to our own day. His book, like
+everything which came from his pen, is written in a fluent style, with
+spirit and brilliance; the facts cited are for the most part correct,
+but the author, aiming at making a sensation, has cleverly presented
+them in a light which distorts their real character. "There are means,"
+says Madame de Staal, "of so distributing light and shade on the facts
+one is exhibiting, as to alter their appearance without altering the
+groundwork." Take, for instance, the description that Linguet gives of
+his belongings while in the Bastille: "Two worm-eaten mattresses, a cane
+chair the seat of which was only held to it by strings, a folding table,
+a jug for water, two earthenware pots, one of them for drinking, and two
+stone slabs to make a fire on." A contemporary could say of Linguet's
+_Memoirs_, "It is the longest lie that ever was printed." And yet, if we
+take the facts themselves which are related by the clever journalist,
+and disengage them from the deceitful mirage in which he has enwrapped
+them, we do not see that his life in the Bastille was so wretched as he
+endeavours to make us believe. He is forced to acknowledge that his food
+was always most abundant, adding, it is true, that that was because they
+wished to poison him! He owed his life, he is convinced, "only to the
+obstinate tenacity of his constitution." He marked, nevertheless, on the
+menu for the day, which was sent up every morning by the Bastille cook,
+the dishes he fancied; and later on he had his room furnished after his
+own heart. He still enjoyed, moreover, enough liberty to write during
+his imprisonment a work entitled, _The Trials of Three Kings, Louis
+XVI., Charles III., and George III._, which appeared in London in 1781.
+Let us recall once more the famous saying of Linguet to the wig-maker of
+the Bastille on the first day that he presented himself to trim the
+prisoner's beard: "To whom have I the honour of speaking?" "I am, sir,
+the barber to the Bastille." "Gad, then, why don't you raze it?"
+
+In June, 1792, some years after his liberation, Linguet was prosecuted a
+second time for breach of the press laws. The revolutionary tribunal
+condemned him to death. As he mounted the steps of the scaffold, the
+ardent pamphleteer thought, mayhap, with bitterly ironical regret, of
+that Bastille whose destruction he had so clamorously demanded.
+
+
+DIDEROT.
+
+We have still to speak of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who were
+not incarcerated at the Bastille, but at Vincennes, not in the castle
+keep, but in the ch�teau itself, which constituted a separate place of
+imprisonment. They placed in the ch�teau only prisoners guilty of minor
+offences, who were sentenced to a temporary detention, and to whom they
+wished to show some consideration. This was, as we have just said, the
+abode of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot was arrested on
+July 24, 1749. His last book, _Letters on the Blind for the Use of those
+Who Can See_, contained theories which appeared to have but little title
+to the description of "moral." But in the course of his examination he
+stoutly denied that he was its author, as also he denied the authorship
+of the _Thoughts of a Philosopher_ he had published some years before.
+The lieutenant of police gave instructions to the governor of Vincennes
+that, short of being set at liberty, Diderot was to be granted all
+possible comforts--allowed to walk in the garden and park; "that the
+king's desire was, in consideration of the literary work on which he was
+engaged (the _Encyclop�dia_), to permit him to communicate freely with
+persons from without who might come for that purpose or on family
+business." And so Diderot received a visit from his wife and walked with
+her in the wood; Rousseau and D'Alembert spent their afternoons with
+him, and, as in the "good old days" of Plato and Socrates, our
+philosophers chatted of metaphysics and love, seated on the green grass
+under the shade of mighty oaks. The booksellers and printers who had
+undertaken the publication of the _Encyclop�dia_ were, as we have seen,
+in constant communication with Diderot at Vincennes; he corrected in
+prison the proofs of the publication, which the court looked on with no
+favourable eye. And we know, too, that at night, with the secret
+complicity of the governor, our philosopher cleared the park walls to
+hurry to a fair lady at Paris, one Madame de Puysieux, whom he loved
+with a passion by no means platonic; ere the sun was up, the jailers
+found him safely back under lock and key. This irksome captivity lasted
+little more than three months.
+
+
+THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU.
+
+The imprisonment of Mirabeau lasted only ten days. The _lettre de
+cachet_ had been obtained by the clique of financiers, who took fright
+at the audacious conceptions of the _Theory of Taxation_. "I fancy I
+deserved my punishment," wrote the Marquis, "like the ass in the fable,
+for a clumsy and misplaced zeal." In regard to the arrest, Madame
+d'Epinay sent word to Voltaire: "Never before was a man arrested as this
+one was. The officer said to him, 'Sir, my orders do not state I am to
+hurry you: to-morrow will do, if you haven't time to-day.' 'No, sir, one
+cannot be too prompt in obeying the king's orders, I am quite ready.'
+And off he went with a bag crammed with books and papers." At Vincennes
+the Marquis had a servant with him. His wife came to see him. The king
+spent for his support fifteen livres a day, more than twenty-five
+shillings of our money. He was liberated on December 24, 1760. His
+brother, Bailie Mirabeau, speaking of this detention, wrote to him of "a
+week's imprisonment in which you were shown every possible
+consideration."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have exhausted M. Bournon's list of the writers who were victims of
+arbitrary authority. Such are the "martyrs" for whom that excellent
+historian, and Michelet and others, have shown the most affecting
+compassion. The foregoing facts do not call for comment. Men of letters
+were the spoilt children of the eighteenth century much more than of our
+own, and never has an absolute government shown a toleration equal to
+that of the monarchy under the _ancien r�gime_ towards writers whose
+doctrines, as events have proved, tended directly to its destruction.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LATUDE.
+
+
+Few historical figures have taken a higher place in the popular
+imagination than Masers de Latude. That celebrated prisoner seems to
+have accumulated in his life of suffering all the wrongs that spring
+from an arbitrary government. The novelists and playwrights of the
+nineteenth century have made him a hero; the poets have draped his woes
+in fine mourning robes, our greatest historians have burnt for him the
+midnight oil; numerous editions of his _Memoirs_ have appeared in quick
+succession down to our own days. Even by his contemporaries he was
+regarded as a martyr, and posterity has not plucked the shining crown of
+martyrdom from his head, hoary with the snows of long captivity. His
+legend is the creature of his own unaided brain. When in 1790 he
+dictated the story of his life, he made greater calls on his glowing
+southern imagination than on his memory; but the documents relating to
+his case in the archives of the Bastille have been preserved. At the
+present time they are to be found dispersed among various libraries, at
+the Arsenal, at Carnavalet, at St. Petersburg. Thanks to them it is
+easy to establish the truth.
+
+On March 23, 1725, at Montagnac in Languedoc, a poor girl named
+Jeanneton Aubrespy gave birth to a male child who was baptized three
+days later under the name of Jean Henri, given him by his god-parents,
+Jean Bouhour and Jeanne Boudet. Surname the poor little creature had
+none, for he was the illegitimate child of a father unknown. Jeanneton,
+who had just passed her thirtieth year, was of respectable middle-class
+family, and lived near the Lom gate in a little house which seems to
+have been her own. Several cousins of hers held commissions in the army.
+But from the day when she became a mother, her family had no more to do
+with her, and she fell into want. Happily she was a woman of stout
+heart, and by her spinning and sewing she supported her boy, who shot up
+into a lad of keen intelligence and considerable ambition. She succeeded
+in getting him some sort of education, and we find Jean Henri at the age
+of seventeen acting as assistant surgeon in the army of Languedoc.
+Surgeons, it is true, made no great figure in the eighteenth century;
+they combined the duties of barber and dentist as well as leech. But the
+situation was good enough. "Assistant surgeons in the army," wrote
+Saint-Marc the detective, "who really worked at their trade, made a good
+deal of money." At this time, being reluctant to bear his mother's name,
+the young man ingeniously transformed his double forename into Jean
+Danry, under which he is designated in a passport for Alsace, given him
+on March 25, 1743, by the general commanding the royal forces in
+Languedoc. In the same year 1743, Danry accompanied the army of Marshal
+de Noailles in its operations on the Maine and the Rhine, receiving from
+the Marshal, towards the end of the season, a certificate testifying to
+his good and faithful service throughout the campaign.
+
+Four years later we find Danry at Brussels, employed in the
+field-hospital of the army in Flanders, at a salary of 500 livres a
+month. He was present at the famous siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, the
+impregnable fortress which the French so valiantly stormed under the
+command of the Comte de Lowendal. But peace being concluded at
+Aix-la-Chapelle, the armies were disbanded, and Danry went to Paris. He
+had in his pocket a letter of recommendation to Descluzeaux, the surgeon
+of Marshal de Noailles, and a certificate signed by Guignard de La
+Garde, chief of the commissariat, testifying to the ability and good
+conduct of "the aforesaid Jean Danry, assistant surgeon." These two
+certificates formed the most substantial part of his fortune.
+
+Danry arrived in Paris about the end of the year 1748. On any afternoon
+he might have been seen strolling about the Tuileries in a grey frock
+and red waistcoat, carrying his twenty-three years with a good grace. Of
+middle height and somewhat spare figure, wearing his brown hair in a
+silk net, having keen eyes and an expression of much intelligence, he
+would probably have been thought a handsome fellow but for the marks
+which smallpox had indelibly stamped on his face. His accent had a
+decided Gascon tang, and it is obvious, from the spelling of his
+letters, not only that he could not boast of a literary education, but
+that his speech was that of a man of the people. Yet, what with his
+brisk temperament, his professional skill, and his favour with his
+superiors, he was in a fair way to attain an honourable position, which
+would have enabled him at length to support his mother, then living in
+solitary friendlessness at Montagnac, centring on him, in her forlorn
+condition, all her affection and her dearest hopes.
+
+Paris, with its gaiety and stir, dazzled the young man. Its brilliant
+and luxurious life, its rustling silks and laces, set him dreaming. He
+found the girls of Paris charming creatures, and opened his heart to
+them without stint, and his purse too; and his heart was more opulent
+than his purse. Ere long he had spent his modest savings and sunk into
+want. He fell into bad company. His best friend, an apothecary's
+assistant named Binguet, shared with him a mean garret in the Cul-de-sac
+du Coq, in the house of one Charmeleux, who let furnished lodgings. Than
+these two no greater rakes, wastrels, or thorough-paced rascals could
+have been found in all Paris. Danry in particular very soon got a name
+all over his neighbourhood for his riotous, threatening, and choleric
+temper. Dying of hunger, threatened with being ejected neck-and-crop
+from his lodging for nonpayment of rent, he was reduced at last to write
+for money to his mother, who, poor thing, had barely enough for her own
+modest wants.
+
+As yet we are a long way from the "handsome officer of engineers" who
+lives in our remembrance: we see little likeness to the brilliant
+picture which Danry drew later of those youthful years during which he
+received, "by the care of his father the Marquis de La Tude, the
+education of a gentleman destined to serve his country and his king."
+
+Having come now absolutely to the end of his resources, Danry took it
+into his head that, at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, he had been stripped
+by some soldiers of all his clothes but his shirt, and robbed of 678
+livres into the bargain. This story he worked up in a letter addressed
+to Moreau de S�chelles, commissary of the army in Flanders, hoping to
+get it corroborated by Guignard de La Garde, the commissary under whom
+he had himself served. In this letter he demanded compensation for the
+losses he had suffered while devoting himself under fire to the care of
+the wounded. But we read, in the _Memoirs_ he wrote later, that so far
+from having been stripped and robbed, he had actually purchased at
+Bergen-op-Zoom a considerable quantity of goods of all kinds when they
+were sold off cheap after the sack of the town. However that may be, his
+experiment was a failure. But Danry was a man of resource, and not many
+days had passed before he had hit on another means of raising the wind.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Cover of the explosive box sent by Danry to the Marquise de
+     Pompadour. The words almost obliterated are: "Je vous prie, Madame,
+     d'ouvrir le paquet en particuli�." Below is the record and the date
+     of Danry's examination, with his signature, and that of Berryer,
+     the lieutenant of police.
+]
+
+At this time everybody was talking about the struggle between the
+king's ministers and the Marquise de Pompadour, which had just ended in
+a triumph for the lady. Maurepas was going into exile, but it was
+generally believed that he was a man who would wreak vengeance on his
+enemy, and the favourite herself openly declared that she went in fear
+of poison. A light dawned on the young surgeon's mind as he heard such
+gossip as this; he caught a sudden glimpse of himself--even he, the
+ragged outcast--arrayed in cloth of gold and rolling in his carriage
+along the Versailles road.
+
+This was his plan. On April 27, 1749, in a shop under the arcade of the
+Palais-Royal, hard by the grand staircase, he bought of a small
+tradesman six of those little bottle-shaped toys, once called Prince
+Rupert's Drops, out of which children used to get so much harmless
+amusement. They were globules of molten glass, which, on being thrown
+into cold water, had taken the shape of pears, and which, if the
+tapering end was suddenly snapped, crumbled with a loud report into
+dust. Four of these crackers Danry placed in a cardboard box, binding
+the thin ends together with a thread which he fixed in the lid. Over
+these he sprinkled some toilet powder, and this he covered with a layer
+of powdered vitriol and alum. The whole packet he then enclosed in a
+double wrapper, writing on the inner one, "I beg you, madam, to open the
+packet in private," and on the outer one, "To Madame the Marquise de
+Pompadour, at court."
+
+At eight o'clock in the evening of the next day, Danry, having seen his
+packet safely in the post, hurried off himself to Versailles. He had
+hoped to gain admittance to the favourite herself, but being stopped by
+Gourbillon, her principal valet, in a voice trembling with emotion he
+related to him a frightful story. Happening to be at the Tuileries, he
+said, he had observed two men seated in animated conversation, and on
+going close to them heard them mouthing the most horrible threats
+against Madame de Pompadour. When they rose he dogged their footsteps,
+which led direct to the post office, where they consigned a packet to
+the box. Who the men were, and what was the nature of the packet, were
+natural questions to which Danry had no answer; all he could say was
+that, devoted to the interests of the Marquise, he had instantly sped
+off to reveal to her what he had seen.
+
+To understand the impression produced by the young man's information, it
+is necessary to bear in mind the feverish excitement then prevailing at
+court. Maurepas, the witty and sprightly minister who had won Louis
+XV.'s special affection because of the charm with which he endowed mere
+business for "the man who was always bored"--Maurepas had just been
+exiled to Bourges. "Pontchartrain," the king sent word to him, "is too
+near." The struggle between the minister and the favourite had been one
+of extraordinary violence. Maurepas was for ever dashing off satirical
+verses on the girl who had reached the steps of the throne, and
+incessantly pursuing her with the cruel and insolent shafts of his wit;
+his muse indeed did not shrink from the most brutal insults. Nor was the
+Marquise a whit more tender towards her foe: she openly dubbed him liar
+and knave, and assured everybody that he was trying to get her poisoned.
+A surgeon was actually required to be in constant attendance upon her,
+and she always had an antidote within reach. At table she was careful
+never to be the first to partake of any dish, and in her box at the
+theatre she would drink no lemonade but what had been prepared by her
+surgeon.
+
+The packet which Danry had posted arrived at Versailles on April 29, and
+Quesnay, the physician to the king and the Marquise, was requested to
+open it. Having done so with infinite precaution, he recognized the
+vitriol and alum and toilet powder, and declared at once that there was
+not a pennyworth of danger in the whole contrivance. But since alum and
+vitriol were substances capable of being turned to baneful uses, he
+thought that possibly it was a case of a criminal design clumsily
+executed.
+
+There is not a shadow of doubt that Louis XV. and his mistress were
+seriously alarmed. D'Argenson himself, who had upheld Maurepas against
+the favourite, had the greatest possible interest in seeing the affair
+cleared up as soon as possible. The first move was altogether in favour
+of the informer. D'Argenson wrote to Berryer that Danry was deserving of
+a reward.
+
+No time was lost in instituting a search for the authors of the plot.
+The lieutenant of police selected the most skilful and intelligent of
+his officers, the detective Saint-Marc, who put himself in communication
+with Danry. But he had not spent two days with the assistant surgeon
+before he drew up a report demanding his arrest. "It is not unimportant
+to note that Danry is a surgeon, and his best friend an apothecary. In
+my opinion it is essential to apprehend both Danry and Binguet without
+further delay, and without letting either know of the other's arrest,
+and at the same time to search their rooms."
+
+Accordingly Danry was conveyed to the Bastille on May 1, 1749, and
+Binguet was secured the same day. Saint-Marc had taken the precaution to
+ask the assistant surgeon for a written account of his adventure. This
+document he put into the hands of an expert, who compared the
+handwriting with the address on the packet sent to Versailles. Danry was
+lost. Suspicion was but too well confirmed by the results of a search in
+his room. Being shut up in the Bastille, Danry knew nothing of all these
+proceedings, and when, on May 2, the lieutenant-general of police came
+to question him, he replied only with lies.
+
+Berryer, the lieutenant of police, was a man of much firmness, but
+honourable and kindly disposed. "He inspired one's confidence," wrote
+Danry himself, "by his urbanity and kindness." This excellent man was
+vexed at the attitude taken up by the prisoner, and pointing out the
+danger he was incurring, he besought him to tell the truth. But at a
+second examination Danry only persisted in his lies. Then all at once he
+changed his tactics and refused to answer the questions put to him.
+"Danry, here we do justice to every one," said Berryer to him, to give
+him courage. But entreaties had no better success than threats. Danry
+maintained his obstinate silence; and D'Argenson wrote to Berryer: "The
+thorough elucidation of this affair is too important for you not to
+follow up any clue which may point towards a solution."
+
+By his falsehoods, and then by his silence, Danry had succeeded in
+giving the appearance of a mysterious plot to what was really an
+insignificant piece of knavery.
+
+Not till June 15 did he make up his mind to offer a statement very near
+the truth, which was written down and sent at once to the king, who read
+it over several times and kept it in his pocket the whole day--a
+circumstance which indicates to what importance the affair had now
+swelled. Suspicions were not dispelled by the declaration of June 15.
+Danry had misrepresented the truth in his former examinations, and there
+was reason to believe that he was equally misrepresenting it in the
+third. Thus he owed his ruin to his silence and his self-contradictory
+depositions. Six months later, on October 7, 1749, when he was at
+Vincennes, Dr. Quesnay, who had shown much interest in the young
+surgeon, was sent to find out from him the name of the individual who
+had instigated the crime. On his return the doctor wrote to Berryer,
+"My journey has been utterly useless. I only saw a blockhead, who
+persisted nevertheless in adhering to his former declarations." Two
+years more had passed away when the lieutenant of police wrote to
+Quesnay:--"February 25, 1751. Danry would be very glad if you would pay
+him a visit, and your compliance might perhaps induce him to lay bare
+his secret soul, and make a frank confession to you of what up to the
+present he has obstinately concealed from me."
+
+Quesnay at once repaired to the Bastille, bearing with him a conditional
+promise of liberty. Working himself up into a frenzy, Danry swore that
+"all his answers to the lieutenant of police had been strictly true."
+When the doctor had taken his leave, Danry wrote to the minister: "M.
+Quesnay, who has been several times to see me in my wretchedness, tells
+me that your lordship is inclined to believe I had some accomplice in my
+fault whom I will not reveal, and that it is for this reason your
+lordship will not give me my liberty. I could wish, my lord, from the
+bottom of my heart, that your belief were true, for it would be much to
+my profit to put my guilt upon another, whether for having induced me to
+commit my sin or for not having prevented me from committing it."
+
+It was the opinion of the ministers that Danry had been the instrument
+of a plot against the life of the Marquise de Pompadour directed by some
+person of high rank, and that at the critical moment he had either
+taken fright, or else had made a clean breast of the matter at
+Versailles in the hope of reaping some advantage from both sides. These
+facts must be kept in mind if we are to understand the real cause of his
+confinement. Kept, then, in the Bastille, he was subjected to several
+examinations, the reports of which were regularly drawn up and signed by
+the lieutenant of police. Under the _ancien r�gime_, this officer was,
+as we have seen, a regular magistrate, indeed he has no other
+designation in the documents of the period; he pronounced sentence and
+awarded punishments in accordance with that body of customs which then,
+as to-day in England, constituted the law.
+
+Binguet, the apothecary, had been set at liberty immediately after
+Danry's declaration of June 15. In the Bastille, Danry was treated with
+the utmost consideration, in accordance with the formal instructions of
+Berryer. He was provided with books, tobacco, and a pipe; he was
+permitted to play on the flute; and having declared that a solitary life
+bored him, he was given two room mates. Every day he was visited by the
+officers of the fortress, and on May 25 the governor came to tell him of
+the magistrate's order: "That the utmost attention was to be shown him;
+if he needed anything he was to be requested to say so, and was to be
+allowed to want for nothing." No doubt the lieutenant of police hoped,
+by dint of kindness, to persuade him to disclose the authors of the
+unfortunate plot which was the figment of his imagination.
+
+Danry did not remain long in the prison of the Suburb Saint-Antoine; on
+July 28 Saint-Marc transferred him to Vincennes, and we see from the
+report drawn up by the detective with what astonishment the Marquis du
+Ch�telet, governor of the fortress, heard "that the court had resolved
+to send him such a fellow." Vincennes, like the Bastille, was reserved
+for prisoners of good position; our hero was sent there by special
+favour, as he was told for his consolation by the surgeon who attended
+him: "Only persons of noble birth or the highest distinction are sent to
+Vincennes." Danry was indeed treated like a lord. The best apartment was
+reserved for him, and he was able to enjoy the park, where he walked for
+two hours every day. At the time of his admission to the Bastille, he
+was suffering from some sort of indisposition which later on he ascribed
+to his long confinement. At Vincennes he complained of the same illness,
+with the same plea that his troubles had made him ill. He was attended
+by a specialist as well as by the surgeon of the prison.
+
+Meantime the lieutenant came again to see him, reiterating assurances of
+his protection, and advising him to write direct to Madame de Pompadour.
+Here is what Danry wrote:--
+
+"VINCENNES, _November 4, 1749_.
+
+     "MADAM,--If wretchedness, goaded by famine, has driven me to commit
+     a fault against your dear person, it was with no design of doing
+     you any mischief. God is my witness. If the divine mercy would
+     assure you to-day, on my behalf, how my soul repents of its heinous
+     fault, and how for 188 days I have done nothing but weep at the
+     sight of my iron bars, you would have pity on me. Madam, for the
+     sake of God who is enlightening you, let your just wrath soften at
+     the spectacle of my repentance, my wretchedness, my tears. One day
+     God will recompense you for your humanity. You are all-powerful,
+     Madam; God has given you power with the greatest king on all the
+     earth, His well-beloved; he is merciful, he is not cruel, he is a
+     Christian. If the divine power moves your magnanimity to grant me
+     my freedom, I would rather die, or sustain my life on nothing but
+     roots, than jeopardize it a second time. I have staked all my hopes
+     on your Christian charity. Lend a sympathetic ear to my prayer, do
+     not abandon me to my unhappy fate. I hope in you, Madam, and God
+     will vouchsafe an abundant answer to my prayers that your dear
+     person may obtain your heart's desires.
+
+     "I have the honour to be, with a repentance worthy of pardon,
+     Madam, your very humble and very obedient servant,
+
+"DANRY."
+
+
+
+A letter which it is a pleasure to quote, for it shows to great
+advantage beside the letters written later by the prisoner. It was only
+the truth that he had no evil design on the favourite's life; but soon
+becoming more audacious, he wrote to Madame de Pompadour saying that if
+he had addressed the box to her at Versailles, it was out of pure
+devotion to her, to put her on her guard against the machinations of her
+enemies, in short, to save her life.
+
+Danry's letter was duly forwarded to the Marquise, but remained without
+effect. Losing patience, he resolved to win for himself the freedom
+denied him: on June 15, 1750, he escaped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In his _Memoirs_ Danry has related the story of this first escape in a
+manner as lively as imaginative. He really eluded his jailers in the
+simplest way in the world. Having descended to the garden at the usual
+hour for his walk, he found there a black spaniel frisking about. The
+dog happened to rear itself against the gate, and to push it with its
+paws. The gate fell open. Danry passed out and ran straight ahead,
+"till, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, he fell to the ground with
+fatigue, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Denis."
+
+There he remained until nine o'clock in the evening. Then he struck into
+the road to Paris, passing the night beside the aqueduct near the
+Saint-Denis gate. At daybreak he entered the city.
+
+We know what importance was attached at court to the safe custody of the
+prisoner: there was still hope that he would make up his mind to speak
+of the grave conspiracy of which he held the secret. D'Argenson wrote at
+once to Berryer: "Nothing is more important or more urgent than to set
+on foot at once all conceivable means of recapturing the prisoner."
+Accordingly all the police were engaged in the search; the description
+of the prisoner was printed, a large number of copies being distributed
+by Inspector Rulhi�re among the mounted police.
+
+Danry took up his lodging with one Cocardon, at the sign of the Golden
+Sun; but he did not venture to remain for more than two days in the same
+inn. He expected his old chum Binguet to come to his assistance, but
+Binguet was not going to have anything more to do with the Bastille. It
+was a pretty girl, Annette Benoist, whom Danry had known when he was
+lodging with Charmeleux, that devoted herself heart and soul to him. She
+knew she herself was running the risk of imprisonment, and already
+strangers of forbidding appearance had come asking at the Golden Sun who
+she was. Little she cared; she found assistance among her companions:
+the girls carried Danry's letters and undertook the search for a safe
+lodging. Meanwhile, Danry went to pass the night under the aqueducts; in
+the morning he shut himself in the lodging the girls had chosen for him,
+and there he remained for two days without leaving the house, Annette
+coming there to keep him company. Unluckily the young man had no money:
+how was he to pay his score? "What was to be done, what was to become of
+me?" he said later. "I was sure to be discovered if I showed myself; if
+I fled I ran no less risk." He wrote to Dr. Quesnay, who had shown him
+so much kindness at Vincennes; but the police got wind of the letter,
+and Saint-Marc arrived and seized the fugitive in the inn where he lay
+concealed. The unlucky wretch was haled back to the Bastille. Annette
+was arrested at the Golden Sun at the moment when she was asking for
+Danry's letters; she too was shut up in the Bastille. The warders and
+sentinels who were on duty at Vincennes on the day of the escape had
+been thrown into the cells.
+
+By his escape from Vincennes, Danry had doubled the gravity of his
+offence. The regulations demanded that he should be sent down into the
+cells reserved for insubordinate prisoners. "M. Berryer came again to
+lighten my woes; outside the prison he demanded justice and mercy for
+me, inside he sought to calm my grief, which seemed less poignant when
+he assured me that he shared it." The lieutenant of police ordered the
+prisoner to be fed as well as formerly, and to be allowed his books,
+papers, knick-knacks, and the privilege of the two hours' walk he had
+enjoyed at Vincennes. In return for these kindnesses, the assistant
+surgeon sent to the magistrate "a remedy for the gout." He asked at the
+same time to be allowed to breed little birds, whose chirping and lively
+movements would divert him. The request was granted. But instead of
+bearing his lot with patience, Danry grew more and more irritable every
+day. He gave free rein to his violent temper, raised a hubbub, shrieked,
+tore up and down his room, so that they came perforce to believe that he
+was going mad. On the books of the Bastille library, which circulated
+from room to room, he wrote ribald verses against the Marquise de
+Pompadour. In this way he prolonged his sojourn in the cells. Gradually
+his letters changed their tone. "It is a little hard to be left for
+fourteen months in prison, a whole year of the time, ending to-day, in
+one cell where I still am."
+
+Then Berryer put him back into a good room, about the end of the year
+1751. At the same time he gave him, at the king's expense, a servant to
+wait on him.
+
+As to Annette Benoist, she had been set at liberty after a fortnight's
+detention. Danry's servant fell sick; as there was no desire to deprive
+the prisoner of society, he was given a companion. This was a certain
+Antoine All�gre, who had been there since May 29, 1750. The
+circumstances which had led to his imprisonment were almost identical
+with those to which Danry owed his confinement. All�gre was keeping a
+school at Marseilles when he learnt that the enemies of the Marquise de
+Pompadour were seeking to destroy her. He fabricated a story of a
+conspiracy in which he involved Maurepas, the Archbishop of Albi, and
+the Bishop of Lod�ve; he sent a denunciation of this plot to Versailles,
+and, to give it some semblance of truth, addressed to the favourite's
+valet a letter in disguised handwriting, beginning with these words: "On
+the word of a gentleman, there are 100,000 crowns for you if you poison
+your mistress." He hoped by this means to obtain a good situation, or
+the success of a business project he had in hand.
+
+Intelligent, with some education, and venturesome, Danry and All�gre
+were just the men to get on well together, so much the better that the
+schoolmaster dominated the comrade to whom he was so much superior. The
+years that Danry spent in company with All�gre exercised so great an
+influence on his whole life that the lieutenant of police, Lenoir, could
+say one day: "Danry is the second volume of All�gre." The letters of the
+latter, a large number of which have been preserved, bear witness to the
+originality and energy of his mind: their style is fine and fluent, of
+the purest French; the ideas expressed have distinction and are
+sometimes remarkable without eccentricity. He worked untiringly, and was
+at first annoyed at the presence of a companion: "Give me, I beg you, a
+room to myself," he wrote to Berryer, "even without a fire: I like being
+alone, I am sufficient for myself, because I can find things to do, and
+seed to sow for the future." His temperament was naturally mystical, but
+of that cold and acrid mysticism which we sometimes find in men of
+science, and mathematicians in particular. For All�gre's principal
+studies were mathematics, mechanics, and engineering. The lieutenant of
+police procured for him works on fortification, architecture, mechanics,
+hydraulics. The prisoner used them to compile essays on the most diverse
+questions, which he sent to the lieutenant of police in the hope of
+their procuring his liberation. Those essays which we possess show the
+extent of his intelligence and his education. Danry followed his example
+by-and-by, in this as in everything else, but clumsily. All�gre was
+also very clever with his fingers, and could make, so the officials of
+the ch�teau declared, whatever he pleased.
+
+All�gre was a dangerous man: the warders were afraid of him. Some time
+after his entrance into the Bastille he fell ill, and a man was set to
+look after him; the two men did not agree at all. All�gre sent complaint
+after complaint to the lieutenant of police. An inquiry was made which
+turned out not unfavourable to the keeper, and he was left with the
+prisoner. One morning--September 8, 1751--the officers of the Bastille
+heard cries and clamour in the "Well" tower. Hastily ascending, they
+found All�gre in the act of stabbing his companion, who lay on the floor
+held down by the throat, wallowing in the blood that streamed from a
+gash in the stomach. If All�gre had not been in the Bastille, the
+Parlement would have had him broken on the wheel in the Place de Gr�ve:
+the Bastille was his safety, though he could no longer hope for a speedy
+liberation.
+
+Danry, in his turn, wore out the patience of his guardians. Major
+Chevalier, who was kindness itself, wrote to the lieutenant of police:
+"He is no better than All�gre, but though more turbulent and choleric,
+he is much less to be feared in every respect." The physician of the
+Bastille, Dr. Boyer, a member of the Academy, wrote likewise: "I have
+good reason to distrust the man." The temper of Danry became embittered.
+He began to revile the warders. One morning they were obliged to take
+from him a knife and other sharp instruments he had concealed. He used
+the paper they gave him to open communications with other prisoners and
+with people outside. Paper was withheld: he then wrote with his blood on
+a handkerchief; he was forbidden by the lieutenant of police to write to
+him with his blood, so he wrote on tablets made of bread crumbs, which
+he passed out secretly between two plates.
+
+The use of paper was then restored to him, which did not prevent him
+from writing to Berryer: "My lord, I am writing to you with my blood on
+linen, because the officers refuse me ink and paper; it is now more than
+six times that I have asked in vain to speak to them. What are you
+about, my lord? Do not drive me to extremities. At least, do not force
+me to be my own executioner. Send a sentry to break my head for me; that
+is the very least favour you can do me." Berryer, astonished at this
+missive, remarked on it to the major, who replied: "I have not refused
+paper to Danry."
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Beginning of a letter written with blood on linen by Danry (Latude)
+     while a prisoner at Vincennes, to Rougemont, the king's lieutenant.
+]
+
+So the prisoner forced them more and more to the conclusion that he was
+a madman. On October 13, 1753, he wrote to Dr. Quesnay to tell him that
+he wished him well, but that being too poor to give him anything else,
+he was making him a present of his body, which was on the point of
+perishing, for him to make a skeleton of. To the paper on which he
+wrote, Danry had sewn a little square of cloth, adding: "God has given
+the garments of martyrs the virtue of healing all manner of diseases. It
+is now fifty-seven months since I have been suffering an enforced
+martyrdom. So there is no doubt that to-day the cloth of my coat will
+work miracles; here is a bit for you." This letter was returned to the
+lieutenant of police in December, and on it we find a marginal note in
+Berryer's hand: "A letter worth keeping, as it reveals the prisoner's
+mind." We know in what fashion madmen were wont to be treated in the
+eighteenth century.
+
+But suddenly, to the great astonishment of the officers of the ch�teau,
+our two friends amended their character and their conduct. No more
+noises were heard in their room, and they answered politely anyone who
+came to speak to them. But their behaviour was even more odd than ever.
+All�gre used to walk up and down the room half naked, "to save his
+toggery," he said, and he sent letter after letter to his brother and
+the lieutenant of police, asking them to send him things, particularly
+shirts and handkerchiefs. Danry followed suit. "This prisoner," wrote
+Chevalier to the lieutenant of police, "is asking for linen. I shall not
+make a requisition, because he has seven very good shirts, four of them
+new; he has shirts on the brain." But why decline to humour a prisoner's
+whim? So the commissary of the Bastille had two dozen expensive shirts
+made--every one cost twenty livres, more than thirty-three shillings of
+our money--and some handkerchiefs of the finest cambric.
+
+If the wardrobe-keeper of the Bastille had kept her eyes open, she would
+have noticed that the serviettes and cloths which went into the room of
+the two companions were of much smaller dimensions when they came out.
+Our friends had established communication with their neighbours above
+and below, begging twine and thread from them and giving tobacco in
+exchange. They had succeeded in loosening the iron bars which prevented
+climbing up the chimney; at night they used to mount to the platforms,
+whence they conversed down the chimneys with prisoners in the other
+towers. One of these hapless creatures believed himself to be a prophet
+of God; he heard at night the sound of a voice descending upon his cold
+hearth: he revealed the miracle to the officers, who only considered him
+still more insane than before. On the terrace All�gre and Danry found
+the tools left there in the evening by the masons and gardeners employed
+at the Bastille. Thus they got possession of a mallet, an auger, two
+sorts of pulleys, and some bits of iron taken from the gun-carriages.
+All these they concealed in the hollow between the floor of their room
+and the ceiling of the room below.
+
+All�gre and Danry escaped from the Bastille on the night of February 25,
+1756. They climbed up the chimney till they reached the platform, and
+descended by means of their famous rope ladder, fastened to a
+gun-carriage. A wall separated the Bastille moat from that of the
+Arsenal. By the aid of an iron bar they succeeded in working out a large
+stone, and they escaped through the hole thus made. Their rope ladder
+was a work of long patience and amazing skill. When in after days
+All�gre went mad, Danry appropriated the whole credit of this
+enterprise which his friend had conceived and directed.
+
+At the moment of leaving, All�gre had written on a scrap of paper, for
+the officers of the Bastille, the following note, which is an excellent
+indication of his character:--
+
+"We have done no damage to the furniture of the governor, we have only
+made use of a few rags of coverlets of no possible use; the others are
+left just as they were. If some serviettes are missing, they will be
+found at the bottom of the water in the great moat, whither we are
+taking them to wipe our feet.
+
+"_Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!_
+
+"_Scito cor nostrum et cognosce semitas nostras._"[46]
+
+Our two companions had provided themselves with a portmanteau, and they
+made haste to change their clothes as soon as they had cleared the
+precincts of the fortress. A foreman of works whom Danry knew interested
+himself in them, and conducted them to one Rouit, a tailor, who lodged
+them for some little time. Rouit even lent Danry forty-eight livres,
+which he promised to return as soon as he reached Brussels. At the end
+of a month our two friends were across the frontier.
+
+It is very difficult to follow Danry's proceedings from the time when he
+left Rouit to the moment of his reincarceration in the Bastille. He has
+left, it is true, two accounts of his sojourn in Flanders and Holland;
+but these accounts are themselves inconsistent, and both differ from
+some original documents which remain to us.
+
+The two fugitives had considered it advisable not to set out together.
+All�gre was the first to arrive at Brussels, whence he wrote an insolent
+letter to Madame de Pompadour. This letter led to his discovery. On
+reaching Brussels, Danry learnt that his friend had been arrested. He
+lost no time in making for Holland, and at Amsterdam he took service
+with one Paul Melenteau. From Rotterdam he had written to his mother,
+and the poor creature, collecting her little savings, sent him 200
+livres by post. But Saint-Marc had already struck on the track of the
+fugitive. "The burgomaster of Amsterdam readily and gladly granted the
+request made by Saint-Marc on behalf of the king, through the
+ambassador, for the arrest and extradition of Danry." Louis XV. confined
+himself to claiming him as one of his subjects. Saint-Marc, disguised as
+an Armenian merchant, discovered him in his retreat. Danry was arrested
+in Amsterdam on June 1, 1756, conducted to a cell belonging to the town
+hall, and thence brought back to France and consigned to the Bastille on
+June 9. Word came from Holland that Saint-Marc was there regarded as a
+sorcerer.
+
+By his second escape the unhappy man had succeeded in making his case
+very serious. In the eighteenth century, escape from a state prison was
+punishable with death. The English, great apostles of humanity as they
+were, were no more lenient than the French; and everyone knows what
+treatment was meted out by Frederick II. to Baron de Trenck. He was to
+have remained in prison only one year; but after his second escape he
+was chained up in a gloomy dungeon; at his feet was the grave in which
+he was to be buried, and on it his name and a death's-head had been cut.
+
+The government of Louis XV. did not punish with such rigour as this. The
+fugitive was simply put in the cells for a time. At the Bastille the
+cells were damp and chilly dungeons. Danry has left in his _Memoirs_ an
+account of the forty months spent in this dismal place,--an account
+which makes one's hair stand on end; but it is packed full of
+exaggeration. He says that he spent three years with irons on his hands
+and feet: in November, 1756, Berryer offered to remove the irons from
+either hands or feet at his choice, and we see from a marginal note by
+Major Chevalier that he chose the feet. Danry adds that he lay all
+through the winter on straw without any coverlet: he was actually so
+well supplied with coverlets that he applied to Berryer for some others.
+To believe him you would think that when the Seine was in flood the
+water rose as high as his waist: as a fact, when the water threatened to
+invade the cell, the prisoner was removed. Again, he says that he passed
+there forty months in absolute darkness: the light of his prison was
+certainly not very brilliant, but it was sufficient to enable him to
+read and write, and we learn from letters he sent to the lieutenant of
+police that he saw from his cell all that went on in the courtyard of
+the Bastille. Finally, he tells us of a variety of diseases he
+contracted at the time, and cites in this connection the opinion of an
+oculist who came to attend him. But this very report was forged by Danry
+himself, and the rest he invented to match.
+
+In this cell, where he professes to have been treated in so barbarous a
+manner, Danry, however, proved difficult enough to deal with, as we
+judge from the reports of Chevalier. "Danry has a thoroughly nasty
+temper; he sends for us at eight o'clock in the morning, and asks us to
+send warders to the market to buy him fish, saying that he never eats
+eggs, artichokes, or spinach, and that he insists on eating fish; and
+when we refuse, he flies into a furious passion." That was on fast days;
+on ordinary days it was the same. "Danry swore like a trooper, that is,
+in his usual way, and after the performance said to me: 'Major, when you
+give me a fowl, at least let it be stuffed!'" He was not one of the
+vulgar herd, he said, "one of those fellows you send to Bic�tre." And he
+demanded to be treated in a manner befitting his condition.
+
+It was just the same with regard to clothes. One is amazed at the sight
+of the lists of things the lieutenant of police got made for him. To
+give him satisfaction, the administration did not stick at the most
+unreasonable expense, and it was by selling these clothes that Danry, at
+his various escapes, procured a part of the money he was so much in
+need of. He suffered from rheumatism, so they provided him with
+dressing-gowns lined with rabbit-skin, vests lined with silk plush,
+gloves and fur hats, and first-rate leather breeches. In his _Memoirs_
+Danry lumps all these as "half-rotten rags." Rochebrune, the commissary
+charged with the prisoners' supplies, was quite unable to satisfy him.
+"You instructed me," he wrote to the major, "to get a dressing-gown made
+for the Sieur Danry, who asks for a calamanco with red stripes on a blue
+ground. I have made inquiries for such stuff of a dozen tradesmen, who
+have no such thing, and indeed would be precious careful not to have it,
+for there is no sale for that kind of calamanco. I don't see why I
+should satisfy the fantastic tastes of a prisoner who ought to be very
+well pleased at having a dressing-gown that is warm and well-fitting."
+On another occasion, the major writes: "This man Danry has never up to
+the present consented to accept the breeches that M. de Rochebrune got
+made for him, though they are excellent, lined with good leather, with
+silk garters, and in the best style." And Danry had his own pretty way
+of complaining. "I beg you," he wrote to the governor, "to have the
+goodness to tell M. de Sartine in plain terms that the four
+handkerchiefs he sent me are not fit to give to a galley-slave, and I
+will not have them on any account; but that I request him kindly to give
+me six print handkerchiefs, blue, and large, and two muslin cravats." He
+adds, "If there is no money in the treasury, go and ask Madame de
+Pompadour for some."
+
+One day Danry declared that something was wrong with his eyes.
+Grandjean, the king's oculist, came more than once to see him, ordered
+aromatic fumigations for him, gave him ointments and eye-salve; but it
+was soon seen that all that was wrong was that Danry desired to get a
+spy-glass, and to smuggle out, with the doctor's assistance, memoirs and
+letters.
+
+On September 1, 1759, Danry was removed from the cells and placed in a
+more airy chamber. He wrote at once to Bertin to thank him, and to tell
+him that he was sending him two doves. "You delight in doing good, and I
+shall have no less delight, my lord, if you favour me by accepting this
+slight mark of my great gratitude.
+
+"Tamerlaine allowed himself to be disarmed by a basket of figs presented
+to him by the inhabitants of a town he was proceeding to besiege. The
+Marquise de Pompadour is a Christian lady; I beg you to allow me to send
+her also a pair: perhaps she will allow her heart to be touched by these
+two innocent pigeons. I append a copy of the letter which will accompany
+them:--
+
+     "'MADAM,--Two pigeons used to come every day to pick grains out of
+     my straw; I kept them, and they gave me young ones. I venture to
+     take the liberty of presenting you with this pair as a mark of my
+     respect and affection. I beseech you in mercy to be good enough to
+     accept them, with as much pleasure as I have in offering them to
+     you. I have the honour to be, with the profoundest respect, Madam,
+     your very humble and obedient servant,
+
+"'DANRY, for eleven years at the Bastille.'"
+
+Why did not Danry always make so charming a use of the permission
+accorded him to write to the minister, the lieutenant of police, Madame
+de Pompadour, Dr. Quesnay, and his mother? He wrote incessantly, and we
+have letters of his in hundreds, widely differing one from another. Some
+are suppliant and pathetic: "My body is wasting away every day in tears
+and blood, I am worn out." He writes to Madame de Pompadour:--"Madam,--I
+have never wished you anything but well; be then sensible to the voice
+of tears, of my innocence, and of a poor despairing mother of sixty-six
+years. Madam, you are well aware of my martyrdom. I beg you in God's
+name to grant me my precious liberty; I am spent, I am dying, my blood
+is all on fire by reason of my groaning; twenty times in the night I am
+obliged to moisten my mouth and nostrils to get my breath." Everyone
+knows the famous letter beginning with the words, "I have been suffering
+now for 100,000 hours." He writes to Quesnay: "I present myself to you
+with a live coal upon my head, indicating my pressing necessity." The
+images he uses are not always so happy: "Listen," he says to Berryer,
+"to the voice of the just bowels with which you are arrayed"!
+
+In other letters the prisoner alters his tone; to plaints succeed cries
+of rage and fury, "he steeps his pen in the gall with which his soul is
+saturated." He no longer supplicates, he threatens. There is nothing to
+praise in the style of these epistles: it is incorrect and vulgar,
+though at times vigorous and coloured with vivid imagery. To the
+lieutenant of police he writes: "When a man is to be punished in this
+accursed prison, the air is full of it, the punishments fall quicker
+than the thunderbolt; but when it is a case of succouring a man who is
+unfortunate, I see nothing but crabs;" and he addresses to him these
+lines of Voltaire:--
+
+    "Perish those villains born, whose hearts of steel
+     No touch of ruth for others' woes can feel."
+
+He predicts terrible retribution for the ministers, the magistrates, and
+Madame de Pompadour. To her he writes: "You will see yourself one day
+like that owl in the park of Versailles; all the birds cast water upon
+him to choke him, to drown him; if the king chanced to die, before two
+hours were past someone would set five or six persons at your heels, and
+you would yourself pack to the Bastille." The accused by degrees becomes
+transformed into the accuser; he writes to Sartine: "I am neither a dog
+nor a criminal, but a man like yourself." And the lieutenant of police,
+taking pity on him, writes on one of these letters sent to the minister
+of Paris: "When Danry writes thus, it is not that he is mad, but frantic
+from long imprisonment." The magistrate counsels the prisoner "to keep
+out of his letters all bitterness, which can only do him harm." Bertin
+corrected with his own hand the petitions Danry sent to the Marquise de
+Pompadour; in the margin of one of them we read, "I should think I was
+prejudicing him and his interests if I sent on to Madame de Pompadour a
+letter in which he ventures to reproach her with having _abused his good
+faith and confidence_." Having amended the letter, the lieutenant of
+police himself carried it to Versailles.
+
+The years of captivity, far from humbling the prisoner and abasing his
+pride, only made him the more arrogant; his audacity grew from day to
+day, and he was not afraid of speaking to the lieutenants of police
+themselves, who knew his history, about his fortune which had been
+ruined, his brilliant career which had been cut short, his whole family
+plunged into despair. At first the magistrate would shrug his shoulders;
+insensibly he would be won over by these unwavering assertions, by this
+accent of conviction; and he ends actually by believing in this high
+birth, this fortune, this genius, in all which Danry had perhaps come to
+believe himself. Then Danry takes a still higher tone: he claims not
+only his freedom, but compensation, large sums of money, honours. But
+one must not think that this sprang from a sordid sentiment unworthy of
+him: "If I propose compensation, my lord, it is not for the sake of
+getting money, it is only so that I may smooth away all the obstacles
+which may delay the end of my long suffering."
+
+In return, he is very ready to give the lieutenant of police some good
+advice--to indicate the means of advancement in his career, to show him
+how to set about getting appointed secretary of state, to compose for
+him the speech he is to make to the king at his first audience. He adds:
+"This very time is extremely favourable to you; it is the auspicious
+hour: profit by it. Before they take horse on the day of rejoicing for
+the conclusion of peace, you ought to be a counsellor of state."
+
+He is very ready also to send to the king schemes conceived in his
+prison for the welfare of the realm. Now it is a suggestion to give
+sergeants and officers on the battlefield muskets instead of spontoons
+and pikes, by which the French arms would be strengthened by 25,000 good
+fusiliers. Now it is a suggestion for increasing postal facilities,
+which would augment the resources of the Treasury by several millions
+every year. He recommends the erection of public granaries in the
+principal towns, and draws up plans of battle for giving unheard-of
+strength to a column of men three deep. We might mention other and
+better suggestions. These notions were drowned in a flood of words, an
+unimaginable wealth of verbiage, with parallels drawn from the history
+of all periods and every country. His manuscripts were illustrated with
+pen and ink sketches. Danry copied and recopied them incessantly, sent
+them to all and sundry in all sorts of forms, persuaded the sentinels
+that these lofty conceptions intimately concerned the safety of the
+state and would win him an immense fortune. Thus he induced these good
+fellows to compromise their situation by carrying the papers secretly to
+ministers, members of the Parlement, marshals of France; he threw them
+from the windows of his room, and, wrapped in snowballs, from the top of
+the towers. These memoirs are the work of a man whose open and active
+mind, of incredible activity indeed, plans, constructs, invents without
+cessation or repose.
+
+Among these bundles of papers we have discovered a very touching letter
+from the prisoner's mother, Jeanneton Aubrespy, who wrote to her son
+from Montagnac on June 14, 1759:--
+
+     "Do not do me the injustice of thinking that I have forgotten you,
+     my dear son, my loving son. Could I shut you out of my thoughts,
+     you whom I bear always in my heart? I have always had a great
+     longing to see you again, but to-day I long more than ever, I am
+     constantly concerned for you, I think of nothing but you, I am
+     wholly filled with you. Do not worry, my dear son; that is the only
+     favour I ask of you. Your misfortunes will come to an end, and
+     perhaps it is not far off. I hope that Madame de Pompadour will
+     pardon you; for that I am trying to win heaven and earth over to
+     your cause. The Lord is putting my submission and yours to a long
+     test, so as to make us better realize the worth of His favour. Do
+     not distress yourself, my son. I hope to have the happiness of
+     receiving you again, and of embracing you more tenderly than ever.
+     Adieu, my son, my dear son, my loving son, I love you, and I shall
+     love you dearly to the grave. I beg you to give me news of your
+     health. I am, and always shall be, your good mother,
+
+DAUBRESPI, _widow_."
+
+
+
+Is not this letter charming in its artless pathos? The son's reply is
+equally touching; but on reading it again one feels that it was to pass
+under the eyes of the lieutenant of police; on examining it closely, one
+sees the sentiments grimacing between the lines.
+
+No one knew better than Danry how to play on the souls of others, to
+awake in them, at his will, pity or tenderness, astonishment or
+admiration. No one has surpassed him in the art, difficult in very
+truth, of posing as a hero, a genius, and a martyr, a part that we shall
+see him sustain for twenty years without faltering.
+
+In 1759 there entered upon the office of lieutenant of police a man who
+was henceforth to occupy Danry's mind almost exclusively--Gabriel de
+Sartine. He was a fine sceptic, of amiable character and pleasing
+manners. He was loved by the people of Paris, who boasted of his
+administrative abilities and his spirit of justice. He exerted himself
+in his turn to render the years of captivity less cruel to Danry. "He
+allowed me," writes the latter, "what no other State prisoner has ever
+obtained, the privilege of walking along the top of the towers, in the
+open air, to preserve my health." He cheered the prisoner with genial
+words, and urged him to behave well and no longer to fill his letters
+with insults. "Your fate," he told him, "is in your own hands." He
+looked into Danry's scheme for the construction of public granaries, and
+when he had read it said, "Really, there are excellent things, most
+excellent things in it." He visited Danry in prison and promised to do
+his utmost to obtain his liberation. He himself put into the hands of
+Madame de Pompadour the _Grand M�moire_ which Danry had drawn up for
+her. In this memorial the prisoner told the favourite that in return for
+a service he had rendered her in sending her a "hieroglyphic symbol" to
+put her on her guard against the machinations of her enemies, she had
+caused him to suffer unjustly for twelve years. Moreover, he would now
+only accept his freedom along with an indemnity of 60,000 livres. He
+added: "Be on your guard! When your prisoners get out and publish your
+cruelties abroad, they will make you hateful to heaven and the whole
+earth!" It is not surprising that this _Grand M�moire_ had practically
+no result. Sartine promised that he would renew his efforts on his
+behalf. "If, unhappily, you should meet with some resistance to the
+entreaties you are about to make for me," wrote Danry, "I take the
+precaution of sending you a copy of the scheme I sent to the king."
+(This was the memorial suggesting that muskets should be given to the
+officers and sergeants.) "Now the king has been putting my scheme in
+operation for five years or more, and he will continue to avail himself
+of it every time we are at war." Sartine proceeded to Versailles, this
+marvellous scheme in his pocket. He showed it to the ministers and
+pleaded on behalf of this prot�g� of his who, from the depths of his
+dungeon, was doing his country service. But on his return he wrote to
+the major of the Bastille a note in regard to Danry, in which we read:
+"They have not made use, as he believes, of his military scheme."
+
+Danry had asked several times to be sent to the colonies. In 1763 the
+government was largely occupied with the colonization of La D�sirade. We
+find a letter of June 23, 1763, in which Sartine proposes to send Danry
+to La D�sirade "with an introduction to the commanding officer." But
+nothing came of these proposals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All his life, Danry sought to compass his ends by the aid of women. He
+was well aware of all the tenderness and devotion there is in these
+light heads; he knew that sentiment is always stronger in them than
+reason: "I was always looking out for women, and wished to find young
+women, for their gentle and loving soul is more susceptible of pity;
+misfortune moves them, stirs in them a more lively interest; their
+impressionability is less quickly dulled, and so they are capable of
+greater efforts."
+
+While taking his walk on the towers of the Bastille in the fresh morning
+air, he tried by means of gestures and signals to open relations with
+the people of the neighbourhood. "One day I noticed two young persons
+working alone in a room, whose countenances struck me as pretty and
+gentle. I was not deceived. One of them having glanced in my direction,
+I wafted her with my hand a salutation which I endeavoured to make
+respectful and becoming, whereupon she told her sister, who instantly
+looked at me too. I then saluted them both in the same manner, and they
+replied to me with an appearance of interest and kindliness. From that
+moment we set up a sort of correspondence between us." The girls were
+two good-looking laundresses named Lebrun, the daughters of a wigmaker.
+And our rogue, the better to stimulate the little fools to enthusiastic
+service in his behalf, knocked at the door of their young hearts,
+willing enough to fly open. He spoke to them of youth, misfortune,
+love--and also of his fortune, prodigious, he said, the half of which he
+offered them. Glowing with ardour, the girls spared for him neither
+time, nor trouble, nor what little money they had.
+
+The prisoner had put them in possession of several of his schemes, among
+others the military one, with letters for certain writers and persons of
+importance, and in addition a "terrible" indictment of Madame de
+Pompadour for the king, in which "her birth and her shame, all her
+thefts and cruelties were laid bare." He begged the girls to have
+several copies made, which they were then to send to the addresses
+indicated. Soon large black crosses daubed on a neighbouring wall
+informed the prisoner that his instructions had been carried out. Danry
+seems no longer to have doubted that his woes were coming to an end,
+that the gates of the Bastille were about to fly open before him, and
+that he would triumphantly leave the prison only to enter a palace of
+fortune: _Parta victoria!_[47] he exclaims in a burst of happiness.
+
+And so we come to one of the most extraordinary episodes in this strange
+life.
+
+In December, 1763, the Marquise of Pompadour was taken seriously ill.
+"An officer of the Bastille came up to my room and said to me: 'Sir,
+write four words to the Marquise de Pompadour, and you may be sure that
+in less than a week you will have recovered your freedom.' I replied to
+the major that prayers and tears only hardened the heart of that cruel
+woman, and that I would not write to her. However, he came back next day
+with the same story, and I replied in the same terms as on the previous
+day. Scarcely had he gone than Daragon, my warder, came into my room and
+said: 'Believe the major when he tells you that within a week you will
+be free: if he tells you so, depend upon it he is sure of it.' Next day
+but one the officer came to me for the third time: 'Why are you so
+obstinate?' I thanked him--it was Chevalier, major of the Bastille--for
+the third time, telling him that I would sooner die than write again to
+that implacable shrew.
+
+"Six or eight days after, my two young ladies came and kissed their
+hands to me, at the same time displaying a roll of paper on which were
+written in large characters the words: 'Madame de Pompadour is dead!'
+The Marquise de Pompadour died on April 19, 1764, and two months
+afterwards, on June 19, M. de Sartine came to the Bastille and gave me
+an audience; the first thing he said was that we would say no more about
+the past, but that at the earliest moment he would go to Versailles and
+demand of the minister the justice which was my due." And we find, in
+truth, among the papers of the lieutenant of police, the following note,
+dated June 18, 1764: "M. Duval (one of the lieutenant's secretaries)--to
+propose at the first inspection that Danry be liberated and exiled to
+his own part of the country."
+
+Returning to his room, Danry reflected on these developments; for the
+lieutenant of police to show so much anxiety for his liberation was
+evidently a sign that he was afraid of him, and that his memorials had
+reached their destination and achieved their end. But he would be a
+great ass to be satisfied with a mere liberation: "100,000 livres" would
+scarcely suffice to throw oblivion over the injustices with which he had
+been overwhelmed.
+
+He revolved these thoughts in his head for several days. To accept
+freedom at the hands of his persecutors would be to pardon the past, a
+mistake he would never fall into. The door opened, the major entered,
+bearing in his hand a note written by de Sartine: "You will tell County
+Number 4 that I am working for his effectual liberation." The officer
+went out; Danry immediately sat down at his table and wrote to the
+lieutenant of police a letter replete with threats, insults, and
+obscenity. The original is lost, but we have an abstract made by Danry
+himself. He concluded with leaving to Sartine a choice: "he was either a
+mere lunatic, or else had allowed himself to be corrupted like a villain
+by the gold of the Marquis de Marigny, the Marquise de Pompadour's
+brother."
+
+"When Sartine received my letter, he wrote an answer which the major
+brought and read to me, in which these were his very words: that I was
+wrong to impute to him the length of my imprisonment, that if he had had
+his way I should long ago have been set free; and he ended by telling me
+that there was Bedlam for the mad. On which I said to the major: 'We
+shall see in a few days whether he will have the power to put me in
+Bedlam.' He did not deprive me of my walk on the towers; nine days
+after, he put me in the cells on bread and water." But Danry was not
+easily put out. No doubt they were only meaning to put his assurance to
+the test. He went down to his cell singing, and for several days
+continued to manifest the most confident gaiety.
+
+From that moment the prisoner made himself insufferable to his
+guardians. It was yells and violence from morning to night. He filled
+the whole Bastille with bursts of his "voice of thunder." Major
+Chevalier wrote to Sartine: "This prisoner would wear out the patience
+of the saintliest monk"; again: "He is full of gall and bitterness, he
+is poison pure and simple"; once more: "This prisoner is raving mad."
+
+The lieutenant of police suggested to Saint-Florentin, the minister, to
+transfer Danry to the keep of Vincennes. He was conducted there on the
+night of September 15, 1764. We are now entering on a new phase of his
+life. We shall find him still more wretched than in the past, but
+constantly swelling his demands and pretensions, and with reason, for he
+is now, mark you, a nobleman! He had learnt from a sentinel of the
+Bastille of the death of Henri Vissec de la Tude, lieutenant-colonel of
+a dragoon regiment, who had died at Sedan on January 31, 1761. From that
+day he determined that he was the son of that officer. And what were his
+reasons? Vissec de la Tude was from his own part of the country, he was
+a nobleman and rich, and he was dead. These arguments Danry considered
+excellent. He was, however, in complete ignorance of all that concerned
+his father and his new family; he did not know even the name "Vissec de
+la Tude," of which he made "Masers de la Tude"; Masers was the name of
+an estate belonging to Baron de Font�s, a relation of Henri de Vissec.
+The latter was not a marquis, as Danry believed, but simply a chevalier;
+he died leaving six sons, whilst Danry represents him as dying without
+issue. It goes without saying that all that our hero relates about his
+father in his _Memoirs_ is pure invention. The Chevalier de la Tude
+never knew of the existence of the son of Jeanneton Aubrespy, and when
+in later years Danry asked the children to recognize him as their
+natural brother, his pretensions were rejected. Nevertheless our
+gentleman will henceforth sign his letters and memoirs "Danry, or rather
+Henri Masers d'Aubrespy," then "de Masers d'Aubrespy," then "de Masers
+de la Tude." When Danry had once got an idea in his head, he never let
+it go. He repeated it unceasingly until he had forced it upon the
+conviction of all about him--pertinacity which cannot fail to excite our
+admiration. In the patent of Danry's pension of 400 livres granted by
+Louis XVI. in 1784, the king calls the son of poor Jeanneton "Vicomte
+Masers de la Tude."
+
+As may well be imagined, the Vicomte de la Tude could not accept his
+liberty on the same terms as Danry. The latter would have been satisfied
+with 60,000 livres: the viscount demands 150,000 and the cross of St.
+Louis to boot. So he writes to the lieutenant of police. Sartine was too
+sensible a man to be long obdurate to the prisoner on account of these
+extravagances. "I was transferred to the keep of Vincennes on the night
+of September 15, 1764. About nine hours after, the late M. de Guyonnet,
+king's lieutenant, came and saw me in the presence of the major and the
+three warders, and said: 'M. de Sartine has instructed me to inform you,
+on his behalf, that provided you behave yourself quietly for a short
+time, he will set you free. You have written him a very violent letter,
+and you must apologize for it.'" Danry adds: "When all is said and done,
+M. de Sartine did treat me well." He granted him for two hours every day
+"the extraordinary promenade of the moats." "When a lieutenant of
+police," says Danry, "granted this privilege to a prisoner, it was with
+the object of promptly setting him free." On November 23, 1765, Danry
+was walking thus, in company with a sentinel, outside the keep. The fog
+was dense. Turning suddenly towards his keeper, Danry said, "What do you
+think of this weather?" "It's very bad." "Well, it's just the weather to
+escape in." He took five paces and was out of sight. "I escaped from
+Vincennes," writes Danry, "without trickery; an ox would have managed it
+as well." But in the speech he delivered later in the National Assembly,
+the matter took a new complexion. "Think," he cried, "of the unfortunate
+Latude, in his third escape, pursued by twenty soldiers, and yet
+stopping and disarming under their very eyes the sentinel who had taken
+aim at him!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Latude was at large, he found himself without resources, as at his
+first escape. "I escaped with my feet in slippers and not a sou in my
+pocket; I hadn't a thing to bless myself with." He took refuge with his
+young friends, the Misses Lebrun.
+
+In their keeping he found a part of his papers, plans and projects,
+memorials and dissertations. He sent "a basketful" of these to Marshal
+de Noailles, begging him to continue to honour him with his protection,
+and imparting to him "four great discoveries he had just made; first,
+the true cause of the tides; secondly, the true cause of mountains, but
+for which the globe would be brought to a standstill and become
+speedily vitrified; thirdly, the cause of the ceaseless turning of the
+globe; fourthly, the cause of the saltness of sea-water." He wrote also
+to the Duke de Choiseul, minister of war, in order to obtain a reward
+for his military scheme; he wrote making overtures of peace to Sartine:
+in return for an advance of 10,000 crowns of the 150,000 livres due to
+him, he would overlook the past: "I was resolved," he says, "to stake
+all on one cast." In reply, he received a letter naming a house where he
+would find 1200 livres obtained for him by Dr. Quesnay. He proceeded to
+the address indicated--and was there captured.
+
+He was at once taken back to Vincennes. He declares that he was about to
+be set at liberty at the moment of his escape: and now a new detention
+was commencing. We shall not relate in detail the life he was now to
+lead. Materially he continued to be well treated, but his mind became
+affected, his rages became more and more violent, reaching at last
+paroxysms of fury. Here are some extracts from letters and memorials
+sent to Sartine: "By all the devils, this is coming it too strong. It is
+true, sir, that I'd defy the blackest devils in all hell to teach you
+anything in the way of cruelty; and that's but poor praise for you." He
+writes on another occasion: "The crime of every one of us is to have
+seen through your villainies: we are to perish, are we? how delighted
+you would be if some one told you that we had all strangled ourselves in
+our cells!" Danry reminds the lieutenant of police of the tortures of
+Enguerrand de Marigni, adding: "Remember that more than a thousand
+wretches have been broken in the Place de Gr�ve who had not committed
+the hundredth part of your crimes."... "Not a single person would be
+astonished to see you flayed alive, your skin tanned, and your carcase
+thrown into the gutters for the dogs to eat."... "But Monsieur laughs
+at everything, Monsieur fears neither God, nor king, nor devil, Monsieur
+swills down his crimes like buttermilk!"
+
+In prison Latude wrote memoirs which he filled with calumnies on the
+ministers and the court. These memoirs are composed in the most dramatic
+style, with an inimitable accent of sincerity. It was known that the
+prisoner found a thousand means of sending them outside the walls, and
+it was feared that they might be circulated among the populace, whose
+minds--the year is 1775--were beginning to ferment. Latude had just been
+flung into a cell in consequence of a fresh outbreak against his
+jailers. "On March 19, 1775, the king's lieutenant entered, accompanied
+by the major and three warders, and said to me: 'I have obtained leave
+to let you out of the cell, but on one condition: that you hand over
+your papers.'
+
+"'Hand over my papers! I tell you, sir, I'd rather be done to death in
+this cell than show the white feather so!'
+
+"'Your trunk is upstairs in your room: I've only to say the word and the
+seals would be broken and your papers taken out.'
+
+"I replied: 'Sir, justice has formalities to which you are bound to
+conform, and you are not allowed to commit such outrages.'
+
+"He took five or six steps out of the cell, and as I did not call him
+back, he came back himself and said: 'Just hand them to me for ten days
+to examine them, and I give you my word of honour that at the end of
+that time I will have them returned to your room.'
+
+"I replied: 'I will not let you have them for two hours even.'
+
+"'All right,' he said; 'as you won't entrust them to me, you have only
+to stay where you are.'"
+
+Latude relates in his _Memoirs_ with great indignation the story of a
+flute he had made, on which he used to play, his sole diversion during
+the long hours of solitude; his jailers had the barbarity to take it
+from him. The governor of the fortress, out of compassion, offered to
+restore it. "But it will only be on condition that you play by day only,
+and not at night." At this stipulation, writes Latude in his _R�veries_,
+"I could not refrain from bantering him, saying, 'Why, don't you know,
+sir, that forbidding a thing is just the way to make me eager for it?'"
+
+And so at Vincennes as at Paris they came to consider Danry as a madman.
+Among the books given him for his amusement there were some dealing with
+sorcery. These he read and re-read, and from that time onward he saw in
+all the incidents of his life nothing but the perpetual intervention of
+devils evoked by the witch Madame de Pompadour and her brother the
+magician, the Marquis de Marigny.
+
+Sartine came again to see the prisoner on November 8, 1772. Danry begged
+him to send a police officer to make a copy of a memorial he had drawn
+up for his own justification; to send also an advocate to assist him
+with his advice, and a doctor, to examine the state of his health. The
+police officer arrived on the 24th. On the 29th, he wrote to the
+lieutenant of police: "I have the honour to report that in pursuance of
+your orders I proceeded to the ch�teau of Vincennes on the 24th curt.,
+to hear from Danry something which, he asserts, concerns the minister:
+it is impossible to hear anything which concerns him less. He began by
+saying that to write all he had to tell me I should have to remain for
+three weeks with him. He was bound to tell me the story of 180
+sorceries, and I was to copy the story, according to him, from a heap of
+papers he drew from a bag, the writing of which is undecipherable."
+
+We know from Danry himself what passed at the visit of the advocate. He
+entered the prisoner's room about noon. Danry handed him two memorials
+he had drawn up and explained their purport. "Instantly he cut me short,
+saying, 'Sir, I have no belief whatever in witchcraft.' I did not give
+in, but said, 'Sir, I cannot show you the devil in bodily shape, but I
+am very certain I can convince you, by the contents of this memorial,
+that the late Marquise de Pompadour was a witch, and that the Marquis de
+Marigny, her brother, is at this very time still having dealings with
+the devil.'
+
+"The advocate had read but a few pages when he stopped dead, put the
+manuscript on the table, and said, as though he had been wakened out of
+a deep sleep, 'Would you not like to get out of prison?' I replied:
+'There's no doubt of that.' 'And do you intend to remain in Paris, or to
+go to your home?' 'When I am free, I shall go home.' 'But have you any
+means?' Upon this I took his hand and said: 'My dear sir, I beg you not
+to take offence at what I am going to say.' 'Speak on,' he said, 'say
+whatever you like, I shall not be offended.' 'Well then, I see very
+clearly that the devil has already got hold of you.'"
+
+In the same year, Malesherbes made his celebrated inspection of the
+prisons. "This virtuous minister came to see me at the beginning of
+August, 1775, and listened to me with the most lively interest." The
+historian who has the completest knowledge of everything relating to the
+Bastille, Fran�ois Ravaisson, believed that Malesherbes left the
+wretched man in prison out of regard for his colleague Maurepas. "One
+would have thought that Maurepas' first act on resuming office would
+have been to release his old accomplice." This conjecture is destroyed
+by a letter from Malesherbes to the governor of Vincennes: "I am busy,
+sir, with the examination of the papers relating to your various
+prisoners. Danry, Thorin, and Mar�chal are quite mad, according to the
+particulars furnished to me, and the two first gave indubitable marks
+of madness in my presence."
+
+In consequence, Danry was transferred to Charenton on September 27,
+1775, "on account of mental derangement, in virtue of a royal order of
+the 23rd of the said month, countersigned by Lamoignon. The king will
+pay for his keep." On entering his new abode, Latude took the precaution
+to change his name a third time, and signed the register "Danger."
+
+In passing from the fortress of Vincennes to the hospital of Charenton,
+Danry thought it was as well to rise still higher in dignity. So we see
+him henceforth styling himself "engineer, geographer, and royal
+pensioner at Charenton."
+
+His situation was sensibly changed for the better. He speaks of the
+kindnesses shown him by the Fathers of La Charit�.[48] He had companions
+whose society pleased him. Halls were set apart for billiards,
+backgammon, and cards. He had company at his meals and in his walks. He
+met All�gre, his old fellow-prisoner, whom he came upon among the
+dangerous lunatics in the dungeons; All�gre had been removed in 1763
+from the Bastille, where he was shattering and destroying everything.
+His latest fancy was that he was God. As to Danry, he had taken so
+kindly to his r�le as nobleman that to see his aristocratic and
+well-to-do air, to hear his conversation, full of reminiscences of his
+family and his early life, no one could have doubted that he actually
+was the brilliant engineer officer he set up for, who had fallen in the
+prime of life a victim to the intrigues of the favourite. He hobnobbed
+with the aristocratic section of society at Charenton and struck up an
+intimacy with one of his associates, the Chevalier de Moyria, son of a
+lieutenant-colonel, and a knight of Saint-Louis.
+
+Meanwhile the Parlement, which sent a commission every year to inspect
+the Charenton asylum--a commission before which Danry appeared on two
+separate occasions--did not decide that he ought to be set at liberty.
+But one fine day in September, 1776, the prior of the Fathers, who took
+a quite exceptional interest in the lot of his pensioner, meeting him in
+the garden, said to him abruptly: "We are expecting a visit from the
+lieutenant of police; get ready a short and taking address to say to
+him." The lieutenant of police, Lenoir, saw Danry, and listened to him
+attentively, and as the prior's account of him was entirely favourable,
+the magistrate promised him his liberty. "Then Father Prudentius, my
+confessor, who was behind me, drew me by the arm to get me away, fearing
+lest, by some imprudent word, I might undo the good that had been
+decided on"--a charming incident, much to the honour of Father
+Prudentius.
+
+But on consideration it appeared dangerous to fling so suddenly upon
+society a man who would be at a loss how to live, having neither
+relatives nor fortune, having no longer the means of gaining a
+livelihood, and a man, moreover, whom there was only too much reason to
+mistrust. Lenoir asked the prisoner if, once set at liberty, he would
+find the wherewithal to assure his existence; if he had any property; if
+he could give the names of any persons willing to go bail for him.
+
+What did this mean--_if_ he had any property, _if_ he could find
+sureties? He, Masers de Latude! Why, his whole family, when the Marquise
+de Pompadour had him put in the Bastille, was occupying a brilliant
+position! Why, his mother, of whose death he had had the agony to hear,
+had left a house and considerable estates! Latude took his pen, and
+without hesitation wrote to M. Caillet, royal notary at Montagnac: "My
+dear friend, I would bet ten to one you believe me dead; see how
+mistaken you are!... You have but to say the word and before the
+carnival is over we shall eat a capital leveret together." And he speaks
+to his friend the notary of the fortune left by his mother, and of his
+family, who all of them cannot fail to be interested in him. Latude
+himself was not greatly astonished at receiving no reply to this
+epistle: but it must have passed under the eyes of the lieutenant of
+police, and what more did he want?
+
+Latude's new friend, the Chevalier de Moyria, had already been for some
+time at liberty. The prisoner hastened to send him a copy of his letter
+to the notary. "The reply is a long time coming, M. Caillet is dead,
+doubtless." What is to become of him? These twenty-eight years of
+captivity have endangered his fortune, have made him lose his friends;
+how is he to find the remnant of his scattered family? Happily there
+remains to him a friendship, a friendship still recent, but already
+strong, in which he places his whole confidence. "Chevalier, it would
+only need your intervention to deliver me, by inducing your good mother
+to write to M. Lenoir." The Chevalier de Moyria sent an amiable reply.
+Danry wrote another and more urgent letter, with such success that not
+only the Chevalier's mother, but also an old friend of the Moyria
+family, Mercier de Saint-Vigor, a colonel, and controller-general of the
+queen's household, intervened, and made applications at Versailles. "On
+June 5, 1777, King Louis XVI. restored to me my freedom; I have in my
+pocket the warrant under his own hand!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On leaving Charenton, Danry signed an undertaking to depart immediately
+for Languedoc, an undertaking which he did not trouble to fulfil. Paris
+was the only city in France where a man of his stamp could thrive. He
+was now fifty-two years old, but was still youthful in appearance, full
+of go and vigour; his hair, as abundant as it had been in youth, had not
+become white. He soon found means of borrowing some money, and then we
+see him opening a campaign, exerting himself to get in touch with the
+ministers, gaining the protection of the Prince de Beauvau, distributing
+memorials in which he claimed a reward for great services rendered, and
+launched out into invectives against his oppressors, Sartine in
+particular. Minister Amelot sent for him, and in tones of severity
+notified him that he was to leave the city at once. Latude did not wait
+for the command to be repeated. He had reached Saint-Bris, about a
+hundred miles from the capital, when he was suddenly arrested by the
+police officer Marais. Brought back to Paris, he was locked up in the
+Ch�telet on July 16, 1777, and on August 1 conducted to Bic�tre. The
+first use he had made of his liberty was to introduce himself to a lady
+of quality and extort money from her by menaces. The officer found a
+considerable sum in his possession.
+
+Bic�tre was not a state prison like the Bastille and Vincennes, or an
+asylum like Charenton; it was the thieves' prison. On entering, Danry
+took the precaution of changing his name a fourth time, calling himself
+Jedor. He is, moreover, careful in his _Memoirs_ to give us the reason
+of this fresh metamorphosis: "I would not sully my father's name by
+inscribing it on the register of this infamous place." From this day
+there begins for him a truly wretched existence; huddled with criminals,
+put on bread and water, his lodging is a cell. But his long martyrdom is
+nearing its end: the hour of his apotheosis is at hand!
+
+Louis XVI. had now been on the throne for several years, and France had
+become the most impressionable country in the world. Tears flowed at the
+slightest provocation. Was it the sentimental literature, which Rousseau
+made fashionable, that produced this moving result, or contrariwise, was
+the literature successful because it hit the taste of the day? At all
+events, the time was ripe for Latude. His recent unlucky experience was
+not to dishearten him. On the contrary, it is with a greater energy, a
+more poignant emotion, and cries still more heartrending, that he
+resumes the story of his interminable sufferings. The victim of cruel
+oppressors, of cowardly foes who have their own reasons for smothering
+his voice, he will not bend his head under his abominable treatment; he
+will remain proud, self-assured, erect before those who load him with
+irons!
+
+On the birth of the Dauphin, Louis XVI. resolved to admit his wretched
+prisoners to a share of his joy and to pronounce a great number of
+pardons. A special commission, composed of eight counsellors of the
+Ch�telet and presided over by Cardinal de Rohan, sat at Bic�tre. Danry
+appeared before it on May 17, 1782. His new judges, as he testifies,
+heard his story with interest. But the decision of the commission was
+not favourable to him. He was not so much surprised at this as might be
+supposed: "The impure breath of vice," he wrote to the Marquis de
+Conflans, "has never tainted my heart, but there are magistrates who
+would let off guilty men with free pardons rather than expose themselves
+to the merited reproach of having committed injustice of the most
+revolting kind in keeping innocence for thirty-three years in irons."
+
+Giving rein to the marvellous activity of his brain, he composed at
+Bic�tre new schemes, memorials, and accounts of his misfortunes. To the
+Marquis de Conflans he sends a scheme for a hydraulic press, "the
+homage of an unfortunate nobleman who has grown old in irons"; he
+induces the turnkeys to carry memorials to all who may possibly interest
+themselves in him. The first to take compassion on him was a priest, the
+Abb� Legal, of the parish of St. Roch, and curate of Bic�tre. He visited
+him, consoled him, gave him money, showed him attentions. Cardinal de
+Rohan also took much interest in him, and sent him some assistance
+through his secretary. We are coming at last to Madame Legros. This
+wonderful story is so well known that we shall tell it briefly. A
+drunken turnkey chanced to lose one of Latude's memorials at a corner of
+the Rue des Foss�s-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois: it was picked up and
+opened by a woman, a haberdasher in a small way. Her heart burned within
+her as she read of these horrible sufferings, depicted in strokes of
+fire. She inspired her husband with her own emotion; henceforth it was
+to be the aim in life of these worthy people to effect the unhappy man's
+deliverance, and Madame Legros devoted herself to the self-imposed task
+with indefatigable ardour, courage, and devotion. "A grand sight," cries
+Michelet, "to see this poor, ill-clad woman going from door to door,
+paying court to footmen to win entrance into mansions, to plead her
+cause before the great, to implore their support!" In many houses she
+was well received. President de Gourgues, President de Lamoignon,
+Cardinal de Rohan, aided her with their influence. Sartine himself took
+steps on behalf of the unhappy man. Two advocates of the Parlement of
+Paris, Lacroix and Comeyras, devoted themselves to his cause. Copies
+were made of the prisoner's memorials and distributed in every
+drawing-room; they penetrated even into the boudoir of the queen. All
+hearts were stirred by the accents of this harrowing voice.
+
+The Marquis de Villette, who had become celebrated through the
+hospitality he showed to Voltaire when dying, conceived a passionate
+enthusiasm for Danry. He sent his steward to Bic�tre to offer him a
+pension of 600 livres on the sole condition of the prisoner's leaving
+his case entirely in the Marquis's hands. Latude received this singular
+proposal with becoming dignity. "For two years a poor woman has been
+devoting herself to my cause. I should be an ungrateful wretch if I did
+not leave my fate in her hands." He knew that this pension would not
+escape him, and it was not for 600 livres that he would have consented
+to rob his story of the touching and romantic features it was
+increasingly assuming.
+
+Further, the French Academy actually intervenes! D'Alembert is all fire
+and flame. From this time a stream of visitors of the highest
+distinction flows through the squalid prison. At length the king himself
+is led to look into the affair. He has the documentary evidence brought
+to him and examines it carefully. With what anxiety everyone awaits his
+decision! But Louis XVI., now acquainted with the case, replies that
+Latude will be released--_never_! At this decree, to all appearance
+irrevocable, all the prisoner's friends lose heart, except Madame
+Legros. The queen and Madame Necker are on her side. In 1783, Breteuil,
+the queen's man, comes into power; on March 24, 1784, the release is
+signed! The Vicomte de Latude receives a pension of 400 livres, but is
+exiled to his own part of the country. New importunities, new
+applications; at last they succeed: Latude is free to live in Paris!
+
+This is the grandest period in the life of a great man! Latude is soon
+in occupation of a modest but decent and well-ordered suite of rooms on
+the fourth floor. He lives with his two benefactors, M. and Madame
+Legros, petted, spoilt in a thousand ways. The Duchess of Beauvau has
+obtained for Madame Legros from Calonne, out of funds intended for the
+support of distressed gentlefolk, a pension of 600 livres: the Duchess
+of Kingston[49] grants a pension of the same amount. In addition to the
+royal pension, Latude receives 500 livres a year from President Dupaty
+and 300 from the Duke d'Ayen. Moreover, a public subscription is opened,
+and the list is filled with the greatest names in France. An agreeable
+competency is assured to the Legros couple and their adopted son. At its
+sitting on March 24, the French Academy solemnly awarded the Montyon
+prize to the valiant little haberdasher. "The Dame Legros came to
+receive the medal amid the acclamations of the whole assembly."
+
+The name of Latude is on everyone's lips; he wins admiration and pity on
+all sides. Ladies of the highest society are not above mounting to the
+fourth story, accompanied by their daughters, to bring the poor man "aid
+in money, with their tears." The hero has left a complacent description
+of the throng: duchesses, marchionesses, grandees of Spain, wearers of
+the cross of St. Louis, presidents of the Parlement, all these met at
+his house. Sometimes there were six or eight persons in his room.
+Everyone listened to his story and lavished on him marks of the most
+affectionate compassion, and no one failed before going away "to leave a
+mark of his sensibility." The wives of Marshals de Luxembourg and de
+Beauvau, the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, the Countess de Guimont, were
+among the most zealous. "Indeed," says our hero, "it would be extremely
+difficult for me to tell which of these countesses, marchionesses,
+duchesses, and princesses had the most humane, the most compassionate
+heart."
+
+Thus Latude became one of the lions of Paris: strangers flocked to his
+lodging, hostesses ran off with him. At table, when he spoke, all voices
+were hushed with an air of deference and respect; in the drawing-room
+you would find him seated in a gilt chair near the fireplace where great
+logs were blazing, and surrounded by a thick cluster of bright, silky,
+rustling robes. The Chevalier de Pougens, son of the Prince de Conti,
+pressed him to come and stay at his house; Latude graciously consented.
+The American ambassador, the illustrious Jefferson, invited him to
+dinner.
+
+Latude has himself described this enchanted life: "Since I left prison,
+the greatest lords of France have done me the honour of inviting me to
+eat with them, but I have not found a single house--except that of the
+Comte d'Angevillier, where you could meet men of wit and learning in
+scores, and receive all sorts of civilities on the part of the countess;
+and that of M. Guillemot, keeper of the royal palaces, one of the most
+charming families to be found in Paris--where you are more at your ease
+than with the Marquis de Villette.
+
+"When a man has felt, as I have felt, the rage of hunger, he always
+begins by speaking of his food. The Marquis de Villette possesses a cook
+who is a match for the most skilful in his art: in a word, his table is
+first-rate. At the tables of the dukes and peers and marshals of France
+there is eternal ceremony, and everyone speaks like a book, whereas at
+that of the Marquis de Villette, men of wit and learning always form the
+majority of the company. All the first-class musicians have a cover set
+at his table, and on at least three days of the week he gives a little
+concert."
+
+On August 26, 1788, died one of the benefactresses of Latude, the
+Duchess of Kingston, who did not fail to mention her prot�g� in her
+will. We see him dutifully assisting at the sale of the lady's furniture
+and effects. He even bought a few things, giving a _louis d' or_ in
+payment. Next day, the sale being continued, the auctioneer handed the
+coin back to Latude: it was bad. Bad! What! did they take the Vicomte de
+Latude for a sharper? The coin bad! Who, he would like to know, had the
+insolence to make "an accusation so derogatory to his honour and his
+reputation?" Latude raised his voice, and the auctioneer threatened to
+bundle him out of the room. The insolent dog! "Bundle out rogues, not
+gentlemen!" But the auctioneer sent for the police, who put "the Sieur
+de Latude ignominiously outside." He went off calmly, and the same day
+summoned the auctioneer before the Ch�telet tribunal, "in order to get a
+reparation as authoritative as the defamation had been public."
+
+In the following year (1789) Latude made a journey into England. He had
+taken steps to sue Sartine, Lenoir, and the heirs of Madame de Pompadour
+in the courts in order to obtain the damages due to him. In England, he
+drew up a memorandum for Sartine, in which he informed the late
+lieutenant of police of the conditions on which he would withdraw his
+actions. "M. de Sartine, you will give me, as compensation for all the
+harm and damage you have made me suffer unjustly, the sum of 900,000
+livres; M. Lenoir, 600,000 livres; the heirs of the late Marquise de
+Pompadour and Marquis de Menars, 100,000 crowns; in all, 1,800,000
+livres;" that is to say, about �160,000 in English money of to-day.
+
+[Illustration: LATUDE.
+
+_From the Painting by Vestier (H�tel Carnavalet)._]
+
+The Revolution broke out. If the epoch of Louis XVI., with its mildness
+and fellow-feeling, had been favourable to our hero, the Revolution
+seems to have been ordained on purpose for him. The people rose against
+the tyranny of kings: the towers of the Bastille were overthrown.
+Latude, the victim of kings, the victim of the Bastille and arbitrary
+warrants, was about to appear in all his glory.
+
+He hastened to throw into the gutter his powdered peruque and viscount's
+frock; listen to the revolutionist, fierce, inflexible, indomitable,
+_uncompromising_: "Frenchmen, I have won the right to tell you the
+truth, and if you are free, you cannot but love to hear it.
+
+"For thirty-five years I meditated in dungeons on the audacity and
+insolence of despots; with loud cries I was calling down vengeance, when
+France in indignation rose up as one man in one sublime movement and
+levelled despotism with the dust. The will to be free is what makes a
+nation free; and you have proved it. But to preserve freedom a nation
+must make itself worthy of it, and that is what remains for you to do!"
+
+In the Salon of 1789 there were two portraits of Latude with the famous
+ropeladder. Below one of these portraits, by Vestier, a member of the
+Royal Academy, these lines were engraved:--
+
+    Instruit par ses malheurs et sa captivit�
+    A vaincre des tyrans les efforts et la rage,
+    Il apprit aux Fran�ais comment le vrai courage
+            Peut conqu�rir la libert�.[50]
+
+In 1787 the Marquis de Beaupoil-Saint-Aulaire had written, inspired by
+Latude himself, the story of the martyr's captivity. Of this book two
+editions appeared in the same year. In 1789 Latude published the
+narrative of his escape from the Bastille, as well as his _Grand
+M�moire_ to the Marquise de Pompadour; finally, in 1790 appeared
+_Despotism Unmasked, or the Memoirs of Henri Masers de Latude_, edited
+by the advocate Thi�ry. The book was dedicated to La Fayette. On the
+first page we see a portrait of the hero, his face proud and energetic,
+one hand on the ropeladder, the other extended towards the Bastille
+which workmen are in the act of demolishing. "I swear," says the author
+at the commencement, "that I will not relate one fact which is not
+true." The work is a tissue of calumnies and lies; and what makes a most
+painful impression on the reader is to see this man disowning his
+mother, forgetting the privations she endured out of love for her son,
+and ascribing the credit of what little the poor thing could do for her
+child to a Marquis de la Tude, knight of St. Louis, and
+lieutenant-colonel of the Orleans Dragoons!
+
+But the book vibrates with an incomparable accent of sincerity and of
+that profound emotion which Latude knew so well how to infuse into all
+those with whom he had to do. In 1793, twenty editions had been
+exhausted, the work had been translated into several languages; the
+journals had no praise strong enough for the boldness and genius of the
+author; the _Mercure de France_ proclaimed that henceforth it was a
+parent's duty to teach his children to read in this sublime work; a copy
+was sent to all the departments, accompanied by a model of the Bastille
+by the architect Palloy. With good reason could Latude exclaim in the
+National Assembly: "I have not a little contributed to the Revolution
+and to its consolidation."
+
+Latude was not the man to neglect opportunities so favourable. To begin
+with, he sought to get his pension augmented, and presented to the
+Constituent Assembly a petition backed by representative Bouche. But
+Camus, "rugged Camus," president of the committee appointed to
+investigate the matter, decided on rejection; and at the sitting of
+March 13, 1791, deputy Voidel delivered a very spirited speech; his view
+was that the nation had unhappy folk to succour more worthy of their
+concern than a man whose life had begun with roguery and villainy. The
+Assembly sided with him; not only was Latude's pension not increased,
+but on consideration, the pension granted by Louis XVI. was altogether
+withdrawn.
+
+Horror and infamy! "What madness has seized on the minds of the
+representatives of the most generous nation in the world!... To slay a
+hapless wretch the mere sight of whom awakens pity and warms into life
+the most sluggish sensibility ... for death is not so terrible as the
+loss of honour!" The valiant Latude will not abide the stroke of such an
+insult. Ere long he has brought Voidel to retract; in the heart of the
+Assembly he gains an influential supporter in the Marshal de Broglie.
+The Constituent Assembly is replaced by the Legislative, and Latude
+returns to the charge. He is admitted to the bar of the House on January
+26, 1792; the matter is re-committed and gone into a second time on
+February 25. We should like to be able to quote at length the speech
+which Latude himself composed for his advocate; here is a portion of the
+peroration:--
+
+"That a man, without any outside assistance, should have been able to
+escape three times, once from the Bastille and twice from Vincennes,
+yes, gentlemen, I venture to say he could not have succeeded except by a
+miracle, or else that Latude has more than extraordinary genius. Cast
+your eyes on this ladder of rope and wood, and on all the other
+instruments which Latude constructed with a mere knife, which you see
+here in the centre of this chamber. I resolved to bring before your own
+eyes this interesting object, which will for ever win admiration from
+men of intelligence. Not a single stranger comes to Paris without going
+to see this masterpiece of intelligence and genius, as well as his
+generous deliverer, Madame Legros. We have resolved to give you,
+gentlemen, the pleasure of seeing this celebrated woman, who
+unremittingly for forty months set despotism at defiance, and vanquished
+it by dint of virtue. Behold her there at the bar with M. de Latude,
+behold that incomparable woman, for ever to be the glory and the
+ornament of her sex!"
+
+It is not surprising that the Legislative Assembly was deeply moved by
+this eloquent harangue and this exhibition of the lady, as touching as
+unexpected. It unanimously voted Latude a pension of 2000 livres,
+without prejudice to the pension of 400 livres previously awarded.
+Henceforth Latude will be able to say: "The whole nation adopted me!"
+
+However, the little mishap in the Constituent Assembly was to be the
+only check that Latude suffered in the course of his glorious martyr's
+career. Presented to the Society of "Friends of the Constitution," he
+was elected a member by acclamation, and the Society sent a deputation
+of twelve members to carry the civic crown to Madame Legros. The leader
+of the deputation said, in a voice broken by emotion, "This day is the
+grandest day of my life." A deputation from the principal theatres of
+Paris offered Latude free admission to all performances, "so that he
+might go often and forget the days of his mourning." He was surrounded
+by the highest marks of consideration; pleaders begged him to support
+their cases before the tribunals with the moral authority bestowed on
+him by his virtue. He took advantage of this to bring definitively
+before the courts his claims against the heirs of the Marquise de
+Pompadour. Citizen Mony argued the case for the first time before the
+court of the sixth arrondissement on July 16, 1793; on September 11 the
+case came again before the magistrates: Citizens Chaumette, Laurent, and
+Legrand had been designated by the Commune of Paris as counsel for the
+defence, and the whole Commune was present at the hearing. Latude
+obtained 60,000 livres, 10,000 of which were paid him in cash.
+
+And now his life became more tranquil. Madame Legros continued to lavish
+her care on him. The 50,000 livres remaining due to him from the heirs
+of the Marquise were paid in good farm lands situated in La Beauce, the
+profits of which he regularly drew.
+
+Let us hasten to add that France did not find in Latude an ungrateful
+child. The critical situation in which the nation was then struggling
+pained him deeply. He sought the means of providing a remedy, and in
+1799 brought out a "Scheme for the valuation of the eighty departments
+of France to save the Republic in less than three months," and a "Memoir
+on the means of re-establishing the public credit and order in the
+finances of France."
+
+When the estates of Madame de Pompadour were sequestrated, the farms
+Latude had received were taken from him; but he induced the Directory to
+restore them. He was less fortunate in his requisition for a licence for
+a theatre and a gaming-house. But he found consolation. The subsidies he
+went on extorting from right and left, the proceeds of his farms, the
+sale of his books, and the money brought in by the exhibition of his
+ropeladder, which was exhibited by a showman in the different towns of
+France and England, provided him with a very comfortable income.
+
+The Revolution became a thing of the past. Latude hailed the dawning
+glory of Bonaparte, and when Bonaparte became Napoleon, Latude made his
+bow to the emperor. We have a very curious letter in which he marks out
+for Napoleon I. the line of conduct he should pursue to secure his own
+welfare and the good of France. It begins as follows:--
+
+"SIRE,--I have been five times buried alive, and am well acquainted with
+misfortune. To have a heart more sympathetic than the common run of men
+it is necessary to have suffered great ills.... At the time of the
+Terror I had the delightful satisfaction of saving the lives of
+twenty-two poor wretches.... To petition Fouquet d'Etinville on behalf
+of the royalists was to persuade him that I was one myself. When I
+braved death in order to save the lives of twenty-two citizens, judge,
+great Emperor, if my heart can do ought but take great interest in you,
+the saviour of my beloved country."
+
+We are given some details of the last years of Latude's life in the
+_Memoirs_ of his friend, the Chevalier de Pougens, and in the _Memoirs_
+of the Duchess d'Abrant�s. The Chevalier tells us that at the age of
+seventy-five years he still enjoyed good health; he was "active and gay,
+and appeared to enjoy to the full the delights of existence. Every day
+he took long walks in Paris without experiencing the least fatigue.
+People were amazed to find _no trace_ of the cruel sufferings he had
+undergone in the cells during a captivity of thirty-five years." His
+popularity suffered no diminution under the Empire. Junot awarded him a
+pension from funds at his disposal. One day the general presented him
+to his wife, along with Madame Legros, whose side Latude never left.
+"When he arrived," says the Duchess d'Abrant�s, "I went to greet him
+with a respect and an emotion that must have been truly edifying. I took
+him by the hand, conducted him to a chair, and put a cushion under his
+feet; in fact, he might have been my grandfather, whom I could not have
+treated better. At table I placed him on my right. But," adds the
+Duchess, "my enchantment was of short duration. He talked of nothing but
+his own adventures with appalling loquacity."
+
+At the age of eighty, a few months before his death, Latude wrote in the
+most familiar terms to his protector, the Chevalier de Pougens, a member
+of the Institute: "Now I assure you in the clearest possible words, that
+if within ten days of the present time, the 11th Messidor, you have not
+turned up in Paris (the Chevalier was staying at his country estate), I
+shall start the next day and come to you with the hunger of a giant and
+the thirst of a cabby, and when I have emptied your cellar and eaten you
+out of house and home you will see me play the second act of the comedy
+of _Jocrisse_[51]; you will see me run off with your plates, and dishes,
+and tankards, and bottles--empty, you may be sure--and fling all your
+furniture out of the window!"
+
+On July 20, 1804, Latude compiled one more circular, addressed to the
+sovereigns of Europe: the kings of Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, the
+Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor; and to the President of the
+United States. To each of them he sent a copy of his _Memoirs_,
+accompanied by the famous scheme for replacing with muskets the pikes
+with which the sergeants were armed. He explained to each of the
+sovereigns that as the country he ruled was profiting by this child of
+his genius, it was only just that he should reap some benefit.
+
+Jean Henri, surnamed Danry, alias Danger, alias Jedor, alias Masers
+d'Aubrespy, alias De Masers de Latude, died of pneumonia at Paris, on
+January 1, 1805, aged eighty years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY.
+
+
+In the remarkable book entitled _Paris during the Revolution_, M.
+Adolphe Schmidt writes: "All the purely revolutionary events, the events
+of the Fourteenth of July, of October 5 and 6, 1789, were the work of an
+obscure minority of reckless and violent revolutionists. If they
+succeeded, it was only because the great majority of the citizens
+avoided the scene of operations or were mere passive spectators there,
+attracted by curiosity, and giving in appearance an enhanced importance
+to the movement." Further on he says: "After the fall of the
+Gironde,[52] Dutard expressed himself in these terms: 'If, out of 50,000
+Moderates, you succeed in collecting a compact body of no more than
+3000, I shall be much astonished; and if out of these 3000 there are to
+be found only 500 who are agreed, and courageous enough to express their
+opinion, I shall be still more astonished. And these, in truth, must
+expect to be Septembrised.'[53] 'Twelve maniacs, with their blood well
+up, at the head of the Sansculotte section,' writes Dutard in another
+report, 'would put to flight the other forty-seven sections of Paris.'
+Mercier, after the fall of the Gironde, thus expresses himself in regard
+to the reign of Terror: 'Sixty brigands deluged France with blood:
+500,000 men within our walls were witnesses of their atrocities, and
+were not brave enough to oppose them.'"
+
+To enable the reader to understand the extraordinary and improbable
+event which is the subject of this chapter, it would be necessary to
+begin by explaining the circumstances and describing the material and
+moral state of things in which it happened; and that, unhappily, would
+occupy much space. Let us take the two principal facts, see what they
+led to, and then come to the events of the Fourteenth of July.
+
+For its task of governing France, the royal power had in its hands no
+administrative instrument, or, at any rate, administrative instruments
+of a very rudimentary character. It ruled through tradition and
+sentiment. The royal power had been created by the affection and
+devotion of the nation, and in this devotion and affection lay its whole
+strength.
+
+What, actually and practically, were the means of government in the
+hands of the king? "Get rid of _lettres de cachet_," observed
+Malesherbes, "and you deprive the king of all his authority, for the
+_lettre de cachet_ is the only means he possesses of enforcing his will
+in the kingdom." Now, for several years past, the royal power had
+practically renounced _lettres de cachet_. On the other hand, during the
+course of the eighteenth century, the sentiments of affection and
+devotion of which we have spoken had become enfeebled, or at least had
+changed their character. So it was that on the eve of the Revolution the
+royal power, which stood in France for the entire administration, had,
+if the expression may be allowed, melted into thin air.
+
+Below the royal power, the lords in the country, the upper ten in the
+towns, constituted the second degree in the government. The same remarks
+apply here also. And unhappily it is certain that, over the greater part
+of France, the territorial lords had forgotten the duties which their
+privileges and their station imposed. The old attachment of the
+labouring classes to them had almost everywhere disappeared, and in many
+particulars had given place to feelings of hostility.
+
+Thus on the eve of '89 the whole fabric of the state had no longer any
+real existence: at the first shock it was bound to crumble into dust.
+And as, behind the fragile outer wall, there was no solid structure--no
+administrative machine, with its numerous, diverse, and nicely-balanced
+parts, like that which in our time acts as a buffer against the shocks
+of political crises,--the first blow aimed at the royal power was bound
+to plunge the whole country into a state of disorganization and
+disorder from which the tyranny of the Terror, brutal, blood-stained,
+overwhelming as it was, alone could rescue it.
+
+Such is the first of the two facts we desire to make clear. We come now
+to the second. Ever since the year 1780, France had been almost
+continually in a state of famine. The rapidity and the abundance of the
+international exchanges which in our days supply us constantly from the
+remotest corners of the world with the necessaries of life, prevent our
+knowing anything of those terrible crises which in former days swept
+over the nations. "The dearth," writes Taine, "permanent, prolonged,
+having already lasted ten years, and aggravated by the very outbreaks
+which it provoked, went on adding fuel to all the passions of men till
+they reached a blaze of madness." "The nearer we come to the Fourteenth
+of July," says an eye witness, "the greater the famine becomes." "In
+consequence of the bad harvest," writes Schmidt, "the price of bread had
+been steadily rising from the opening of the year 1789. This state of
+things was utilized by the agitators who aimed at driving the people
+into excesses: these excesses in turn paralyzed trade. Business ceased,
+and numbers of workers found themselves without bread."
+
+A few words should properly be said in regard to brigandage under the
+_ancien r�gime_. The progress of manners and especially the development
+of executive government have caused it utterly to disappear. The
+reader's imagination will supply all we have not space to say. He will
+recollect the lengths of daring to which a man like Cartouche[54] could
+go, and recall what the forest of Bondy[55] was at the gates of Paris.
+
+So grew up towards the end of the _ancien r�gime_ what Taine has so
+happily called a spontaneous anarchy. In the four months preceding the
+capture of the Bastille, one can count more than three hundred riots in
+France. At Nantes, on January 9, 1789, the town hall was invaded, and
+the bakers' shops pillaged. All this took place to the cries of "Vive le
+roi!" At Bray-sur-Seine, on May 1, peasants armed with knives and clubs
+forced the farmers to lower the price of corn. At Rouen, on May 28, the
+corn in the market place was plundered. In Picardy, a discharged
+carabineer put himself at the head of an armed band which attacked the
+villages and carried off the corn. On all sides houses were looted from
+roof to cellar. At Aupt, M. de Montferrat, defending himself, was "cut
+into little pieces." At La Seyne, the mob brought a coffin in front of
+the house of one of the principal burgesses; he was told to prepare for
+death, and they would do him the honour to bury him. He escaped, and his
+house was sacked. We cull these facts haphazard from among hundreds of
+others.
+
+The immediate neighbourhood of Paris was plunged in terror. The batches
+of letters, still unpublished, preserved in the National Archives throw
+the most vivid light on this point. Bands of armed vagabonds scoured the
+country districts, pillaging the villages and plundering the crops.
+These were the "Brigands," a term which constantly recurs in the
+documents, and more and more frequently as we approach the 14th of July.
+These armed bands numbered three, four, five hundred men. At Cosne, at
+Orleans, at Rambouillet, it was the same story of raids on the corn. In
+different localities of the environs of Paris, the people organized
+themselves on a military basis. Armed burghers patrolled the streets
+against the "brigands." From all sides the people rained on the king
+demands for troops to protect them. Towns like Versailles, in dread of
+an invasion by these ruffians, implored the king for protection: the
+letters of the municipal council preserved in the National Archives are
+in the highest degree instructive.
+
+At this moment there had collected in the outskirts of Paris those
+troops whose presence was in the sequel so skilfully turned to account
+by the orators of the Palais-Royal. True, the presence of the troops
+made them uneasy. So far were the soldiers from having designs against
+the Parisians that in the secret correspondence of Villedeuil we find
+the court constantly urging that they should be reserved for the
+safeguarding of the adjoining districts, which were every day exposed to
+attack, and for the safe conduct of the convoys of corn coming up to
+Versailles and Paris. Bands mustered around the capital. In the first
+weeks of May, near Villejuif, a troop of from five to six hundred
+ruffians met intending to storm Bic�tre and march on Saint-Cloud. They
+came from distances of thirty, forty, and fifty leagues, and the whole
+mass surged around Paris and was swallowed up there as into a sewer.
+During the last days of April the shopmen saw streaming through the
+barriers "a terrific number of men, ill clad and of sinister aspect." By
+the first days of May, it was noticed that the appearance of the mob had
+altogether changed. There was now mingled with it "a number of strangers
+from all the country parts, most of them in rags, and armed with huge
+clubs, the mere aspect of them showing what was to be feared." In the
+words of a contemporary, "one met such physiognomies as one never
+remembered having seen in the light of day." To provide occupation for a
+part of these ill-favoured unemployed, whose presence everybody felt to
+be disquieting, workshops were constructed at Montmartre, where from
+seventeen to eighteen thousand men were employed on improvised tasks at
+twenty sous a day.
+
+Meanwhile the electors chosen to nominate deputies to the National
+Assembly had been collecting. On April 22, 1789, Thiroux de Crosne, the
+lieutenant of police, speaking of the tranquillity with which the
+elections were being carried on, added: "But I constantly have my eye on
+the bakers."
+
+On April 23, de Crosne referred to the irritation which was showing
+itself among certain groups of workmen in the Suburb Saint-Antoine
+against two manufacturers, Dominique Henriot, the saltpetre-maker, and
+R�veillon, the manufacturer of wall-papers. Henriot was known, not only
+for his intelligence, but for his kindliness; in years of distress he
+had sacrificed a portion of his fortune for the support of the workmen;
+as to R�veillon, he was at this date one of the most remarkable
+representatives of Parisian industry. A simple workman to begin with, he
+was in 1789 paying 200,000 livres a year in salaries to 300 workers;
+shortly before, he had carried off the prize founded by Necker for the
+encouragement of useful arts. Henriot and R�veillon were said to have
+made offensive remarks against the workmen in the course of the recent
+electoral assemblies. They both denied, however, having uttered the
+remarks attributed to them, and there is every reason to believe that
+their denials were genuine.
+
+During the night of April 27 and the next day, howling mobs attacked the
+establishments of Henriot and R�veillon, which were thoroughly
+plundered. Commissary Gueullette, in his report of May 3, notes that a
+wild and systematic devastation was perpetrated. Only the walls were
+left standing. What was not stolen was smashed into atoms. The
+"brigands"--the expression used by the Commissary--threw a part of the
+plant out of the windows into the street, where the mob made bonfires of
+it. Part of the crowd were drunk; nevertheless they flung themselves
+into the cellars, and the casks were stove in. When casks and bottles
+were empty, the rioters attacked the flasks containing colouring
+matter; this they absorbed in vast quantities, and reeled about with
+fearful contortions, poisoned. When these cellars were entered next day,
+they presented a horrible spectacle, for the wretches had come to
+quarrelling and cutting each other's throats. "The people got on to the
+roofs," writes Thiroux de Crosne, "whence they rained down upon the
+troops a perfect hailstorm of tiles, stones, &c.; they even set rolling
+down fragments of chimneys and bits of timber; and although they were
+fired upon several times and some persons were killed, it was quite
+impossible to master them."
+
+The riot was not quelled by the troops until 10 o'clock that night; more
+than a hundred persons were left dead in the street. M. Alexandre Tuetey
+has devoted some remarkable pages to R�veillon's affair; he has
+carefully studied the interrogatories of rioters who were arrested. The
+majority, he says, had been drunk all day. R�veillon, as is well known,
+only found safety by taking refuge in the Bastille. He was the only
+prisoner whom the Bastille received throughout the year 1789.
+
+In the night following these bacchanalian orgies, the agents of the
+Marquis du Ch�telet, colonel of the Gardes Fran�aises, having crept
+along one of the moats, "saw a crowd of brigands" collected on the
+further side of the Tr�ne gate. Their leader was mounted on a table,
+haranguing them.
+
+We come upon them again in the report of Commissary Vauglenne, quoted by
+M. Alexandre Tuetey. "On April 29, Vauglenne took the depositions of
+bakers, confectioners, and pork butchers of the Marais, who had been
+robbed by veritable bands of highwaymen, who proceed by burglary and
+violence; they may possibly be starving men, but they look and act
+uncommonly like gentlemen of the road."
+
+Meanwhile, in the garden of the Palais-Royal, Camille Desmoulins was
+haranguing groups of the unemployed and ravenous outcasts, who were
+pressing round him with wide glaring eyes. Desmoulins vociferates: "The
+beast is in the trap; now to finish him!... Never a richer prey has ever
+been offered to conquerors! Forty thousand palaces, mansions, ch�teaux,
+two-fifths of the wealth of France will be the prize of valour. Those
+who have set up as our masters will be mastered in their turn, the
+nation will be purged!" It is easy to understand that in Paris the alarm
+had become as acute as in the country; everyone was in terror of the
+"brigands." On June 25 it was decided to form a citizen militia for the
+protection of property. "The notoriety of these disorders," we read in
+the minutes of the electors, "and the excesses committed by several mobs
+have decided the general assembly to re-establish without delay the
+militia of Paris." But a certain time was necessary for the organization
+of this civil guard. On June 30, the doors of the Abbaye, where some
+Gardes Fran�aises had been locked up, some for desertion, others for
+theft, were broken in by blows from hatchets and hammers. The prisoners
+were led in triumph to the Palais-Royal, where they were f�ted in the
+garden. The extent of the disorders was already so great that the
+government, powerless to repress them, had perforce to grant a general
+pardon. From that day there was no longer any need to capture the
+Bastille, the _ancien r�gime_ was lost.
+
+The disturbances at the Palais-Royal, the rendezvous of idlers, light
+women, and hot-headed fools, were becoming ever more violent. They began
+to talk of setting fire to the place. If some honest citizen plucked up
+courage to protest he was publicly whipped, thrown into the ponds, and
+rolled in the mud.
+
+On July 11, Necker was dismissed from the ministry and replaced by
+Breteuil. At this time Necker was very popular; Breteuil was not, though
+he ought to have been, particularly in the eyes of supporters of a
+revolutionary movement. Of all the ministers of the _ancien r�gime_, and
+of all the men of his time, Breteuil was the one who had done most for
+the suppression of _lettres de cachet_ and of state prisons. It was he
+who had closed Vincennes and the Ch�timoine tower of Caen, who had got
+the demolition of the Bastille decided on, who had set Latude at
+liberty, and how many other prisoners! who had drawn up and made
+respected, even in the remotest parts of the kingdom, those admirable
+circulars which will immortalize his name, by which he ordered the
+immediate liberation of all prisoners whose detention was not absolutely
+justified, and laid down such rigorous formalities for the future, that
+the arbitrary character of _lettres de cachet_ may be said to have been
+destroyed by them. Nevertheless the orators of the Palais-Royal
+succeeded in persuading many people that the advent of Breteuil to the
+ministry presaged a "St. Bartholomew of patriots." The agitation became
+so vehement, the calumnies against the court and the government were
+repeated with so much violence, that the court, in order to avoid the
+slightest risk of the outbreak of a "St. Bartholomew," ordered all the
+troops to be withdrawn and Paris to be left to itself.
+
+Meanwhile, Camille Desmoulins was continuing to thunder forth: "I have
+just sounded the people. My rage against the despots was turned to
+despair. I did not see the crowds, although keenly moved and dismayed,
+strongly enough disposed to insurrection.... I was rather lifted on to
+the table than mounted there myself. Scarcely was I there than I saw
+myself surrounded by an immense throng. Here is my short address, which
+I shall never forget: 'Citizens! there is not a moment to lose. I come
+from Versailles; M. Necker is dismissed; this dismissal is the alarm
+bell of a St. Bartholomew of patriots; this evening all the Swiss and
+German battalions will march from the Champ de Mars to cut our throats.
+Only one resource remains to us: we must fly to arms!'"
+
+The Parisians were in an abject state of fright, but it was not the
+Swiss and German battalions which terrified them. The author of the
+_Memorable Fortnight_, devoted heart and soul as he was to the
+revolutionary movement, acknowledges that during the days from the 12th
+to the 14th of July, all respectable people shut themselves up in their
+houses. And while the troops and decent people were retiring, the dregs
+were coming to the surface. During the night of July 12, the majority of
+the toll gates, where the town dues were collected, were broken open,
+plundered, and set on fire. "Brigands," armed with pikes and clubs,
+scoured the streets, threatening the houses in which the trembling and
+agitated citizens had shut themselves. Next day, July 13, the shops of
+the bakers and wine merchants were rifled. "Girls snatched the earrings
+from women who went by; if the ring resisted, the ear was torn in two."
+"The house of the lieutenant of police was ransacked, and Thiroux de
+Crosne had the utmost difficulty in escaping from the bands armed with
+clubs and torches. Another troop, with murderous cries, arrived at the
+Force, where prisoners for debt were confined: the prisoners were set
+free. The Garde-Meuble was ransacked. One gang broke in with their axes
+the door of the Lazarists, smashed the library, the cupboards, the
+pictures, the windows, the physical laboratory, dived into the cellar,
+stove in the wine-casks and got gloriously drunk. Twenty-four hours
+afterwards some thirty dead and dying were found there, men and women,
+one of the latter on the point of childbirth. In front of the house the
+street was full of d�bris and of brigands, who held in their hands, some
+eatables, others a pitcher, forcing wayfarers to drink and filling for
+all and sundry. Wine flowed in torrents." Some had possessed themselves
+of ecclesiastical robes, which they put on, and in this attire yelled
+and gesticulated down the street. In the minute books of the electors we
+read at this date: "On information given to the committee that the
+brigands who had been dispersed showed some disposition to reassemble
+for the purpose of attacking and pillaging the Royal Treasury and the
+Bank, the committee ordered these two establishments to be guarded." On
+the same day, they luckily succeeded in disarming more than a hundred
+and fifty of these roisterers, who, drunk with wine and brandy, had
+fallen asleep inside the H�tel de Ville. Meanwhile the outskirts of
+Paris were no safer than the city itself, and from the top of the towers
+of the Bastille they could see the conflagrations which were started in
+various quarters.
+
+The organization of the citizen militia against these disorders was
+becoming urgent. When evening came, the majority of the districts set
+actively to work. Twelve hundred good citizens mustered in the Petit
+Saint-Antoine district. It was a motley crew: tradesmen and artisans,
+magistrates and doctors, writers and scholars, cheek by jowl with
+navvies and carpenters. The future minister of Louis XVI., Champion de
+Villeneuve, filled the post of secretary. The twelve hundred citizens,
+as we read in the minutes, "compelled to unite by the too well founded
+alarm inspired in all the citizens by the danger which seems to threaten
+them each individually, and by the imminent necessity of taking prompt
+measures to avert its effects, considering that a number of
+individuals, terrified perhaps by the rumours which doubtless
+evil-disposed persons have disseminated, are traversing, armed and in
+disorder, all the streets of the capital, and that the ordinary town
+guard either mingles with them or remains a passive spectator of the
+disorder it cannot arrest; considering also that the prison of the Force
+has been burst into and opened for the prisoners, and that it is
+threatened to force open in the same way the prisons which confine
+vagabonds, vagrants, and convicts ... in consequence, the assembled
+citizens decide to organize themselves into a citizen militia. Every man
+will carry while on duty whatever arms he can procure, save and except
+pistols, which are forbidden as dangerous weapons.... There will always
+be two patrols on duty at a time, and two others will remain at the
+place fixed for headquarters." Most of the other districts imitated the
+proceedings of the Petit-Saint-Antoine. They sent delegates to the H�tel
+des Invalides to ask for arms. The delegates were received by Besenval,
+who would have been glad to grant them what they requested; but he must
+have proper instructions. He writes in his _Memoirs_ that the delegates
+were in a great state of fright, saying that the "brigands" were
+threatening to burn and pillage their houses. The author of the
+_Memorable Fortnight_ dwells on the point that the militia of Paris was
+formed in self-defence against the excesses of the brigands. Speaking of
+the minute book of the Petit-Saint-Antoine district, an excellent
+authority, M. Charavay, writes: "The burgesses of Paris, less alarmed
+at the plans of the court than at the men to whom the name of _brigands_
+had already been given, organized themselves into a militia to resist
+them: that was their only aim. The movement which on the next day swept
+away the Bastille might perhaps have been repressed by the National
+Guard if its organization had had greater stability." The fact could not
+have been better put.
+
+The H�tel de Ville was attacked, and one of the electors, Legrand, only
+cleared it of the hordes who were filling it with their infernal uproar
+by ordering six barrels of powder to be brought up, and threatening to
+blow the place up if they did not retire.
+
+During the night of July 13, the shops of the bakers and wine-sellers
+were pillaged. The excellent Abb� Morellet, one of the Encyclop�dists,
+who, as we have seen, was locked up in the Bastille under Louis XV.,
+writes: "I spent a great part of the night of the 13th at my windows,
+watching the scum of the population armed with muskets, pikes, and
+skewers, as they forced open the doors of the houses and got themselves
+food and drink, money and arms." Mathieu Dumas also describes in his
+_Souvenirs_ these ragged vagabonds, several almost naked, and with
+horrible faces. During these two days and nights, writes Bailly, Paris
+ran great risk of pillage, and was only saved by the National Guard.
+
+The proceedings of these bandits and the work of the National Guard are
+described in a curious letter from an English doctor, named Rigby, to
+his wife. "It was necessary not only to give arms to those one could
+rely on, but to disarm those of whom little protection could be expected
+and who might become a cause of disorder and harm. This required a good
+deal of skill. Early in the afternoon we began to catch a glimpse here
+and there among the swarms of people, where we saw signs of an
+irritation which might soon develop into excesses, of a man of decent
+appearance, carrying a musket with a soldierly air. These slowly but
+surely increased in number; their intention was evidently to pacify and
+at the same time to disarm the irregular bands. They had for the most
+part accomplished their task before nightfall. Then the citizens who had
+been officially armed occupied the streets almost exclusively: they were
+divided into several sections, some mounting guard at certain points,
+others patrolling the streets, all under the leadership of captains.
+When night came, only very few of those who had armed themselves the
+evening before could be seen. Some, however, had refused to give up
+their arms, and during the night it was seen how well founded had been
+the fears they had inspired, for they started to pillage. But it was too
+late to do so with impunity. The looters were discovered and seized, and
+we learnt next morning that several of these wretches, taken redhanded,
+had been executed." Indeed, the repressive measures of the citizens were
+not wanting in energy. Here and there brigands were strung up to the
+lamp-posts, and then despatched, as they hung there, with musket shots.
+
+The author of the _Authentic History_, who left the best of the
+contemporary accounts of the taking of the Bastille which we possess,
+says rightly enough: "The riot began on the evening of July 12." There
+was thus a combination of disorders and "brigandage" in which the
+capture of the Bastille, though it stands out more prominently than the
+other events, was only a part, and cannot be considered by itself.
+
+The morning of the Fourteenth dawned bright and sunny. A great part of
+the population had remained up all night, and daylight found them still
+harassed with anxiety and alarm. To have arms was the desire of all; the
+citizens and supporters of order, so as to protect themselves; the
+brigands, a part of whom had been disarmed, in order to procure or
+recover the means of assault and pillage. There was a rush to the
+Invalides, where the magazines of effective arms were. This was the
+first violent action of the day. The mob carried off 28,000 muskets and
+twenty-four cannon. And as it was known that other munitions of war were
+deposited in the Bastille, the cry of "To the Invalides!" was succeeded
+by the cry "To the Bastille!"
+
+We must carefully distinguish between the two elements of which the
+throng flocking to the Bastille was composed. On the one hand, a horde
+of nameless vagabonds, those whom the contemporary documents invariably
+style the "brigands"; and, on the other hand, the respectable
+citizens--these certainly formed the minority--who desired arms for the
+equipment of the civil guard. The sole motive impelling this band to
+the Bastille was the wish to procure arms. On this point all documents
+of any value and all the historians who have studied the matter closely
+are in agreement. There was no question of liberty or of tyranny, of
+setting free the prisoners or of protesting against the royal authority.
+The capture of the Bastille was effected amid cries of "Vive le roi!"
+just as, for several months past in the provinces, the granaries had
+been plundered.
+
+About 8 o'clock in the morning, the electors at the H�tel de Ville
+received some inhabitants of the Suburb Saint-Antoine who came to
+complain that the district was threatened by the cannon trained on it
+from the towers of the Bastille. These cannon were used for firing
+salutes on occasions of public rejoicing, and were so placed that they
+could do no harm whatever to the adjacent districts. But the electors
+sent some of their number to the Bastille, where the governor, de
+Launey, received the deputation with the greatest affability, kept them
+to lunch, and at their request withdrew the cannon from the embrasures.
+To this deputation there succeeded another, which, however, was quite
+unofficial, consisting of three persons, with the advocate Thuriot de la
+Rosi�re at the head. They were admitted as their predecessors had been.
+Thuriot was the eloquent spokesman, "in the name of the nation and the
+fatherland." He delivered an ultimatum to the governor and harangued the
+garrison, consisting of 95 Invalides and 30 Swiss soldiers. Some
+thousand men were thronging round the Bastille, vociferating wildly. The
+garrison swore not to fire unless they were attacked. De Launey said
+that without orders he could do no more than withdraw the cannon from
+the embrasures, but he went so far as to block up these embrasures with
+planks. Then Thuriot took his leave and returned to the H�tel de Ville,
+the crowd meanwhile becoming more and more threatening.
+
+[Illustration: THE CAPTURE OF THE BASTILLE.
+
+_From an anonymous contemporary painting now in the H�tel Carnavalet._]
+
+"The entrance to the first courtyard, that of the barracks, was open,"
+says M. Fernand Bournon in his admirable account of the events of this
+day; "but de Launey had ordered the garrison to retire within the
+enclosure, and to raise the outer drawbridge by which the court of the
+governor was reached, and which in the ordinary way used to be lowered
+during the day. Two daring fellows dashed forward and scaled the roof of
+the guard-house, one of them a soldier named Louis Tournay: the name of
+the other is unknown. They shattered the chains of the drawbridge with
+their axes, and it fell."
+
+It has been said in a recent work, in which defects of judgment and
+criticism are scarcely masked by a cumbrous parade of erudition, that
+Tournay and his companion performed their feat under the fire of the
+garrison. At this moment the garrison did not fire a single shot,
+contenting themselves with urging the besiegers to retire. "While M. de
+Launey and his officers contented themselves with threats, these two
+vigorous champions succeeded in breaking in the doors and in lowering
+the outer drawbridge; then the horde of brigands advanced in a body and
+dashed towards the second bridge, which they wished to capture, firing
+at the troops as they ran. It was then for the first time that M. de
+Launey, perceiving his error in allowing the operations at the first
+bridge to be managed so quietly, ordered the soldiers to fire, which
+caused a disorderly stampede on the part of the rabble, which was more
+brutal than brave; and it is at this point that the calumnies against
+the governor begin. Transposing the order of events, it has been
+asserted that he had sent out a message of peace, that the people had
+advanced in reliance on his word, and that many citizens were
+massacred." This alleged treachery of de Launey, immediately hawked
+about Paris, was one of the events of the day. It is contradicted not
+only by all the accounts of the besieged, but by the besiegers
+themselves, and is now rejected by all historians.
+
+A wine-seller named Cholat, aided by one Baron, nicknamed La Girofl�e,
+had brought into position a piece of ordnance in the long walk of the
+arsenal. They fired, but the gun's recoil somewhat seriously wounded the
+two artillerymen, and they were its only victims. As these means were
+insufficient to overturn the Bastille, the besiegers set about devising
+others. A pretty young girl named Mdlle. de Monsigny, daughter of the
+captain of the company of Invalides at the Bastille, had been
+encountered in the barrack yard. Some madmen imagined that she was
+Mdlle. de Launey. They dragged her to the edge of the moat, and gave the
+garrison to understand by their gestures that they were going to burn
+her alive if the place was not surrendered. They had thrown the unhappy
+child, who had fainted, upon a mattress, to which they had already set
+light. M. de Monsigny saw the hideous spectacle from a window of the
+towers, and, desperately rushing down to save his child, he was killed
+by two shots. These were tricks in the siege of strongholds of which
+Duguesclin would never have dreamed. A soldier named Aubin Bonnem�re
+courageously interposed and succeeded in saving the girl.
+
+A detachment of Gardes Fran�aises, coming up with two pieces of
+artillery which the H�tel de Ville had allowed to be removed, gave a
+more serious aspect to the siege. But the name of Gardes Fran�aises must
+not give rise to misapprehension: the soldiers of the regular army under
+the _ancien r�gime_ must not be compared with those of the present day.
+The regiment of Gardes Fran�aises in particular had fallen into a
+profound state of disorganization and degradation. The privates were
+permitted to follow a trade in the city, by this means augmenting their
+pay. It is certain that in the majority of cases the trade they followed
+was that of the bully. "Almost all the soldiers in the Guards belong to
+this class," we read in the _Encyclop�die m�thodique_, "and many men
+indeed only enlist in the corps in order to live on the earnings of
+these unfortunates." The numerous documents relating to the Gardes
+Fran�aises preserved in the archives of the Bastille give the most
+precise confirmation to this statement. We see, for example, that the
+relatives of the engraver Nicolas de Larmessin requested a _lettre de
+cachet_ ordering their son to be locked up in jail, where they would pay
+for his keep, "because he had threatened to enlist in the Gardes
+Fran�aises."
+
+From the fifteen cannon placed on the towers, not a single shot was
+fired during the siege. Within the ch�teau, three guns loaded with grape
+defended the inner drawbridge; the governor had only one of them fired,
+and that only once. Not wishing to massacre the mob, de Launey
+determined to blow up the Bastille and find his grave among the ruins.
+The Invalides Ferrand and B�quart flung themselves upon him to prevent
+him from carrying out his intention. "The Bastille was not captured by
+main force," says Elie, whose testimony cannot be suspected of
+partiality in favour of the defenders; "it surrendered before it was
+attacked, on my giving my word of honour as a French officer that all
+should escape unscathed if they submitted."
+
+We know how this promise was kept, in spite of the heroic efforts of
+Elie and Hulin, to whom posterity owes enthusiastic homage. Is the mob
+to be reproached for these atrocious crimes? It was a savage horde, the
+scum of the population. De Launey, whose confidence and kindness had
+never faltered, was massacred with every circumstance of horror. "The
+Abb� Lef�vre," says Dusaulx, "was an involuntary witness of his last
+moments: 'I saw him fall,' he told me, 'without being able to help him;
+he defended himself like a lion, and if only ten men had behaved as he
+did at the Bastille, it would not have been taken.'" His murderers
+slowly severed his head from his trunk with a penknife. The operation
+was performed by a cook's apprentice named Desnot, "who knew, as he
+afterwards proudly said, how to manage a joint." The deposition of this
+brute should be read. It has been published by M. Guiffrey in the _Revue
+historique_. To give himself courage, Desnot had gulped down brandy
+mixed with gunpowder, and he added that what he had done was done in the
+hope of obtaining a medal.
+
+"We learnt by-and-by," continues Dusaulx, "of the death of M. de
+Losme-Salbray, which all good men deplored." De Losme had been the good
+angel of the prisoners during his term of office as major of the
+Bastille: there are touching details showing to what lengths he carried
+his kindliness and delicacy of feeling. At the moment when the mob was
+hacking at him, there happened to pass the Marquis de Pelleport, who had
+been imprisoned in the Bastille for several years; he sprang forward to
+save him: "Stop!" he cried, "you are killing the best of men." But he
+fell badly wounded, as also did the Chevalier de Jean, who had joined
+him in the attempt to rescue the unfortunate man from the hands of the
+mob. The adjutant Miray, Person the lieutenant of the Invalides, and
+Dumont, one of the Invalides, were massacred. Miray was led to the
+Gr�ve, where the mob had resolved to execute him. Struck with fists and
+clubs, stabbed with knives, he crawled along in his death agony. He
+expired, "done to death with pin-pricks," before arriving at the place
+of execution. The Invalides Asselin and B�quart were hanged. It was
+B�quart who had prevented de Launey from blowing up the Bastille. "He
+was gashed with two sword-strokes," we read in the _Moniteur_, "and a
+sabre cut had lopped off his wrist. They carried the hand in triumph
+through the streets of the city--the very hand to which so many citizens
+owed their safety." "After I had passed the arcade of the H�tel de
+Ville," says Restif de la Bretonne, who has left so curious a page about
+the 14th of July, "I came upon some cannibals: one--I saw him with my
+own eyes--brought home to me the meaning of a horrible word heard so
+often since: he was carrying at the end of a _taille-cime_[56] the
+bleeding entrails of a victim of the mob's fury, and this horrible
+top-knot caused no one to turn a hair. Farther on I met the captured
+Invalides and Swiss: from young and pretty lips--I shudder at it
+still--came screams of 'Hang them! Hang them!'"
+
+Further, they massacred Flesselles, the provost of the guilds, accused
+of a treacherous action as imaginary as that of de Launey. They cut the
+throat of Foulon, an old man of seventy-four years, who, as Taine tells
+us, had spent during the preceding winter 60,000 francs in order to
+provide the poor with work. They assassinated Berthier, one of the
+distinguished men of the time. Foulon's head was cut off; they tore
+Berthier's heart from his body to carry it in procession through
+Paris--charming touch!--in a bouquet of white carnations. For the fun
+was growing fast and furious. De Launey's head was borne on a pike to
+the Palais Royal, then to the new bridge, where it was made to do
+obeisance three times to the statue of Henri IV., with the words,
+"Salute thy master!" At the Palais Royal, two of the conquerors had
+merrily set themselves down at a dining-table in an entresol. As we
+garnish our tables with flowers, so these men had placed on the table a
+trunkless head and gory entrails; but as the crowd below cried out for
+them, they shot them gaily out of the window.
+
+Those who had remained in front of the Bastille had dashed on in quest
+of booty. As at the pillage of the warehouses of R�veillon and Henriot,
+and of the convent of the Lazarists, the first impulse of the conquerors
+was to bound forward to the cellar. "This rabble," writes the author of
+the _Authentic History_, "were so blind drunk that they made in one body
+for the quarters of the staff, breaking the furniture, doors, and
+windows. All this time their comrades, taking the pillagers for some of
+the garrison, were firing on them."
+
+No one gave a thought to the prisoners, but the keys were secured and
+carried in triumph through Paris. The doors of the rooms in which the
+prisoners were kept had to be broken in. The wretched men, terrified by
+the uproar, were more dead than alive. These victims of arbitrary power
+were exactly seven in number. Four were forgers, B�chade, Laroche, La
+Corr�ge, and Pujade; these individuals had forged bills of exchange, to
+the loss of two Parisian bankers: while their case was being dealt with
+in regular course at the Ch�telet, they were lodged in the Bastille,
+where they consulted every day with their counsel. Then there was the
+young Comte de Solages, who was guilty of monstrous crimes meriting
+death; he was kept in the Bastille out of regard for his family, who
+defrayed his expenses. Finally there were two lunatics, Tavernier and de
+Whyte. We know what immense progress has been made during the past
+century in the methods of treating lunatics. In those days they locked
+them up. Tavernier and de Whyte were before long transferred to
+Charenton, where assuredly they were not so well treated as they had
+been at the Bastille.
+
+Such were the seven martyrs who were led in triumphant procession
+through the streets, amid the shouts of a deeply moved people.
+
+Of the besiegers, ninety-eight dead were counted, some of whom had met
+their death through the assailants' firing on one another. Several had
+been killed by falling into the moat. Of this total, only nineteen were
+married, and only five had children. These are details of some interest.
+
+There was no thought of burying either the conquerors or the conquered.
+At midnight on Wednesday the 15th, the presence of the corpses of the
+officers of the Bastille, still lying in the Place de Gr�ve, was
+notified to the commissaries of the Ch�telet. In his admirable work M.
+Furnand Bournon has published the ghastly report that was drawn up on
+that night. It is a fitting crown to the work of the great day: "We, the
+undersigned commissaries, duly noted down the declaration of the said
+Sieur Houdan, and having then gone down into the courtyard of the
+Ch�telet (whither the corpses had just been carried), we found there
+seven corpses of the male sex, the first without a head, clothed in a
+coat, vest, breeches, and black silk stockings, with a fine shirt, but
+no shoes; the second also without a head, clothed in a vest of red
+stuff, breeches of nankeen with regimental buttons, blue silk stockings
+with a small black pattern worked in; the third also headless, clothed
+in a shirt, breeches, and white cotton stockings; the fourth also
+headless, clothed in a blood-stained shirt, breeches, and black
+stockings; the fifth clad in a shirt, blue breeches, and white gaiters,
+with brown hair, apparently about forty years old, and having part of
+his forearm cut off and severe bruises on his throat; the sixth clothed
+in breeches and white gaiters, with severe bruises on his throat; and
+the seventh, clothed in a shirt, breeches, and black silk stockings,
+disfigured beyond recognition."
+
+Meanwhile the majority of the victors, the first moments of intoxication
+having passed, were hiding themselves like men who had committed a
+crime. The disorder in the city was extreme. "The commissioners of the
+districts," writes the Sicilian ambassador, "seeing the peril in which
+the inhabitants were placed before this enormous number of armed men,
+including brigands and men let out of prison on the previous days,
+formed patrols of the National Guard. They proclaimed martial law, or
+rather, they issued one solitary law declaring that whoever robbed or
+set fire to a house would be hanged. Indeed, not a day passed without
+five and even as many as ten persons suffering this penalty. To this
+salutary expedient we owe our lives and the safety of our houses."
+
+More than one conqueror of the Bastille was hanged in this way, which
+was a great pity, for two days later his glorious brow might have been
+crowned with laurels and flowers!
+
+It has been said that the Bastille was captured by the people of Paris.
+But the number of the besiegers amounted to no more than a thousand,
+among whom, as Marat has already brought to our notice, there were many
+provincials and foreigners. As to the Parisians, they had come in great
+numbers, as they always do, to see what was going on. We have this too
+on the testimony of Marat. "I was present at the taking of the
+Bastille," writes the Chancellor de Pasquier also: "what has been called
+the 'fight' was not serious, and of resistance there was absolutely
+none. A few musket shots were fired to which there was no reply, and
+four or five cannon shots. We know the results of this boasted victory,
+which has brought a shower of compliments upon the heads of the
+so-called conquerors: the truth is that this great fight did not give a
+moment's uneasiness to the numerous spectators who had hurried up to see
+the result. Among them there was many a pretty woman; they had left
+their carriages at a distance in order to approach more easily. I was
+leaning on the end of the barrier which closed in the garden skirting
+Beaumarchais' garden in the direction of the Place de la Bastille. By my
+side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Com�die Fran�aise: we stayed to the end,
+and I gave her my arm to her carriage. As pretty as any woman could be,
+Mdlle. Contat added to the graces of her person an intelligence of the
+most brilliant order."
+
+By next day there was quite another story. The Bastille had been
+"stormed" in a formidable and heroic assault lasting a quarter of an
+hour. The guns of the assailants had made a breach in its walls. These,
+it is true, were still standing intact; but that did not signify, the
+guns had made a breach, unquestionably! The seven prisoners who had been
+set free had been a disappointment, for the best will in the world could
+not make them anything but scoundrels and lunatics; some one invented an
+eighth, the celebrated Comte de Lorges, the white-headed hero and
+martyr. This Comte de Lorges had no existence; but that fact also is
+nothing to the purpose: he makes an admirable and touching story. There
+was talk of instruments of torture that had been discovered: "an iron
+corslet, invented to hold a man fast by all his joints, and fix him in
+eternal immobility:" it was really a piece of knightly armour dating
+from the middle ages, taken from the magazine of obsolete arms which was
+kept at the Bastille. Some one discovered also a machine "not less
+destructive, which was brought to the light of day, but no one could
+guess its name or its special use"; it was a secret printing-press
+seized in the house of one Fran�ois Lenormand in 1786. Finally, while
+digging in the bastion, some one came upon the bones of Protestants who
+had once been buried there, the prejudices of the time not allowing
+their remains to be laid in the consecrated ground of the cemetery: the
+vision of secret executions in the deepest dungeons of the Bastille was
+conjured up in the mind of the discoverers, and Mirabeau sent these
+terrible words echoing through France: "The ministers were lacking in
+foresight, they forgot to eat the bones!"
+
+The compilation of the roll of the conquerors of the Bastille was a
+laborious work. A great number of those who had been in the thick of the
+fray did not care to make themselves known: they did not know but that
+their laurel-crowned heads might be stuck aloft! It is true that these
+bashful heroes were speedily replaced by a host of fine fellows
+who--from the moment when it was admitted that the conquerors were
+heroes, deserving of honours, pensions, and medals--were fully persuaded
+that they had sprung to the assault, and in the very first rank. The
+final list contained 863 names.
+
+Victor Fournel in a charming book has sung the epic, at once ludicrous
+and lachrymose, of the men of the 14th of July. The book, which ought to
+be read, gives a host of delightful episodes it is impossible to
+abridge. In the sequel these founders of liberty did not shine either
+through the services they rendered to the Republic, or through their
+fidelity to the immortal principles. The Hulins--Hulin, however, had
+done nobly in trying to save de Launey--the Palloys, the Fourniers, the
+Latudes, and how many others! were the most servile lackeys of the
+Empire, and those of them who survived were the most assiduous servants
+of the Restoration. Under the Empire, the conquerors of the Bastille
+tried to secure the Legion of Honour for the whole crew. They went about
+soliciting pensions even up to 1830, and at that date, after forty-three
+years, there were still 401 conquerors living. In 1848 the conquerors
+made another appearance. There was still mention of pensions for the
+conquerors of the Bastille in the budget of 1874--let us save the
+ladder, the ladder of Latude!
+
+This is the amusing side of their story. But there is a painful side
+too: their rivalries with the Gardes Fran�aises, who charged them with
+filching the glory from them, and with the "volunteers of the Bastille."
+The heroes were acquainted with calumny and opprobrium. There were, too,
+deadly dissensions among their own body. There were the true conquerors,
+and others who, while they were true conquerors, were nevertheless not
+true: there were always "traitors" among the conquerors, as well as
+"patriots." On July 1, 1790, two of the conquerors were found beaten to
+death near Beaumarchais' garden, in front of the theatre of their
+exploits. Next day there was a violent quarrel between four conquerors
+and some soldiers. In December two others were assassinated near the
+Champs de Mars. Early in 1791 two were wounded, and a third was
+discovered with his neck in a noose, in a ditch near the military
+school. Such were the nocturnal doings on the barriers.
+
+It remains to explain this amazing veering round of opinion, this
+legend, of all things the least likely, which transformed into great men
+the "brigands" of April, June, and July, 1789.
+
+The first reason is explained in the following excellent passage from
+_Rabagas_[57]:--
+
+     _Carle._--But how then do you distinguish a riot from a revolution?
+
+     _Boubard._--A riot is when the mob is defeated ... they are all
+     curs. A revolution is when the mob is the stronger: they are all
+     heroes!
+
+During the night of July 14, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld woke Louis
+XVI. to announce to him the capture of the Bastille. "It's a revolt
+then," said the king. "Sire," replied the duke, "it is a revolution."
+
+The day on which the royal power, in its feebleness and irresolution,
+abandoned Paris to the mob, was the day of its abdication. The Parisians
+attempted to organize themselves into a citizen militia in order to
+shoot down the brigands. The movement on the Bastille was a stroke of
+genius on the part of the latter--instinctive, no doubt, but for all
+that a stroke of genius. The people now recognized its masters, and with
+its usual facility it hailed the new r�gime with adulation. "From that
+moment," said a deputy, "there was an end of liberty, even in the
+Assembly; France was dumb before thirty factionaries."
+
+What rendered the national enthusiasm for the conquerors more easy was
+precisely all those legends to which credence was given, in all
+sincerity, by the most intelligent people in France--the legends on the
+horrors of the Bastille and the cruelties of arbitrary power. For fifty
+years they had been disseminated throughout the kingdom, and had taken
+firm root. The pamphlets of Linguet and Mirabeau, the recent stupendous
+success of the _Memoirs of Latude_, had given these stories renewed
+strength and vigour. Compelled to bow before the triumphant mob, people
+preferred to regard themselves--so they silenced their conscience--as
+hailing a deliverer. There was some sincerity in this movement of
+opinion, too. The same districts which on July 13 took arms against the
+brigands could exclaim, after the crisis had passed: "The districts
+applaud the capture of a fortress which, regarded hitherto as the seat
+of despotism, dishonoured the French name under a popular king."
+
+In his edition of the _Memoirs of Barras_, M. George Duruy has well
+explained the transformation of opinion. "In the _Memoirs_, the capture
+of the Bastille is merely the object of a brief and casual mention.
+Barras only retained and transmits to us one single detail. He saw
+leaving the dungeons the 'victims of arbitrary power, saved at last from
+rack and torture and from living tombs.' Such a dearth of information is
+the more likely to surprise us in that Barras was not only a spectator
+of the event, but composed, in that same year 1789, an account of it
+which has now been discovered. Now his narrative of 1789 is as
+interesting as the passage in the _Memoirs_ is insignificant. The
+impression left by these pages, written while the events were vividly
+pictured in his mind, is, we are bound to say, that the famous capture
+of the Bastille was after all only a horrible and sanguinary saturnalia.
+There is no word of heroism in this first narrative: nothing about
+'victims of arbitrary power' snatched from 'torture and living tombs';
+but on the other hand, veritable deeds of cannibalism perpetrated by the
+victors. That is what Barras saw, and what he recorded on those pages
+where, at that period of his life, he noted down day by day the events
+of which he was a witness. Thirty years slip by. Barras has sat on the
+benches of the 'Montagne.'[58] He has remained an inflexible
+revolutionist. He gathers his notes together in view of _Memoirs_ he
+intends to publish. At this time, the revolutionist version of the
+capture of the Bastille is officially established. It is henceforth
+accepted that the Bastille fell before an impulse of heroism on the part
+of the people of Paris, and that its fall brought to light horrible
+mysteries of iniquity. This legend, which has so profoundly distorted
+the event, was contemporary with the event itself, a spontaneous fruit
+of the popular imagination. And Barras, having to speak of the capture
+in his _Memoirs_, discovers his old narrative among his papers, and
+reads it, I imagine, with a sort of stupefaction. What! the capture of
+the Bastille was no more than that!--and he resolutely casts it aside."
+
+In the provinces, the outbreak had a violent counterpart. "There
+instantly arose," writes Victor Fournel, "a strange, extraordinary,
+grotesque panic, which swept through the greater part of France like a
+hurricane of madness, and which many of us have heard our grand-fathers
+tell stories about under the name of the 'day of the brigands' or 'the
+day of the fear.' It broke out everywhere in the second fortnight of
+July, 1789. Suddenly, one knew not whence, an awful rumour burst upon
+the town or village: the brigands are here, at our very gates: they are
+advancing in troops of fifteen or twenty thousand, burning the standing
+crops, ravaging everything! Dust-stained couriers appear, spreading the
+terrible news. An unknown horseman goes through at the gallop, with
+haggard cheeks and dishevelled hair: 'Up, to arms, they are here!' Some
+natives rush up: it is only too true: they have seen them, the bandits
+are no more than a league or two away! The alarm bell booms out, the
+people fly to arms, line up in battle order, start off to reconnoitre.
+In the end, nothing happens, but their terrors revive. The brigands have
+only turned aside: every man must remain under arms." In the frontier
+provinces, there were rumours of foreign enemies. The Bretons and
+Normans shook in fear of an English descent: in Champagne and Lorraine
+a German invasion was feared.
+
+Along with these scenes of panic must be placed the deeds of violence,
+the assassinations, plunderings, burnings, which suddenly desolated the
+whole of France. In a book which sheds a flood of light on these facts,
+Gustave Bord gives a thrilling picture of them. The ch�teaux were
+invaded, and the owner, if they could lay hands on him, was roasted on
+the soles of his feet. At Versailles the mob threw themselves on the
+hangman as he was about to execute a parricide, and the criminal was set
+free: the state of terror in which the town was plunged is depicted in
+the journals of the municipal assembly. On July 23, the governor of
+Champagne sends word that the rising is general in his district. At
+Rennes, at Nantes, at Saint-Malo, at Angers, at Caen, at Bordeaux, at
+Strasburg, at Metz, the mob engaged in miniature captures of the
+Bastille more or less accompanied with pillage and assassination. Armed
+bands went about cutting down the woods, breaking down the dikes,
+fishing in the ponds.[59] The disorganization was complete.
+
+Nothing could more clearly show the character of the government under
+the _ancien r�gime:_ it was wholly dependent on traditions. Nowhere was
+there a concrete organization to secure the maintenance of order and
+the enforcement of the king's decrees. France was a federation of
+innumerable republics, held together by a single bond, the sentiment of
+loyalty every citizen felt towards the crown. One puff of wind sent the
+crown flying, and then disorder and panic bewilderment dominated the
+whole nation. The door was open to all excesses, and the means of
+checking them miserably failed. Under the _ancien r�gime_, devotion to
+the king was the whole government, the whole administration, the whole
+life of the state. And thus arose the necessity for the domination of
+the Terror, and the legislative work of Napoleon.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+All�gre, Latude's fellow prisoner, 154, 185-192, 217.
+
+Ameilhon, city librarian, 55.
+
+Argenson, D', 60, 72, 95, 175, 182.
+
+Arsenal library, 55, 56.
+
+Atrocities of the mob, 258-266.
+
+Avedick, Armenian patriarch, 133.
+
+
+Barras, 272.
+
+Bastille, its situation, 47;
+  appearance, 48;
+  repute, 49, 50;
+  archives, 50-56;
+  origin, 57;
+  site, 58;
+  construction, 59, 60;
+  additions to, 61;
+  appearance in later days, 61, 62;
+  early uses, 63;
+  becomes state prison, 63, 64;
+  prisoners, 65;
+  its administration, 66;
+  gradual transformation, 67;
+  character of prisoners, 68, 69;
+  secretary, 70;
+  office of lieutenant of police, 71;
+  his duties, 71, 72;
+  becomes like modern prisons, 77, 78;
+  abolition of torture, 78;
+  duration of prisoners' detention, 80;
+  expenses, 81;
+  plans for altering, 81-83;
+  a _prison de luxe_, 85;
+  treatment of prisoners, 86;
+  the rooms, 87;
+  manner of prisoners' entrance, 88, 89;
+  cells, 92, 93;
+  tower rooms, 93, 94;
+  furniture, 95, 96;
+  examination of prisoners, 96, 97;
+  indemnified if innocent, 98, 99;
+  allowed companions, 100, 101;
+  prison fare, 102-107;
+  clothes, 107, 108;
+  books, 108, 109;
+  exercise, 109;
+  diversions, 109, 110;
+  funerals, 110, 111;
+  liberation, 111, 112;
+  the Iron Mask, 114-146;
+  men of letters, 147-165;
+  capture, 238-272.
+
+Berryer, 175, 176, 178, 184, 188, 189, 193.
+
+Besmaus, de, 70.
+
+Binguet, 171, 179.
+
+Bread riots, 242, 243.
+
+Breteuil, 78, 248.
+
+Brigands, 241, 245, 250.
+
+Burgaud, 135.
+
+
+Campan, Madame de, 144, 145.
+
+Carutti's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+Cellamare conspiracy, 72, 73.
+
+Character of French government and society, 239-241.
+
+Chevalier, major, 49, 51, 120, 121, 187, 189, 194.
+
+Citizen militia, 251-253.
+
+Clothes of prisoners, 107, 108.
+
+Crosne, de, lieutenant of police, 244-246.
+
+
+D'Aubrespy, Jeanneton, 169, 201.
+
+Dauger suggested as Iron Mask, 135.
+
+Desmoulins, 247, 249.
+
+Diderot, 165.
+
+Diversions of prisoners, 109, 110.
+
+Du Junca's journal, 69, 89, 90, 114-116, 122.
+
+Dusaulx, 51.
+
+
+Encyclop�dia, 80.
+
+Estrades, Abb� d', 138-142.
+
+
+Food of prisoners, 102-107.
+
+Funerals, 110.
+
+
+Games of prisoners, 101, 102.
+
+Gleichen, baron, 130.
+
+Griffet, Father, 120.
+
+
+Heiss, Baron, first to suggest true solution of Iron Mask, 136.
+
+Henriot, 245.
+
+Houdon, sculptor, 82.
+
+
+July 14th, 255-276.
+
+Jung's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+
+Kingston, Duchess of, 225, 227.
+
+
+La Beaumelle, 152-155.
+
+Lagrange-Chancel, 132.
+
+La Reynie, 71.
+
+Latude, 168-237.
+
+Launay, Mdlle. de, _see_ Staal, Madame de.
+
+Launey, de, governor, 256, 258, 260.
+
+Lauzun, 91.
+
+Legros, Madame de, 223-226, 232, 233.
+
+Lenoir, lieutenant of police, 186.
+
+_Lettres de cachet_, 240.
+
+Lieutenancy of police created, 97.
+
+Linguet, 163-165.
+
+Loiseleur's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+Loquin's theory of Iron Mask, 133.
+
+Losme, de, 261.
+
+Louis XIV. and Iron Mask, 137-140.
+
+Louis XV. and Iron Mask, 144.
+
+Louis XVI. and Iron Mask, 144.
+
+Louvois, 70, 141.
+
+
+Maisonrouge, king's lieutenant, 73-76.
+
+Malesherbes, 78, 156, 216.
+
+Man in the Iron Mask, documents, 114-125;
+  legends, 125-136;
+  true solution, 136-146.
+
+Marmontel, 158-163.
+
+Mattioli, the Iron Mask, 136-146.
+
+Maurepas, 144, 173-175.
+
+Mirabeau, 166, 167.
+
+Morellet, 155-158, 253.
+
+Moyria, de, 218-220.
+
+
+Necker, 248.
+
+
+Palatine, Madame, 125.
+
+Palteau, M. de, 118, 119.
+
+Papon's theory of Iron Mask, 127.
+
+Parlement, 76, 77.
+
+Pensions to prisoners, 98, 99.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, 173, 206.
+
+Pontchartrain, 69.
+
+Puget, king's lieutenant, 83.
+
+
+Quesnay, Dr., 175, 177, 178.
+
+
+Ravaisson, librarian, 54, 55, 134.
+
+Register of St. Paul's church, 117, 142, 143.
+
+Regnier's lines, 59.
+
+Renneville's meals, 103, 104.
+
+R�veillon, 245, 246.
+
+Ricarville, companion of the Iron Mask, 123, 124.
+
+Richelieu, Cardinal, 63-66.
+
+Richelieu, Duke de, 76, 129, 130.
+
+Rigby, Dr., 253, 254.
+
+Risings in the provinces, 273.
+
+Rochebrune, commissary, 195.
+
+Rohan, Cardinal de, 222.
+
+
+Sade, Marquis de, 95.
+
+Saint-Mars, governor, 87, 115-119, 127, 142.
+
+Saint-Marc, detective, 169, 176, 180, 183, 192.
+
+Sartine, de, 49, 202, 203, 207, 210, 215.
+
+Sauv�, Madame de, her dress, 108.
+
+Solages, de, 84.
+
+Staal, Madame de, 73-76, 94, 95, 102.
+
+
+Taul�s, de, 132.
+
+Tavernier, 106.
+
+Theories on Iron Mask, 125-136.
+
+Thuriot de la Rosi�re, 256.
+
+Tirmont, companion of Iron Mask, 123, 124.
+
+
+Vieux-Maisons, Madame de, 128.
+
+Villette, Marquis de, 224.
+
+Vinache's library, 109.
+
+Vincennes, 165-167, 180.
+
+Voltaire, 99, 126, 128, 129, 148-152.
+
+LONDON:
+
+GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LD.
+
+ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, CLERKENWELL, E.C.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The castle of Tours, 147 miles south-west of Paris, which Louis XI.
+made his favourite residence. See Scott's _Quentin Durward_.--T.
+
+[2] Jean Balue (1471-1491), chaplain to Louis XI. For traitorously
+divulging the king's schemes to his enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, he was
+for eleven years shut up in the castle of Loches, in an iron-bound
+wooden cage.--T.
+
+[3] A French author (1624-1693) who was involved in the fall of Louis
+XIV.'s dishonest finance minister, Fouquet, in 1661, and was imprisoned
+for five years in the Bastille, amusing himself with reading the Fathers
+of the Church and taming a spider. See Kitchin's _History of France_,
+iii. 155-157.--T.
+
+[4] Antoine de Caumont, duc de Lauzun (1633-1723), a courtier of Louis
+XIV., whose favours to the Duke made Louvois, the minister, his bitter
+enemy. He was twice imprisoned in the Bastille, the second time at the
+instance of Madame de Montespan. He commanded the French auxiliaries of
+James II. in Ireland. See Macaulay's _History_, Chaps. IX., XII.,
+XV.--T.
+
+[5] A game played with a sort of box, in the top of which are cut holes
+of equal size, and with metal discs or balls, the object being to pitch
+the balls into the holes from a distance. A similar game may be seen at
+any English country fair.--T.
+
+[6] The famous president of the Cour des Aides and Minister of the
+Interior, renowned for his consistent support of the people against
+oppression. He was banished in 1771 for remonstrating against the abuses
+of law; but returning to Paris to oppose the execution of Louis XVI., he
+was guillotined in 1794.--T.
+
+[7] Antonio del Giudice, prince de Cellamare (1657-1733), the Spanish
+ambassador, was the instigator of a plot against the Regent in 1718. See
+Kitchin, _ib._ iii. 474.--T.
+
+[8] The H�tel des Invalides, residence of pensioned soldiers, &c. still
+a well-known building of Paris.--T.
+
+[9] A ch�teau, four miles east of Paris, notable as the place where St.
+Louis, the royal lawgiver of France, dispensed justice. The _donjon_
+still exists, serving now as a soldier's barracks.--T.
+
+[10] One of the first prisons on the system of solitary confinement in
+cells erected in Paris. It dates from 1850.--T.
+
+[11] The Abb� de Buquoy (1653-1740) owed his imprisonment originally to
+having been found in company with dealers in contraband salt when the
+_gabelle_, or salt-tax, compelled the French people to buy salt, whether
+they wanted it or not, at a price _two thousand times_ its true value.
+He was a man of very eccentric views, one of which was that woman was
+man's chief evil, and that was why, when the patriarch Job was stripped
+of children, flocks, herds, &c., his wife was left to him!--T.
+
+[12] The madhouse, eight miles east of Paris.--T.
+
+[13] A ch�teau originally outside Paris, now included in the city
+itself, once used as a hospital and jail, now a hospital for aged and
+indigent poor and for lunatics. The first experiments with the
+guillotine were tried there.--T.
+
+[14] See _infra_, p. 83.
+
+[15] The title r�le in a comedy by Henri Mounier, entitled _Grandeur et
+d�cadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme_ (1852). He is a writing-master, very
+vain, given (like Mr. Micawber) to tall talk and long-winded periods. He
+has become typical of "much cry and little wool." As an officer of the
+National Guard he says, "This sabre constitutes the finest day in my
+life! I accept it, and if ever I find myself at the head of your
+phalanxes, I shall know how to use it in defence of our
+institutions--and, if need arise, to fight for them!"--T.
+
+[16] In the early days of the Revolution, Paris was divided into
+sections or wards, and as the _pike_ had played a great part in the
+recent disturbances, one of the wards was known as the "Pike"
+section.--T.
+
+[17] A disciple of the Marquis de Sade (see p. 35), a notorious
+debauchee, whose book _Justine_ was a disgusting mixture of brutality
+and obscenity.--T.
+
+[18] The pseudonym of Beffroy de Reigny (1757-1811), author of farces,
+and of a _Pr�cis historique de la prise de la Bastille_.--T.
+
+[19] The name given to the constitutional struggles of the nobles and
+the Parlement of Paris against Mazarin and the royal power (1648-1654).
+The name is derived from _fronde_, a sling. A wit of the Parlement, one
+Bachaumont, "told the lawyers of that august body that they were like
+schoolboys playing in the town ditches with their slings, who run away
+directly the watchman appears, and begin again when his back is turned."
+See Kitchin, iii. pp. 102-128.--T.
+
+[20] See _Monte-Cristo_.--T.
+
+[21] Delivered to the French Association for the Advancement of Science
+in 1893.
+
+[22] The battle fought on August 10, 1557, in which Egmont with a
+combined force of Spaniards, Flemish, and English (sent by Queen Mary)
+routed Constable Montmorency and the finest chivalry of France. It was
+in commemoration of this victory that Philip II. built the palace of the
+Escurial, shaped like a gridiron because the battle was fought on St.
+Lawrence's day.--T.
+
+[23] The following unpublished letter from Pontchartrain to Bernaville,
+intimating his probable nomination as governor of the Bastille, shows
+exactly what Louis XIV.'s government demanded of the head of the great
+state prison:-
+
+"Versailles, September 28, 1707.
+
+     "I have received your letter of yesterday. I can only repeat what I
+     have already written: to pay constant attention to what goes on in
+     the Bastille; to neglect none of the duties of a good governor; to
+     maintain order and discipline among the soldiers of the garrison,
+     seeing that they keep watch with all the necessary exactitude, and
+     that their wages are regularly paid; to take care that the
+     prisoners are well fed and treated with kindness, preventing them,
+     however, from having any communication with people outside and from
+     writing letters; finally, to be yourself especially prompt in
+     informing me of anything particular that may happen at the
+     Bastille. You will understand that in following such a line of
+     action you cannot but please the king, and perhaps induce him to
+     grant you the post of governor; on my part, you may count on my
+     neglecting no means of representing your services to His Majesty in
+     the proper light.
+
+"I am, &c.,
+
+"PONTCHARTRAIN."
+
+
+
+
+
+[24] The appellation of the eldest brother of the reigning king.--T.
+
+[25] Under the _ancien r�gime_, there being no Minister of the Interior
+(Home Secretary), each of the ministers (the War Minister, Minister for
+Foreign Affairs, &c.) had a part of France under his charge. The
+Minister of Paris was usually what we should call the Lord
+Chamberlain.--T.
+
+[26] The court which up to the time of the Revolution was the seat of
+justice, presided over by the Provost of Paris. It held its sittings in
+the castle known as the Ch�telet.--T.
+
+[27] A judicial, not a legislative body. It was constantly in antagonism
+to the king.--T.
+
+[28] The famous Encyclop�dia edited by D'Alembert and Diderot. It
+occupied twenty years of the life of the latter, and went through many
+vicissitudes; its free criticism of existing institutions provoking the
+enmity of the government. Voltaire was one of its largest
+contributors.--T.
+
+[29] This raised Linguet's indignation. "The consideration of this
+enormous expense has given to some ministers, among others to M. Necker,
+a notion of reform; if this should come to anything, it would be very
+disgraceful to spring from no other cause. 'Suppress the Bastille out of
+economy!' said on this subject, a few days ago, one of the youngest and
+most eloquent orators of England."
+
+[30] The H�tel Carnavalet, museum in Paris, where a large number of
+documents and books are preserved relating to the history of the
+city.--T.
+
+[31] It may be noted that the different escapes contributed to the
+gradual tightening of the rules of the Bastille. After the escape of the
+Comte de Bucquoy, such ornaments as the prisoners could attach cords to
+were at once removed, and knives were taken from them; after the escape
+of All�gre and Latude, bars of iron were placed in the chimneys, and so
+forth.
+
+[32] The second of the four principal officers of the Bastille. The
+officers were: (1) the governor; (2) the king's lieutenant; (3) the
+major; (4) the adjutant. There was also a doctor, a surgeon, a
+confessor, &c. The garrison consisted of Invalides.--T.
+
+[33] The most surprising instance is that of an Englishman, who returned
+spontaneously from England to become a prisoner in the Bastille. "On
+Thursday, May 22, 1693, at nightfall, M. de Jones, an Englishman,
+returned from England, having come back to prison for reasons concerning
+the king's service. He was located outside the ch�teau, in a little room
+where M. de Besmaus keeps his library, above his office, and he is not
+to appear for some days for his examination, and is to be taken great
+care of."--Du Junca's Journal.
+
+[34] This was not the Lauzun already mentioned, but his nephew, Armand
+Louis de Gontaut, duke de Biron (1747-1793), who was notorious
+throughout Europe for his gallantries.--T.
+
+[35] An official of the royal council, whose function originally was to
+examine and report on petitions to the king. He became a sort of
+superior magistrate's clerk.--T.
+
+[36] "1751, March 2. I have received a letter from Dr. Duval (secretary
+to the lieutenant of police), in which he tells me that M. Berryer
+(lieutenant of police) is struck with the cost of the clothes supplied
+to the prisoners for some time past; but, as you know, I only supply
+things when ordered by M. Berryer, and I try to supply good clothes, so
+that they may last and give the prisoners satisfaction."--Letter from
+Rochebrune, commissary to the Bastille, to Major Chevalier.
+
+[37] These extracts are translated literally, in order to preserve the
+clumsy constructions of the unlettered official.--T.
+
+[38] Step-sister of Louis XIV. The following extracts from her
+correspondence show how, even in circles that might have been expected
+to be well informed, the legend had already seized on people's
+imaginations:--
+
+"Marly, October 10, 1711. A man remained long years in the Bastille, and
+has died there, masked. At his side he had two musketeers ready to kill
+him if he took off his mask. He ate and slept masked. No doubt there was
+some reason for this, for otherwise he was well treated and lodged, and
+given everything he wished for. He went to communion masked; he was very
+devout and read continually. No one has ever been able to learn who he
+was."
+
+"Versailles, October 22, 1711. I have just learnt who the masked man
+was, who died in the Bastille. His wearing a mask was not due to
+cruelty. He was an English lord who had been mixed up in the affair of
+the Duke of Berwick (natural son of James II.) against King William. He
+died there so that the king might never know what became of him."
+
+[39] The insurgents who rose for the king against the Revolutionists in
+Brittany: see Balzac's famous novel. The movement smouldered for a great
+many years.--T.
+
+[40] The Gregorian calendar was abolished by the National Convention in
+1793, who decreed that September 22, 1792, should be regarded as the
+first day of a new era. The year was divided into twelve months, with
+names derived from natural phenomena. Nivose (snowy) was the fourth of
+these months. Thus, the period mentioned in the text includes from
+December 21, 1800, to January 19, 1801.--T.
+
+[41] Since M. Funck-Brentano's book was published, his conclusions have
+been corroborated by Vicomte Maurice Boutry in a study published in the
+_Revue des Etudes historiques_ (1899, p. 172). The Vicomte furnishes an
+additional proof. He says that the Duchess de Cr�quy, in the third book
+of her _Souvenirs_, gives a _r�sum�_ of a conversation on the Iron Mask
+between Marshal de Noailles, the Duchess de Luynes, and others, and
+adds: "The most considerable and best informed persons of my time always
+thought that the famous story had no other foundation than the capture
+and captivity of the Piedmontese Mattioli."--T.
+
+[42] "I have seen these ills, and I am not twenty yet."
+
+[43] These verses were, of course, in Latin.--T.
+
+[44] Palissot was a dramatist and critic who in his comedy _Les
+Philosophes_ had bitterly attacked Rousseau, Diderot, and the
+Encyclop�dists generally.--T.
+
+[45] The old prison of Paris. It was the debtors' prison, famous also
+for the number of actors who were imprisoned there under the _ancien
+r�gime_. It was demolished in 1780.--T.
+
+[46] "Not unto us, O Lord, but unto Thy name give glory!
+
+"Know our heart and search out our ways."
+
+[47] "The victory is won!"--T.
+
+[48] Charenton was under the direction of a religious order known as the
+_Fr�res de la Charit�_, who undertook the care of sick and weak-minded
+poor.--T.
+
+[49] This was Elizabeth Chudleigh (1720-1788), the notorious beauty who
+privately married the Hon. Augustus Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol,
+separated from him after three years, and became the mistress of the
+second Duke of Kingston, whom she bigamously married. After his death
+she was tried by the House of Lords for bigamy, and fled to France to
+escape punishment. Her gallantries and eccentricities were the talk of
+Europe.--T.
+
+[50] Instructed by his misfortunes and his captivity how to vanquish the
+efforts and the rage of tyrants, he taught the French how true courage
+can win liberty.
+
+[51] Jocrisse is the stock French type of the booby, and as such is a
+character in many comedies. He breaks a plate, for instance; his master
+asks him how he managed to be so clumsy, and he instantly smashes
+another, saying, "_Just like that!_" His master asks him to be sure and
+wake him early in the morning; Jocrisse answers: "Right, sir, depend on
+me; _but of course you'll ring_!"--T.
+
+[52] The Girondists (so called from Gironde, a district of Bordeaux)
+were the more sober republican party in the Assembly, who were forced by
+circumstances to join the Jacobins against Louis XVI. With their fall
+from power in the early summer of 1792 the last hope of the monarchy
+disappeared.--T.
+
+[53] Referring to the horrible massacres of September, 1792, when about
+1400 victims perished.--T.
+
+[54] The French Dick Turpin. Of good education, he formed when quite a
+youth a band of robbers, and became the terror of France. Like Turpin,
+he is the subject of dramas and stories.--T.
+
+[55] A forest near Paris, on the line to Avricourt. It was a famous
+haunt of brigands. There is a well-known story of a dog which attacked
+and killed the murderer of its master there.--T.
+
+[56] Literally "cut-top": we have no equivalent in English.--T.
+
+[57] A five-act comedy by Victorien Sardou.
+
+[58] The nickname given to the Jacobins, the extreme revolutionists, who
+sat on the highest seats on the left in the National Assembly.--T.
+
+[59] Which were the strict preserves of the aristocrats: to fish in them
+was as great a crime as to shoot a landlord's rabbit was, a few years
+ago, in England.--T.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Legends of the Bastille, by Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
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+  The Project Gutenberg eBook of Legends of The Bastille by Frantz Funck-Brentano.
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+
+Project Gutenberg's Legends of the Bastille, by Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Legends of the Bastille
+
+Author: Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
+Translator: George Maidment
+
+Release Date: July 16, 2013 [EBook #43231]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE ***
+
+
+
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+Produced by Chris Curnow, Chuck Greif and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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+</p>
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+<i>NEW PUBLICATIONS</i>.</p>
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+<p><span class="sans"><b>MEDICINE AND THE MIND.</b></span> Translated from the French of <span class="smcap">Maurice de
+Fleury</span> by <span class="smcap">S. B. Collins</span>, M.D. 16<i>s.</i></p>
+
+<p><sup>*</sup>*<sup>*</sup> This work has been crowned by the French Academy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sans"><b>OLD LONDON TAVERNS.</b></span> By <span class="smcap">Edward Callow</span>. Illustrated. 6<i>s.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="sans"><b>THE GOOD QUEEN CHARLOTTE.</b></span> By <span class="smcap">Percy Fitzgerald</span>. With a Photogravure
+reproduction of Gainsborough’s Portrait and other Illustrations.
+Demy 8vo. 10<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i></p>
+
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+
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+Illustrations. 42<i>s.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="sans"><b>THE ACTOR AND HIS ART.</b></span> By <span class="smcap">Stanley Jones</span>. Crown 8vo. With Cover
+designed by <span class="smcap">H. Mitchell</span>. 3<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cb">LEGENDS &nbsp; OF &nbsp; THE &nbsp; BASTILLE</p>
+
+<p><a name="front" id="front"></a></p>
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<a href="images/i_006_lg.png">
+<img class="enlargeimage"
+src="images/enlarge-image.jpg"
+alt="enlarge-image"
+title="enlarge-image"
+width="18"
+height="14" />
+</a><br /><img src="images/i_006_sml.png" width="550" height="325" alt="Model of the Bastille, carved in one of the Stones of the
+Fortress.
+
+One of these models, made by the instructions of the architect Palloy,
+was sent to the chief-town of every department in France." />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">Model of the Bastille, carved in one of the Stones of the
+Fortress.<br />
+
+<i>One of these models, made by the instructions of the architect Palloy,
+was sent to the chief-town of every department in France.</i></span>
+</p>
+
+<h1><span style="margin-right: 10%;">Legends of</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12%;">the Bastille</span></h1>
+
+<p class="cbc"><small>BY</small><br />
+<big>FRANTZ FUNCK-BRENTANO</big><br />
+<br /><br />
+<i>WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIEN SARDOU</i><br />
+<br /><br />
+AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY<br />
+<big>GEORGE MAIDMENT</big><br />
+<br /><br />
+WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS<br />
+<br /><br />
+LONDON<br />
+DOWNEY &amp; CO. <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+1899</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot1">
+<p class="c">BIBLIOGRAPHY</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Legendes et Archives de la Bastille.</i> Paris: Hachette et Cie.,
+1898; second edition, 1899. Crowned by the French Academy.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Die Bastille in der Legende und nach historischen Documenten.</i>
+German translation by Oscar Marschall von Bieberstein. Breslau:
+Schottlaender, 1899.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="TRANSLATORS_PREFACE" id="TRANSLATORS_PREFACE"></a>TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>N</small> his own entertaining way, Mr. Andrew Lang has recently been taking
+the scientific historian to task, and giving him a very admirable lesson
+on “history as she ought to be wrote.” But though the two professors to
+whom he mainly addresses himself are Frenchmen, it would be doing an
+injustice to France to infer that she is the <i>alma mater</i> of the modern
+dryasdust. The exact contrary is the case: France is rich in historical
+writers like the Comte d’Haussonville, M. de Maulde la Clavière, M.
+Gaston Boissier, to name only a few, who know how to be accurate without
+being dull.</p>
+
+<p>M. Funck-Brentano, whom I have the honour of introducing here to the
+English public, belongs to the same class. Of literary parentage and
+connections&mdash;his uncle is Professor Lujo Brentano, whose work on the
+English trade gilds is a standard&mdash;he entered in his twentieth year the
+École des Chartes, the famous institution which trains men in the
+methods of historical research. At the end of his three years’ course,
+he was appointed to succeed François Ravaisson in the work of
+classifying the archives of the Bastille in the Arsenal Library,&mdash;a work
+which occupied him for more than ten years. One fruit of it is to be
+seen in the huge catalogue of more than one thousand pages, printed
+under official auspices and awarded the Prix Le Dissez de Penanrum by
+the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. Another is the present
+work, which has been crowned by the French Academy. Meanwhile M.
+Funck-Brentano had been pursuing his studies at the Sorbonne and at
+Nancy, and his French thesis for the doctorate in letters was a volume
+on the origins of the Hundred Years’ War, which obtained for him the
+highest possible distinction for a work of erudition in France, the
+Grand Prix Gobert. This volume he intends to follow up with two others,
+completing a social rather than a military history of the war, and this
+no doubt he regards as his <i>magnum opus</i>. He is known also as a lecturer
+in Belgium and Alsace as well as in Paris, and being general secretary
+of the Société des Etudes historiques and deputy professor of history at
+the College of France as well as sub-librarian of the Arsenal Library,
+he leads a busy life.</p>
+
+<p>Trained in the rigorous methods of the École des Chartes and inspired by
+the examples of Fustel de Coulanges and M. Paul Meyer, M. Funck-Brentano
+has developed a most interesting and conscientious method of his own. He
+depends on original sources, and subjects these to the most searching
+critical tests; but this is a matter of course: his individuality
+appears in regard to the publication of the results of his researches.
+When he has discoveries of importance to communicate, he gives them to
+the world first in the form of articles or studies in reviews of
+standing, thus preparing public opinion, and at the same time affording
+opportunities for the search-light of criticism to play on his work.
+Some of the chapters of this book thus appeared in the various <i>revues</i>,
+and have subsequently gone through a severe process of pruning and
+amending. It is now eleven years since the first appearance, in the
+pages of the <i>Revue des deux Mondes</i>, of the study of Latude which, in a
+much altered shape, now forms one of the most interesting portions of
+this book. The coming autumn will see the publication in France of a
+striking work by M. Funck-Brentano on the amazing poison-dramas at Louis
+XIV.’s court, and of this book also the several sections have been
+appearing at intervals for several years past.</p>
+
+<p>The present work, as I have already said, is the fruit of many years of
+research. Its startling revelations, so well summarized in M. Victorien
+Sardou’s Introduction, have revolutionized public opinion in France, and
+in particular the solution of the old problem of the identity of the Man
+in the Iron Mask has been accepted as final by all competent critics.
+The <i>Athenæum</i>, in reviewing the book in its French form the other day,
+said that it must be taken cautiously as an ingenious bit of special
+pleading, and that the Bastille appears in M. Funck-Brentano’s pages in
+altogether too roseate hues, suggesting further that no such results
+could be obtained without prejudice from the same archives as those on
+which Charpentier founded his <i>La Bastille dévoilée</i> in 1789. This
+criticism seems to me to ignore several important points. Charpentier’s
+book, written in the heat of the revolutionary struggle, is not a
+history, but a political pamphlet, which, in the nature of the case, was
+bound to represent the Bastille as a horror. Moreover, Charpentier could
+only have depended superficially on the archives, which, as M.
+Funck-Brentano shows, were thrown into utter disorder on the day of the
+capture of the Bastille. The later writer, on the other hand, approached
+the subject when the revolutionary ardours had quite burnt out, and with
+the independent and dispassionate mind of a trained official. He spent
+thirteen years in setting the rediscovered archives in order, after his
+predecessor Ravaisson had already spent a considerable time at the same
+work. He was able, further (as Charpentier certainly was not), to
+complete and check the testimony of the archives by means of the memoirs
+of prisoners&mdash;the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, Renneville, Dumouriez, and a
+host of others. In these circumstances it would be surprising if his
+conclusions were not somewhat different from those of Charpentier a
+hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The gravamen of the <i>Athenæun’s</i> objection is that M. Funck-Brentano’s
+description of the treatment of prisoners in the Bastille applies only
+to the favoured few, the implication being that M. Funck-Brentano has
+shut his eyes to the cases of the larger number. But surely the reviewer
+must have read the book too rapidly. M. Funck-Brentano shows, by means
+of existing and accessible documents, that the fact of being sent to the
+Bastille at all was itself, in the eighteenth century at least, a mark
+of favour. Once at the Bastille, the prisoner, whoever he might be, was
+treated without severity, unless he misbehaved. Prisoners of no social
+importance, such as Renneville, Latude (a servant’s love-child),
+Tavernier (son of a house-porter), were fed and clothed and cared for
+much better than they would have been outside the prison walls. A young
+man named Estival de Texas, who was being exiled to Canada because he
+was a disgrace to his family, wrote to the minister of Paris on June 22,
+1726, from the roadstead of La Rochelle: “Your lordship is sending me to
+a wild country, huddled with mean wretches, and condemned to a fare very
+different from what your lordship granted me in the Bastille.” Here was
+a friendless outcast looking back regretfully on his prison fare! On
+February 6, 1724, one of the king’s ministers wrote to the lieutenant
+of police: “I have read to the duke of Bourbon the letter you sent me
+about the speeches of M. Quéhéon, and his royal highness has instructed
+me to send you an order and a <i>lettre de cachet</i> authorizing his removal
+to the Bastille. But as he thinks that this is <i>an honour the fellow
+little deserves</i>, he wishes you to postpone the execution of the warrant
+for three days, in order to see if Quéhéon will not take the hint and
+leave Paris as he was commanded.” It is on such documents as these,
+which are to be seen in hundreds at the Arsenal Library in Paris, that
+M. Funck-Brentano has founded his conclusions. Anyone who attacks him on
+his own ground is likely to come badly off.</p>
+
+<p>With M. Funck-Brentano’s permission, I have omitted the greater part of
+his footnotes, which are mainly references to documents inaccessible to
+the English reader. On the other hand, I have ventured to supply a few
+footnotes in explanation of such allusions as the Englishman not reading
+French (and the translation is intended for no others) might not
+understand. On the same principle I have attempted rhymed renderings of
+two or three scraps of verse quoted from Regnier and Voltaire, to whom I
+make my apologies. The proofs have had the advantage of revision by M.
+Funck-Brentano, who is, however, in no way responsible for any
+shortcomings. The Index appears in the English version alone.</p>
+
+<p>The portrait of Latude and the views of the Bastille are reproduced from
+photographs of the originals specially taken by M. A. Bresson, of 40 Rue
+de Passy, Paris.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">George Maidment.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><i>August, 1899.</i></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr><td align="right" colspan="3"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Introduction</span> </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_001">1</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Archives</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_047">47</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">History of the Bastille</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_057">57</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Life in the Bastille</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_085">85</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Man in the Iron Mask</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_114">114</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Men of Letters in the Bastille</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_147">147</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="smcap">I.</td><td class="smcap"><a href="#Voltaire">VOLTAIRE</a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_148">148</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="smcap">II.</td><td class="smcap"><a href="#Beaumelle">LA BEAUMELLE</a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_152">152</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="smcap">III.</td><td class="smcap"><a href="#Morellet">THE ABBÉ MORELLE</a>T</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="smcap">IV.</td><td class="smcap"><a href="#Marmontel">MARMONTEL</a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="smcap">V.</td><td class="smcap"><a href="#Linguet">LINGUET</a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="smcap">VI.</td><td class="smcap"><a href="#Diderot">DIDEROT</a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_165">165</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="smcap">VII.</td><td class="smcap"><a href="#Mirabeau">THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU</a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_166">166</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Latude</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_168">168</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Fourteenth of July</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_238">238</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Index:
+<a href="#A">A</a>,
+<a href="#B">B</a>,
+<a href="#C">C</a>,
+<a href="#D">D</a>,
+<a href="#E">E</a>,
+<a href="#F">F</a>,
+<a href="#G">G</a>,
+<a href="#H">H</a>,
+<a href="#J">J</a>,
+<a href="#K">K</a>,
+<a href="#L">L</a>,
+<a href="#M">M</a>,
+<a href="#N">N</a>,
+<a href="#P">P</a>,
+<a href="#Q">Q</a>,
+<a href="#R">R</a>,
+<a href="#S">S</a>,
+<a href="#T">T</a>,
+<a href="#V">V</a></span>
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_277">277</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr><td>Model of the Bastille</td><td align="right"><a href="#front"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Facsimile of Du Junca’s note regarding the
+entry of the Iron Mask&nbsp; &nbsp; </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><i>Facing page</i> <a href="#page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Facsimile of Du Junca’s note regarding the
+death of the Iron Mask                           </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><span class="ditto">"</span> <a href="#page_116">116</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Facsimile of the Iron Mask’s burial certificate       "</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><span class="ditto">"</span>  <a href="#page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Facsimile of the cover of Latude’s explosive
+box                                              </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><span class="ditto">"</span>  <a href="#page_173">173</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Facsimile of Latude’s writing with blood on
+linen                                            </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><span class="ditto">"</span>  <a href="#page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Portrait of Latude                                    </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><span class="ditto">"</span>  <a href="#page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Capture of the Bastille                           </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><span class="ditto">"</span>  <a href="#page_257">257</a></td></tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<p><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<p class="nind">A<small>T</small> the great Exhibition of 1889 I visited, in company with some friends,
+the reproduction of the Bastille, calculated to give all who saw it&mdash;and
+the whole world must have seen it&mdash;an entirely false impression.</p>
+
+<p>You had barely cleared the doorway when you saw, in the gloom, an old
+man enveloped in a long white beard, lying on the “sodden straw” of
+tradition, rattling his chains and uttering doleful cries. And the guide
+said to you, not without emotion, “You see here the unfortunate Latude,
+who remained in this position, with both arms thus chained behind his
+back, for thirty-five years!”</p>
+
+<p>This information I completed by adding in the same tone: “And it was in
+this attitude that he so cleverly constructed the ladder, a hundred and
+eighty feet long, which enabled him to escape.<a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a>”</p>
+
+<p>The company looked at me with surprise, the guide with a scowl, and I
+slipped away.</p>
+
+<p>The same considerations that prompted my intervention have suggested to
+M. Funck-Brentano this work on the Bastille, in which he has set the
+facts in their true light, and confronted the legends which everyone
+knows with the truth of which many are in ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>For in spite of all that has been written on the subject by Ravaisson,
+in the introduction to his <i>Archives of the Bastille</i>, by Victor
+Fournel, in his <i>Men of the Fourteenth of July</i>, and by other writers,
+the popular idea of the internal administration of the Bastille in 1789
+holds by the description of Louis Blanc: “Iron cages, recalling
+Plessis-les-Tours<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> and the tortures of Cardinal La
+Balue!<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>&mdash;underground dungeons, the loathsome haunts of toads, lizards,
+enormous rats, spiders&mdash;the whole furniture consisting of one huge stone
+covered with a little straw,<a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a> where the prisoner breathed poison in the
+very air.... Enveloped in the shades of mystery, kept in absolute
+ignorance of the crime with which he was charged, and the kind of
+punishment awaiting him, he ceased to belong to the earth!”</p>
+
+<p>If this Bastille of melodrama ever had any existence, the Bastille of
+the eighteenth century bore the least possible resemblance to it. In
+1789, these dungeons on the ground floor of the fortress, with windows
+looking on the moats, were no longer reserved, as under Louis XV., for
+prisoners condemned to death, dangerous madmen, or prisoners who had
+been insolent, obstreperous, or violent; nor for warders guilty of
+breaches of discipline. At the time of Necker’s first ministry, the use
+of these dungeons had been abolished altogether.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner, put through an interrogation in the early days of his
+detention, was never left in ignorance of the “delinquency” with which
+he was charged, and had no reason to be concerned about the kind of
+punishment awaiting him; for there had been neither torture nor
+punishment of any kind at the Bastille for a hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of a dungeon or a cage of iron, every<a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a> prisoner occupied a room
+of fair size, its greatest defect being that it was rather poorly
+lighted by a narrow window, secured by bars, some of them projecting
+inwards. It was sufficiently furnished; and there was nothing to hinder
+the prisoner from getting in more furniture from outside. Moreover, he
+could procure whatever clothing and linen he desired, and if he had no
+means to pay for them, money was supplied. Latude complained of
+rheumatism, and furs were at once given him. He wanted a dressing-gown
+of “red-striped calamanco”; the shops were ransacked to gratify him. A
+certain Hugonnet complained that he had not received the shirts “with
+embroidered ruffles” which he had asked for. A lady named Sauvé wanted a
+dress of white silk spotted with green flowers. In all Paris there was
+only a white dress with green stripes to be found, with which it was
+hoped that she would be satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>Every room was provided with a fireplace or a stove. Firewood was
+supplied, and light; the prisoner could have as many candles as he
+pleased. Paper, pens, and ink were at his disposal; though he was
+deprived of them temporarily if he made bad<a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a> use of them, like Latude,
+who scribbled all day long only to heap insults in his letters on the
+governor and the lieutenant of police. He could borrow books from the
+library, and was at liberty to have books sent in from outside. La
+Beaumelle had six hundred volumes in his room. He might breed birds,
+cats, and dogs&mdash;by no means being reduced to taming the legendary spider
+of Pellisson,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> which figures also in the story of Lauzun,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> and,
+indeed, of all prisoners in every age. Instruments of music were
+allowed. Renneville played the fiddle, and Latude the flute. There were
+concerts in the prisoners’ rooms and in the apartments of the governor.</p>
+
+<p>Every prisoner could work at embroidery, at the turning lathe, or the
+joiner’s bench, at pleasure. All whose conduct was irreproachable were
+allowed to come and go, to pay each other visits, to play at<a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a>
+backgammon, cards, or chess in their rooms; at skittles, bowls, or
+<i>tonneau</i><a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> in the courtyard. La Rouërie asked for a billiard table for
+himself and his friends, and he got it.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners were permitted to walk on the platform of the fortress,
+from which they could see the people passing up and down the Rue
+Saint-Antoine and the vicinity, and watch the animated crowds on the
+boulevard at the hours when fashionable people were accustomed to take
+their drives. By the aid of telescopes and big letters written on boards
+they were able to communicate with the people of the neighbourhood, and,
+like Latude, to keep up a secret correspondence with the grisettes of
+the district. Michelet, with too obvious a design, declares that under
+Louis XVI. the regulations of the prison were more severe than under
+Louis XV., and that this promenade on the platform was done away with.
+There is not a word of truth in it. The promenade was forbidden only to
+those prisoners who, like the Marquis de Sade, took advantage of it to
+stir up<a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a> riots among the passers-by; and from the accession of Louis
+XVI. and the visitation of Malesherbes,<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> the rule of the prison grew
+milder day by day.</p>
+
+<p>Certain of the prisoners were invited to dine with the governor, and to
+walk in his gardens, in excellent company. Some were allowed to leave
+the fortress, on condition of returning in the evening; others were even
+allowed to remain out all night!</p>
+
+<p>Those who had servants could have them in attendance if the servants
+were willing to share their captivity. Or they had room-mates, as was
+the case with Latude and Allègre.</p>
+
+<p>In regard to food, the prisoners are unanimous in declaring that it was
+abundant and good. “I had five dishes at dinner,” says Dumouriez, “and
+five at supper, without reckoning dessert.” The Provost de Beaumont
+declared that he had quitted the Bastille with regret, because there he
+had been able to eat and drink to his heart’s content. Poultier
+<a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a>d’Elmotte says: “M. de Launey had many a friendly chat with me, and
+sent me what dishes I wished for.” Baron Hennequin, a hypochondriac who
+found fault with everything, confesses nevertheless that they gave him
+more meat than he could eat. The Abbé de Buquoy affirms that he fared
+sumptuously, and that it was the king’s intention that the prisoners
+should be well fed. The splenetic Linguet owns, in his pamphlet, that he
+had three good meals a day, and that meat was supplied to him in such
+quantities that his suspicions were aroused: “They meant to poison me!”
+he says. But he omits to say that de Launey sent him every morning the
+menu for the day, on which he marked down with his own hand the dishes
+he fancied, “choosing always the most dainty, and in sufficient
+quantities to have satisfied five or six epicures.”</p>
+
+<p>In Louis XIV.’s time, Renneville drew up the following list of dishes
+served to him: “Oysters, prawns, fowls, capons, mutton, veal, young
+pigeons; forcemeat pies and patties; asparagus, cauliflower, green peas,
+artichokes; salmon, soles, pike, trout, every kind of fish whether
+fresh-water or salt; pastry, and fruits in their season.” We find Latude
+complaining that the fowls given him were not stuffed!<a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a> M.
+Funck-Brentano tells the amusing story of Marmontel’s eating by mistake
+the dinner intended for his servant, and finding it excellent.</p>
+
+<p>Mdlle. de Launay, afterwards Madame de Staal, who was imprisoned for
+complicity in the Cellamare<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> plot, relates that on the first evening
+of her sojourn in the Bastille, she and her maid were both terrified by
+the strange and prolonged sound, beneath their feet, of a mysterious
+machine, which conjured up visions of an instrument of torture. When
+they came to inquire, they found that their room was over the kitchen,
+and the terrible machine was the roasting-jack!</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners were not only allowed to receive visits from their
+relations and friends, but to keep them to dinner or to make up a
+rubber. Thus Madame de Staal held receptions in the afternoon, and in
+the evening there was high play. “And this time,” she says, “was the
+happiest in my life.”</p>
+
+<p>Bussy-Rabutin received the whole court, and all his friends&mdash;especially
+those of the fair sex. M. de Bonrepos&mdash;an assumed name&mdash;was so
+comfortable<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a> in the Bastille that when he was directed to retire to the
+Invalides,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> he could only be removed by force.</p>
+
+<p>“I there spent six weeks,” says Morellet, “so pleasantly, that I chuckle
+to this day when I think of them.” And when he left, he exclaimed: “God
+rest those jolly tyrants!”</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire remained there for twelve days, with a recommendation from the
+lieutenant of police that he should be treated with all the
+consideration “due to his genius.”</p>
+
+<p>The objection may be raised that these cases are all of great lords or
+men of letters, towards whom the government of those days was
+exceptionally lenient. (How delightful to find writers put on the same
+footing with peers!) But the objection is groundless.</p>
+
+<p>I have referred to Renneville and Latude, prisoners of very little
+account. The one was a spy; the other a swindler. In the three-volume
+narrative left us by Renneville, you hear of nothing but how he kept
+open house and made merry with his companions. They gambled and smoked,
+ate and drank, fuddled and fought, gossiped with their neighbours<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a> of
+both sexes, and passed one another pastry and excellent wine through the
+chimneys. How gladly the prisoners in our jails to-day would accommodate
+themselves to such a life! Renneville, assuredly, was not treated with
+the same consideration as Voltaire; but, frankly, would you have wished
+it?</p>
+
+<p>As to Latude&mdash;who was supplied with dressing-gowns to suit his
+fancy&mdash;the reader will see from M. Funck-Brentano’s narrative that no
+one but himself was to blame if he did not dwell at Vincennes<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> or in
+the Bastille on the best of terms&mdash;or even leave his prison at the
+shortest notice, by the front gate, and with a well-lined pocket.</p>
+
+<p>For that was one of the harsh measures of this horrible Bastille&mdash;to
+send away the poor wretches, when their time was expired, with a few
+hundred livres in their pockets, and to compensate such as were found to
+be innocent! See what M. Funck-Brentano says of Subé, who, for a
+detention of eighteen days, received 3000 livres (£240 to-day), or of
+others, who, after an imprisonment of two years, were consoled with an
+annual pension of 2400 francs<a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a> of our reckoning. Voltaire spent twelve
+days in the Bastille, and was assured of an annual pension of 1200
+livres for life. What is to be said now of our contemporary justice,
+which, after some months of imprisonment on suspicion, dismisses the
+poor fellow, arrested by mistake, with no other indemnity than the
+friendly admonition: “Go! and take care we don’t catch you again!”</p>
+
+<p>Some wag will be sure to say that I am making out the Bastille to have
+been a palace of delight. We can spare him his little jest. A prison is
+always a prison, however pleasant it may be; and the best of cheer is no
+compensation for the loss of liberty. But there is a wide difference, it
+will be granted, between the reality and the notion generally
+held&mdash;between this “hotel for men of letters,” as some one called it,
+and the hideous black holes of our system of solitary confinement. I
+once said that I should prefer three years in the Bastille to three
+months at Mazas.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> I do not retract.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Linguet and Latude, unquestionably, were the two men whose habit of
+drawing the long bow has done<a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a> most to propagate the fables about the
+Bastille, the falsity of which is established by incontrovertible
+documents. Party spirit has not failed to take seriously the interested
+calumnies of Linguet, who used his spurious martyrdom to advertise
+himself, and the lies of Latude, exploiting to good purpose a captivity
+which he had made his career.</p>
+
+<p>Let us leave Linguet, who, after having so earnestly urged the
+demolition of the Bastille, had reason to regret it at the Conciergerie
+at the moment of mounting the revolutionary tumbril, and speak a little
+of the other, this captive who was as ingenious in escaping from prison,
+when locked up, as in hugging his chains when offered the means of
+release.</p>
+
+<p>For the bulk of mankind, thirty-five years of captivity was the price
+Latude paid for a mere practical joke: the sending to Madame de
+Pompadour of a harmless powder that was taken for poison. The punishment
+is regarded as terrific: I do not wonder at it. But if, instead of
+relying on the gentleman’s own fanfaronades, the reader will take the
+trouble to look at the biography written by M. Funck-Brentano and amply
+supported by documents,<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a> he will speedily see that if Latude remained in
+prison for thirty-five years, it was entirely by his own choice; and
+that his worst enemy, his most implacable persecutor, the author of all
+his miseries was&mdash;himself.</p>
+
+<p>If, after the piece of trickery which led to his arrest, he had followed
+the advice of the excellent Berryer, who counselled patience and
+promised his speedy liberation, he might have got off with a few months
+of restraint at Vincennes, where his confinement was so rigorous that he
+had only to push the garden gate to be free!</p>
+
+<p>That was the first folly calculated to injure his cause, for the new
+fault was more serious than the old. He was caught; he was locked in the
+cells of the Bastille: but the kind-hearted Berryer soon removed him.
+Instead of behaving himself quietly, however, our man begins to grow
+restless, to harangue, to abuse everybody, and on the books lent him to
+scribble insulting verses on the Pompadour. But they allow him an
+apartment, then give him a servant, then a companion, Allègre. And then
+comes the famous escape. One hardly knows which to wonder at the most:
+the ingenuity of the<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a> two rogues, or the guileless management of this
+prison which allows them to collect undisturbed a gimlet, a saw, a
+compass, a pulley, fourteen hundred feet of rope, a rope ladder 180 feet
+long, with 218 wooden rungs; to conceal all these between the floor and
+the ceiling below, without anyone ever thinking to look there; and,
+after having cut through a wall four and a half feet thick, to get clear
+away without firing a shot!</p>
+
+<p>They were not the first to get across those old walls. Renneville
+mentions several escapes, the most famous being that of the Abbé de
+Buquoy.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> But little importance seems to have been attached to them.</p>
+
+<p>With Allègre and Latude it was a different matter. The passers-by must
+have seen, in the early morning, the ladder swinging from top to bottom
+of the wall, and the escape was no longer a secret. The Bastille is
+discredited. It is possible, then, to escape from<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a> it. The chagrined
+police are on their mettle. There will be laughter at their expense. The
+fugitives are both well known, too. They will take good care to spread
+the story of their escape, with plenty of gibes against the governor,
+the lieutenant of police, the ministry, the favourite, the king! This
+scandal must be averted at any cost; the fugitives must be caught!</p>
+
+<p>And we cannot help pitying these two wretches who, after a flight so
+admirably contrived, got arrested so stupidly: Allègre at Brussels,
+through an abusive letter written to the Pompadour; Latude in Holland,
+through a letter begging help from his mother.</p>
+
+<p>Latude is again under lock and key, and this time condemned to a
+stricter confinement. And then the hubbub begins again: outcries,
+demands, acts of violence, threats! He exasperates and daunts men who
+had the best will in the world to help him. He is despatched to the
+fortress of Vincennes, and promised his liberty if he will only keep
+quiet. His liberation, on his own showing, was but a matter of days. He
+is allowed to walk on the bank of the moat. He takes advantage of it to
+escape again!<a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a></p>
+
+<p>Captured once more, he is once more lodged at Vincennes, and the whole
+business begins over again. But they are good enough to consider him a
+little mad, and after a stay at Charenton,<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> where he was very well
+treated, he at last gets his dismissal, with the recommendation to
+betake himself to his own part of the country quietly. Ah, that would
+not be like Latude! He scampers over Paris, railing against De Sartine,
+De Marigny; hawking his pamphlets; claiming 150,000 livres as
+damages!&mdash;and, finally, extorting money from a charitable lady by
+menaces!</p>
+
+<p>This is the last straw. Patience is exhausted, and he is clapped into
+Bicêtre<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> as a dangerous lunatic. Imagine his fury and disgust!</p>
+
+<p>Let us be just. Suppose, in our own days, a swindler, sentenced to a few
+months’ imprisonment, insulting the police, the magistrates, the court,
+the president; sentenced on this account to a longer term, escaping
+once, twice, a third time; always<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a> caught, put in jail again, sentenced
+to still longer terms: then when at last released, after having done his
+time, scattering broadcast insulting libels against the chief of police,
+the ministers, the parliament, and insisting on the President of the
+Republic paying him damages to the tune of 150,000 francs; to crown it
+all, getting money out of some good woman by working on her fears! You
+will agree with me that such a swaggering blade would not have much
+difficulty in putting together thirty-five years in jail!</p>
+
+<p>But these sentences would of course be public, and provide no soil for
+the growth of those legends to which closed doors always give rise. Yet
+in all that relates to the causes and the duration of the man’s
+imprisonment, his case would be precisely that of Latude&mdash;except that
+for him there would be no furs, no promenading in the gardens, no
+stuffed fowls for his lunch!</p>
+
+<p>Besides some fifty autograph letters from Latude, addressed from Bicêtre
+to his good angel, Madame Legros, in which he shows himself in his true
+character, an intriguing, vain, insolent, bragging, insupportable
+humbug, I have one, written to M. de Sartine, which Latude published as
+a pendant to the<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a> pamphlet with which he hoped to move Madame de
+Pompadour to pity, and in which every phrase is an insult. This letter
+was put up at public auction, and these first lines of it were
+reproduced in the catalogue:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I am supporting with patience the loss of my best years and of my
+fortune. I am enduring my rheumatism, the weakness of my arm, and a ring
+of iron around my body for the rest of my life!”</p>
+
+<p>A journalist, one of those who learn their history from Louis Blanc, had
+a vision of Latude for ever riveted by a ring of iron to a pillar in
+some underground dungeon, and exclaimed with indignation: “A ring of
+iron! How horrible!”</p>
+
+<p>And it was only a linen band!</p>
+
+<p>That fabulous iron collar is a type of the whole legend of the
+unfortunate Latude!</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Everything connected with the Bastille has assumed a fabulous character.</p>
+
+<p>What glorious days were those of the 13th and 14th of July, as the
+popular imagination conjures them up in reliance on Michelet, who, in a
+vivid, impassioned, picturesque, dramatic, admirable style,<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a> has
+written, not the history, but the romance of the French Revolution!</p>
+
+<p>Look at his account of the 13th. He shows you all Paris in revolt
+against Versailles, and with superb enthusiasm running to arms to try
+issues with the royal army. It is fine as literature. Historically, it
+is pure fiction.</p>
+
+<p>The Parisians were assuredly devoted to the “new ideas,” that is, the
+suppression of the abuses and the privileges specified in the memorials
+of the States General; in a word, to the reforms longed for by the whole
+of France. But they had no conception of gaining them without the
+concurrence of the monarchy, to which they were sincerely attached. That
+crowd of scared men running to the Hôtel de Ville to demand arms, who
+are represented by the revolutionary writers as exasperated by the
+dismissal of Necker and ready to undermine the throne for the sake of
+that Genevan, were much less alarmed at what was hatching at Versailles
+than at what was going on in Paris. If they wished for arms, it was for
+their own security. The dissolution of the National Assembly, which was
+regarded as certain, was setting all minds in a ferment, and
+ill-designing<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a> people took advantage of the general uneasiness and
+agitation to drive matters to the worst extremities, creating disorder
+everywhere. The police had disappeared; the streets were in the hands of
+the mob. Bands of ruffians&mdash;among them those ill-favoured rascals who
+since the month of May had been flocking, as at a word of command, into
+Paris from heaven knows where, and who had already been seen at work,
+pillaging Réveillon’s<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> establishment&mdash;roamed in every direction,
+insulting women, stripping wayfarers, looting the shops, opening the
+prisons, burning the barriers. On July 13 the electors of Paris resolved
+on the formation of a citizen militia for the protection of the town,
+and the scheme was adopted on the same day by every district, with
+articles of constitution, quoted by M. Funck-Brentano, which specify the
+intentions of the signatories. It was expressly in self-defence against
+the “Brigands,” as they were called, that the citizen militia was
+formed: “To protect the citizens,” ran the minutes of the
+Petit-Saint-Antoine district, “against the dangers which threaten them
+each individually.” “In a word,” says M. Victor Fournel,<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a> “the
+dominating sentiment was fear. Up till the 14th of July, the Parisian
+middle-classes showed far more concern at the manifold excesses
+committed by the populace after Necker’s dismissal than at the schemes
+of the court.” And M. Jacques Charavay, who was the first to publish the
+text of the minutes in question, says not a word too much when he draws
+from them this conclusion: “The movement which next day swept away the
+Bastille might possibly have been stifled by the National Guard, if its
+organization had had greater stability.”</p>
+
+<p>All that was wanting to these good intentions was direction, a man at
+the helm, and particularly the support of Besenval. But his conduct was
+amazing! He left Versailles with 35,000 men and an order signed by the
+king&mdash;obtained not without difficulty&mdash;authorizing him “to repel force
+by force.” Now let us see a summary of his military operations:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>On the 13th, towards four o’clock in the afternoon, a skirmish of the
+German regiment on the Place Vendôme, where it came into collision with
+the “demonstration”&mdash;as we should say to-day&mdash;which was displaying busts
+of Necker and the Duke of Orleans, and dispersed it.<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a></p>
+
+<p>At six o’clock, a march of the same horse soldiers to the
+swinging-bridge of the Tuileries, where they had five or six chairs
+thrown at their head; and the massacre, by M. de Lambesc, of the
+legendary grey-beard who, an hour after, was describing his tragic end
+at the Palais-Royal!</p>
+
+<p>At nine o’clock, a military promenade of the same regiment along the
+boulevards. A volley from the Gardes Françaises slew two of their
+number, and the regiment beat a retreat without returning fire, to the
+great surprise of M. de Maleissye, officer of the Guards. For, by his
+own confession, if the cavalry had charged, it would easily have routed
+the Gardes Françaises “in the state of drunkenness in which they then
+were.”</p>
+
+<p>And Besenval, terrified at such a resistance, assembled all his troops,
+shut himself up with them in the Champ de Mars, and did not move another
+step!</p>
+
+<p>We ask ourselves, “Was he a fool? or was he a traitor?” He was a fool,
+for he thought he had “three hundred thousand men” in front of him, took
+every excited person for a rebel, and did not understand that out of
+every hundred Parisians<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a> there were ninety who were relying on him to
+bring the mutineers to reason.</p>
+
+<p>He had no confidence in his troops, he said.</p>
+
+<p>It was rather for them to have no confidence in him, and to lose heart
+utterly at such a spectacle of cowardice. But he was slandering them.
+One solitary regiment showed disloyalty. And if he had only given the
+Swiss the word to march, their conduct on August 10 gives ample proof
+that they could have been depended on.</p>
+
+<p>“And then,” says he again, “I was fearful of letting loose civil war!”</p>
+
+<p>Indeed! And so a soldier going to suppress a revolt is not to run the
+risk of fighting!</p>
+
+<p>Last reason of all: “I requested orders from Versailles&mdash;and did not get
+them!”</p>
+
+<p>What, then, had he in his pocket?</p>
+
+<p>Finally, after having sent word to Flesselles and De Launey to maintain
+their position till he arrived, and after having allowed the arms of the
+Invalides to be looted under his eyes without a single effort to save
+them, he waited till the Bastille was taken before making up his mind to
+leave the Champ de Mars, and to return quietly to<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a> Versailles with his
+35,000 men, who had not fired a shot!</p>
+
+<p>Ah! those were the days for rioting!</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>“On July 13,” says Michelet, “Paris was defending herself.” (Against
+whom?) “On the 14th, she attacked! A voice wakened her and cried, ‘On,
+and take the Bastille!’ And that day was the day of the entire People!”</p>
+
+<p>Admirable poetry; but every word a lie!</p>
+
+<p>Listen to Marat, who is not open to suspicion, and who saw things at
+closer quarters. “The Bastille, badly defended, was captured by a
+handful of soldiers and a gang of wretches for the most part Germans and
+provincials. The Parisians, those everlasting star-gazers, came there
+out of curiosity!”</p>
+
+<p>In reality, Michelet’s “entire people” reduces itself to a bare thousand
+assailants, of whom three hundred at most took part in the fight: Gardes
+Françaises and deserters of all arms, lawyers’ clerks, and citizens who
+had lost their heads: fine fellows who thought themselves engaged in
+meritorious work in rushing on these inoffensive walls; bandits
+attracted by the riot which promised them theft and murder<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a> with
+impunity. And a number of mere spectators&mdash;spectators above all!</p>
+
+<p>“I was present,” says Chancellor Pasquier, “at the taking of the
+Bastille. What is called the fight was not serious. The resistance was
+absolutely nil. The truth is, that this grand fight did not cause an
+instant’s alarm to the spectators, who had flocked up to see the result.
+Among them there were many ladies of the greatest elegance. In order to
+get more easily to the front they had left their carriages at a
+distance. By my side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Comédie Française. We
+stayed to see the finish, and then I escorted her on my arm to her
+carriage in the Place Royale.”</p>
+
+<p>“The Bastille was not taken; truth must be told, it surrendered.” It is
+Michelet himself who makes this statement, and he adds: “what ruined it
+was its own evil conscience!”</p>
+
+<p>It would be too simple to acknowledge that it was the incapacity of its
+governor.</p>
+
+<p>There is no connoisseur in old prints but is acquainted with those
+last-century views which represent the taking of the Bastille. The
+platform of the fortress bristles with cannon all firing<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a> together,
+“belching forth death,”&mdash;without the slightest attention on the part of
+the assailants, for all the balls from this artillery, passing over
+their heads, would only kill inoffensive wayfarers without so much as
+scratching a single one of the besiegers!</p>
+
+<p>And the Bastille did not fire a single shot in self-defence!</p>
+
+<p>In the morning, at the request of Thuriot de la Rozière, De Launey had
+readily consented to the withdrawal of the fifteen cannon of the
+platform from their embrasures, and had blocked up the embrasures with
+planks. Of the three guns which later on he ranged batterywise before
+the entrance gate, not one was effective, and the discharge attributed
+to one of them came from a piece of ordnance on the wall.</p>
+
+<p>He placed such absolute reliance on succour from Besenval that, on
+evacuating the arsenal and getting the whole garrison together into the
+Bastille&mdash;eighty-two Invalides and M. de Flue’s thirty-two Swiss&mdash;he had
+forgotten to increase his stock of provisions. Now, the Bastille had no
+reserve of provisions. Every morning, like a good housewife, it received
+the goods ordered the night before,<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a> brought by the different purveyors;
+on this day, they were intercepted. So it happened that at three o’clock
+in the afternoon the garrison was without its usual rations, and the
+Invalides, who had been for a week past going in and out of all the inns
+in the neighbourhood, and were disposed to open the doors to their good
+friends of the suburbs, used the scantiness of their rations as a
+pretext for mutiny, for refusing to fight, and for muddling the brains,
+never very clear, of the unhappy De Launey.</p>
+
+<p>“On the day of my arrival,” says De Flue, “I was able to take this man’s
+measure from the absolutely imbecile preparations which he made for the
+defence of his position. I saw clearly that we should be very poorly led
+in case of attack. He was so struck with terror at the idea of it that,
+when night came on, he took the shadows of trees for enemies! Incapable,
+irresolute, devoting all his attention to trifles and neglecting
+important duties&mdash;such was the man.”</p>
+
+<p>Abandoned by Besenval, instead of cowing his Invalides into obedience by
+his energy, and maintaining his position to famishing point behind walls
+over which the balls of the besiegers flew without<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a> killing more than
+one man, De Launey lost his head, made a feint of firing the powder
+magazine, capitulated, and opened his gates to men who, as Chateaubriand
+says, “could never have cleared them if he had only kept them shut.”</p>
+
+<p>If this poor creature had done his duty, and Besenval had done his,
+things would have had quite a different complexion. That is not to say
+that the Revolution would have been averted&mdash;far from it! The Revolution
+was legitimate, desirable, and, under the generous impulse of a whole
+nation, irresistible. But it would have followed another bent, and would
+have triumphed at a slighter cost, with less ruin and less bloodshed.
+The consequences of the 14th of July were disastrous. The mere words,
+“The Bastille is taken!” were the signal for the most frightful
+disorders throughout France. It seemed as though those old walls were
+dragging down with them in their fall all authority, all respect, all
+discipline; as though the floodgates were being opened to every kind of
+excess. Peasants went about in bands, ravaging, pillaging, firing the
+châteaux, the burghers’ houses, and burning alive those who fell into
+their hands. The soldiers<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a> mutinied, insulted their chiefs, and fell to
+carousing with the malefactors whom they set free. There was not a town
+or village where the mob did not put on menacing airs, where decent
+people were not molested by the brawlers of the clubs and the
+street-corners. Such violence led to a rapid reaction, and there were
+numerous defections&mdash;of men who, on the very eve of the outbreak, among
+the magistracy, the army, the clergy, the nobility, though sympathizing
+with the new ideas, abruptly cut themselves loose from the movement,
+like the good Duke de la Rochefoucauld, who exclaimed, “Liberty is not
+entered by such a door as this!” Hovering between the desire and the
+fear of granting the promised reforms, urged on one side to resistance,
+on the other to submission, and more than ever destitute of all
+political acumen and all will power, the king went to Paris, and,
+bending before the revolt, approved of the assassination of his most
+faithful servants&mdash;and took, on that fatal day, his first step towards
+the scaffold! Henceforth, under the pressure of the populace, to whom
+its first success had shown the measure of its strength, and who became
+every day more exacting, more threatening,<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a> the Revolution was to go on
+in its perverse course, stumbling at every step, until it came to the
+orgy of ’93, which, properly speaking, was only the systematizing of
+brigandage. Malouet was right indeed: what we symbolize in our festival
+of the 14th of July is not the rising sun, the dawn of Liberty; it is
+the first lurid lightning flash of the Terror!</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Rigby, after having walked up and down the whole afternoon in the
+Jardin Monceau without the least idea of what was going on in the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine, returned in the evening to his house near the
+Palais-Royal. He saw the mob reeling in drunkenness. Men and women were
+laughing, crying, and embracing one another: “The Bastille is taken! At
+last we are free!” And not the least enthusiastic were those very men of
+the citizen militia who, ready yesterday to fight the insurrection, were
+to-day hailing its triumph! The first sabre brandished by the first
+national guard was in point of fact that of Joseph Prudhomme!<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a></p>
+
+<p>All at once this delirious crowd shudders, parts asunder with cries of
+horror!</p>
+
+<p>Down the Rue Saint-Honoré comes a yelling mob of wine-soaked
+malefactors, bearing along, at the ends of two pikes, the still bleeding
+heads of De Launey and De Flesselles!</p>
+
+<p>And the silly folk, so madly rejoiced by the fall of an imaginary
+tyranny which has not even the wits to defend itself, go their several
+ways, struck dumb with consternation.</p>
+
+<p>For here the Real is making its entrance!</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Do not fancy that because the Bastille has opened its gates, the legends
+which give it so cruel a name are going to vanish into thin air, like
+the phantoms of an ancient château when light is let in.</p>
+
+<p>While Michelet’s “entire Paris” is making short work of the Invalides
+who surrendered the place; cutting in pieces the man who prevented its
+blowing up; slaughtering Major de Losme, the friend and<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a> benefactor of
+the prisoners; torturing the hapless De Launey, who, from the Bastille
+to the Hôtel de Ville, stabbed, slashed, hacked with sabres and pikes
+and bayonets, is finally decapitated by the aid of a short knife&mdash;an
+episode which Michelet skilfully slurs over&mdash;while all the criminals of
+the district, crowding along in the wake of the combatants, are rushing
+to the official buildings, looting, smashing, throwing into the moats
+furniture, books, official papers, archives, the remnants of which will
+be collected with such difficulty&mdash;some good people are saying to
+themselves: “But come now, there are some prisoners! Suppose we go and
+set them free?”</p>
+
+<p>Here let us see what Louis Blanc has to say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Meanwhile the doors of the cells” (he insists on the cells) “were burst
+in with a mighty effort; the prisoners were free! Alas! for three of
+them it was too late! The first, whose name was the Comte de Solages, a
+victim for seven years of the incomprehensible vengeance of an
+implacable father, found neither relatives who would consent to
+acknowledge him, nor his property, which had become the prey of covetous
+collateral heirs! The second was called Whyte. Of what crime was he
+guilty, accused, of,<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a> at any rate, suspected? No one has ever known! The
+man himself was questioned in vain. In the Bastille he had lost his
+reason. The third, Tavernier, at the sight of his deliverers, fancied he
+saw his executioners coming, and put himself on the defensive. Throwing
+their arms round his neck they undeceived him; but next day he was met
+roaming through the town, muttering wild and whirling words. He was
+mad!”</p>
+
+<p>As many wilful errors as there are words!</p>
+
+<p>The Comte de Solages was an execrable libertine, confined at the request
+of his family for “atrocious and notorious crimes.” His relatives
+nevertheless had the humanity to take him in after his deliverance, and
+it was with them that he died in 1825.</p>
+
+<p>Whyte and Tavernier did not go mad in the Bastille. They were in the
+Bastille because they were mad; and the second was, further, implicated
+in an assassination. Finding shelter with a perruquier of the
+neighbourhood, he set about smashing all his host’s belongings, which
+necessitated his banishment to Charenton, where Whyte soon rejoined him.
+It was not worth the trouble of changing their quarters!<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a></p>
+
+<p>Four other prisoners who were set free, Corrège, Béchade, Pujade, and
+Laroche, were imprisoned for forgery. And so Louis Blanc is careful
+silently to pass them over!</p>
+
+<p>Ten days before, another victim of tyranny had been groaning in
+irons&mdash;the Marquis de Sade, who, from the height of the platform, used
+to provoke the passers-by with the aid of a speaking trumpet. De Launey
+was compelled to transfer him to Vincennes, thus depriving the victors
+of the glory of liberating the future author of <i>Justine</i>. The Republic
+took its revenge in making him later secretary of the “Pike” ward,<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>
+an office for which he was marked out by his virtues!</p>
+
+<p>But of all these prisoners the most celebrated, the most popular, the
+man whose misfortunes all Paris deplored, was the famous Comte de
+Lorges, who, according to the biographical sketch devoted to him by the
+unknown author of his deliverance, had been shut up for thirty-two
+years. The story must be read in the pamphlet of Citizen Rousselet,
+conqueror of the Bastille: “The tide of humanity penetrates into<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a> ways
+narrowed by mistrust. An iron door opens: what does one see? Is this a
+man? Good heavens! this old man loaded with irons! the splendour of his
+brow, the whiteness of his beard hanging over his breast! What majesty!
+the fire still flashing from his eyes seems to shed a gentle light in
+this lugubrious abode!”</p>
+
+<p>Surprised at seeing so many armed men, he asks them if Louis XV. is
+still alive. They set him free, they lead him to the Hôtel de Ville.</p>
+
+<p>For fifteen days all Paris went to visit the black dungeon in which this
+unhappy wretch had been shut up for so many years without other light
+than that which escaped “from his eyes”! A stone from that dungeon had a
+place in the Curtius Museum. His portrait was published. A print
+represents him at the moment when his chains were broken, seated on a
+chair in his cell, a pitcher of water by his side!</p>
+
+<p>And this hapless greybeard&mdash;he was never seen! He never existed!</p>
+
+<p>In reality there were in the Bastille, on the 14th of July, only seven
+prisoners&mdash;two madmen, a <i>Sadique</i>,<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a><a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a> and four forgers. But about
+their number and their right to imprisonment Michelet remains dumb: to
+discuss that would spoil his epic! And he excels in making the most of
+everything that can support his case, and in ignoring everything that
+damages it. And so he contents himself with speaking of the two who had
+“gone mad”!&mdash;a prevarication worthy of Louis Blanc, nay, unworthy even
+of him!</p>
+
+<p>The conquerors were somewhat surprised at the small number of victims,
+more surprised still to find them comfortably installed in rooms, some
+of which were furnished with arm-chairs in Utrecht velvet! The author of
+<i>The Bastille Unmasked</i> exclaims: “What! No corpses! No skeletons! No
+men in chains!” “The taking of the Bastille,” said “Cousin Jacques,”<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a>
+“has opened the eyes of the public on the kind of captivity experienced
+there.”</p>
+
+<p>But in this he was greatly mistaken. Legends die hard! A Bastille
+without cells, dungeons, cages of iron! Public opinion did not admit
+that it could have been deceived on that point.</p>
+
+<p>“Several prisoners,” says the <i>History of Remarkable<a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a> Events</i>, “were set
+at liberty; but some, and perhaps the greater number, had already died
+of hunger, because men could not find their way about this monstrous
+prison. Some of these prisoners confined within four walls received food
+only through holes cut in the wall. A party of prisoners was found
+starved to death, because their cells were not discovered till several
+days had elapsed!”</p>
+
+<p>Another pamphlet on the underground cells discovered in the Bastille,
+resuscitating an old fable which had already done duty for the Cardinal
+de Richelieu, shows us a prisoner taken from his cell and led by the
+governor into “a room which had nothing sinister in its appearance. It
+was lit by more than fifty candles. Sweet-scented flowers filled it with
+a delicious perfume. The tyrant chatted amicably with his prisoner....
+Then he gave the horrible signal: a bascule let into the floor opened,
+and the wretched man disappeared, falling upon a wheel stuck with razors
+and set in motion by invisible hands.” And the author winds up with this
+magnificent reflection:&mdash;“Such a punishment, so basely contrived, is not
+even credible&mdash;and yet it<a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a> was at Paris, in that beautiful and
+flourishing city, that this took place!”</p>
+
+<p>Dorat-Cubières, who was one of the literary disgraces of the eighteenth
+century, goes further! He saw, with his own eyes, one of those dens
+where the captive, shut up with enough bread to last him a week, had
+thereafter nothing else to subsist on but his own flesh. “In this den,”
+he says, “we came upon a horrible skeleton, the sight of which made me
+shrink back with horror!”</p>
+
+<p>And the popular picture-mongers did not fail to propagate these
+insanities. I have an engraving of the time nicely calculated to stir
+sensitive hearts. Upon the steps of a gloomy cellar the conquerors are
+dragging along a man whom his uniform shows to be one of the defenders
+of the Bastille, and are pointing out to him an old man being carried
+away, another being cut down from the ceiling where he is hanging by the
+arms; yet others lying on a wheel furnished with iron teeth, chained to
+it, twisted into horrible contortions by abominable machines; and in a
+recess behind a grating appears the skeleton&mdash;which Dorat-Cubières never
+saw!</p>
+
+<p>The non-existence of these dungeons and holes<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a> with skeletons was too
+great a shock to settled beliefs. This Bastille <i>must</i> contain concealed
+below ground some unknown cells where its victims were moaning! And
+naturally enough, when one bent down the ear, one heard their despairing
+appeals! But after having pierced through vaults, sunk pits, dug,
+sounded everywhere, there was no help for it but to give up these
+fancies, though&mdash;an agreeable thing to have to say!&mdash;with regret.</p>
+
+<p>They fell back then on instruments of torture. For though the rack had
+been abolished for a hundred years, how was it possible to conceive of
+the Bastille without some slight instruments of torture?</p>
+
+<p>They had no difficulty in finding them&mdash;“chains,” says Louis Blanc,
+“which the hands of many innocent men had perhaps worn, machines of
+which no one could guess the use: an old iron corslet which seemed to
+have been invented to reduce man to everlasting immobility!”</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, these chains belonged to two statuettes of
+prisoners which stood on either side of the great clock in the
+courtyard. The machines, the use of which no one could guess, were the
+fragments<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a> of a clandestine printing-press that had been pulled to
+pieces. And the iron corslet was a piece of fifteenth-century armour!</p>
+
+<p>Skeletons, too, were missing, though indeed some bones were found in the
+apartment of the surgeon of the fortress; but the utmost bad faith could
+not but be compelled to acknowledge that these were anatomical
+specimens. Happily for the legend, a more serious discovery was made:
+“two skeletons, chained to a cannon-ball,” as the register of the
+district of Saint-Louis la Culture declared.</p>
+
+<p>They both came to light in the rubbish dug out during the construction
+of the bastion afterwards turned into a garden for the governor. “One,”
+says the report of Fourcroy, Vicq-d’Azyr, and Sabatier, instructed to
+examine them, “was found turned head downwards on the steps of a steep
+staircase, entirely covered with earth, and appears to be that of a
+workman who had fallen by accident down this dark staircase, where he
+was not seen by the men working at the embankment. The other, carefully
+buried in a sort of ditch, had evidently been laid there a long time
+previously, before there was any idea of filling up the bastion.<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a>”</p>
+
+<p>As to the cannon-ball, it must have dated back to the Fronde.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<p>But skeletons were necessary! They had found some: they might as well
+profit by them!</p>
+
+<p>The demolisher of the Bastille, that charlatan Palloy, exhibited them to
+the veneration of the faithful in a cellar by the light of a funereal
+lamp, after which they were honoured with a magnificent funeral, with
+drums, clergy, a procession of working men, between two lines of
+National Guards, from the Bastille to the Church of St. Paul. And
+finally, in the graveyard adjoining the church, they raised to them,
+amid four poplars, a monument of which a contemporary print has
+preserved the likeness.</p>
+
+<p>After such a ceremony, dispute if you dare the authenticity of the
+relics!</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The memory of the Man in the Iron Mask is so closely bound up with the
+story of the Bastille that M.<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a> Funck-Brentano could not neglect this
+great enigma about which for two hundred years so much ink has been
+spilt. He strips off this famous mask&mdash;which, by the way, was of
+velvet&mdash;and shows us the face which the world has been so anxious to
+see: the face of Mattioli, the confidant of the Duke of Mantua and the
+betrayer of both Louis XIV. and his own master.</p>
+
+<p>M. Funck-Brentano’s demonstration is so convincing as to leave no room
+for doubt. But one dare not hope that the good public will accept his
+conclusions as final. To the public, mystery is ever more attractive
+than the truth. There is a want of prestige about Mattioli; while about
+a twin brother of Louis XIV.&mdash;ah, <i>there</i> is something that appeals to
+the imagination!</p>
+
+<p>And then there are the guides, the showmen, to reckon with&mdash;those
+faithful guardians of legends, whose propaganda is more aggressive than
+that of scholars. When you reflect that every day, at the Isles of
+Saint-Marguerite, the masked man’s cell is shown to visitors by a good
+woman who retails all the traditional fables about the luxurious life of
+the prisoner, his lace, his plate, and the attentions<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a> shown him by M.
+de Saint-Mars, you will agree that a struggle with this daily discourse
+would be hopeless. And you would not come off with a whole skin!</p>
+
+<p>I was visiting the Château d’If before the new buildings were erected.
+The show-woman of the place, another worthy dame, pointed out to us the
+ruined cells of the Abbé Faria and Edmond Dantès.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> And the spectators
+were musing on the story as they contemplated the ruins.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to me,” I said, “that these cells are rather near one another,
+but surely Alexandre Dumas put them a little farther apart!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well!” replied the good creature, withering me with a glance of
+contempt, “if, when I’m relating gospel truth, the gentleman begins
+quoting a novelist&mdash;!”</p>
+
+<p>To come nearer home. Follow, one of these days, a batch of Cook’s
+tourists at Versailles, shown round by an English cicerone. You will see
+him point out the window from which Louis XVI. issued, on a flying
+bridge, to reach his scaffold, erected in the marble court! The guide is
+no fool. He knows well enough that the Place de la Concorde would<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a> not
+appeal to the imagination of his countrymen; while it is quite natural
+to them to draw a parallel in their minds between the scaffold of Louis
+XVI. at Versailles and that of Charles I. at Whitehall.</p>
+
+<p>And the conclusion of the whole matter is this: that whatever may be
+said or written, nothing will prevail against the popular beliefs that
+the Bastille was “the hell of living men,” and that it was taken by
+storm. Legends are the history of the people, especially those which
+flatter their instincts, prejudices, and passions. You will never
+convince them of their falsity.</p>
+
+<p>M. Funck-Brentano must also expect to be treated as a “reactionary,” for
+such is, to many people, any one who does not unreservedly decry the
+<i>ancien régime</i>. It had, assuredly, its vices and abuses, which the
+Revolution swept away&mdash;to replace them by others, much more tolerable,
+to be sure; but that is no reason for slandering the past and painting
+it blacker than it really was. The fanatical supporters of the
+Revolution have founded in its honour a sort of cult whose intolerance
+is often irritating. To hear them you would fancy that before its birth
+there was nothing but darkness, ignorance, iniquity,<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a> and wretchedness!
+And so we are to give it wholehearted admiration, and palliate its
+errors and its crimes; even gilding, as Chateaubriand said, the iron of
+its guillotine. These idolaters of the Revolution are very injudicious.
+By endeavouring to compel admiration for all that it effected, good and
+ill without distinction, they provoke the very unreasonable inclination
+to regard its whole achievement with abhorrence. It could well dispense
+with such a surplusage of zeal, for it is strong enough to bear the
+truth; and its work, after all, is great enough to need no justification
+or glorification by means of legends.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Victorien Sardou.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a></p>
+
+<h1>LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE</h1>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.<br /><br />
+<small>THE ARCHIVES.</small></h2>
+
+<p class="nind">“T<small>HE</small> Bastille,” wrote Sainte-Foix, “is a castle which, without being
+strong, is one of the most formidable in Europe, and about it I shall
+say nothing.” “Silence is safer than speech on that subject,” was the
+saying in Paris.</p>
+
+<p>At the extremity of the Rue Saint-Antoine, as one entered the suburb,
+appeared the eight lofty towers, sombre, massive, plunging their
+moss-grown feet into pools of muddy water. Their walls were pierced at
+intervals with narrow, iron-barred windows: they were crowned with
+battlements. Situated not far from the Marais, the blithe and wealthy
+quarter, and quite near to the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where industry
+raised its perpetual hum, the Bastille, charged with gloom and silence,
+formed an impressive contrast.</p>
+
+<p>The common impression it made is conveyed by Restif<a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a> de la Bretonne in
+his <i>Nights of Paris</i>: “It was a nightmare, that awesome Bastille, on
+which, as I passed each evening along the Rue Saint-Gilles, I never
+dared to turn my eyes.”</p>
+
+<p>The towers had an air of mystery, harsh and melancholy, and the royal
+government threw mystery like a cloud around them. At nightfall, when
+the shutters were closed, a cab would cross the drawbridge, and from
+time to time, in the blackness of night, funeral processions, vague
+shadows which the light of a torch set flickering on the walls, would
+make their silent exit. How many of those who had entered there had ever
+been seen again? And if perchance one met a former prisoner, to the
+first question he would reply that on leaving he had signed a promise to
+reveal nothing of what he had seen. This former prisoner had, as a
+matter of fact, never seen anything to speak of. Absolute silence was
+imposed upon the warders. “There is no exchanging of confidences in this
+place,” writes Madame de Staal, “and the people you come across have all
+such freezing physiognomies that you would think twice before asking the
+most trifling question.” “The first article of their code,” says
+Linguet, “is the impenetrable mystery which envelops all their
+operations.”</p>
+
+<p>We know how legends are formed. Sometimes you see them open out like
+flowers brilliant under the sun’s bright beams, you see them blossom
+under the glorious radiance that lights up the life of heroes. The man
+himself has long gone down into the tomb; the legend<a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a> survives; it
+streams across the ages, like a meteor leaving its trail of light; it
+grows, broadens out, with ever-increasing lustre and glow: in this light
+we see Themistocles, Leonidas, Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon.</p>
+
+<p>Or may be, on the contrary, the legend is born in some remote corner,
+covered with shade and silence. There men have lived their lives, there
+it has been their lot to suffer. Their moans have risen in solitude and
+confinement, and the only ears that heard them were harder than their
+stone walls. These moans, heard by no compassionate soul, the great
+resounding soul of the people catches up, swelling them with all its
+might. Soon, among the mass of the people, there passes a blast
+irresistible in its strength, like the tempest that upheaves the
+restless waves. Then is the sea loosed from its chains: the tumultuous
+breakers dash upon the affrighted shore: the sea-walls are all swept
+away!</p>
+
+<p>In a letter written by Chevalier, the major of the Bastille, to Sartine,
+the chief of the police, he spoke of the common gossip on the Bastille
+that was going about. “Although utterly false,” he said, “I think it
+very dangerous on account of its dissemination through the kingdom, and
+that has now been going on for several years.” No attention was paid to
+Chevalier’s warning. Mystery continued to be the rule at the Bastille
+and in all that related to it. “The mildness of manners and of the
+government,” writes La Harpe, “had caused needlessly harsh measures in
+great part to disappear. They lived<a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a> on in the imagination of the
+people, augmented and strengthened by the tales which credulity and hate
+seize upon.” Ere long the <i>Memoirs</i> of Latude and of Linguet appeared.
+Latude concealed his grievous faults, to paint his long sufferings in
+strokes of fire. Linguet, with his rare literary talent, made of the
+Bastille a picture dark in the extreme, compressing the gist of his
+pamphlet into the sentence: “Except perhaps in hell, there are no
+tortures to approach those of the Bastille.” At the same period, the
+great Mirabeau was launching his powerful plea against <i>lettres de
+cachet</i>, “arbitrary orders.” These books produced a mighty
+reverberation. The Revolution broke out like a clap of thunder. The
+Bastille was disembowelled. The frowning towers crumbled stone by stone
+under the picks of the demolishers, and, as if they had been the
+pedestal of the <i>ancien régime</i>, that too toppled over with a crash.</p>
+
+<p>One of the halls of the Bastille contained, in boxes carefully arranged,
+the entire history of the celebrated fortress from the year 1659, at
+which date the foundation of this precious store of archives had been
+begun. There were collected the documents concerning, not only the
+prisoners of the Bastille, but all the persons who had been lodged
+there, either under sentence of exile, or simply arrested within the
+limits of the generality of Paris in virtue of a <i>lettre de cachet</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The documents in this store-room had been in charge of archivists, who
+throughout the eighteenth century had laboured with zeal and
+intelligence at putting in order<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a> papers which, on the eve of the
+Revolution, were counted by hundreds of thousands. The whole mass was
+now in perfect order, classified and docketed. The major of the château,
+Chevalier, had even been commissioned to make these documents the basis
+of a history of the prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>The Bastille was taken. In the disorder, what was the fate of the
+archives? The ransacking of the papers continued for two days, writes
+Dusaulx, one of the commissioners elected by the Assembly for the
+preservation of the archives of the Bastille. “When, on Thursday the
+16th, my colleagues and myself went down into the sort of cellar where
+the archives were, we found the boxes in very orderly arrangement on the
+shelves, but they were already empty. The most important documents had
+been carried off: the rest were strewn on the floor, scattered about the
+courtyard, and even in the moats. However, the curious still found some
+gleanings there.” The testimony of Dusaulx is only too well confirmed.
+“I went to see the siege of the Bastille,” writes Restif de la Bretonne;
+“when I arrived it was all over, the place was taken. Infuriated men
+were throwing papers, documents of great historical value, from the top
+of the towers into the moats.” Among these papers, some had been burnt,
+some torn, registers had been torn to shreds and trailed in the mud. The
+mob had invaded the halls of the château: men of learning and mere
+curiosity hunters strove eagerly to get possession of as many of these
+documents as possible, in<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a> which they thought they were sure to find
+startling revelations. “There is talk of the son of a celebrated
+magistrate,” writes Gabriel Brizard, “who went off with his carriage
+full of them.” Villenave, then twenty-seven years of age and already a
+collector, gathered a rich harvest for his study, and Beaumarchais, in
+the course of a patriotic ramble through the interior of the captured
+fortress, was careful to get together a certain number of these papers.</p>
+
+<p>The papers purloined from the archives on the day of the capture and the
+day following became dispersed throughout France and Europe. A large
+packet came into the hands of Pierre Lubrowski, an attaché in the
+Russian embassy. Sold in 1805, with his whole collection, to the Emperor
+Alexander, the papers were deposited in the Hermitage Palace. To-day
+they are preserved in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, the custody of the captured fortress was entrusted on July
+15 to the company of arquebusiers, which received orders to prevent the
+removal of any more papers. On July 16 one of the members present at a
+sitting of the Electoral Assembly, sprang forward to the table and
+cried, “Ah, gentlemen, let us save the papers! It is said that the
+papers of the Bastille are being plundered; let us hasten to collect the
+remnants of these old title-deeds of an intolerable despotism, so that
+we may inspire our latest posterity with their horror!” There was
+rapturous applause. A committee was nominated, consisting of Dusaulx, De
+Chamseru,<a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a> Gorneau, and Cailleau. Let us follow the style of the period:
+“Before the Bastille the commissioners received a triumphant reception.
+Amid the cheers of the people, who had been informed of their mission,
+ten distinguished men of letters besought them to lead the commissioners
+into the heart of that famous fortress, so long detested.” When they got
+into the Bastille, the commissioners were not long in perceiving that
+they were a little behind the fair: “Many boxes were empty, and there
+was an immense heap of papers in complete disorder.”</p>
+
+<p>The question of the papers of the Bastille grew day by day
+extraordinarily popular. The Electoral Assembly had just appointed
+commissioners to collect them; La Fayette, commander of the National
+Guards, imposed a similar duty on the St. Elizabeth district; Bailly,
+the mayor of Paris, delegated Dusaulx to the same office. In the
+Constituent Assembly, the Comte de Châtenay-Lanty proposed that the
+municipality of Paris should be instructed to get together the papers
+found at the Bastille, so that they might be arranged, and that extracts
+from them might be printed and published, “in order to keep for ever
+alive in the hearts of Frenchmen, by means of this reading, the
+detestation of arbitrary orders and the love of liberty”! This book was
+to be the preface to the constitution. Finally, the district of St. Roch
+took the initiative in calling upon the electors to restore to the
+nation the papers carried off from the Bastille by Beaumarchais.</p>
+
+<p>In the sitting of July 24, the Electoral Assembly<a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a> passed a resolution
+enjoining such citizens as were in possession of papers from the
+Bastille to bring them back to the Hôtel de Ville. The appeal was
+responded to, and the restitutions were numerous.</p>
+
+<p>When the pillage and destruction had been stopped and possession had
+been regained of a part of the stolen documents, the papers were
+consigned to three different depositories; but it was not long before
+they were deposited all together in the convent of St. Louis la Culture.
+At length, on November 2, 1791, the Commune of Paris resolved to have
+the precious documents placed in the city library. The decision was so
+much the more happy in that the transfer, while placing the papers under
+the guardianship of trained men and genuine librarians, did not
+necessitate removal, since the city library at that date occupied the
+same quarters as the archives of the Bastille, namely, the convent of
+St. Louis la Culture.</p>
+
+<p>To the revolutionary period succeeded times of greater calm. The
+archives of the Bastille, after being the object of so much discussion,
+and having occupied the Constituent Assembly, the Electoral Assembly,
+the Paris Commune, the press, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, all Paris,
+the whole of France, fell into absolute oblivion. They were lost from
+sight; the very recollection of them was effaced. In 1840, a young
+librarian named François Ravaisson discovered them in the Arsenal
+library at the bottom of a veritable dungeon. How had they got stranded
+there?<a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a></p>
+
+<p>Ameilhon, the city librarian, had been elected on April 22, 1797, keeper
+of the Arsenal library. Anxious to enrich the new depository of which he
+had become the head, he obtained a decree handing over the papers of the
+Bastille to the Arsenal library. The librarians recoiled in dismay
+before this invasion of documents, more than 600,000 in number and in
+the most admired disorder. Then, having put their heads together, they
+had the papers crammed into a dusty back-room, putting off the sorting
+of them from day to day. Forty years slipped away. And if it happened
+that some old antiquary, curious and importunate, asked to be allowed to
+consult the documents he had heard spoken of in his youth, he was
+answered&mdash;no doubt in perfect good faith&mdash;that they did not know what he
+was talking about.</p>
+
+<p>In 1840 François Ravaisson had to get some repairs done in his kitchen
+at the Arsenal library. The slabs of the flooring were raised, when
+there came to view, in the yawning hole, a mass of old papers. It
+happened by the merest chance that, as he drew a leaf out of the heap,
+Ravaisson laid his hand on a <i>lettre de cachet</i>. He understood at once
+that he had just discovered the lost treasure. Fifty years of laborious
+effort have now restored the order which the victors of the 14th of July
+and successive removals had destroyed. The archives of the Bastille
+still constitute, at the present day, an imposing collection, in spite
+of the gaps made by fire and pillage in 1789, for ever to be regretted.
+The administration of the Arsenal library has acquired copies of<a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a> the
+documents coming from the Bastille which are preserved at St.
+Petersburg. The archives of the Bastille are now open to inspection by
+any visitor to the Arsenal library, in rooms specially fitted up for
+them. Several registers had holes burnt in them on the day of the
+capture of the Bastille, their binding is scorched black, their leaves
+are yellow. In the boxes the documents are now numbered, and they are
+daily consulted by men of letters. The catalogue has been compiled and
+published recently, through the assiduity of the minister of public
+instruction.</p>
+
+<p>It is by the light of these documents, of undeniable genuineness and
+authority, that the black shade which so long brooded over the Bastille
+has at length been dispelled. The legends have melted away in the clear
+light of history, as the thick cloak of mist with which night covers the
+earth is dissipated by the morning sun; and enigmas which mankind,
+wearied of fruitless investigations, had resigned itself to declare
+insoluble, have now at last been solved.<a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.<br /><br />
+<small>HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE.</small></h2>
+
+<p class="nind">J<small>ULIUS</small> C<small>ÆSAR</small> describes a structure three stories high which his
+legionaries used rapidly to erect in front of towns they were besieging.
+Such was the remote origin of the “bastides” or “bastilles,” as these
+movable fortresses were called in the Middle Ages. Froissart, speaking
+of a place that was being invested, says that “bastides were stationed
+on the roads and in the open country” in such a manner that the town
+could get no food supplies. It was not long before the designation was
+applied to the fixed towers erected on the ramparts for the defence of
+the towns, and more particularly to those which were constructed at the
+entrance gates.</p>
+
+<p>In 1356, the chroniclers mention some important works that had been done
+on the circumvallations of Paris. These were constructions interrupting
+the wall at intervals, and so placed as to protect either an entrance
+gate or the wall itself. The special designations of <i>eschiffles</i>,
+<i>guérites</i>, or <i>barbacanes</i> were applied to such of these buildings as
+rose between two gates of the city,<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a> while the <i>bastilles</i> or <i>bastides</i>
+were those which defended the gates. The first stone of the edifice
+which for more than four centuries was to remain famous under the name
+of the Bastille was laid on April 22, 1370, by the mayor of Paris in
+person, Hugh Aubriot, the object being to strengthen the defences of the
+city against the English. To reproach the king, Charles V., with the
+construction of a cruel prison would be almost as reasonable as to
+reproach Louis-Philippe with the construction of the fortress of Mont
+Valérien. We borrow these details from M. Fernand Bournon’s excellent
+work on the Bastille in the <i>Histoire générale de Paris</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“The Bastille,” writes M. Bournon, “at the time of its capture on July
+14, 1789, was still identical, except in some trifling particulars, with
+the work of the architects of the fourteenth century.” The Place de la
+Bastille of the present day does not correspond exactly to the site of
+the fortress. Mentally to restore that site it is necessary to take away
+the last houses of the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV.;
+the ground they occupy was then covered with the château and its glacis.
+The round towers, however, must have extended considerably in advance of
+the line of the houses and have encroached upon the pavement. The plan
+reproducing the site exactly is to-day marked by lines of white stones,
+by means of which all Parisians may get some notion of it if they go to
+the Place de la Bastille.</p>
+
+<p>M. Augé de Lassus, who drew so largely upon the works of M. Bournon and
+ourselves for his lecture on the<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a> Bastille,<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> will permit us in our
+turn to borrow from him the description he gave of the Bastille, so far
+as its construction is concerned. Prints of the commonest kind which
+have circulated in thousands, the more recent reconstruction which in
+1889 gave Paris so much entertainment, have familiarized us with the
+aspect of the Bastille, whose eight circular towers, connected by
+curtains of equal height, give us the impression of a box all of a
+piece, or, if you prefer it, an enormous sarcophagus. The eight towers
+all had their names. There were the Corner, the Chapel, and the Well
+towers, names readily accounted for by their position or by details of
+their construction. Then came the Bertaudière and Bazinière towers,
+baptized by the names of two former prisoners. The Treasure tower was so
+called because it had received on many occasions, notably under Henri
+IV., the custody of the public money. The excellent poet Mathurin
+Regnier alludes to this fact in these oft-quoted lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Now mark these parsons, sons of ill-got gain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whose grasping sires for years have stolen amain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whose family coffers vaster wealth conceal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Than fills that royal store-house, the Bastille.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="nind">The seventh tower was known as the County tower, owing its name, as M.
+Bournon conjectures, to the feudal dignity called the County of Paris.
+“The hypothesis,” he adds, “derives the greater weight from the fact
+that the mayors of Paris were called, up to the end of the<a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a> <i>ancien
+régime</i>, mayors of the town and viscounty of Paris.” The eighth tower
+bore a name which, for the tower of a prison, is very remarkable. It was
+called the Tower of Liberty. This odd appellation had come to it from
+the circumstance that it had been the part of the Bastille where
+prisoners were lodged who enjoyed exceptionally favourable treatment,
+those who had the “liberty” of walking during the day in the courtyards
+of the château. These prisoners were said to be “in the liberty of the
+court”; the officers of the château called them the “prisoners of the
+liberty” in contradistinction to the prisoners “in durance”; and that
+one of the eight towers in which they were lodged was thus, quite
+naturally, called “the Tower of Liberty.”</p>
+
+<p>The towers of the Chapel and the Treasure, which were the oldest, had
+flanked the original gateway, but this was soon walled up, leaving
+however in the masonry the outline of its arch, and even the statues of
+saints and crowned princes that had been the only ornaments of its bare
+walls. “In accordance with custom,” says M. Augé de Lassus, “the
+entrance to the Bastille was single and double at the same time; the
+gate for vehicles, defended by its drawbridge, was flanked by a smaller
+gate reserved for foot passengers, and this, too, was only accessible
+when a small drawbridge was lowered.”</p>
+
+<p>In the first of the two courtyards of the Bastille, D’Argenson had
+placed a monumental clock held up by large sculptured figures
+representing prisoners in chains. The<a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a> heavy chains fell in graceful
+curves around the clock-face, as a kind of ornamentation. D’Argenson and
+his artists had a ferocious taste.</p>
+
+<p>On the morrow of the defeat at St. Quentin,<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> the fear of invasion
+decided Henri II., under the advice of Coligny, to strengthen the
+Bastille. It was then, accordingly, that there was constructed, in front
+of the Saint-Antoine gate, the bastion which was at a later date to be
+adorned with a garden for the prisoners to walk in.</p>
+
+<p>Around the massive and forbidding prison, in the course of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, quite a little town sprang up and
+flourished, as in the Middle Ages happened around lofty and impressive
+cathedrals. Barbers, cobblers, drink-sellers, poulterers, cheesemongers,
+and general dealers had their shops there. These new buildings
+encroached on the Rue Saint-Antoine, and extended as far as the convent
+of the Visitation, the chapel of which, converted into a Protestant
+place of worship, still exists.</p>
+
+<p>“In its latter days,” writes M. de Lassus, “the Bastille with its
+appendages presented an appearance somewhat as follows:&mdash;On the Rue
+Saint-Antoine, a gateway of considerable size, and, with its trophies of
+arms, making some pretensions to a triumphal arch, gave access to a<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a>
+first court skirted with shops, and open, at least during the day, to
+all comers. People might pass through it freely, but were not allowed to
+loiter there. Then appeared a second entrance, a double one for horse
+and foot traffic, each gate defended by its drawbridge. Admittance
+through this was more difficult, and the sentry’s instructions more
+rigorous; this was the outer guard. As soon as this entrance was passed,
+one came to the court of the governor, who received the more or less
+voluntary visitor. On the right stretched the quarters of the governor
+and his staff, contiguous to the armoury. Then there were the moats,
+originally supplied by the waters of the Seine&mdash;at that time people
+frequently fell in and were drowned, the moats not being protected by
+any railing&mdash;in later times they were for the most part dry. Then rose
+the lofty towers of the citadel, encircled, nearly a hundred feet up, by
+their crown of battlements; and then one found the last drawbridge, most
+often raised, at any rate before the carriage gate, the door for foot
+passengers alone remaining accessible, under still more rigorous
+conditions.”</p>
+
+<p>These conditions, so rigorous for contemporaries&mdash;the Czar Peter the
+Great himself found them inflexible&mdash;are removed for the historian:
+thanks to the numerous memoirs left by prisoners, thanks to the
+documents relating to the administration of the Bastille now in the
+Arsenal library, and to the correspondence of the lieutenants of police,
+we shall penetrate into the interior<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a> of these well-fenced precincts and
+follow the life of the prisoners day by day.</p>
+
+<p>In its early days, then, the Bastille was not a prison, though it became
+such as early as the reign of Charles VI. Yet for two centuries it kept
+its character as a military citadel. Sometimes the kings gave lodgment
+there to great personages who were passing through Paris. Louis XI. and
+Francis I. held brilliant fêtes there, of which the chroniclers speak
+with admiration.</p>
+
+<p>It is Richelieu who must be considered the founder of the Bastille&mdash;the
+Bastille, that is, as a royal prison, the Bastille of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries. Before him, imprisonment in the old fortress
+was merely casual; it is to him that we must trace the conception of the
+state prison as an instrument of government. Here we shall be arrested
+by the question, what is to be understood by a state prison? The term,
+vague and open to discussion, is explained by M. Bournon. “By a state
+prison&mdash;taking the Bastille as a particular instance&mdash;must be understood
+a prison for those who have committed a crime or misdemeanour not
+provided for by the common law; for those who, rightly or wrongly, have
+appeared dangerous to the safety of the state, whether the nation itself
+is concerned, or its head, or a body more or less considerable of
+citizens, a body sometimes no larger than the family of the suspect. If
+we add to this class of prisoners personages too conspicuous to be
+punished for a crime at common law on equal terms with the ordinary
+malefactor, and for whom it would appear inevitable that<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a> an exceptional
+prison should be reserved, we shall have passed in review the different
+kinds of delinquents who expiated their misdeeds at the Bastille from
+the time of Richelieu to the Revolution.”</p>
+
+<p>The administration of the Bastille, which, up to the reign of Louis
+XIII., was entrusted to great lords, dukes, constables, marshals of
+France&mdash;the Marshal de Bassompierre, the Constable de Luynes, the
+Marshal de Vitry, the Duke of Luxemburg, to mention only the last of
+them&mdash;was placed by Richelieu in the hands of a real jailer, Leclerc du
+Tremblay, brother of Père Joseph.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a></p>
+
+<p>Documents throwing any light on the Bastille at the time when the Red
+Man, as Victor Hugo named<a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a> Richelieu, was supreme, are however very
+rare. An advocate, Maton de la Varenne, published in 1786, in his
+<i>Revolutions of Paris</i>, a letter which ostensibly had been written on
+December 1, 1642, to Richelieu, at that time ill. In it we read: “I,
+whom you are causing to rot in the Bastille for having disobeyed your
+commandment, which would have brought upon my soul condemnation to
+eternal hell, and would have made me appear in eternity with hands
+stained with blood&mdash;&mdash;” It is impossible to guarantee the authenticity
+of this document. To us it appears suspicious, the text having been
+published at a time when many apocryphal documents were produced as
+coming from the archives of the Bastille. More worthy of arresting our
+attention is the “return of the prisoners who are in the château of the
+Bastille,” a document of Richelieu’s time which M. Bournon discovered in
+the archives of the Foreign Office. This catalogue, containing
+fifty-three names, is the oldest list of prisoners of the Bastille known
+up to the present time. Among the prisoners several are suspected or
+convicted of evil designs against “Monsieur le cardinal,” some are
+accused of an intention to “complot,” that is, to conspire against the
+throne, or of being spies. There is an “extravagant” priest, a monk who
+had “opposed Cluni’s election,” three hermits, three coiners, the
+Marquis d’Assigny, condemned to death, but whose punishment had been
+commuted to perpetual imprisonment, a score or so of lords designated as
+“madmen, vile scoundrels, evil wretches,” or accused<a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a> of some definite
+crime, theft or murder; finally, those whose name is followed by the
+simple note, “Queen-mother,” or “Monsieur,”<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> whence we may conclude
+that the clerk had no exact information about the prisoners of the
+cardinal. We shall give later the list of the prisoners in the Bastille
+on the day of its capture, July 14, 1789; and the comparison between the
+two lists at the two periods, the remotest and the most recent that we
+could select, will be instructive. We have also, to assist us in forming
+a judgment of the Bastille in Richelieu’s time, the memoirs of
+Bassompierre and of Laporte, which transport us into a state prison,
+elegant, we might almost say luxurious, reserved for prisoners of birth
+and breeding, where they lived observing all social usages in their
+mutual relations, paying and returning calls. But the Bastille preserved
+its military character for many more years, and among the prisoners we
+find especially a number of officers punished for breaches of
+discipline. Prisoners of war were confined there, and foreign personages
+of high rank arrested by way of reprisal, secret agents and spies
+employed in France by hostile nations; finally, powerful lords who had
+incurred the king’s displeasure. The court intrigues under Richelieu and
+Mazarin contributed to the diversion of the Bastille from its original
+intention: they began to incarcerate there <i>valets de chambre</i> who had
+somehow become mixed up in the plots of sovereigns.</p>
+
+<p>Religious persecution was revived by the government<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a> of Louis XIV., and
+ere long a whole world of gazetteers and “novelists,” the journalists of
+the period, were seen swarming like flies in the sun. Louis XIV. was not
+precisely a stickler for the liberty of the press, but on the other hand
+he shrank from cooping up men of letters, Jansenists and Protestants
+convinced of the truth of their beliefs, pell-mell with the vagabonds
+and thiefs confined at Bicêtre, Saint-Lazare, and the other prisons of
+Paris. He threw open to them, too generously no doubt, the portals of
+his château in the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where they mixed with young men
+of family undergoing a mild course of the Bastille at the request of
+their parents, and with quarrelsome nobles whom the marshals of France,
+anxious to avoid duels, used to send there to forget their animosities.
+Further, the reign of Louis XIV. was marked by some great trials which
+produced a strange and appalling impression, and threw around the
+accused a halo of mystery&mdash;trials for magic and sorcery, cases of
+poisoning and base coining. The accused parties in these cases were
+confined in the Bastille. And here we encounter a fresh departure from
+the primitive character of the old fortress; prisoners were sent there
+whose cases were tried by the regularly constituted judges. Henceforth
+prisoners who appeared before the court of the Arsenal were divided
+between the Bastille and the fortress of Vincennes.</p>
+
+<p>This is the grand epoch in the history of the Bastille: it is now a
+veritable prison of state. Writers can speak<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a> of its “nobleness.” It
+shows itself to us in colours at once charming and awe-inspiring,
+brilliant, majestic, now filled with sounds of merriment, now veiled
+with an appalling silence. From the gloomy regions within the massive
+walls there come to us the sounds of song and laughter mingled with
+cries of despair, with sobs and tears. This is the period of the Iron
+Mask: the period when the governor receives mysterious letters from the
+court. “I beg you, sir, to see that, if anyone comes to ask for news of
+the prisoner whom Desgrez conducted to the Bastille this morning by
+order of the king, nothing be said about him, and that, if possible, in
+accordance with the intention of His Majesty and the accompanying
+instructions, no one may get to know him or even his name.” “M. de
+Bernaville (the name of one of the governors of the Bastille), having
+given orders for the conveyance of an important prisoner to the prison
+of my château of the Bastille, I send this letter to inform you of my
+intention that you receive him there and keep him closely guarded until
+further orders, warning you not to permit him, under any pretext
+whatever, to hold communication with any person, either by word of mouth
+or in writing.” The prisoners surrounded with so absolute a silence
+almost all belonged to the same category, namely, distinguished spies,
+who seem to have been rather numerous in France at the full tide of
+Louis XIV.’s wars, and who were hunted down with an eagerness which grew
+in proportion as fortune frowned on the royal armies. We read in the
+Journal kept by<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a> the King’s lieutenant, Du Junca: “On Wednesday,
+December 22, about ten o’clock in the morning, M. de la Coste, provost
+of the King’s armies, came here, bringing and leaving in our custody a
+prisoner whom for greater secrecy he caused to enter by our new gate,
+which allows us to pass into or out of the garden of the Arsenal at all
+hours&mdash;the which prisoner, M. d’Estingen by name, a German, but married
+in England, was received by the governor by order of the King sent by
+the hand of the Marquis de Barbezieux, with explicit instructions to
+keep the prisoner’s presence a secret and to prevent him from holding
+communication with anyone, in speech or writing: the which prisoner is a
+widower, without children, a man of intelligence, and doing a brisk
+trade in news of what is happening in France, sending his information to
+Germany, England, and Holland: a gentlemanly spy.” On February 10, 1710,
+Pontchartrain wrote to Bernaville, governor of the Bastille: “I cannot
+refrain from telling you that you and the Chevalier de la Croix speak a
+good deal too much and too openly about the foreign prisoners you have.
+Secrecy and mystery is one of your first duties, as I must ask you to
+remember. Neither D’Argenson nor any other than those I have apprized
+you of should see these prisoners. Give explicit warning to the Abbé
+Renaudot and to de la Croix of the necessity of maintaining an
+inviolable and impenetrable secrecy.”</p>
+
+<p>It happened also at that period that a prisoner remained in complete
+ignorance of the reason of his<a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a> incarceration: “The prisoner at the
+Bastille named J. J. du Vacquay,” writes Louvois to the governor, “has
+complained to the King that he has been kept there for thirteen years
+without knowing the reason: be good enough to let me know what minister
+signed the warrant under which he is detained, so that I may report to
+His Majesty.”</p>
+
+<p>As the greater part of the papers relating to the arrest were destroyed
+as soon as the incarceration was effected, it sometimes happened that in
+certain cases the reasons were not known even in the offices of the
+ministers. Thus Seignelay writes to the governor, M. de Besmaus: “The
+King has commanded me to write and ask you who is a certain prisoner
+named Dumesnil, how long he has been at the Bastille, and for what
+reason he was placed there.” “The demoiselle de Mirail, a prisoner at
+the Bastille, having demanded her liberty of the King, His Majesty has
+instructed me to write and ask you the reason of her detention; if you
+know it, be good enough to inform me at your earliest convenience.”
+Again, we find Louvois writing to the same effect: “I am sending you a
+letter from M. Coquet, in regard to which the King has commanded me to
+ask who signed the warrant under which he was sent to the Bastille, and
+whether you know the reason of his being sent there.” “Sir, I am writing
+a line merely to ask you to let me know who is Piat de la Fontaine, who
+has been five years at the Bastille, and whether you do not remember why
+he was placed there.<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a>”</p>
+
+<p>Letters of this kind are, it is true, very rare; yet if one compares the
+state of things they disclose with the extraordinary comfort and luxury
+with which the prisoners were surrounded, they help to characterize the
+celebrated prison at this epoch of its history, namely, the seventeenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>In 1667 the office of lieutenant of police had been created. The first
+to hold the title was Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, a man of the
+greatest worth. It is very important to note that under the <i>ancien
+régime</i> the lieutenant of police had a double function, being at the
+same time a subordinate of the minister of Paris<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> and a member of the
+Châtelet.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> His duties were thus of a twofold nature, administrative
+and judicial. Now the Bastille, as a state prison, was more especially
+an administrative institution; but gradually, owing to the character of
+the persons brought there as prisoners, it became difficult to avoid
+turning it also into a judicial institution, and the minister of Paris
+became accustomed to delegate his subordinate, the lieutenant of police,
+to conduct the examination of the prisoners at the Bastille. Though La
+Reynie took practically the whole responsibility<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a> of the administration
+of the Bastille, his visits to the prison itself were nevertheless
+relatively rare, and on every occasion a permit signed by Louis XIV. or
+by Colbert was necessary.</p>
+
+<p>La Reynie was succeeded by D’Argenson. Under him the powers of the
+lieutenant of police were very largely extended, and the Bastille was
+comprised within his jurisdiction. Henceforth the lieutenant of police
+will enter the state prison whenever it seems good to him, as lord and
+master, accompanied by his subordinates at the Châtelet, clerks and
+inspectors of police; the prisoners will be in direct and constant
+communication with him, and he will make an inspection of all the
+chambers at least once a year. We find that at every change in the
+lieutenancy of police, it sufficed for the minister of Paris to send the
+name of the new officer to the governor. Dating from this period, the
+prison in the Suburb Saint-Antoine remained under the authority of a
+magistrate.</p>
+
+<p>The Regency was a transition period between the reigns of Louis XIV. and
+Louis XV., and there was a corresponding transition period in the
+history of the Bastille. The incarcerations were less numerous and less
+rigorous, but the rule of the prison lost something of that aristocratic
+air which had characterized it. The most important episode in the
+history of the Bastille during the Regency was the incarceration of
+those who were accused of complicity in the Cellamare conspiracy. Among
+these was Mdlle de Launay, later to be known<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a> as Madame de Staal. She
+has left some charming pages about her imprisonment, in which we find,
+related with a fluent and subtle pen, the little romance which we
+proceed to outline.</p>
+
+<p>Mdlle de Launay was secretary to the Duchess of Maine. She had had some
+part in drawing up the scheme of the Cellamare conspiracy, which, if it
+had succeeded, would have placed the king of Spain on the throne of
+France. On December 10, 1718, the Regent sent her, with several of her
+accomplices, to the Bastille, less with the idea of punishing her for
+machinations against the state than to obtain from her details of the
+conspiracy. At that period of her life she was of but moderate fortune
+and rank, and it would not have been strange if she had been treated
+with rigour. She found at the Bastille, on the contrary, unexpected
+comfort and consideration. In her <i>Memoirs</i>, she writes that her sojourn
+at the Bastille was the pleasantest time of her life. Her maid, Rondel,
+was permitted to live with her. She was installed in a veritable suite
+of rooms. She complained of the mice there, and a cat was given her, to
+drive out the mice and provide some amusement. By and by there were
+kittens, and the sportive tricks of the numerous little family cheered
+her wonderfully, she said. Mdlle de Launay was regularly invited to dine
+with the governor; she spent her days in writing and card-playing. The
+king’s lieutenant, Maisonrouge, a man well on in years, who held, after
+the governor, the first place in the administration of the château,
+conceived a profound<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a> and pathetic passion for the fair prisoner. He
+declared that nothing would give him greater happiness than to make her
+his wife. His apartments happened to be near those of Mdlle de Launay.
+Unhappily for the king’s lieutenant, there was in the neighbourhood a
+third suite, occupied by a young and brilliant nobleman, the Chevalier
+de Ménil, who also was implicated in the Cellamare affair. The fair
+prisoner was not acquainted with him. Maisonrouge impresses us as a man
+of great dignity, and rare nobility of character. He spoke to the two
+young prisoners about each other, hoping, by bringing them into
+communication, to provide them with fresh distractions, more
+particularly the lady, whom he loved. The Chevalier de Ménil and Mdlle
+de Launay could not see each other; they had never met. They began by
+exchanging epistles in verse. Like everything that came from her pen,
+the verses of Mdlle de Launay were full of animation and charm. The good
+Maisonrouge played post between them, happy to see his little friend’s
+delight in the diversion she owed to him. It was not long before the
+verses carried from one room to the other by Maisonrouge began to speak
+of love, and this love&mdash;surprising as it may seem, but not difficult to
+understand in the sequestered life of the Bastille&mdash;ere long became real
+in the consciousness of the young people, who saw each other in
+imagination under the most charming colours. Maisonrouge was soon
+induced to contrive an interview between them. It is a delightful
+moment. The two captives had never seen each other,<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a> yet loved each
+other passionately: what will their mutual impressions be? Mdlle de
+Launay’s impression, when she saw the gay chevalier, was of unmixed
+enthusiasm; the chevalier’s, maybe, was more subdued; but if it is true,
+as someone has said, that to nuns the gardener represents mankind, to a
+prisoner every young woman must be an exquisite creature. The interviews
+continued under the benevolent eye of Maisonrouge, who watched the
+development of Mdlle de Launay’s love for Ménil&mdash;the love of the girl
+whom he himself loved intensely, but whose happiness he preferred to his
+own. There are delightful details which may be found delightfully
+described in Mdlle de Launay’s <i>Memoirs</i>. It is M. Bournon’s opinion
+that, according to the testimony of Mdlle de Launay herself, this idyll
+of the Bastille had “the dénouement that might have been foretold.” We
+have caught no hint of the sort in the <i>Memoirs</i> of Madame de Staal, but
+then, M. Bournon is no doubt the better psychologist. At any rate, the
+governor of the Bastille got wind of the diversions of the lovers. He
+put his foot down. Ménil was transferred to a distant tower, Mdlle de
+Launay shed tears, and, incredible as it seems, Maisonrouge, while
+redoubling his efforts to please her, sympathized with her lot to the
+point of arranging fresh and more difficult interviews with the sparkish
+chevalier. Mdlle de Launay left the prison in the spring of 1720, after
+having sent to the Regent a detailed statement of the facts of the
+conspiracy, which hitherto she had refused to furnish. Once at liberty,
+she vainly implored<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a> the Chevalier de Ménil to fulfil his pledges and
+make her his wife. Maisonrouge died in the following year, of
+disappointment, says the gay coquette, at his failure to get from her,
+during her imprisonment, the promise of marriage which now she would
+have been glad enough to fulfil.</p>
+
+<p>It seems as though under the Regency everything at the Bastille turned
+on love&mdash;a reflection of the epoch itself. The young Duke de Richelieu
+was locked up there because he did not love his wife. The brilliant
+nobleman was kept under lock and key for several weeks, “in solitude and
+gloom,” he says, when suddenly the door of his room flew open and Madame
+de Richelieu appeared, a wonder of grace, brightness and charm: “The
+fair angel,” writes the duke, “who flew from heaven to earth to set
+Peter free was not so radiant.”</p>
+
+<p>We have seen how the Bastille had been transformed from a military
+citadel into a prison of state. We shall now witness, under the
+government of the Duke of Orleans, another transformation, betokened by
+an event which is of little apparent importance. The Duke de Richelieu
+was imprisoned in the Bastille a second time as the result of a duel: a
+judge of the Parlement went there to question him and the Parlement
+tried his case. The Parlement<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> at the Bastille, in the prison of the
+king! From that moment the fortress continued year by year to grow more
+like our modern<a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a> prisons. “Under the Cardinal de Fleury,” writes La
+Harpe, “this famous château was inhabited by hardly any but Jansenist
+writers: it then became the enforced residence of champions of
+philosophy and authors of clandestine satires, and acted as a foil to
+their obscurity and shame.” It became increasingly the practice to
+confine there accused persons whose cases were regularly tried at the
+Châtelet or even before the Parlement. By the second half of the
+eighteenth century accused persons had come to be incarcerated in the
+Bastille by direct order of the Châtelet, which would have seemed
+incredible to a contemporary of Louis XIV. The summoning officer would
+post himself before the towers, and there, while the prisoner pressed
+his head close against the bars of the window, the officer would shout
+the terms of the writ at him across the moat. The advocates defending
+the accused obtained permission to go and consult their clients, and
+they were the only persons who were permitted to interview the prisoners
+in private. On the appointed day the prisoner was transferred to the law
+courts quietly and by night to avoid the curiosity of the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Under Louis XVI. the judges of the Parlement visited the Bastille as
+they visited the other prisons; at length the minister Breteuil sent
+instructions to the officials informing them that no more <i>lettres de
+cachet</i> would be issued without stating the duration of the penalty to
+which the guilty person was condemned and the grounds for his
+punishment. The Bastille was now merely a<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a> prison like the others,
+except that the prisoners were better treated there.</p>
+
+<p>In 1713 Voysin, the Secretary of State, wrote to D’Argenson:
+“Beaumanielle is not sufficiently deserving of consideration to warrant
+his removal from the Châtelet to the Bastille.” La Harpe has well
+described the transformation which from this time came over the great
+state prison by saying that, from the beginning of the century, none of
+the prisoners who had been placed there “had merited the honour.” His
+remark receives corroboration from Linguet: “It is not, in these latter
+days especially, for criminals of state that the Bastille is reserved:
+it has become in some sort the antichambre of the conciergerie.”</p>
+
+<p>If the glories of the Bastille paled as it grew older, on the other hand
+torture, which, it is true, had never been applied except by order of
+the courts, had completely disappeared. From the beginning of the
+eighteenth century, the cells and chains were merely a temporary
+punishment reserved for insubordinate prisoners: from the accession of
+Louis XVI. they had fallen into disuse. Breteuil forbade any person
+whatever to be placed in the cells, which were the rooms on the lowest
+floor of each tower, a sort of damp and gloomy vaults. On September 11,
+1775, Malesherbes writes: “No prisoner should be refused material for
+reading and writing. The abuse it is pretended that they may make of it
+cannot be dangerous, confined so closely as they are. Nor should any
+refusal be made to the desire of such as may wish to<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a> devote themselves
+to other occupations, provided they do not require you to leave in their
+hands tools of which they might avail themselves to effect their escape.
+If any of them should wish to write to his family and his friends, he
+must be permitted to receive replies, and to send replies to their
+letters after having read them. In all this you must be guided by your
+prudence and your humanity.” The reading of the gazettes, formerly
+rigidly forbidden, was now authorised.</p>
+
+<p>It must further be remarked that the number of prisoners confined in the
+Bastille was not so large as might be thought. During the whole reign of
+Louis XVI. the Bastille received no more than two hundred and forty
+prisoners, an average of sixteen a year; while it had room for forty-two
+in separate apartments.</p>
+
+<p>Under Louis XIV., at the period when the government was most liberal in
+dispensing its <i>lettres de cachet</i>, an average of only thirty prisoners
+a year entered the château, and their captivity was for the most part of
+short duration. Dumouriez informs us in his <i>Memoirs</i> that during his
+detention he had never more than eighteen fellow prisoners, and that
+more than once he had only six. M. Alfred Bégis has drawn up a list of
+the prisoners detained in the Bastille from 1781 to 1789. In May, 1788,
+it contained twenty-seven prisoners, the highest figure reached during
+these eight year; in September, 1782, it contained ten; in April, 1783,
+seven; in June of the same year, seven; in December, 1788,<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a> nine; in
+February, 1789, nine; at the time of its capture, July 14, 1789, there
+were seven.</p>
+
+<p>True, not only men were locked up in the Bastille, but also books when
+they appeared dangerous. The royal warrant under which they were
+incarcerated was even drawn up on the model of the <i>lettres de cachet</i>.
+M. Bournon has published a specimen of these. The books were shut up in
+a closet between the towers of the Treasure and the County, over an old
+passage communicating with the bastion. In 1733 the lieutenant of police
+instructed the governor of the Bastille to receive at the château “all
+the apparatus of a clandestine printing-press which had been seized in a
+chamber of the Saint-Victor abbey: the which you will be good enough to
+have placed in the store room of the Bastille.” When the books ceased to
+appear dangerous, they were set at liberty. In this way the
+<i>Encyclopædia</i><a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> was liberated after a detention of some years.</p>
+
+<p>We have just seen that during the reign of Louis XVI. the Bastille did
+not receive more than sixteen prisoners a year, on an average. Several
+of these were only detained for a few days. From 1783 to 1789 the
+Bastille remained almost empty, and would have been absolutely empty if
+it had not been decided to place there prisoners who should properly
+have been<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a> elsewhere. As early as February, 1784, the fortress of
+Vincennes, which served as a sort of overflow pipe to the Bastille, had
+been shut for lack of prisoners. The system of <i>lettres de cachet</i> was
+slipping away into the past. On the other hand, the Bastille was a
+source of great expense to the King. The governor alone received 60,000
+livres annually. When you add the salaries and board of the officers of
+the garrison, the turnkeys, the physicians, the surgeon, the apothecary,
+the chaplains; when you add the food&mdash;this alone in 1774 came to 67,000
+livres&mdash;and the clothing of the prisoners, and the upkeep of the
+buildings, the total will appear outrageous, for the figures given above
+must be tripled to represent the value of the present day. So Necker,
+seeing that the Bastille was of no further utility, thought of
+suppressing it “for economy’s sake,”<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> and he was not the only one in
+high places to speak of this suppression. The Carnavalet<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> museum
+possesses a scheme drawn up in 1784 by Corbet, the superintending
+architect to the city of Paris, whence the project has an official
+character: it is a scheme for a “Place Louis XVI.” to be opened up on
+the site of the old fortress. We learn from Millin<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a> that other artists
+“were occupied with a scheme for erecting a monument on the site of the
+Bastille.” One of these schemes deserves special mention. Seven of the
+eight towers were to be destroyed, the eighth to remain standing, but in
+a significant state of dilapidation: on the site of the demolished
+towers a monument was to be erected to the glory of Louis XVI. This
+monument was to consist of a pedestal formed by piling up chains and
+bolts taken from the state prison, above which would rise a statue of
+the king, one hand extended towards the ruined tower with the gesture of
+a deliverer. It is to be regretted, if not for the beauty, at least, for
+the picturesqueness of Paris, that this scheme was never put into
+execution. Davy de Chavigné, king’s counsellor and auditor to the
+treasury, was allowed to present to the Royal Academy of Architecture,
+at its sitting on June 8, 1789, “a plan for a monument on the site of
+the Bastille, to be decreed by the States General to Louis XVI. as the
+restorer of the public liberty.” On this subject the famous sculptor
+Houdon wrote to Chavigné: “I am very anxious for the plan to be adopted.
+The idea of erecting a monument to liberty on the very spot where
+slavery has reigned up to the present, appears to me particularly well
+conceived, and well calculated to inspire genius. I shall think myself
+only too fortunate to be among the artists who will celebrate the epoch
+of the regeneration of France.”</p>
+
+<p>We have seen prints, long anterior to 1789&mdash;one of them the frontispiece
+of the edition of Linguet’s <i>Memoirs</i><a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a> that appeared in
+1783&mdash;representing Louis XVI. extending his hand towards the lofty
+towers, which workmen are in the act of demolishing.</p>
+
+<p>Among the archives of the Bastille are preserved two reports drawn up in
+1788 by the king’s lieutenant, Puget, the most important personage in
+the fortress after the governor. He proposes the suppression of the
+state prison, the demolition of the old château, and the sale of the
+ground for the benefit of the crown. It may be said of these schemes, as
+of the plan of the architect Corbet, that they would not have been
+propounded if they had not been approved in high places.</p>
+
+<p>Further, in the year 1784, an ardent supporter of the old state of
+things cried: “Oh! if our young monarch ever committed a fault so great,
+if he so far belied the most ancient usages of this government, if it
+were possible that one day he could be tempted to destroy you” (the
+author is apostrophizing the Bastille) “to raise on your ruins a
+monument to the liberator-king....” The demolition of the Bastille was
+decided on; and it would have been accomplished as a government
+undertaking but for the outbreak of the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>From January 1 to July 14, 1789, that is to say for more than six
+months, only one solitary prisoner entered the Bastille; and what a
+prisoner!&mdash;Réveillon, the paper manufacturer of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine, who was shut up on May 1 at his own request, in order to
+escape the fury of the mob. The same year, the<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a> lieutenant of police, de
+Crosne, made an inspection of the Bastille, accompanied by a judge of
+the Parlement; their object was to arrange officially about the
+destruction of the state prison.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, the Bastille no longer existed,
+though its towers were still standing.</p>
+
+<p>The victors of the 14th of July set free seven prisoners: four forgers
+whose arrest had been ordered by the Châtelet, whose case had been
+regularly tried, and whose proper place was an ordinary prison; two
+madmen who ought to have been at Charenton; and the Comte de Solages, a
+young nobleman who had been guilty of a monstrous crime over which it
+was desired to throw a veil out of regard for his family; he was
+maintained on a pension paid by his father. The conquerors of the
+Bastille destroyed an old fortified castle: the state prison no longer
+existed. They “broke in an open door.” That was said of them even in
+1789.<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.<br /><br />
+<small>LIFE IN THE BASTILLE.</small></h2>
+
+<p class="nind">H<small>AVING</small> sketched rapidly and with bold strokes the outlines of the
+history of the Bastille from its foundation to its fall, we intend to
+show how the rule to which prisoners in the fortress of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine were submitted underwent its own process of
+transformation, parallel with the transformation of the prison itself.
+To understand the facts which follow, and which are of a kind to astound
+the mind of everyone in these days, it is necessary to remember what we
+have already said as to the character of the Bastille. It was the prison
+of luxury, the aristocratic prison of the <i>ancien régime</i>, the <i>prison
+de luxe</i> at a period when it was no dishonour, as we shall see later, to
+be confined there. We must remember the phrase of the minister of Paris
+writing to D’Argenson, in regard to a personage of but modest rank, that
+this individual did not deserve “consideration” enough to be put in the
+Bastille. Let us reflect on this observation of Mercier in his excellent
+<i>Pictures of Paris</i>: “The people fear the Châtelet more than the
+Bastille. Of the latter they have no dread, because it is almost unknown
+to them.<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a>”</p>
+
+<p>We have shown how the Bastille, originally a military citadel, had
+become a prison of state; then, little by little, had approximated to
+the ordinary prisons, until the day when it died a natural death ere it
+could be assassinated. The same transformation took place in the
+treatment of the prisoners. Midway in the seventeenth century, the
+Bastille had none of the characteristics of a prison, but was simply a
+château in which the king caused certain of his subjects to sojourn, for
+one cause or another. They lived there just as they thought proper,
+furnishing their rooms according to their fancy with their own
+furniture, indulging their tastes in regard to food at their own
+expense, and waited on by their own servants. When a prisoner was rich
+he could live at the Bastille in princely style; when he was poor, he
+lived there very wretchedly. When the prisoner had no property at all,
+the king did not for that reason give him furniture or food; but he gave
+him money which he might use as seemed good to him in providing himself
+with furniture and food: money of which he could retain a part&mdash;a number
+of prisoners did not fail to do so&mdash;these savings becoming his own
+property. This system, the character of which it is important to
+recognize, underwent gradual modification during the course of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, approximating, without ever
+becoming identical with, the system of our modern prisons. Thus the
+king, instead of granting pensions individually to the poorest of the
+prisoners, came to endow the Bastille with a certain fixed number<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a> of
+pensions for the less fortunate prisoners. The recipients of these
+pensions continued to enjoy them for long years, and if they did not
+wish the whole of the money to be expended on their support, the balance
+was handed over to them. So we see certain individuals getting little
+fortunes together by the mere fact of their having been prisoners in the
+Bastille&mdash;a circumstance which has so much surprised historians because
+they have not sought its cause. It even happened that prisoners, when
+their liberation was announced to them, asked to remain a little longer
+in order to swell their savings, a favour which was sometimes granted
+them. In the course of the eighteenth century the money destined to the
+maintenance of the prisoners at the Bastille could not be diverted from
+its purpose; the prisoners were no longer able to appropriate a part;
+the whole sum had to be expended.</p>
+
+<p>It was only in the second half of the seventeenth century that the king
+had some rooms at the Bastille furnished for such prisoners as were
+without means of procuring furniture themselves. And it is very
+interesting to note that it was only at the extreme end of the century,
+under the administration of Saint-Mars, that certain apartments of the
+Bastille were arranged in the prison style with bars and bolts. Until
+then they had been simply the rooms of a stronghold.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a></p>
+
+<p>Let us follow the prisoner from his entrance to his exit.</p>
+
+<p>When the <i>lettre de cachet</i> had been signed, it was usually a sort of
+sheriff’s officer who effected the arrest. He appeared in company with
+five or six men-at-arms, and signified the arrest by touching his quarry
+with a white staff. A coach was in waiting. The police officer politely
+begged the person he was instructed to secure to step into the coach,
+and took his place beside him. And, according to the testimony of
+various memoirs, while the vehicle was rolling along with lowered
+blinds, there was a pleasant conversational exchange of courtesies up to
+the moment of the prisoner’s finding himself within the walls of the
+Bastille. A certain Lafort was living in furnished apartments with a
+young and pretty Englishwoman whom he had abducted, when one evening,
+about sunset, a police officer arrived. The coach was at the door.
+Preliminaries were settled on both sides with as much politeness as if a
+visit or an evening party had been the topic of discussion. They all got
+into the vehicle, even the young man’s lackey who, beguiled by
+appearances, mounted behind. Arrived at the Bastille, the lackey lost no
+time in descending to open the door: there was general astonishment,
+especially on the part of the poor servant, when he learnt that since he
+had entered the Bastille along with his master, he must stay with him.<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a></p>
+
+<p>Most often the officer and his companions surprised their quarry early
+in the morning, on rising from bed. Imagine then the coach with the
+prisoner and the police officer inside, arriving before the Bastille, in
+the first court in front of the castle keep. “Who goes there?” cries the
+sentinel. “The king’s writ!” replies the officer. At this, the shops we
+have seen attached to the flanks of the château are bound at once to be
+shut. The soldiers on guard have to turn their faces to the wall, or
+perhaps to pull their hats over their eyes. The coach passes the
+outpost, a bell sounds. “Advance!” cries the officer on duty. The
+drawbridge is lowered and the coach rattles over the stout iron-clamped
+boards. For greater secrecy, spies and prisoners of war were taken in by
+a private door leading to the gardens of the Arsenal.</p>
+
+<p>Officers and noblemen presented themselves before the Bastille alone,
+unless they were accompanied by relatives or friends. “It is my
+intention,” the king had written to them, “that you betake yourselves to
+my château of the Bastille.” And no one dreamt of declining the royal
+invitation. Further, when the governor desired to transfer one of them
+from one prison to another, he contented himself with telling him so. We
+find in the Journal of Du Junca, king’s lieutenant<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> at the<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a> Bastille,
+several notes like the following: “Monday, December 26, 1695, about ten
+o’clock in the morning, M. de Villars, lieutenant-colonel of the
+regiment of Vosges infantry, came and reported himself a prisoner, as
+ordered by M. Barbezieux, though he was a prisoner in the citadel of
+Grenoble, whence he came direct without being brought by anyone.”<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> On
+the arrival of the prisoner, the king’s lieutenant, accompanied by the
+captain of the gates, came to receive him as he got out of his carriage.
+The officers of the château at once led the new-comer into the presence
+of the governor, who received him civilly, invited him to sit down, and
+after having endorsed the <i>lettre de cachet</i> conversed with him for some
+time. Under Louis XIV. the governor in most cases even kept his new
+guest, as well as the persons who had accompanied him, to lunch or
+dinner. Meanwhile his quarters had been got ready. We read in Du Junca’s
+Journal that on January 26, 1695, a certain De Courlandon, a colonel of
+cavalry, presented himself for incarceration at the Bastille. There
+being no room ready to receive him, the governor asked him to go and
+pass the night in a neighbouring inn, at the sign of the<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a> <i>Crown</i>, and
+to return next day. “Whereupon M. de Courlandon did not fail to return
+about eleven o’clock in the morning, having dined with M. de Besmaus
+(the governor), and in the afternoon he entered the château.”</p>
+
+<p>The reader will not be surprised at learning that the prospect of
+incarceration at the Bastille did not always strike the future prisoner
+with terror. We read in the <i>Memoirs</i> of the Duke de Lauzun:<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a>
+“Scolded for two hours on end by everybody who fancied himself entitled
+to do so, I thought I could not do better than go to Paris and await
+developments. A few hours after my arrival, I received a letter from my
+father telling me that it had been decided to put us all in the
+Bastille, and that I should probably be arrested during the night. I
+determined at least to finish gaily, so I invited some pretty girls from
+the Opera to supper, so that I might await the officer without
+impatience. Seeing that he did not arrive, I determined on the bold move
+of going to Fontainebleau and joining the king’s hunt. He did not speak
+to me once during the chase, which was such a confirmation of our
+disgrace that on our return no one gave us the customary salute. But I
+did not lose heart; in the evening I was in attendance, and the king
+came to me. ‘You are all,’ he said, ‘hotheaded rips, but funny dogs all
+the same; come along and have supper, and bring M. de Guéméné and the
+Chevalier de Luxembourg.<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a>’”</p>
+
+<p>Before the new arrival was installed in the chamber prepared for him, he
+was taken to the great council hall, where he was requested to empty his
+pockets. Only notorious rogues were searched. If the prisoner had upon
+him money, jewels, or other articles such as knives and scissors, the
+use of which was not allowed by the regulations, they were done up in a
+parcel which he himself sealed, with his own seal if he had one; if not,
+with the seal of the Bastille. Finally, he was conducted to the room
+reserved for him.</p>
+
+<p>Each of the eight towers of the Bastille contained four or five stories
+of rooms or cells. The worst of these rooms were on the lowest floor,
+and these were what were called the “cells,”&mdash;octagonal vaults, cold and
+damp, partly under ground; the walls, grey with mould, were bare from
+floor to ceiling, the latter a groined arch. A bench and a bed of straw
+covered with a paltry coverlet, formed the whole appointments. Daylight
+feebly flickered through the vent-hole opening on to the moat. When the
+Seine was in flood, the water came through the walls and swamped the
+cells; and then any prisoners who might happen to be in them were
+removed. During the reign of Louis XIV. the cells were sometimes
+occupied by prisoners of the lowest class and criminals condemned to
+death. Later, under Louis XV., the cells ceased to be used except as a
+place of punishment for insubordinate prisoners who assaulted their
+guardians or fellow-prisoners, or for turnkeys and sentinels of the
+château who had committed breaches of discipline. They stayed in the
+cells for<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a> a short time in irons. The cells had fallen into disuse by
+the time the Revolution broke out; since the first ministry of Necker,
+it had been forbidden to confine in them any one whatever, and none of
+the warders questioned on July 18 remembered having seen any one placed
+in them. The two prisoners, Tavernier and Béchade, whom the conquerors
+of the 14th of July found in one of these dungeons, had been placed
+there, at the moment of the attack, by the officers of the château, for
+fear lest amid the rain of bullets some harm should befall them.</p>
+
+<p>The worst rooms after the cells were the <i>calottes</i>, the rooms on the
+floor above. In summer the heat was extreme in them, and in winter the
+cold, in spite of the stoves. They were octagons whose ceilings, as the
+name implies, were shaped like a skull-cap. High enough in the centre,
+they gradually diminished in height towards the sides. It was impossible
+to stand upright except in the middle of the room.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners were only placed in the cells and <i>calottes</i> under
+exceptional circumstances. Every tower had two or three floors of lofty
+and airy chambers, and in these the prisoners lived. They were octagons
+from fifteen to sixteen feet in diameter and from fifteen to twenty feet
+high. Light entered through large windows approached by three steps. We
+have said that it was only towards the end of Louis XIV.’s reign that
+these rooms were arranged like prison cells with bars and bolts. They
+were warmed with open fireplaces or stoves. The ceiling was whitewashed,
+the floor of brick. On the<a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a> walls the prisoners had chalked verses,
+mottoes, and designs.</p>
+
+<p>One artistic prisoner amused himself by decorating the bare walls with
+paintings. The governor, delighted at seeing him thus find relaxation,
+moved him from room to room; when he had finished filling one with his
+designs and arabesques, he was placed in another. Some of these rooms
+were decorated with portraits of Louis XIV. placed above the
+chimney-piece, a characteristic detail which helps to show what the
+Bastille was at this period: the château of the king, where the king
+received a certain number of his subjects as his willing or unwilling
+guests.</p>
+
+<p>The best rooms in the Bastille were those that were fitted up in the
+eighteenth century for the accommodation of the staff. These were what
+were called the “suites.” In these were placed invalids and prisoners of
+distinction.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the furniture of these
+apartments was still extremely simple: they were absolutely empty. The
+reason of this we have indicated above. “I arrived,” says Madame de
+Staal, “at a room where there was nothing but four walls, very filthy,
+and daubed all over by my predecessors for want of something better to
+do. It was so destitute of furniture that someone went and got a little
+straw chair for me to sit on, and two stones to support a lighted
+faggot, and a little candle-end was neatly stuck on the wall to give me
+light.”</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners sent to their own homes for a table, bed,<a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a> and chair, or
+they hired these from the upholsterer of the Bastille. When they had
+nothing to bless themselves with, the government, as we have already
+said, did not provide them with furniture. It gave them money, sometimes
+considerable sums, which permitted them to adorn their rooms after their
+own fancy. This was the case in regard to all prisoners up to 1684. At
+this date the king ordered the administration to supply furniture to
+those of the prisoners whose detention was to be kept secret, for, by
+getting in bedding from their own houses or the houses of friends, they
+made known their arrest. D’Argenson had half a dozen of the rooms
+permanently furnished, others were furnished under Louis XV.; under
+Louis XVI., almost all were furnished. The appointments were very
+modest: a bed of green baize with curtains, one or two tables, several
+chairs, fire-dogs, a shovel, and a small pair of tongs. But after having
+undergone examination, the prisoner retained the right of getting in
+furniture from outside. And in this way the rooms of the prisoners were
+sometimes adorned with great elegance. Madame de Staal relates that she
+had hers hung with tapestry; the Marquis de Sade covered the bare walls
+with long and brilliant hangings: other prisoners ornamented their rooms
+with family portraits: they procured chests of drawers, desks, round
+tables, dressing-cases, armchairs, cushions in Utrecht velvet; the
+inventories of articles belonging to the prisoners show that they
+managed to secure everything they thought necessary. The Abbé Brigault,
+who<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a> was imprisoned at the same time as Madame de Staal and for the same
+affair, brought into the Bastille five arm-chairs, two pieces of
+tapestry, eleven serge hangings, eight chairs, a bureau, a small table,
+three pictures, &amp;c. The list of effects taken out of the Bastille by the
+Comte de Belle-Isle when he was set at liberty includes a library
+consisting of 333 volumes and ten atlases, a complete service of fine
+linen and plate for the table, a bed furnished with gold-bordered red
+damask, four pieces of tapestry on antique subjects, two mirrors, a
+screen of gold-bordered red damask matching the bed, two folding
+screens, two armchairs with cushions, an armchair in leather, three
+chairs in tapestry, an overmantel of gilt copper, tables, drawers,
+stands, candlestick of plated copper, &amp;c. We might multiply examples,
+even from among prisoners of middle station.</p>
+
+<p>It was the rule that prisoners newly arrived at the Bastille should be
+examined within twenty-four hours. It sometimes happened, however, that
+one or another remained for two or three weeks before appearing before
+the magistrate. The Châtelet commissioner, specially delegated to the
+Bastille for these examinations, founded his questions on notes supplied
+him by the lieutenant of police, who, indeed, often went in person to
+see the prisoners. A special commission was appointed for affairs of
+importance. Dumouriez says that he was examined after nine hours of
+detention by three commissioners: “The president was an old councillor
+of<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a> state named Marville, a man of intelligence, but coarse and
+sarcastic. The second was M. de Sartine, lieutenant of police and
+councillor of state, a man of polish and refinement. The third was a
+<i>maître des requêtes</i><a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> named Villevaux, a very insincere and
+disputatious fellow. The clerk, who had more intelligence than any of
+them, was an advocate named Beaumont.”</p>
+
+<p>We have found many instances of prisoners who spoke in high terms of
+their judges. And it cannot be said that prisoners at the Bastille
+escaped judgment. A Châtelet commissioner examined them and sent the
+official report of his examination, with a statement of his opinion, to
+the lieutenant of police. He decided whether the arrest should be
+sustained. Moreover, it would be a mistake to compare the lieutenant of
+police under the <i>ancien régime</i> with the prefect of police of to-day;
+the lieutenants of police, selected from former <i>maîtres des requêtes</i>,
+had a judicial character: the documents of the period call them
+“magistrates”; they issued decrees without appeal and pronounced penal
+sentences, even condemning to the galleys; they were at the same time
+justices of the peace with an extensive jurisdiction. In addition to the
+examination held on the entrance of a prisoner, the lieutenants of
+police, in the course of their frequent visits, addressed to the<a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a>
+ministers of Paris reports on the prisoners,&mdash;reports in which they
+discussed the evidence, and which constituted veritable judgments.</p>
+
+<p>When the prisoner was recognized as innocent, a new <i>lettre de cachet</i>
+soon set him at liberty. The verdict of “no true bill” often supervened
+with a rapidity which the decisions of our police magistrates would do
+well to emulate. A certain Barbier, who entered the Bastille on February
+15, 1753, was found not guilty and set at liberty the next day. Of the
+279 persons imprisoned in the Bastille during the last fifteen years of
+the <i>ancien régime</i>, thirty-eight benefited by the dropping of the
+indictment.</p>
+
+<p>Finally&mdash;and here is a point on which the new method might well model
+itself on that of the Bastille&mdash;when a detention was recognized as
+unjust, the victim was indemnified. A great number of examples might be
+mentioned. An advocate named Subé left the Bastille on June 18, 1767,
+after a detention of eighteen days; he had been falsely accused of the
+authorship of a book against the king, and received compensation to the
+tune of 3000 livres, more than £240 of our money. A certain Pereyra,
+imprisoned in the Bastille from November 7, 1771, to April 12, 1772, and
+then from July 1 to September 26, 1774, having been found to be
+innocent, was reinstated in all his property, and received from the king
+a life pension of 1200 livres, more than £100 to-day. A certain number
+of those accused in the Canada case, when the charge was withdrawn,<a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a>
+received a life pension on leaving the Bastille. At other times, the
+detention of an individual might throw his family into want. He was kept
+in the Bastille, if it was thought he deserved it, but his people were
+assisted. Under date September 3, 1763, the Duke de Choiseul writes to
+the lieutenant of police: “I have received the letter you did me the
+honour of writing to me in favour of the children of the Sieur
+Joncaire-Chabert. I have the pleasure to inform you that I have got for
+them a second subsidy of 300 livres (nearly £30 to-day) in consideration
+of the sad condition you informed me they were in.” Louis XIV.
+guaranteed to Pellisson, at his liberation, a pension of 2000 crowns.
+The Regent granted to Voltaire, when he left the Bastille, a pension of
+1200 livres. Louis XVI. awarded to Latude an annuity of 400 livres, and
+to La Rocheguérault an annuity of 400 crowns. The minister Breteuil
+pensioned all the prisoners whom he set at liberty. Brun de Condamine,
+confined from 1779 to 1783, received on leaving a sum of 600 livres.
+Renneville speaks of a prisoner to whom Seignelay gave an important
+situation in compensation for his detention at the Bastille. We hear of
+one, Toussaint Socquart, a commissioner of the Châtelet and of police
+whose offices were restored to him when he came out of the Bastille. In
+fact, contrary to detention in our modern prisons, incarceration in the
+Bastille did not cast the slightest slur on the prisoner’s character,
+even in the eyes of those to whom his arrest was due, and instances have
+been known of men who, on their release from the<a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a> Bastille, not only
+were reinstated in public offices, but reached the highest positions.</p>
+
+<p>Until his examinations were quite completed, the prisoner was kept in
+close confinement. None but the officers of the château were allowed to
+communicate with him. And during this time he lived in solitude, unless
+he had brought a servant with him. The administration readily permitted
+the prisoners to avail themselves of the services of their valets, who
+were boarded at the king’s expense. It even happened that the government
+sometimes gave their prisoners valets, paying not only for their board,
+but also their wages at the rate of 900 livres a year. One might cite
+prisoners of inferior rank who thus had servants to wait on them. Two or
+three prisoners were sometimes put together in one room. Prison life has
+no greater terror than solitude. In absolute solitude many of the
+prisoners became mad. In company, the hours of captivity seemed less
+tedious and oppressive. Father and son, mother and daughter, aunt and
+niece, lived together. Many might be named. On September 7, 1693, a lady
+named De la Fontaine was taken to the Bastille for the second time. The
+first time, she had been imprisoned quite alone; but this new detention
+evoked the compassion of the lieutenant of police, who, to please the
+poor lady, sent her husband to the Bastille, locked him up with her, and
+gave them a lackey to wait on them.</p>
+
+<p>The examinations being ended, the prisoners enjoyed a greater liberty.
+They could then enter into communication<a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a> with the people of the town.
+They obtained permission to see their relatives and friends. These
+sometimes paid them visits in their rooms; but as a rule the interviews
+took place in the council-hall, in presence of one of the officers of
+the château. They were usually permitted to discuss only family affairs
+and business matters. All conversation on the Bastille and the reasons
+for their imprisonment was forbidden. The rules of the prison increased
+in severity as time went on. Towards the end of Louis XV.’s reign the
+lieutenant of police went so far as to prescribe the subjects of
+conversation which would alone be permitted in the course of the visits
+the prisoners received. “They may talk to the prisoner about the harvest
+his vineyards will yield this year, about cancelling a lease, about a
+match for his niece, about the health of his parents.” But it is
+necessary to read the <i>Memoirs</i> of Gourville, Fontaine, Bussy-Rabutin,
+Hennequin, Madame de Staal, the Duke de Richelieu, to form a general
+idea of life at the Bastille under Louis XIV. and under the Regent.
+Several prisoners were free to move about through the château wherever
+it seemed good to them; they entered the rooms of their fellow-prisoners
+at all hours of the day. The governor contented himself with locking
+them in their own rooms at night. The prisoners who had the “liberty of
+the court” organized games of bowls or <i>tonneau</i>, and hobnobbed with the
+officers of the garrison. Fontaine relates that they might have been
+seen from the top of the towers, collected fifty at a time in the inner
+court<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a> Bussy-Rabutin’s room was open to all comers: his wife and friends
+visited him; he gave dinners to persons from court, plotted love
+intrigues there, and corresponded freely with his friends and relatives.
+Several prisoners even had permission to take a walk into the town on
+condition of their returning to the château in the evening. Two brothers
+were placed in the Bastille together. They went out when they pleased,
+taking turns; it was sufficient for one or other to be always at the
+château. The officers of the staff gossiped with the prisoners and gave
+them advice as to the best means of obtaining their liberty.</p>
+
+<p>This animated, courtly, and elegant life is described with infinite
+charm by Madame de Staal, whom we have already cited. “We all used to
+spend a part of the day with the governor. We dined with him, and after
+dinner I enjoyed a rubber of ombre with Messieurs de Pompadour and de
+Boisdavis, Ménil advising me. When it was over we returned to our own
+apartments. The company met again in my rooms before supper, for which
+we returned to the governor’s, and after that we all went to bed.”</p>
+
+<p>As to the manner in which the prisoners were fed and looked after, that
+is surprising indeed, and what we shall say about it, though rigidly
+accurate, will perhaps be regarded as an exaggeration. The governor drew
+three livres a day for the maintenance of a man of inferior rank; five
+livres for the maintenance of a tradesman; ten livres for a banker, a
+magistrate, or a man of<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a> letters; fifteen livres for a judge of the
+Parlement; thirty-six livres for a marshal of France. The Cardinal de
+Rohan had 120 francs a day spent on him. The Prince de Courlande, during
+a stay of five months at the Bastille, spent 22,000 francs. These
+figures must be doubled and trebled to give the value they would
+represent to-day.</p>
+
+<p>We read, too, with the greatest astonishment the description of the
+meals the prisoners made. Renneville, whose evidence is the more
+important in that his book is a pamphlet against the administration of
+the Bastille, speaks in these terms of his first meal: “The turnkey put
+one of my serviettes on the table and placed my dinner on it, which
+consisted of pea soup garnished with lettuce, well simmered and
+appetizing to look at, with a quarter of fowl to follow; in one dish
+there was a juicy beef-steak, with plenty of gravy and a sprinkling of
+parsley, in another a quarter of forcemeat pie well stuffed with
+sweetbreads, cock’s combs, asparagus, mushrooms, and truffles; and in a
+third a ragoût of sheep’s tongue, the whole excellently cooked; for
+dessert, a biscuit and two pippins. The turnkey insisted on pouring out
+my wine. This was good burgundy, and the bread was excellent. I asked
+him to drink, but he declared it was not permitted. I asked if I should
+pay for my food, or whether I was indebted to the king for it. He told
+me that I had only to ask freely for whatever would give me pleasure,
+that they would try to satisfy me, and that His Majesty paid for it
+all.” The<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a> “most Christian” king desired that his guests should fast on
+Fridays and in Lent, but he did not treat them any the worse on that
+account. “I had,” says Renneville, “six dishes, and an admirable prawn
+soup. Among the fish there was a very fine weever, a large fried sole,
+and a perch, all very well seasoned, with three other dishes.” At this
+period Renneville’s board cost ten francs a day; later he was reduced to
+the rate of the prisoners of a lower class. “They much reduced my usual
+fare,” he says; “I had, however, a good soup with fried bread crumbs, a
+passable piece of beef, a ragoût of sheep’s tongue, and two custards for
+dessert. I was treated in pretty much the same manner the whole time I
+was in this gloomy place; sometimes they gave me, after my soup, a wing
+or leg of fowl, sometimes they put two little patties on the edge of the
+dish.”</p>
+
+<p>Towards the end of Louis XV.’s reign, Dumouriez eulogizes the cookery of
+the Bastille in almost the same terms. On the day of his entrance,
+noticing that they were serving a fish dinner, he asked for a fowl to be
+got from a neighbouring eating-house. “A fowl!” said the major, “don’t
+you know that to-day is Friday?” “Your business is to look after me and
+not my conscience. I am an invalid, for the Bastille itself is a
+disease,” replied the prisoner. In an hour’s time the fowl was on the
+table. Subsequently he asked for his dinner and supper to be served at
+the same time, between three and four o’clock. His valet, a good cook,
+used to make him stews. “You fared very well at the Bastille;<a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a> there
+were always five dishes at dinner and three at supper, without the
+dessert, and the whole being put on the table at once, appeared
+magnificent.” There is a letter from the major of the Bastille addressed
+in 1764 to the lieutenant of police, discussing a prisoner named Vieilh,
+who never ate butcher’s meat; so they had to feed him exclusively on
+game and poultry. Things were much the same under Louis XVI., as
+Poultier d’Elmotte testifies: “De Launey, the governor, used to come and
+have a friendly chat with me; he got them to consult my taste as regards
+food, and to supply me with anything I wished for.” The bookseller
+Hardy, transferred in 1766 to the Bastille with the members of the
+Breton deputation, declares frankly that they were all treated in the
+best possible way. Finally, Linguet himself, in spite of his desire to
+paint the lot of the victims of the Bastille in the most sombre colours,
+is obliged to confess that food was supplied in abundance. Every morning
+the cook sent up to him a menu on which he marked the dishes he fancied.</p>
+
+<p>The account books of the Bastille confirm the testimony of former
+prisoners. The following, according to these documents, are the meals
+that La Bourdonnais enjoyed during July, 1750. Every day the menu
+contains soup, beef, veal, beans, French beans, two eggs, bread,
+strawberries, cherries, gooseberries, oranges, two bottles of red wine,
+and two bottles of beer. In addition to this regular bill of fare we
+note on July 2, a fowl and a bottle of Muscat; on the 4th, a bottle of
+Muscat; on the 7th, tea;<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a> on the 12th, a bottle of brandy; on the 13th,
+some flowers; on the 14th, some quails; on the 15th, a turkey; on the
+16th, a melon; on the 17th, a fowl; on the 18th, a young rabbit; on the
+19th, a bottle of brandy; on the 20th, a chicken and ham sausage and two
+melons; and so on.</p>
+
+<p>Tavernier was a prisoner of mean station, son of a doorkeeper of Paris
+de Montmartel. He was implicated in a plot against the King’s life, and
+was one of the seven prisoners set free on the 14th of July. He was
+found out of his mind in his cell. After he had been led in triumph
+through the streets of Paris, he was shut up at Charenton. He was a
+martyr, people exclaimed. He was certainly not so well off in his new
+abode as he had been at the Bastille. We have an account of what was
+supplied to him at the Bastille in addition to the ordinary meals, in
+November, 1788, in March and May, 1789, three of the last months of his
+imprisonment. In November we find: tobacco, four bottles of brandy,
+sixty bottles of wine, thirty bottles of beer, two pounds of coffee,
+three pounds of sugar, a turkey, oysters, chestnuts, apples, and pears;
+in March: tobacco, four bottles of brandy, forty-four bottles of wine,
+sixty bottles of beer, coffee, sugar, fowls, cheese; in May: tobacco,
+four bottles of brandy, sixty-two bottles of wine, thirty-one bottles of
+beer, pigeons, coffee, sugar, cheese, &amp;c. We have the menus of the
+Marquis de Sade for January, 1789: chocolate cream, a fat chicken
+stuffed with chestnuts, pullets with truffles, potted ham, apricot
+marmalade, &amp;c.<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a></p>
+
+<p>The facts we are describing were the rule. The prisoners who were
+treated with the least consideration fed very well. Only those who were
+sent down to the cells were sometimes put on bread and water, but that
+was only a temporary punishment.</p>
+
+<p>When a complaint was formulated by any prisoner in regard to his food, a
+reprimand to the governor soon followed. Then the lieutenant of police
+inquired of the person concerned if he was better treated than formerly.
+“His Majesty tells me,” writes Pontchartrain to De Launey, “that
+complaints have been raised about the bad food of the prisoners; he
+instructs me to write to you to give the matter great attention.” And
+Sartine wrote jokingly to Major de Losmes: “I am quite willing for you
+to get the clothes of Sieur Dubois enlarged, and I hope all your
+prisoners may enjoy as excellent health.”</p>
+
+<p>Further, the king clothed those of the prisoners who were too poor to
+buy their own clothes. He did not give them a prison uniform, but
+dressing-gowns padded or lined with rabbit skin, breeches of coloured
+stuff, vests lined with silk plush and fancy coats.<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> The commissary
+at the Bastille appointed to look after the supplies took the prisoners’
+measure, and inquired about their<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> tastes, and the colours and styles
+that suited them best. A lady prisoner named Sauvé asked to have made
+for her a dress of white silk, dotted with green flowers. The wife of
+commissary Rochebrune spent several days in going the round of the Paris
+shops, and then wrote in despair that no dressmaker had such a material,
+the nearest approach to it being a white silk with green stripes: if
+Madame Sauvé would be satisfied with that, they would send to take her
+measure. “Monsieur le major,” writes a prisoner named Hugonnet, “the
+shirts they brought me yesterday are not a bit what I asked for, for I
+remember having written ‘fine, and with embroidered ruffles’; instead of
+which these things are coarse, made of wretched linen, and with ruffles
+at best only fit for a turnkey; and so I shall be glad if you will send
+them back to the commissary; and let him keep them, for I declare I
+won’t have them.”</p>
+
+<p>The governor also saw that the prisoners had some means of diversion.
+The poorest he provided with pocket-money and tobacco.</p>
+
+<p>About the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Neapolitan named
+Vinache died at the Bastille, after founding a library there for the use
+of his fellow-prisoners. This library was gradually augmented by
+donations from the governors, by gifts from various prisoners, and even
+by the generosity of a citizen of Paris whose compassion had been
+excited for the lot of the prisoners. The books consisted of romances,
+works of science and philosophy, and religious books, light literature
+predominating.<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a> The lieutenant of police, Berryer, struck out of the
+list of books that were being sent one day to the binder a “poem on the
+greatness of God,” as being on “too melancholy a subject for prisoners.”
+The prisoners also procured books from outside. We have mentioned the
+Comte de Belle-Isle, who had more than three hundred books and atlases
+at the Bastille. La Beaumelle collected a library of more than 600
+volumes. The administration, moreover, never refused to get for the
+prisoners, out of the royal funds and sometimes at considerable expense,
+such works as they said were necessary to their studies. The works of
+Voltaire and Puffendorf were readily placed in their hands. Finally,
+under Louis XVI., they were allowed to read the gazettes.</p>
+
+<p>After the permission to have books and to write, the most coveted favour
+was that of walking exercise. Refusal of this was rare. The prisoners
+might walk, either on the towers of the Bastille, or in the inner
+courts, or lastly along the bastion, which was transformed into a
+garden. To fresh invigorating air the platform of the towers added the
+attraction of the finest view. Fontaine relates that Sacy went to the
+top of the towers every day after dinner. He there walked about in
+company with the officers, who gave him news of the town and the
+prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>In their rooms the prisoners amused themselves with feeding cats and
+birds and animals of all kinds: they taught dogs tricks. Some were
+allowed to have a violin or a clavecin. Pellisson was shut up with a
+Basque who<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a> used to play to him on the musette. The Duke de Richelieu
+boasts of the operatic airs he sang in parts with his neighbours in the
+Bastille, Mdlle. de Launay among them, with her head at the bars of her
+window; “we got up choruses of a sort, with fine effect.”</p>
+
+<p>Other prisoners killed time with embroidery, weaving or knitting; some
+made ornaments for the chapel of the château. Some devoted themselves to
+carpentry, turned wood, made small articles of furniture. Artists
+painted and sketched. “The occupation of M. de Villeroi was somewhat
+singular: he had very fine clothes, which he was for ever unpicking and
+sewing together again with much cleverness.” The prisoners who lived
+several in one room played at cards, chess, and backgammon. In 1788, at
+the time of the troubles in Brittany, a dozen noblemen of that country
+were shut up in the Bastille. They lived together, and asked for a
+billiard table to amuse themselves; the table was set up in the
+apartments of the major, and there these gentlemen went for their games.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners who died in the Bastille were interred in the graveyard of
+St. Paul’s; the funeral service was held in the church of St. Paul, and
+the burial certificate, bearing the family name of the deceased, was
+drawn up in the vestry. It is not true that the names of the deceased
+were wrongly stated in the register in order that their identity might
+be concealed from the public. The Man in the Iron Mask was inscribed on
+the register of St. Paul’s under his real name. Jews, Protestants,<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a> and
+suicides were buried in the garden of the château, the prejudices of the
+period not allowing their remains to be laid in consecrated ground.</p>
+
+<p>Those who were liberated had a happier fate. Their dismissal was ordered
+by a <i>lettre de cachet</i>, as their incarceration had been. These orders
+for their liberation, so anxiously expected, were brought by the court
+“distributors of packets” or by the ordinary post; sometimes relatives
+and friends themselves brought the sealed envelope, in order to have the
+joy of taking away at once those whose deliverance they came to effect.</p>
+
+<p>The governor, or, in his absence, the king’s lieutenant, came into the
+prisoner’s chamber and announced that he was free. The papers and other
+effects which had been taken from him on entrance were restored to him,
+the major getting a receipt for them; then he signed a promise to reveal
+nothing of what he had seen at the château. Many of the prisoners
+refused to submit to this formality, and were liberated notwithstanding;
+others, after having signed, retailed everywhere all they knew about the
+prison, and were not interfered with. When the prisoner only recovered
+his freedom under certain conditions, he was required to give an
+undertaking to submit to the king’s pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>All these formalities having been completed, the governor, with that
+feeling for good form which characterized the men of the <i>ancien
+régime</i>, had the man who had been his guest served for the last time
+with an excellent dinner. If the prisoner was a man of good<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a> society,
+the governor would even go so far as to invite him to his own table, and
+then, the meal over and the good-byes said, he placed his own carriage
+at the prisoner’s disposal, and often entered it himself to accompany
+him to his destination.</p>
+
+<p>More than one prisoner thus restored to the world must have felt greatly
+embarrassed before a day was past, and have been at a loss what to do or
+where to go. The administration of the Bastille sometimes gave money to
+one and another to enable them to get along for a time. In December,
+1783, a certain Dubu de la Tagnerette, after being set at liberty, was
+lodged in the governor’s house for a fortnight until he had found
+apartments that would suit him. Moreover, many of the prisoners were
+actually annoyed at being dismissed: we could cite examples of persons
+who sought to get themselves sent to the Bastille; others refused to
+accept their liberty, and others did their best to get their detention
+prolonged.</p>
+
+<p>“Many come out,” says Renneville, “very sad at having to leave.” Le
+Maistre de Sacy and Fontaine affirm that the years spent at the Bastille
+were the best years in their lives. “The innocent life we lived,” says
+Renneville again, “Messieurs Hamilton, Schrader, and myself, seemed so
+pleasant to M. Hamilton that he begged me to write a description of it
+in verse.” The <i>Memoirs</i> of Madame de Staal represent her years at the
+Bastille as the happiest she ever knew. “In my heart of hearts, I was
+very far from desiring my liberty.<a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a>” “I stayed at the Bastille for six
+weeks,” observes the Abbé Morellet, “which sped away&mdash;I chuckle still as
+I think of them&mdash;very pleasantly for me.” And later, Dumouriez declares
+that at the Bastille he was happy and never felt dull.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the rule of the celebrated state prison. In the last century
+there was no place of detention in Europe where the prisoners were
+surrounded with so many comforts and attentions: there is no such place
+in these days.</p>
+
+<p>But in spite of these very real alleviations, it would be absurd to
+pretend that the prisoners were in general reconciled to their
+incarceration. Nothing is a consolation for the loss of liberty. How
+many poor wretches, in their despair, have dashed their heads against
+the thick walls while wife and children and concerns of the utmost
+gravity were summoning them from without! The Bastille was the cause of
+ruin to many; within its walls were shed tears which were never dried.</p>
+
+<p>An eighteenth-century writer thus defined the state prison: “A bastille
+is any house solidly built, hermetically sealed, and diligently guarded,
+where any person, of whatever rank, age, or sex, may enter without
+knowing why, remain without knowing how long, hoping to leave it, but
+not knowing how.” These lines, written by an apologist for the old state
+prison, contain its condemnation, without appeal, before the modern
+mind.<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.<br /><br />
+<small>THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.</small></h2>
+
+<p class="nind">F<small>OR</small> two centuries no question has excited public opinion more than that
+of the Man in the Iron Mask. The books written on the subject would fill
+a library. People despaired of ever lifting the veil. “The story of the
+Iron Mask,” says Michelet, “will probably remain for ever obscure,” and
+Henri Martin adds: “History has no right to pronounce judgment on what
+will never leave the domain of conjecture.” To-day, the doubt no longer
+exists. The problem is solved. Before disclosing the solution which
+criticism has unanimously declared correct, we propose to transcribe the
+scanty authentic documents that we possess on the masked man, and then
+to state the principal solutions which have been proposed, before
+arriving at the true solution.</p>
+
+<h3>1. <span class="smcap">The Documents.</span></h3>
+
+<p><i>The Register of the Bastille.</i>&mdash;To begin with, let us quote the text
+which is the origin and foundation of all the works published on the
+question of the Iron Mask.</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<a href="images/i_134_lg.png">
+<img class="enlargeimage"
+src="images/enlarge-image.jpg"
+alt="enlarge-image"
+title="enlarge-image"
+width="18"
+height="14" />
+</a><br /><img src="images/i_134_sml.png" width="363" height="550" alt="Note in Du Junca’s Journal regarding the entrance to the
+Bastille (September 18, 1698) of the Man in the Iron Mask." />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">Note in Du Junca’s Journal regarding the entrance to the
+Bastille<br /> (September 18, 1698) of the Man in the Iron Mask.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>Etienne du Junca, king’s lieutenant at the Bastille,<a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a> in a journal
+which he began to keep on October 2, 1690, when he entered upon his
+office&mdash;a sort of register in which he recorded day by day the details
+concerning the arrival of the prisoners&mdash;writes, under date September
+18, 1698, these lines,<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> which the popular legend has rendered
+memorable:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Thursday, September 18 (1698), at three o’clock in the afternoon, M. de
+Saint-Mars, governor of the château of the Bastille, made his first
+appearance, coming from his governorship of the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite-Honorat, bringing with him, in his conveyance, a
+prisoner he had formerly at Pignerol, whom he caused to be always
+masked, whose name is not mentioned; directly he got out of the carriage
+he put him in the first room of the Bazinière tower, waiting till night
+for me to take him, at nine o’clock, and put him with M. de Rosarges,
+one of the sergeants brought by the governor, alone in the third room of
+the Bertaudière tower, which I had had furnished with all necessaries
+some days before his arrival, having received orders to that effect from
+M. de Saint-Mars: the which prisoner will be looked after and waited on
+by M. de Rosarges, and maintained by the governor.”</p>
+
+<p>In a second register, supplementary to the first, in which du Junca
+records details of the liberation or the death of the prisoners, we
+read, under date November 19, 1703:&mdash;<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a></p>
+
+<p>“On the same day, November 19, 1703, the unknown prisoner, always masked
+with a mask of black velvet, whom M. de Saint-Mars, the governor,
+brought with him on coming from the Isles de Sainte-Marguerite, whom he
+had kept for a long time, the which happening to be a little ill
+yesterday on coming from mass, he died to-day, about ten o’clock at
+night, without having had a serious illness; it could not have been
+slighter. M. Giraut, our chaplain, confessed him yesterday, is surprised
+at his death. He did not receive the sacrament, and our chaplain
+exhorted him a moment before he died. And this unknown prisoner, kept
+here for so long, was buried on Tuesday at four o’clock p.m., November
+20, in the graveyard of St. Paul, our parish; on the register of burial
+he was given a name also unknown. M. de Rosarges, major, and Arreil,
+surgeon, signed the register.”</p>
+
+<p>And in the margin:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I have since learnt that they called him M. de Marchiel on the
+register, and that forty livres was the cost of the funeral.”</p>
+
+<p>The registers of du Junca were preserved among the ancient archives of
+the Bastille, whence they passed to the Arsenal library, where they are
+now kept. They are drawn up in the clumsy handwriting of a soldier, with
+little skill in penmanship. The spelling is bad. But the facts are
+stated with precision, and have always proved accurate when checked.</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<a href="images/i_137_lg.png">
+<img class="enlargeimage"
+src="images/enlarge-image.jpg"
+alt="enlarge-image"
+title="enlarge-image"
+width="18"
+height="14" />
+</a><br /><img src="images/i_137_sml.png" width="363" height="550" alt="Notice in Du Junca’s Journal of the death of the masked
+prisoner in the Bastille (November 19, 1703)." />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">Notice in Du Junca’s Journal of the death of the masked
+prisoner<br /> in the Bastille (November 19, 1703).</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>The extract from the second register shows that the<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a> mysterious
+prisoner wore, not a mask of iron, but one of black velvet.</p>
+
+<p>Further, the entry on the register of St. Paul’s church has been
+discovered. It reads:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“On the 19th, Marchioly, aged 45 years or thereabouts, died in the
+Bastille, whose body was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul, his
+parish, the 20th of the present month, in the presence of M. Rosage
+(<i>sic</i>), major of the Bastille, and of M. Reglhe (<i>sic</i>), surgeon major
+of the Bastille, who signed.&mdash;(Signed) <span class="smcap">Rosarges, Reilhe</span>.”</p>
+
+<p>Such are the fundamental documents for the story of the Iron Mask; we
+shall see by and by that they are sufficient to establish the truth.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Letter of the Governor of Sainte-Marguerite.</i>&mdash;We have just seen,
+from the register of du Junca, that the masked man had been at the Isles
+of Sainte-Marguerite under the charge of Saint-Mars, who, on being
+appointed governor of the Bastille, had brought the prisoner with him.
+In the correspondence exchanged between Saint-Mars and the minister
+Barbezieux, occurs the following letter, dated January 6, 1696, in which
+Saint-Mars describes his method of dealing with the prisoners, and the
+masked man is referred to under the appellation “my ancient prisoner.”</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“<span class="smcap">My Lord</span>,&mdash;You command me to tell you what is the practice, when I
+am absent or ill, as to the visits made and precautions taken daily
+in regard to the prisoners committed to my charge. My two
+lieutenants<a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a> serve the meals at the regular hours, just as they
+have seen me do, and as I still do very often when I am well. The
+first of my lieutenants, who takes the keys of the prison of <i>my
+ancient prisoner</i>, with whom we commence, opens the three doors and
+enters the chamber of the prisoner, who politely hands him the
+plates and dishes, put one on top of another, to give them into the
+hands of the lieutenant, who has only to go through two doors to
+hand them to one of my sergeants, who takes them and places them on
+a table two steps away, where is the second lieutenant, who
+examines everything that enters and leaves the prison, and sees
+that there is nothing written on the plate; and after they have
+given him the utensil, they examine his bed inside and out, and
+then the gratings and windows of his room, and very often the man
+himself: after having asked him very politely if he wants anything
+else, they lock the doors and proceed to similar business with the
+other prisoners.”</p></div>
+
+<p><i>The Letter of M. de Palteau.</i>&mdash;On June 19, 1768, M. de Formanoir de
+Palteau addressed from the château of Palteau, near Villeneuve-le-Roi,
+to the celebrated Fréron, editor of the <i>Année Littéraire</i>, a letter
+which was inserted in the number for June 30, 1768. The author of this
+letter was the grand-nephew of Saint-Mars. At the time when the latter
+was appointed governor of the Bastille, the château of Palteau belonged
+to him, and he halted there with his prisoner on the way from the Isles
+of Sainte-Marguerite to Paris.<a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a></p>
+
+<p>“In 1698,” writes M. de Palteau, “M. de Saint-Mars passed from the
+governorship of the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite to that of the Bastille.
+On his way to take up his duties, he stayed with his prisoner on his
+estate at Palteau. The masked man arrived in a conveyance which preceded
+that of M. de Saint-Mars; they were accompanied by several horsemen. The
+peasants went to meet their lord: M. de Saint-Mars ate with his
+prisoner, who had his back turned to the windows of the dining-hall
+looking on the courtyard. The peasants whom I have questioned could not
+see whether he ate with his mask on; but they observed very well that M.
+de Saint-Mars, who was opposite him at table, had two pistols beside his
+plate. They had only one footman to wait on them, and he fetched the
+dishes from an ante-room where they were brought him, carefully shutting
+the door of the dining-hall behind him. When the prisoner crossed the
+courtyard, he always had his black mask over his face; the peasants
+noticed that his lips and teeth were not covered, that he was tall and
+had white hair. M. de Saint-Mars slept in a bed that was put up for him
+near that of the masked man.”</p>
+
+<p>This account is marked throughout with the stamp of truth. M. de
+Palteau, the writer, makes no attempt to draw inferences from it. He
+declares for none of the hypotheses then under discussion in regard to
+the identity of the mysterious unknown. He is content to report the
+testimony of those of his peasants who saw the masked man when he passed
+through their lord’s estates.<a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a> The only detail in the story which we are
+able to check&mdash;a characteristic detail, it is true&mdash;is that of the black
+mask of which M. de Palteau speaks: it corresponds exactly to the mask
+of black velvet mentioned in du Junca’s register.</p>
+
+<p>The château of Palteau is still in existence. In his work on
+Superintendent Fouquet, M. Jules Lair gives a description of it. “The
+château of Palteau, situated on an eminence among woods and vines,
+presented at that time, as it does to-day, the aspect of a great lordly
+mansion in the style of the time of Henri IV. and Louis XIII. First
+there is a wide courtyard, then two wings; within, the principal
+building and the chapel. The lower story is supported on arches, and its
+lofty windows go right up into the roof, and light the place from floor
+to attic.” Since the eighteenth century, however, the château has
+undergone some modifications. The room in which Saint-Mars dined with
+his prisoner is now used as a kitchen.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Notes of Major Chevalier.</i>&mdash;In addition to the entries in du
+Junca’s Journal which we have transcribed, scholars are accustomed to
+invoke, as equally worthy of credence though later in date, the
+testimony of Father Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and that of Major
+Chevalier.</p>
+
+<p>The extracts from du Junca quoted above were published for the first
+time in 1769 by Father Griffet, who added the following comments: “The
+memory of the masked prisoner was still preserved among the<a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a> officers,
+soldiers, and servants of the Bastille, when M. de Launey, who has long
+been the governor, came to occupy a place on the staff of the garrison.
+Those who had seen him with his mask, when he crossed the courtyard on
+his way to attend mass, said that after his death the order was given to
+burn everything he had used, such as linen, clothes, cushions,
+counterpanes, &amp;c.: that the very walls of the room he had occupied had
+to be scraped and whitewashed again, and that all the tiles of the
+flooring were taken up and replaced by others, because they were so
+afraid that he had found the means to conceal some notes or some mark,
+the discovery of which would have revealed his name.”</p>
+
+<p>The testimony of Father Griffet happens to be confirmed by some notes
+from the pen of a major of the Bastille named Chevalier. The major was
+not a personage of the highest rank in the administration of the
+Bastille, since above him were the governor and the king’s lieutenant:
+but he was the most important personage. The whole internal
+administration, so far as the prisoners were concerned, was entrusted to
+him. Chevalier fulfilled these duties for nearly thirty-eight years,
+from 1749 to 1787. M. Fernand Bournon’s estimate of him is as follows:
+“Chevalier is a type of the devoted hard-working official who has no
+ambition to rise above a rather subordinate rank. It would be impossible
+to say how much the administration of the Bastille owed to his zeal and
+to his perfect familiarity with a service of extraordinary difficulty.<a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a>”</p>
+
+<p>Among notes put together with a view to a history of the Bastille,
+Chevalier gives in condensed form the information furnished by du
+Junca’s register, and adds: “This is the famous masked man whom no one
+has ever known. He was treated with great distinction by the governor,
+and was seen only by M. de Rosarges, major of the said château, who had
+sole charge of him; he was not ill except for a few hours, and died
+rather suddenly: interred at St. Paul’s, on Tuesday, November 20, 1703,
+at 4 o’clock p.m., under the name of Marchiergues. He was buried in a
+new white shroud, given by the governor, and practically everything in
+his room was burnt, such as his bed, chairs, tables, and other bits of
+furniture, or else melted down, and the whole was thrown into the
+privies.”</p>
+
+<p>These notes of Father Griffet and Major Chevalier have derived great
+force, in the eyes of historians, from their exact agreement; but a
+close examination shows that the testimony of Chevalier was the source
+of Father Griffet’s information; in fact, Chevalier was major of the
+Bastille when the Jesuit compiled his work, and it is doubtless upon his
+authority that the latter depended.</p>
+
+<p>Documents recently published in the <i>Revue Bleue</i> upset these
+assertions, which appeared to be based on the firmest foundations.</p>
+
+<p>In the Journal of du Junca, which we have already mentioned, we read
+under date April 30, 1701: “Sunday, April 30, about 9 o’clock in the
+evening, M. Aumont the younger came, bringing and handing over to us a
+prisoner<a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a> named M. Maranville, alias Ricarville, who was an officer in
+the army, a malcontent, too free with his tongue, a worthless fellow:
+whom I received in obedience to the king’s orders sent through the Count
+of Pontchartrain: whom I have had put along with the man Tirmon, in the
+second room of the Bertaudière tower, with the <i>ancient prisoner</i>, both
+being well locked in.”</p>
+
+<p>The “ancient prisoner” here referred to is no other than the masked man.
+When he entered the Bastille, as we have seen, on September 18, 1698, he
+was placed in the third room of the Bertaudière tower. In 1701, the
+Bastille happened to be crowded with prisoners, and they had to put
+several together in one and the same room; so the man in the mask was
+placed with two companions. One of them, Jean-Alexandre de Ricarville,
+also called Maranville, had been denounced as a “retailer of ill speech
+against the State, finding fault with the policy of France and lauding
+that of foreigners, especially that of the Dutch.” The police reports
+depict him as a beggarly fellow, poorly dressed, and about sixty years
+old. He had formerly been, as du Junca says, an officer in the royal
+troops. Maranville left the Bastille on October 19, 1708. He was
+transferred to Charenton, where he died in February, 1709. It must be
+pointed out that Charenton was then an “open” prison, where the
+prisoners associated with one another and had numerous relations with
+the outside world.</p>
+
+<p>The second of the fellow-prisoners of the man in the mask,
+Dominique-François Tirmont, was a servant.<a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a> When he was placed in the
+Bastille, on July 30, 1700, he was nineteen years old. He was accused of
+sorcery and of debauching young girls. He was put in the second room of
+the Bertaudière tower, where he was joined by Maranville and the man in
+the mask. On December 14, 1701, he was transferred to Bicêtre. He lost
+his reason in 1703 and died in 1708.</p>
+
+<p>The man in the mask was taken out of the third room of the Bertaudière
+tower, in which he had been placed on his entrance to the Bastille, on
+March 6, 1701, in order to make room for a woman named Anne Randon, a
+“witch and fortune-teller,” who was shut up alone in it. The masked
+prisoner was then placed in the “second Bertaudière” with Tirmont, who
+had been there, as we have just seen, since July 30, 1700. Maranville
+joined them on April 30, 1701. Not long after, the masked man was
+transferred to another room, with or without Maranville. Tirmont had
+been taken to Bicêtre in 1701. We find that on February 26, 1703, the
+Abbé Gonzel, a priest of Franche-Comté, accused of being a spy, was shut
+up alone in the “second Bertaudière.”</p>
+
+<p>These facts are of undeniable authenticity, and one sees at a glance the
+consequences springing from them. At the time when the masked prisoner
+shared the same room with fellow-captives, other prisoners at the
+Bastille were kept rigorously isolated, in spite of the crowded state of
+the prison, so much more important did the reasons for their
+incarceration seem! The man in the mask was associated with persons of
+the lowest class,<a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a> who were soon afterwards to leave and take their
+places with the ruck of prisoners at Charenton and Bicêtre. We read in a
+report of D’Argenson that there was even some talk of enlisting one of
+them, Tirmont, in the army. Such, then, was this strange personage, the
+repository of a terrible secret of which Madame Palatine<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> was already
+speaking in mysterious terms, the man who puzzled kings, Louis XV.,
+Louis XVI., who puzzled the very officers of the Bastille, and caused
+them to write stories as remote as possible from the reality!</p>
+
+<h3>2. <span class="smcap">The Legend.</span></h3>
+
+<p>If the very officers of the Bastille indulged such wild freaks of
+imagination, what flights into dreamland might not the thoughts of the
+public be expected to take? The movement is a very curious one to
+follow. To begin with, we have the light Venetian mask transforming
+itself<a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a> into an iron mask with steel articulations which the prisoner
+was never without. The consideration&mdash;imaginary, as we have seen&mdash;with
+which the prisoner is supposed to have been treated, and which is
+referred to in the notes of Major Chevalier, becomes transformed into
+marks of a boundless deference shown by the jailers towards their
+captive. The story was that Saint-Mars, the governor, a knight of St.
+Louis, never spoke to the prisoner except standing, with bared head,
+that he served him at table with his own hands and on silver plate, and
+that he supplied him with the most luxurious raiment his fancy could
+devise. Chevalier says that after his death his room at the Bastille was
+done up like new, to prevent his successor from discovering any
+tell-tale evidence in some corner. Speaking of the time when the masked
+man was at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, Voltaire relates: “One day
+the prisoner wrote with a knife on a silver dish, and threw the dish out
+of the window towards a boat moored on the shore, almost at the foot of
+the tower. A fisherman, to whom the boat belonged, picked up the dish
+and carried it to the governor. Astonished, he asked the fisherman,
+‘Have you read what is written on this dish, and has anyone seen it in
+your hands?’ ‘I cannot read,’ replied the fisher, ‘I have only just
+found it, and no one has seen it.’ The poor man was detained until the
+governor was assured he could not read and that no one had seen the
+dish. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘it is lucky for you that you can’t read!<a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a>’”</p>
+
+<p>In Father Papon’s <i>History of Provence</i>, linen takes the place of the
+dish. The upshot is more tragic: “I found in the citadel an officer of
+the Free Company, aged 79 years. He told me several times that a barber
+of that company saw one day, under the prisoner’s window, something
+white floating on the water; he went and picked it up and carried it to
+M. de Saint-Mars. It was a shirt of fine linen, folded with no apparent
+care, and covered with the prisoner’s writing. M. de Saint-Mars, after
+unfolding it and reading a few lines, asked the barber, with an air of
+great embarrassment, if he had not had the curiosity to read what was on
+it. The barber protested over and over again that he had read nothing;
+but, two days after, he was found dead in his bed.”</p>
+
+<p>And the fact that Saint-Mars had had the body of the prisoner buried in
+a white cloth struck the imagination, and was developed in its turn into
+an extraordinary taste on the part of the prisoner for linen of the
+finest quality and for costly lace&mdash;all which was taken to prove that
+the masked man was a son of Anne of Austria, who had a very special
+love, it was declared, for valuable lace and fine linen.</p>
+
+<p><i>A Brother of Louis XIV.</i>&mdash;We are able to fix with precision, we
+believe, the origin of the legend which made the Iron Mask a brother of
+Louis XIV. Moreover, it was due to this suggestion, which was hinted at
+from the first, that the story of the prisoner made so great a noise.
+The glory of it belongs to the most famous writer of the eighteenth
+century. With a boldness of imagination for<a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a> which to-day he would be
+envied by the cleverest journalistic inventor of sensational paragraphs,
+Voltaire started this monstrous hoax on its vigorous flight.</p>
+
+<p>In 1745 there had just appeared a sort of romance entitled <i>Notes
+towards the History of Persia</i>, which was attributed, not without some
+reason, to Madame de Vieux-Maisons. The book contained a story within a
+story, in which the mysterious prisoner, who was beginning to be talked
+about everywhere, was identified with the Duke de Vermandois, and to
+this fact was due the sensation which the book caused. Voltaire
+immediately saw how he could turn the circumstance to account. He had
+himself at one time been confined in the Bastille, which was one reason
+for speaking of it; but he did not dare put in circulation suddenly,
+without some preparation, the terrible story he had just conceived, and,
+with a very delicate sensitiveness to public opinion, he contented
+himself with printing the following paragraph in the first edition of
+his <i>Age of Louis XIV.</i>: “A few months after the death of Mazarin there
+occurred an event which is unexampled in history, and, what is not less
+strange, has been passed over in silence by all the historians. There
+was sent with the utmost secrecy to the château of the Isle of
+Sainte-Marguerite, in the Sea of Provence, an unknown prisoner, of more
+than ordinary height, young, and with features of rare nobility and
+beauty. On the way, this prisoner wore a mask the chinpiece of which was
+fitted with springs of steel, which allowed him to eat freely with the
+mask covering his face. The order had been<a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a> given to kill him if he
+uncovered. He remained in the island until an officer in whom great
+confidence was placed, named Saint-Mars, governor of Pignerol, having
+been made governor of the Bastille, came to the Isle of
+Sainte-Marguerite to fetch him, and conducted him to the Bastille,
+always masked. The Marquis de Louvois saw him in the island before his
+removal, and remained standing while he spoke to him, with a
+consideration savouring of respect.” Voltaire, however, does not say who
+this extraordinary prisoner was. He observed the impression produced on
+the public by his story. Then he ventured more boldly, and in the first
+edition of his <i>Questions on the Encyclopædia</i> insinuated that the
+motive for covering the prisoner’s face with a mask was fear lest some
+too striking likeness should be recognized. He still refrained from
+giving his name, but already everyone was on tip-toe with the
+expectation of startling news. At last, in the second edition of
+<i>Questions on the Encyclopædia</i>, Voltaire intrepidly added that the man
+in the mask was a uterine brother of Louis XIV., a son of Mazarin and
+Anne of Austria, and older than the king. We know what incomparable
+agitators of public opinion the Encyclopædists were.</p>
+
+<p>Once hatched, the story was not long in producing a numerous progeny,
+which grew in their turn and became a monstrous brood.</p>
+
+<p>We read in the <i>Memoirs</i> of the Duke de Richelieu, compiled by his
+secretary the Abbé Soulavie, that Mdlle. de Valois, the Regent’s
+daughter and at this date the<a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a> mistress of Richelieu, consented, at the
+instigation of the latter, to prostitute herself to her
+father&mdash;tradition has it that the Regent was enamoured of his
+daughter&mdash;in order to get sight of an account of the Iron Mask drawn up
+by Saint-Mars. According to this story, which the author of the
+<i>Memoirs</i> prints in its entirety, Louis XIV. was born at noon, and at
+half-past eight in the evening, while the king was at supper, the queen
+was brought to bed of a second son, who was put out of sight so as to
+avoid subsequent dissensions in the state.</p>
+
+<p>The Baron de Gleichen goes still farther. He is at the pains to prove
+that it was the true heir to the throne who was put out of sight, to the
+profit of a child of the queen and the cardinal. Having became masters
+of the situation at the death of the king, they substituted their son
+for the Dauphin, the substitution being facilitated by a strong likeness
+between the children. One sees at a glance the consequences of this
+theory, which nullifies the legitimacy of the last Bourbons.</p>
+
+<p>But the career of imagination was not yet to be checked. The legend came
+into full bloom under the first empire. Pamphlets then appeared in which
+the version of Baron de Gleichen was revived. Louis XIV. had been only a
+bastard, the son of foreigners; the lawful heir had been imprisoned at
+the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, where he had married the daughter of one
+of his keepers. Of this marriage was born a child who, as soon as he was
+weaned, was sent to Corsica, and entrusted to a reliable person, as a
+child coming of “good stock,” in Italian, <i>Buona-parte</i>.<a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a> Of that child
+the Emperor was the direct descendant. The right of Napoleon I. to the
+throne of France established by the Iron Mask!&mdash;there is a discovery
+which the great Dumas missed. But, incredible as it seems, there were
+men who actually took these fables seriously. In a Vendéan manifesto
+circulated among the Chouans,<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> in Nivose of the year <span class="smcap">IX</span>,<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> we read:
+“It is not wise for the Royalist party to rely on the assurances given
+by some emissaries of Napoleon, that he seized the throne only to
+restore the Bourbons; everything proves that he only awaits the general
+pacification to declare himself, and that he means to base his right on
+the birth of the children of the Iron Mask!”</p>
+
+<p>We shall not stay to refute the hypothesis which makes the Iron Mask a
+brother of Louis XIV. Marius Topin has already done so in the clearest
+possible manner. The notion, moreover, has long been abandoned. The last
+writers who adhered to it date from the revolutionary period.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Successive Incarnations of the Iron Mask.</i>&mdash;“Never has an Indian
+deity,” says Paul de Saint-Victor, speaking of the Iron Mask, “undergone
+so many metempsychoses<a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a> and so many avatars.” It would take too long
+merely to enumerate all the individuals with whom it has been attempted
+to identify the Iron Mask: even women have not escaped. We shall cite
+rapidly the theories which have found most credence amongst the public,
+or those which have been defended in the most serious works, in order to
+arrive finally at the identification&mdash;as will be seen, it is one of
+those proposed long ago&mdash;which is beyond doubt the true one.</p>
+
+<p>The hypothesis which, after that of a brother of Louis XIV., has most
+powerfully excited public opinion, is that which made the mysterious
+unknown Louis, Comte de Vermandois, admiral of France, and son of the
+charming Louise de la Vallière. This was indeed the belief of Father
+Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and even of the officers of the
+staff. But the conjecture is disproved in a single line: “The Comte de
+Vermandois died at Courtrai, on November 18, 1683.” A precisely similar
+fact refutes the theory identifying the Iron Mask with the Duke of
+Monmouth, the natural son of Charles II. and Lucy Walters. Monmouth
+perished on the scaffold in 1683. Lagrange-Chancel throws much ardour
+and talent into a defence of the theory which made the Iron Mask Francis
+of Vendôme, Duke de Beaufort, who, under the Fronde, was called “King of
+the Markets.” The Duke de Beaufort died at the siege of Candia, June 25,
+1669.</p>
+
+<p>To Lagrange-Chancel succeeds the Chevalier de Taulès. “I have discovered
+the Man in the Mask,” he cries, “and it is my duty to impart my
+discovery to<a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a> Europe and posterity!” This discovery brings forward one
+Avedick, an Armenian patriarch of Constantinople and Jerusalem,
+kidnapped in the East at the instigation of the Jesuits, and transported
+to France. Vergennes, on entering the ministry for foreign affairs, set
+investigations on foot. They confirmed the statement that Avedick had
+actually been arrested in the circumstances indicated, but after 1706;
+and so he could not be identified with the Iron Mask.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the theories of the eighteenth century. We come now to those
+of our own time. Since mystery and sinister machinations were involved,
+the Jesuits could not be long left out of the business. We have just
+seen them at their tricks with the Armenian patriarch. People dreamt of
+an innocent youth thrown into a dungeon at their instigation for having
+written a couple of verses against them. But even this fancy was
+completely cast into the shade in a work published in 1885 under the
+pseudonym of “Ubalde,” the author of which was unquestionably M. Anatole
+Loquin. This is his conclusion: “The more I reflect, the more I believe
+I recognize in the Man in the Iron Mask, without any elaborate theory,
+without prejudice on my part, no other than J. B. Poquelin de Molière.”
+The Jesuits have got their revenge for <i>Tartufe</i>!</p>
+
+<p>Let us come now to the conjectures which have almost hit the truth and
+have been defended by genuine scholars.</p>
+
+<p>Superintendent Fouquet is the solution of the<a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a> bibliophile Jacob (Paul
+Lacroix). M. Lair has shown that Fouquet died at Pignerol, of a sort of
+apoplexy, on March 23, 1680, at the very moment when there was an idea
+at court of sending him to the waters at Bourbon, as a first step
+towards his final liberation.</p>
+
+<p>François Ravaisson, the learned and charming keeper of the Arsenal
+library, whose work in classifying the archives of the Bastille we have
+had the honour to continue, believed for a moment that the celebrated
+prisoner might have been the young Count de Kéroualze who had fought at
+Candia under the orders of Admiral de Beaufort. Ravaisson put forth his
+theory with much hesitation, and as, in the sequel, he was himself led
+to abandon it, we need not dwell any longer upon it.</p>
+
+<p>M. Loiseleur, in the course of his brilliant controversy with Marius
+Topin, suggested “an obscure spy arrested by Catinat in 1681,” and his
+opponent refuted him in the most piquant manner by discovering Catinat
+in the very prisoner he was said to have arrested!</p>
+
+<p>General Jung published a large volume in support of the claims of a
+certain Oldendorf, a native of Lorraine, a spy and poisoner, arrested on
+March 29, 1673, in a trap laid for him at one of the passages of the
+Somme. The theory was refuted by M. Loiseleur. As M. Lair pointed out,
+General Jung did not even succeed in proving that his nominee entered
+Pignerol, an essential condition to his being the Man in the Mask.</p>
+
+<p>Baron Carutti urged the claims of a mad Jacobin, a prisoner at Pignerol
+whose name remains unknown;<a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a> but this Jacobin died at Pignerol towards
+the close of 1693.’</p>
+
+<p>The recent work of M. Emile Burgaud, written in collaboration with
+Commandant Bazeries, made a great sensation. He fixes on General Vivien
+Labbé de Bulonde, whom Louvois arrested for having shown dereliction of
+a general’s duty before Coni. M. Geoffroy de Grandmaison published in
+the <i>Univers</i> of January 9, 1895, two receipts signed by General de
+Bulonde, one in 1699, when the masked man was in rigorous isolation at
+the Bastille, the other in 1705, when he had been dead for two years.</p>
+
+<p>We come at last to the hypothesis which is the most probable of
+all&mdash;after the true hypothesis, of course. Eustache Dauger, whom M. Lair
+identifies with the masked prisoner, was a valet, who had been put into
+jail at Pignerol on July 28, 1669. But it must be noted that the masked
+prisoner was kept guarded in rigorous secrecy in the early days of his
+detention, as long as he was at Pignerol and the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite. Now, when Dauger went to Pignerol, his case seemed of
+such slight importance that Saint-Mars thought of making him into a
+servant for the other prisoners, and in fact, in 1675, Louvois gave him
+as a valet to Fouquet, who for some time past had seen the rigour of his
+confinement sensibly mitigated, receiving visits, walking freely in the
+courts and purlieus of the fortress, Dauger accompanying him. Further,
+we know that the masked man was transferred direct from Pignerol to the
+Isles of<a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a> Sainte-Marguerite, whilst Dauger was transferred in 1681 to
+Exiles, whence he only went to the Isles in 1687.</p>
+
+<p>We now come to the correct solution.</p>
+
+<h3>3. <span class="smcap">Mattioli.</span></h3>
+
+<p>To Baron Heiss, once captain in the Alsace regiment, and one of the most
+distinguished bibliophiles of his time, belongs the honour of being the
+first, in a letter dated from Phalsbourg, June 28, 1770, and published
+by the <i>Journal encyclopédique</i>, to identify the masked prisoner with
+Count Mattioli, secretary of state to the Duke of Mantua. After him,
+Dutens, in 1783, in his <i>Intercepted Correspondence</i>; Baron de
+Chambrier, in 1795, in a Memoir presented to the Academy of Berlin;
+Roux-Fazillac, member of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, in
+a remarkable work printed in 1801; then successively, Reth, Delort,
+Ellis, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul de Saint-Victor,
+and M. Gallien, in a series of publications more or less important,
+endeavoured to prove that the Man in the Mask was the Duke of Mantua’s
+secretary of state. The scholars most intimate with the history of Louis
+XIV.’s government, Depping, Chéruel, Camille Rousset, have not hesitated
+to pronounce in favour of the same view; while against them,
+singlehanded like his D’Artagnan, Alexandre Dumas resisted the efforts
+of twenty scholars, and the <i>Vicomte de Bragelonne</i>&mdash;giving a new lease
+of life to the legend about the brother of Louis XIV., put in
+circulation by Voltaire, and reinforced by the Revolution&mdash;drove<a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a> back
+into their dust among the archives the documents which students had
+exhumed.</p>
+
+<p>We have no longer to deal with so formidable an adversary, and we hope
+that the following pages will not leave the shadow of a doubt.</p>
+
+<p>We know how, under the influence of Louvois, the able and insinuating
+policy directed first by Mazarin, then by Lionne, gave way to a military
+diplomacy, blunt and aggressive. Louis XIV. was master of Pignerol,
+acquired in 1632. He was induced by Louvois to cast covetous glances at
+Casal. In possession of these two places, the French armies could not
+but dominate Upper Italy, and hold the court of Turin directly at their
+mercy. The throne of Mantua was then occupied by a young duke, Charles
+IV. of Gonzago, frivolous, happy-go-lucky, dissipating his wealth at
+Venice in fêtes and pleasures. In 1677 he had pledged to the Jews the
+crown revenues for several years. Charles IV. was also Marquis of
+Montferrat, of which Casal was the capital. Noting with watchful eye the
+frivolity and financial straits of the young prince, the court of
+Versailles conceived the bold scheme of buying Casal for hard cash.</p>
+
+<p>At this date, one of the principal personages in Mantua was Count
+Hercules Antony Mattioli. He was born at Bologna on December 1, 1640, of
+a distinguished family. A brilliant student, he had barely passed his
+twentieth year when he was elected a professor at the University of
+Bologna. Afterwards he established himself at Mantua, where Charles
+III., whose confidence<a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a> he had won, made him his secretary of state.
+Charles IV., continuing the favour of his father, not only maintained
+Mattioli in his office as minister of state, but appointed him an
+honorary senator, a dignity which was enhanced by the title of Count.</p>
+
+<p>Louis XIV. was employing at the capital of the Venetian republic a
+keen-witted and enterprising ambassador, the Abbé d’Estrades. He saw
+through the ambitious and intriguing nature of Mattioli, and, towards
+the end of 1677, succeeded in winning over his support for the designs
+of the French court on Casal.</p>
+
+<p>On January 12, 1678, Louis XIV. with his own hand wrote expressing his
+thanks to Mattioli, who by-and-by came to Paris. On December 8, the
+contract was signed, the Duke of Mantua receiving in exchange for Casal
+100,000 crowns. In a private audience, Louis XIV. presented Mattioli
+with a costly diamond and paid him the sum of a hundred double louis.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely two months after Mattioli’s journey to France, the courts of
+Vienna, Madrid, Turin, and the Venetian Republic were simultaneously
+informed of all that had taken place. In order to reap a double harvest
+of gold, Mattioli had cynically betrayed both his master Charles IV. and
+the King of France. Like a thunderbolt there came to Versailles the news
+of the arrest of Baron d’Asfeld, the envoy appointed by Louis XIV. to
+exchange ratifications with Mattioli. The governor of Milan had caused
+him to be seized and handed over to the Spaniards. The rage of Louis
+XIV. and of Louvois,<a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a> who had urged the opening of negotiations, taken
+an active part in them, and begun preparations for the occupation of
+Casal, may well be imagined. The Abbé d’Estrades, not less irritated,
+conceived a scheme of the most daring kind, proposing to Versailles
+nothing less than the abduction of the Mantuan minister. But Louis XIV.
+was determined to have no scandal. Catinat was charged with carrying out
+the scheme in person. The Abbé d’Estrades, in his dealings with
+Mattioli, feigned ignorance of the double game the Count was playing. He
+led him to believe, on the contrary, that the balance of the sums
+promised at Versailles was about to be paid. A meeting was fixed for May
+2, 1679. On that day d’Estrades and Mattioli got into a carriage, the
+passing of which was awaited by Catinat accompanied by some dozen men.
+At two o’clock in the afternoon, Mattioli was in the fortress of
+Pignerol, in the hands of jailer Saint-Mars. When we remember the rank
+held by the Italian minister, we are confronted with one of the most
+audacious violations of international law of which history has preserved
+a record.</p>
+
+<p>Early in the year 1694, Mattioli was transferred to the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite; we have seen that he entered the Bastille on
+September 18, 1698, and died there on November 19, 1703.</p>
+
+<p>The details that we possess of the imprisonment of Mattioli at Pignerol
+and afterwards at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite show that he was at the
+outset treated with the consideration due to his rank and to the<a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a>
+position he occupied at the time of his arrest. Eventually the respect
+which the prisoner had at first inspired gradually diminished: as years
+went on the attentions shown him grew less and less until the day when,
+at the Bastille, he was given a room in common with persons of the
+basest class. On the other hand, the rigour of his confinement, so far
+as the secrecy in which he was kept was concerned, was more and more
+relaxed; what it was material to conceal was the circumstances under
+which Mattioli had been arrested, and with the lapse of time this secret
+continually diminished in importance. As to the mask of black velvet
+which Mattioli had among his possessions when he was arrested, and which
+he put on, without a doubt, only for the occasion, this in reality
+constituted a relief to his captivity, for it permitted the prisoner to
+leave his room, while the other state prisoners were rigorously mewed up
+in theirs.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It remains to prove that the masked prisoner was really Mattioli.</p>
+
+<p>1. In the despatch sent by Louis XIV. to the Abbé d’Estrades five days
+before the arrest, the king approves the scheme of his ambassador and
+authorizes him to secure Mattioli, “since you believe you can get him
+carried off without the affair giving rise to any scandal.” The prisoner
+is to be conducted to Pignerol, where “instructions are being sent to
+receive him and keep him there without anybody having knowledge of it.”
+The<a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a> king’s orders close with these words: “You must see to it that no
+one knows what becomes of this man.” The capture effected, Catinat wrote
+on his part to Louvois: “It came off without any violence, and no one
+knows the name of the knave, not even the officers who helped to arrest
+him.” Finally, we have a very curious pamphlet entitled <i>La Prudenza
+triomfante di Casale</i>, written in 1682, that is, little more than two
+years after the event, and&mdash;this slight detail is of capital
+importance&mdash;thirty years before there was any talk of the Man in the
+Mask. In this we read: “The secretary (Mattioli) was surrounded by ten
+or twelve horsemen, who seized him, disguised him, <i>masked</i> him, and
+conducted him to Pignerol”&mdash;a fact, moreover, confirmed by a tradition
+which in the eighteenth century was still rife in the district, where
+scholars succeeded in culling it.</p>
+
+<p>Is there any need to insist on the strength of the proofs afforded by
+these three documents, taken in connection one with another?</p>
+
+<p>2. We know, from du Junca’s register, that the masked man was shut up at
+Pignerol under the charge of Saint-Mars. In 1681, Saint-Mars gave up the
+governorship of Pignerol for that of Exiles. We can determine with
+absolute precision the number of prisoners Saint-Mars had then in his
+keeping. It was exactly five. A dispatch from Louvois, dated June 9, is
+very clear. In the first paragraph, he orders “the two prisoners in the
+lower tower” to be removed; in the second, he adds: “The rest of the
+prisoners in your<a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a> charge.” Here there is a clear indication of the
+“rest”: what follows settles the number: “The Sieur du Chamoy has orders
+to pay two crowns a day for the board of these <i>three</i> prisoners.” This
+account, as clear as arithmetic can make it, is further confirmed by the
+letter addressed by Saint-Mars to the Abbé d’Estrades on June 25, 1681,
+when he was setting out for Exiles: “I received yesterday the warrant
+appointing me governor of Exiles: I am to keep charge of two jailbirds I
+have here, who have no other name than ‘the gentlemen of the lower
+tower’; Mattioli will remain here with two other prisoners.”</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners, then, were five in number, and the masked man is to be
+found, of necessity, among them. Now we know who these five were: (1) a
+certain La Rivière, who died at the end of December, 1686; (2) a
+Jacobin, out of his mind, who died at the end of 1693; (3) a certain
+Dubreuil, who died at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite about 1697. There
+remain Dauger and Mattioli. The Man in the Mask is, without possible
+dispute, the one or the other. We have explained above the reasons which
+lead us to discard Dauger. The mysterious prisoner, then, was Mattioli.
+The proof is mathematically exact.</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width:70%;">
+<a href="images/i_165_lg.png">
+<img class="enlargeimage"
+src="images/enlarge-image.jpg"
+alt="enlarge-image"
+title="enlarge-image"
+width="18"
+height="14" />
+</a><br /><img src="images/i_165_sml.png" width="550" height="237" alt="Burial certificate of the masked prisoner (November 20, 1703),
+reproduced from the facsimile in the sixth edition of The Man in
+the Iron Mask, by Marius Topin, 1883. The original, in the city
+archives of Paris, was destroyed in the conflagration of 1871.
+" />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">Burial certificate of the masked prisoner (November 20, 1703),
+reproduced from the facsimile in the sixth edition of The Man in
+the Iron Mask, by Marius Topin, 1883. The original, in the city
+archives of Paris, was destroyed in the conflagration of 1871.
+</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>3. Opposite this page will be found a facsimile reproduction of the
+death certificate of the masked prisoner as inscribed on the registers
+of the church of St. Paul. It is the very name of the Duke of Mantua’s
+former secretary that is traced there: “Marchioly.” It<a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a> must be
+remembered that “Marchioly” would be pronounced in Italian “Markioly,”
+and that Saint-Mars, governor of the Bastille, who furnished the
+information on which the certificate was drawn up, almost always wrote
+in his correspondence&mdash;a characteristic detail&mdash;not “Mattioli,” but
+“Martioly”: that is the very name on the register, less distorted than
+the name of the major of the Bastille, who was called “Rosarges,” and
+not “Rosage,” as given on the register; and the name of the surgeon, who
+was called “Reilhe,” and not “Reglhe.”</p>
+
+<p>It has been shown above how, as time went on, the rigorous seclusion to
+which the masked prisoner had been condemned was relaxed. What it had
+been thought necessary to conceal was the manner in which Mattioli had
+been captured, and with time that secret itself had lost its importance.
+As the Duke of Mantua had declared himself very well pleased with the
+arrest of the minister by whom he, no less than Louis XIV., had been
+deceived, there was nothing to prevent the name from being inscribed on
+a register of death, where, moreover, no one would ever have thought of
+looking for it.</p>
+
+<p>Let us add that, in consequence of error or carelessness on the part of
+the officer who supplied the information for the register, or perhaps on
+the part of the parson or beadle who wrote it, the age is stated
+incorrectly, “forty-five years or thereabouts,” while Mattioli was
+sixty-three when he died. However, the register was filled up without
+the least care, as a formality of no importance.<a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a></p>
+
+<p>4. The Duke de Choiseul pressed Louis XV. to reveal to him the clue to
+the enigma. The king escaped with an evasion. One day, however, he said
+to him: “If you knew all about it, you would see that it has very little
+interest;” and some time after, when Madame de Pompadour, at de
+Choiseul’s instigation, pressed the king on the subject, he told her
+that the prisoner was “the minister of an Italian prince.”</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette</i> by her
+principal lady in waiting, Madame de Campan, we read that the queen
+tormented Louis XVI., who did not know the secret, to have a search made
+among the papers of the various ministries. “I was with the queen,” says
+Madame de Campan, “when the king, having finished his researches, told
+her that he had found nothing in the secret papers which had any bearing
+on the existence of this prisoner; that he had spoken on the subject to
+M. de Maurepas, whose age brought him nearer the time when the whole
+story must have been known to the ministers (Maurepas had been minister
+of the king’s household as a very young man, in the early years of the
+eighteenth century, having the department of the <i>lettres de cachet</i>),
+and that M. de Maurepas had assured him that the prisoner was simply a
+man of a very dangerous character through his intriguing spirit, and a
+subject of the Duke of Mantua. He was lured to the frontier, arrested,
+and kept a prisoner, at first at Pignerol, then at the Bastille.”</p>
+
+<p>These two pieces of evidence are of such weight that<a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a> they alone would
+be sufficient to fix the truth. When they were written, there was no
+talk of Mattioli, of whose very name Madame de Campan was ignorant.
+Supposing that Madame de Campan had amused herself by inventing a
+fable&mdash;an absurd and improbable supposition, for what reason could she
+have had for so doing?&mdash;it is impossible to admit that her imagination
+could have hit upon fancies so absolutely in accord with facts.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a></p>
+
+<p>And so the problem is solved. The legend, which had reared itself even
+as high as the throne of France, topples down. The satisfaction of the
+historian springs from his reflection that all serious historical works
+for more than a century, resting on far-reaching researches and
+eschewing all preoccupations foreign to science&mdash;such, for example, as
+the desire of attaining a result different from the solutions proposed
+by one’s predecessors&mdash;have arrived at the same conclusion, which proves
+to be the correct solution. Heiss, Baron de Chambrier, Reth,
+Roux-Fazillac, Delort, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul
+de Saint-Victor, Camille Rousset, Chéruel, Depping, have not hesitated
+to place under the famous mask of black velvet the<a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a> features of
+Mattioli. But at each new effort made by science, legend throws itself
+once more into the fray, gaining new activity from the passions produced
+by the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>The truth, in history, sometimes suggests to our mind’s eye those white
+or yellow flowers which float on the water among broad flat leaves; a
+breeze springs up, a wave rises and submerges them, they disappear; but
+only for a moment: then they come to the surface again.<a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.<br /><br />
+<small>MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE.</small></h2>
+
+<p class="nind">S<small>PEAKING</small> of men of letters in France under the <i>ancien régime</i>, Michelet
+calls them “the martyrs of thought”; he adds: “The world thinks, France
+speaks. And that is precisely why the Bastille of France, the Bastille
+of Paris&mdash;I would rather say, the prison-house of thought&mdash;was, among
+all bastilles, execrable, infamous, and accursed.” In the course of the
+article devoted to the Bastille in the <i>Grande Encyclopédie</i>, M. Fernand
+Bournon writes: “After Louis XIV. and throughout the eighteenth century,
+the Bastille was especially employed to repress, though it could not
+stifle, that generous and majestic movement (the glory of the human
+spirit) towards ideas of emancipation and enfranchisement; it was the
+epoch when philosophers, publicists, pamphleteers, the very booksellers,
+were imprisoned there in large numbers.” And to substantiate this
+eloquent apostrophe, M. Bournon cites the names of Voltaire, La
+Beaumelle, the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, and Linguet, imprisoned in the
+Bastille; and of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau placed in the
+château of Vincennes.<a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a></p>
+
+<p>Let us recall the story of these poor victims in turn, and trace the
+history of their martyrdom.</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a name="Voltaire" id="Voltaire"></a>Voltaire.</span></h3>
+
+<p>The most illustrious and the earliest in date of the writers mentioned
+by M. Bournon is Voltaire. He was sent to the Bastille on two different
+occasions. His first imprisonment began on May 17, 1717. At that date
+the poet was only twenty-two years of age and of no reputation; he did
+not even bear the name of Voltaire, which he only took after his
+discharge from the Bastille on April 14, 1718. The cause of his
+detention was not “the generous and majestic movement towards ideas of
+enfranchisement which is the glory of the human spirit,” but some
+scurrilities which, to speak plainly, brought him what he deserved:
+coarse verses against the Regent and his daughter, and public utterances
+coarser still. Many authors state that Voltaire was imprisoned for
+writing the <i>J’ai vu</i>, a satire against the government of Louis XIV.,
+each stanza of which ended with the line:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">J’ai vu ces maux, et je n’ai pas vingt ans.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is a mistake. Voltaire was imprisoned for having written the <i>Puero
+regnante</i>, some verses on the Regent and his daughter, the Duchess of
+Berry, which it would be impossible to translate. To these he added
+observations whose reproduction would be equally impossible. At the
+Bastille Voltaire underwent examinations in the usual way, in the course
+of which he lied with impudence;<a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a> after that he was allowed considerable
+liberty. “It was at the Bastille,” wrote Condorcet, “that the young poet
+made the first draft of his poem <i>La Ligue</i>, corrected his tragedy of
+<i>Œdipe</i>, and composed some very lively lines on the ill-luck of being
+there.”</p>
+
+<p>The following are the most respectable lines of this production:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So one fine faultless morning in the spring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Whitsun splendour brighten’d everything,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A strange commotion startled me from sleep.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">. . . . . . . . . .</span><br />
+<span class="i0">At last I reach’d my chamber in the keep.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A clownish turnkey, with an unctuous smile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of my new lodging ‘gan to praise the style:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">“What ease, what charms, what comforts here are yours!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For never Phœbus in his daily course<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will blind you here with his too brilliant rays;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Within these ten-foot walls you’ll spend your days<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In cool sequester’d blithefulness always.”<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then bidding me admire my cloistral cell&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The triple doors, the triple locks as well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bolts, the bars, the gratings all around&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">“’Tis but,” says he, “to keep you safe and sound!”<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">. . . . . . . . . .</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Behold me, then, lodged in this woful place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cribb’d, cabin’d, and confined in narrow space;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleepless by night, and starving half the day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No joys, no friend, no mistress&mdash;wellaway!<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When Voltaire was set at liberty, the Regent, whom, as we have just
+said, he had reviled, made him a very handsome offer of his protection.
+The poet’s reply is well known: “My lord, I thank your royal highness
+for being so good as to continue to charge yourself with my<a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a> board, but
+I beseech you no longer to charge yourself with my lodging.” The young
+writer thus obtained from the Regent a pension of 400 crowns, which
+later on the latter augmented to 2000 livres.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire was sent to the Bastille a second time in April, 1726. For this
+new detention there was no justification whatever. He had had a violent
+quarrel, one evening at the Opera, with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot.
+On another occasion, at the Comédie Française, the poet and the nobleman
+had a warm altercation in the box of Mdlle. Lecouvreur. Rohan raised his
+stick, Voltaire put his hand on his sword, and the actress fainted. Some
+days later “the gallant chevalier, assisted by half a dozen ruffians,
+behind whom he courageously posted himself,” gave our poet a thrashing
+in broad daylight. When relating the adventure later, the Chevalier said
+pleasantly: “I commanded the squad.” From that moment Voltaire sought
+his revenge. “The police reports reveal curious details of the loose,
+erratic, and feverish life he lived between the insult and his arrest,”
+writes the careful biographer of Voltaire, Desnoiresterres. From one of
+these police reports we see that the young writer established relations
+with soldiers of the guard: several notorious bullies were constantly
+about him. A relative who attempted to calm him found him more irritated
+and violent in his language than ever. It appears certain that he was
+meditating some act of violence, which indeed would not have been
+without justification. But the Cardinal de Rohan contrived that he
+should be arrested<a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a> on the night of April 17, 1726, and placed in the
+Bastille.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of this new imprisonment Marshal de Villars writes: “The
+public, disposed to find fault all round, came to the conclusion on this
+occasion that everybody was in the wrong: Voltaire for having offended
+the Chevalier de Rohan, the latter for having dared to commit a capital
+offence in causing a citizen to be beaten, the government for not having
+punished a notorious crime, and for having sent the injured party to the
+Bastille to pacify the injurer.” Nevertheless, we read in the report of
+Hérault, the lieutenant of police: “The Sieur de Voltaire was found
+armed with pocket pistols, and his family, when informed of the matter,
+unanimously and universally applauded the wisdom of an order which saves
+this young man the ill effects of some new piece of folly and the worthy
+people who compose his family the vexation of sharing his shame.”</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire remained at the Bastille for <i>twelve days</i>: he was permitted to
+have a servant of his own choice to wait on him, who was boarded at the
+king’s expense; as for himself, he took his meals whenever he pleased at
+the governor’s table, going out of the Bastille, as the governor’s
+residence stood outside the prison. Relatives and friends came to see
+him; his friend Thiériot dined with him; he was given pens, paper,
+books, whatever he desired in order to divert himself. “Using and
+abusing these opportunities,” writes Desnoiresterres, “Voltaire believed
+that he could give audience to all<a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a> Paris. He wrote to those of his
+friends who had not yet shown a sense of their duty, exhorting them to
+give him proof they were alive.” “I have been accustomed to all
+misfortunes,” he wrote to Thiériot, “but not yet to that of being
+utterly abandoned by you. Madame de Bernières, Madame du Deffand, the
+Chevalier des Alleurs really ought to come and see me. They only have to
+ask permission of M. Hérault or M. de Maurepas.” At the time of the
+poet’s entrance to the Bastille, the lieutenant of police had written to
+the governor: “The Sieur de Voltaire is of a <i>genius</i> that requires
+humouring. His Serene Highness has approved of my writing to tell you
+that the king’s intention is that you should secure for him mild
+treatment and the internal liberty of the Bastille, so far as these do
+not jeopardize the security of his detention.” The warrant setting him
+at liberty was signed on April 26.</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">La <a name="Beaumelle" id="Beaumelle"></a>Beaumelle.</span></h3>
+
+<p>In M. Bournon’s list La Beaumelle comes second. The circumstances under
+which he was put into the Bastille were as follows. After having fallen
+out at Berlin with Voltaire, whom he had compared to a monkey, La
+Beaumelle returned to Paris, whence he had been exiled. There he got
+printed a new edition of Voltaire’s <i>Age of Louis XIV.</i>, unknown to the
+author, and interpolated therein odes insulting to the house of Orleans.
+“La Beaumelle,” exclaimed Voltaire, “is the first who dared to print
+another man’s work in his lifetime. This miserable<a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a> Erostrates of the
+<i>Age of Louis XIV.</i> has discovered the secret of changing into an
+infamous libel, for fifteen ducats, a work undertaken for the glory of
+the nation.”</p>
+
+<p>La Beaumelle became an inmate of the Bastille in April, 1753, and
+remained there for six months. Writing on May 18, 1753, to M. Roques,
+Voltaire said that “there was scarcely any country where he would not
+inevitably have been punished sooner or later, and I know from a certain
+source that there are two courts where they would have inflicted a
+chastisement more signal than that which he is undergoing here.”</p>
+
+<p>It was not long before La Beaumelle issued his edition of <i>Notes towards
+the History of Madame de Maintenon and that of the past century</i>, with
+nine volumes of correspondence. He had fabricated letters which he
+attributed to Madame de Saint-Géran and Madame de Frontenac, and
+published a correspondence of Madame de Maintenon which M. Geffroy, in a
+work recognized as authoritative, regards as full of barefaced
+falsehoods and foul and scurrilous inventions. He had inserted in his
+work the following phrase: “The court of Vienna has been long accused of
+having poisoners always in its pay.”</p>
+
+<p>It must be observed that La Beaumelle’s publication owed its great vogue
+to special circumstances. The author’s reputation abroad, the very title
+of the book, lent it great importance; and France, then engaged in the
+Seven Years’ War, found it necessary to keep in Austria’s good graces.
+La Beaumelle was conveyed to<a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a> the Bastille a second time. The lieutenant
+of police, Berryer, put him through the usual examination. La Beaumelle
+was a man of the world, so witty that in the course of their quarrels he
+drove Voltaire himself to despair. He showed himself such in his
+examination. “La Beaumelle,” said Berryer to him, “this is wit you are
+giving me when what I ask of you is plain sense.” On his expressing a
+wish for a companion, he was placed with the Abbé d’Estrades. The
+officers of the château had all his manuscripts brought from his house,
+so that he might continue his literary work. He had at the Bastille a
+library of 600 volumes, ranged on shelves which the governor ordered to
+be made for him. He there finished a translation of the <i>Annals</i> of
+Tacitus and the <i>Odes</i> of Horace. He had permission to write to his
+relatives and friends, and to receive visits from them; he had the
+liberty of walking in the castle garden, of breeding birds in his room,
+and of having brought from outside all the luxuries to which he was
+partial. The principal secretary of the lieutenant of police, Duval,
+reports the following incident: “Danry (the famous Latude) and Allègre
+(his companion in confinement and ere long in escape) found means to
+open a correspondence with all the prisoners in the Bastille. They
+lifted a stone in a closet of the chapel, and put their letters
+underneath it. La Beaumelle pretended to be a woman in his letters to
+Allègre, and as he was a man of parts and Allègre was of keen
+sensibility and an excellent writer, the latter fell madly in love with
+La Beaumelle, to such<a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a> a degree that, though they mutually agreed to
+burn their letters, Allègre preserved those of his fancied mistress,
+which he had not the heart to give to the flames; with the result that,
+the letters being discovered at an inspection of his room, he was put in
+the cells for some time. The prisoner amused himself also by composing
+verses which he recited at the top of his voice. This gave much concern
+to the officers of the garrison, and Chevalier, the major, wrote to the
+lieutenant of police on the matter: “The Sieur de la Beaumelle seems to
+have gone clean out of his mind; he seems to be a maniac; he amuses
+himself by declaiming verses in his room for a part of the day: for the
+rest of the time he is quiet.”</p>
+
+<p>This second detention lasted from August, 1756, till August, 1757.</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Abbé <a name="Morellet" id="Morellet"></a>Morellet.</span></h3>
+
+<p>We come to the Abbé Morellet, a man of fine and fascinating mind, one of
+the best of the Encyclopædists, who died in 1819 a member of the
+Institute and the object of general esteem. He was arrested on June 11,
+1760, for having had printed and distributed, without privilege or
+permission, a pamphlet entitled: <i>Preface to the Philosophers’ Comedy;
+or, the Vision of Charles Palissot</i>.<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> These are the terms in which,
+later on, Morellet himself judged his pamphlet: “I must here make my
+confession.<a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a> In this work, I went far beyond the limits of a literary
+pleasantry regarding the Sieur Palissot, and to-day I am not without
+remorse for my fault.” And further, as J. J. Rousseau, in whose favour
+the pamphlet had been in part composed, had to acknowledge, the Abbé
+“very impudently” insulted a young and pretty woman, Madame de Robecq,
+who was dying of decline, spitting blood, and did actually die a few
+days later.</p>
+
+<p>The arrest of Morellet was demanded by Malesherbes, then censor of the
+press, one of the most generous and liberal spirits of the time, the
+inspirer of the famous remonstrances of the Court of Taxation against
+<i>lettres de cachet</i>&mdash;the man who, as M. H. Monin testifies, “being
+elected censor of the press, protected philosophers and men of letters,
+and by his personal efforts facilitated the publication of the
+<i>Encyclopædia</i>.” Speaking of the <i>Preface to the Comedy</i>, Malesherbes
+writes to Gabriel de Sartine, lieutenant-general of police: “It is an
+outrageous pamphlet, not only against Palissot, but against respectable
+persons whose very condition should shelter them against such insults. I
+beg you, sir, to be good enough to put a stop to this scandal. I believe
+it to be a matter of public importance that the punishment should be
+very severe, and that this punishment should not stop at the Bastille or
+the For-l’Evêque,<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> because a very wide distinction must be drawn
+between the delinquencies<a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a> of men of letters tearing each other to
+pieces and the insolence of those who attack persons of the highest
+consideration in the State. I do not think that Bicêtre would be too
+severe for these last. If you have to ask M. de Saint-Florentin for the
+royal authority for your proceedings, I hope you will be good enough to
+inform him of the request I am making.”</p>
+
+<p>It will be observed that, on Malesherbes’ showing, the Bastille would
+not suffice to punish the <i>Preface to the Comedy</i>, nor even the
+For-l’Evêque; he asks for the most stringent of the prisons, Bicêtre.
+Before long, it is true, this excellent man returned to milder
+sentiments. An imprisonment at Bicêtre, he wrote, would be infamous.
+Saint-Florentin and Sartine were not hard to convince. Morellet was
+taken to the Bastille. “The warrant for his arrest,” wrote one of his
+agents to Malesherbes, “was executed this morning by Inspector D’Hémery
+with all the amenities possible in so unpleasant a business. D’Hémery
+knows the Abbé Morellet, and has spoken of him to M. de Sartine in the
+most favourable terms.”</p>
+
+<p>When he entered the Bastille the Abbé calculated that his imprisonment
+would last six months, and after acknowledging that he at that time
+viewed his detention without great distress, he adds: “I am bound to
+say, to lower the too high opinion that may be formed of me and my
+courage, that I was marvellously sustained by a thought which rendered
+my little virtue more easy. I saw some literary glory illumining the
+walls of my prison; persecuted, I must be better known. The men of
+letters<a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a> whom I had avenged, and the philosophy for which I was a
+martyr, would lay the foundation of my reputation. The men of the world,
+who love satire, would receive me better than ever. A career was opening
+before me, and I should be able to pursue it at greater advantage. These
+six months at the Bastille would be an excellent recommendation, and
+would infallibly make my fortune.”</p>
+
+<p>The Abbé remained at the Bastille, not six months, but six weeks, “which
+slipped away,” he observes “&mdash;I chuckle still as I think of them&mdash;very
+pleasantly for me.” He spent his time in reading romances, and, with
+admirable humour, in writing a <i>Treatise on the Liberty of the Press</i>.
+Afterwards the good Abbé informs us that the hopes which he had indulged
+were not deceived. On issuing from the Bastille he was a made man.
+Little known two months before, he now met everywhere with the reception
+he desired. The doors of the salons of Madame de Boufflers, Madame
+Necker, the Baron d’Holbach, flew open before him; women pitied him and
+admired him, and men followed their example. Why have we not to-day a
+Bastille to facilitate the career of writers of talent!</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a name="Marmontel" id="Marmontel"></a>Marmontel.</span></h3>
+
+<p>To Marmontel his stay at the royal prison appeared as pleasant as the
+Abbé Morellet had found his. He had amused himself by reciting at Madame
+Geoffrin’s a mordant satire in which the Duke d’Aumont, first groom of
+the stole to the king, was cruelly hit. The duke<a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a> expostulated;
+Marmontel wrote to him declaring that he was not the author of the
+satire; but the nobleman stood his ground.</p>
+
+<p>“I am helpless,” said the Count de Saint-Florentin, who countersigned
+the <i>lettre de cachet</i>, to Marmontel; “the Duke d’Aumont accuses you,
+and is determined to have you punished. It is a satisfaction he demands
+in recompense for his services and the services of his ancestors. The
+king has been pleased to grant him his wish. So you will go and find M.
+de Sartine; I am addressing to him the king’s order; you will tell him
+that it was from my hand you received it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I went to find M. de Sartine,” writes Marmontel, “and I found with him
+the police officer who was to accompany me. M. de Sartine was intending
+that he should go to the Bastille in a separate carriage; but I myself
+declined this obliging offer, and we arrived at the Bastille, my
+introducer and myself, in the same hack.... The governor, M. d’Abadie,
+asked me if I wished my servant to be left with me.... They made a
+cursory inspection of my packets and books, and then sent me up to a
+large room furnished with two beds, two tables, a low cupboard, and
+three cane chairs. It was cold, but a jailer made us a good fire and
+brought me wood in abundance. At the same time they gave me pens, ink,
+and paper, on condition of my accounting for the use I made of them and
+the number of sheets they allowed me.</p>
+
+<p>“The jailer came back to ask if I was satisfied with<a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a> my bed. After
+examining it I replied that the mattresses were bad and the coverlets
+dirty. In a minute all was changed. They sent to ask me what was my
+dinner hour. I replied, ‘The same as everybody’s.’ The Bastille had a
+library: the governor sent me the catalogue, giving me free choice among
+the books. I merely thanked him for myself, but my servant asked for the
+romances of Prévost, and they were brought to him.”</p>
+
+<p>Let us go on with Marmontel’s story. “For my part,” he says, “I had the
+means of escape from ennui. Having been for a long time impatient of the
+contempt shown by men of letters for Lucan’s poem, which they had not
+read, and only knew in the barbarous fustian of Brébeuf’s version, I had
+resolved to translate it more becomingly and faithfully into prose; and
+this work, which would occupy me without fatiguing my brain, was the
+best possible employment for the solitary leisure of my prison. So I had
+brought the <i>Pharsalia</i> with me, and, to understand it the better, I had
+been careful to bring with it the <i>Commentaries</i> of Cæsar. Behold me
+then at the corner of a good fire, pondering the quarrel of Cæsar and
+Pompey, and forgetting my own with the Duke d’Aumont. And there was Bury
+too (Marmontel’s servant) as philosophical as myself, amusing himself by
+making our beds placed at two opposite corners of my room, which was at
+this moment lit up by the beams of a fine winter sun, in spite of the
+bars of two strong iron gratings which permitted me a view of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine.<a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a></p>
+
+<p>“Two hours later, the noise of the bolts of the two doors which shut me
+in startled me from my profound musings, and the two jailers, loaded
+with a dinner I believed to be mine, came in and served it in silence.
+One put down in front of the fire three little dishes covered with
+plates of common earthenware; the other laid on that one of the two
+tables which was clear a tablecloth rather coarse, indeed, but white. I
+saw him place on the table a very fair set of things, a pewter spoon and
+fork, good household bread, and a bottle of wine. Their duty done, the
+jailers retired, and the two doors were shut again with the same noise
+of locks and bolts.</p>
+
+<p>“Then Bury invited me to take my place, and served my soup. It was a
+Friday. The soup, made without meat, was a <i>purée</i> of white beans, with
+the freshest butter, and a dish of the same beans was the first that
+Bury served me with. I found all this excellent. The dish of cod he gave
+me for second course was better still. It was served with a dash of
+garlic, which gave it a delicacy of taste and odour which would have
+flattered the taste of the daintiest Gascon. The wine was not
+first-rate, but passable; no sweets: of course one must expect to be
+deprived of something. On the whole, I thought that dinner in prison was
+not half bad.</p>
+
+<p>“As I was rising from table, and Bury was about to sit down&mdash;for there
+was enough for his dinner in what was left&mdash;lo and behold! in came my
+two jailers again, with pyramids of dishes in their hands. At this
+display of fine linen, fine china-ware, spoon and fork of silver, we<a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a>
+recognized our mistake; but we made not the ghost of a sign, and when
+our jailers, having laid down their burden, had retired, ‘Sir,’ said
+Bury, ‘you have just eaten my dinner, you will quite agree to my having
+my turn and eating yours.’ ‘That’s fair,’ I replied, and the walls of my
+room were astonished, I fancy, at the sound of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>“This dinner was not vegetarian; here are the details: an excellent
+soup, a juicy beef-steak, a boiled capon’s leg streaming with gravy and
+melting in one’s mouth, a little dish of artichokes fried in pickle, a
+dish of spinach, a very fine William pear, fresh-cut grapes, a bottle of
+old burgundy, and best Mocha coffee; this was Bury’s dinner, with the
+exception of the coffee and the fruit, which he insisted on reserving
+for me.</p>
+
+<p>“After dinner the governor came to see me, and asked me if I found the
+fare sufficient, assuring me that I should be served from his table,
+that he would take care to cut my portions himself, and that no one
+should touch my food but himself. He suggested a fowl for my supper; I
+thanked him and told him that what was left of the fruit from my dinner
+would suffice. The reader has just seen what my ordinary fare was at the
+Bastille, and from this he may infer with what mildness, or rather
+reluctance, they brought themselves to visit on me the wrath of the Duke
+d’Aumont.</p>
+
+<p>“Every day I had a visit from the governor. As he had some smack of
+literature and even of Latin, he took<a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a> some interest in following my
+work, in fact, enjoyed it; but soon, tearing himself away from these
+little dissipations, he said, ‘Adieu, I am going to console men who are
+more unfortunate than you.’”</p>
+
+<p>Such was the imprisonment of Marmontel. It lasted for eleven days.</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a name="Linguet" id="Linguet"></a>Linguet.</span></h3>
+
+<p>Linguet, advocate and journalist, was arrested for a breach of the press
+laws and for slander. He was a man of considerable ability, but little
+character. Attorney-general Cruppi has devoted to the story of Linguet a
+work as extensive as it is eloquent. He has a wealth of indulgence for
+his hero; yet, despite the goodwill he shows for him and endeavours to
+impart to the reader, his book reveals between the lines that Linguet
+was worthy of little esteem, and that his professional brethren were
+justified in removing his name from the roll of the advocates of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Linguet’s captivity lasted for two years. He has left a description of
+it in his <i>Memoirs on the Bastille</i>, which made a great noise, and of
+which the success has endured down to our own day. His book, like
+everything which came from his pen, is written in a fluent style, with
+spirit and brilliance; the facts cited are for the most part correct,
+but the author, aiming at making a sensation, has cleverly presented
+them in a light which distorts their real character. “There are means,”
+says Madame de Staal, “of so distributing light and shade on<a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a> the facts
+one is exhibiting, as to alter their appearance without altering the
+groundwork.” Take, for instance, the description that Linguet gives of
+his belongings while in the Bastille: “Two worm-eaten mattresses, a cane
+chair the seat of which was only held to it by strings, a folding table,
+a jug for water, two earthenware pots, one of them for drinking, and two
+stone slabs to make a fire on.” A contemporary could say of Linguet’s
+<i>Memoirs</i>, “It is the longest lie that ever was printed.” And yet, if we
+take the facts themselves which are related by the clever journalist,
+and disengage them from the deceitful mirage in which he has enwrapped
+them, we do not see that his life in the Bastille was so wretched as he
+endeavours to make us believe. He is forced to acknowledge that his food
+was always most abundant, adding, it is true, that that was because they
+wished to poison him! He owed his life, he is convinced, “only to the
+obstinate tenacity of his constitution.” He marked, nevertheless, on the
+menu for the day, which was sent up every morning by the Bastille cook,
+the dishes he fancied; and later on he had his room furnished after his
+own heart. He still enjoyed, moreover, enough liberty to write during
+his imprisonment a work entitled, <i>The Trials of Three Kings, Louis
+XVI., Charles III., and George III.</i>, which appeared in London in 1781.
+Let us recall once more the famous saying of Linguet to the wig-maker of
+the Bastille on the first day that he presented himself to trim the
+prisoner’s beard: “To whom have I the honour of speaking?” “I am,<a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a> sir,
+the barber to the Bastille.” “Gad, then, why don’t you raze it?”</p>
+
+<p>In June, 1792, some years after his liberation, Linguet was prosecuted a
+second time for breach of the press laws. The revolutionary tribunal
+condemned him to death. As he mounted the steps of the scaffold, the
+ardent pamphleteer thought, mayhap, with bitterly ironical regret, of
+that Bastille whose destruction he had so clamorously demanded.</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a name="Diderot" id="Diderot"></a>Diderot.</span></h3>
+
+<p>We have still to speak of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who were
+not incarcerated at the Bastille, but at Vincennes, not in the castle
+keep, but in the château itself, which constituted a separate place of
+imprisonment. They placed in the château only prisoners guilty of minor
+offences, who were sentenced to a temporary detention, and to whom they
+wished to show some consideration. This was, as we have just said, the
+abode of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot was arrested on
+July 24, 1749. His last book, <i>Letters on the Blind for the Use of those
+Who Can See</i>, contained theories which appeared to have but little title
+to the description of “moral.” But in the course of his examination he
+stoutly denied that he was its author, as also he denied the authorship
+of the <i>Thoughts of a Philosopher</i> he had published some years before.
+The lieutenant of police gave instructions to the governor of Vincennes
+that, short of being set at liberty, Diderot was to be granted all<a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a>
+possible comforts&mdash;allowed to walk in the garden and park; “that the
+king’s desire was, in consideration of the literary work on which he was
+engaged (the <i>Encyclopædia</i>), to permit him to communicate freely with
+persons from without who might come for that purpose or on family
+business.” And so Diderot received a visit from his wife and walked with
+her in the wood; Rousseau and D’Alembert spent their afternoons with
+him, and, as in the “good old days” of Plato and Socrates, our
+philosophers chatted of metaphysics and love, seated on the green grass
+under the shade of mighty oaks. The booksellers and printers who had
+undertaken the publication of the <i>Encyclopædia</i> were, as we have seen,
+in constant communication with Diderot at Vincennes; he corrected in
+prison the proofs of the publication, which the court looked on with no
+favourable eye. And we know, too, that at night, with the secret
+complicity of the governor, our philosopher cleared the park walls to
+hurry to a fair lady at Paris, one Madame de Puysieux, whom he loved
+with a passion by no means platonic; ere the sun was up, the jailers
+found him safely back under lock and key. This irksome captivity lasted
+little more than three months.</p>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Marquis de <a name="Mirabeau" id="Mirabeau"></a>Mirabeau.</span></h3>
+
+<p>The imprisonment of Mirabeau lasted only ten days. The <i>lettre de
+cachet</i> had been obtained by the clique of financiers, who took fright
+at the audacious conceptions of the <i>Theory of Taxation</i>. “I fancy I
+deserved my<a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a> punishment,” wrote the Marquis, “like the ass in the fable,
+for a clumsy and misplaced zeal.” In regard to the arrest, Madame
+d’Epinay sent word to Voltaire: “Never before was a man arrested as this
+one was. The officer said to him, ‘Sir, my orders do not state I am to
+hurry you: to-morrow will do, if you haven’t time to-day.’ ‘No, sir, one
+cannot be too prompt in obeying the king’s orders, I am quite ready.’
+And off he went with a bag crammed with books and papers.” At Vincennes
+the Marquis had a servant with him. His wife came to see him. The king
+spent for his support fifteen livres a day, more than twenty-five
+shillings of our money. He was liberated on December 24, 1760. His
+brother, Bailie Mirabeau, speaking of this detention, wrote to him of “a
+week’s imprisonment in which you were shown every possible
+consideration.”</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>We have exhausted M. Bournon’s list of the writers who were victims of
+arbitrary authority. Such are the “martyrs” for whom that excellent
+historian, and Michelet and others, have shown the most affecting
+compassion. The foregoing facts do not call for comment. Men of letters
+were the spoilt children of the eighteenth century much more than of our
+own, and never has an absolute government shown a toleration equal to
+that of the monarchy under the <i>ancien régime</i> towards writers whose
+doctrines, as events have proved, tended directly to its destruction.<a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.<br /><br />
+<small>LATUDE.</small></h2>
+
+<p class="nind">F<small>EW</small> historical figures have taken a higher place in the popular
+imagination than Masers de Latude. That celebrated prisoner seems to
+have accumulated in his life of suffering all the wrongs that spring
+from an arbitrary government. The novelists and playwrights of the
+nineteenth century have made him a hero; the poets have draped his woes
+in fine mourning robes, our greatest historians have burnt for him the
+midnight oil; numerous editions of his <i>Memoirs</i> have appeared in quick
+succession down to our own days. Even by his contemporaries he was
+regarded as a martyr, and posterity has not plucked the shining crown of
+martyrdom from his head, hoary with the snows of long captivity. His
+legend is the creature of his own unaided brain. When in 1790 he
+dictated the story of his life, he made greater calls on his glowing
+southern imagination than on his memory; but the documents relating to
+his case in the archives of the Bastille have been preserved. At the
+present time they are to be found dispersed among various libraries, at
+the Arsenal, at Carnavalet, at St.<a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a> Petersburg. Thanks to them it is
+easy to establish the truth.</p>
+
+<p>On March 23, 1725, at Montagnac in Languedoc, a poor girl named
+Jeanneton Aubrespy gave birth to a male child who was baptized three
+days later under the name of Jean Henri, given him by his god-parents,
+Jean Bouhour and Jeanne Boudet. Surname the poor little creature had
+none, for he was the illegitimate child of a father unknown. Jeanneton,
+who had just passed her thirtieth year, was of respectable middle-class
+family, and lived near the Lom gate in a little house which seems to
+have been her own. Several cousins of hers held commissions in the army.
+But from the day when she became a mother, her family had no more to do
+with her, and she fell into want. Happily she was a woman of stout
+heart, and by her spinning and sewing she supported her boy, who shot up
+into a lad of keen intelligence and considerable ambition. She succeeded
+in getting him some sort of education, and we find Jean Henri at the age
+of seventeen acting as assistant surgeon in the army of Languedoc.
+Surgeons, it is true, made no great figure in the eighteenth century;
+they combined the duties of barber and dentist as well as leech. But the
+situation was good enough. “Assistant surgeons in the army,” wrote
+Saint-Marc the detective, “who really worked at their trade, made a good
+deal of money.” At this time, being reluctant to bear his mother’s name,
+the young man ingeniously transformed his double forename into Jean
+Danry, under which he is<a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a> designated in a passport for Alsace, given him
+on March 25, 1743, by the general commanding the royal forces in
+Languedoc. In the same year 1743, Danry accompanied the army of Marshal
+de Noailles in its operations on the Maine and the Rhine, receiving from
+the Marshal, towards the end of the season, a certificate testifying to
+his good and faithful service throughout the campaign.</p>
+
+<p>Four years later we find Danry at Brussels, employed in the
+field-hospital of the army in Flanders, at a salary of 500 livres a
+month. He was present at the famous siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, the
+impregnable fortress which the French so valiantly stormed under the
+command of the Comte de Lowendal. But peace being concluded at
+Aix-la-Chapelle, the armies were disbanded, and Danry went to Paris. He
+had in his pocket a letter of recommendation to Descluzeaux, the surgeon
+of Marshal de Noailles, and a certificate signed by Guignard de La
+Garde, chief of the commissariat, testifying to the ability and good
+conduct of “the aforesaid Jean Danry, assistant surgeon.” These two
+certificates formed the most substantial part of his fortune.</p>
+
+<p>Danry arrived in Paris about the end of the year 1748. On any afternoon
+he might have been seen strolling about the Tuileries in a grey frock
+and red waistcoat, carrying his twenty-three years with a good grace. Of
+middle height and somewhat spare figure, wearing his brown hair in a
+silk net, having keen eyes and an expression of much intelligence, he
+would probably have<a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a> been thought a handsome fellow but for the marks
+which smallpox had indelibly stamped on his face. His accent had a
+decided Gascon tang, and it is obvious, from the spelling of his
+letters, not only that he could not boast of a literary education, but
+that his speech was that of a man of the people. Yet, what with his
+brisk temperament, his professional skill, and his favour with his
+superiors, he was in a fair way to attain an honourable position, which
+would have enabled him at length to support his mother, then living in
+solitary friendlessness at Montagnac, centring on him, in her forlorn
+condition, all her affection and her dearest hopes.</p>
+
+<p>Paris, with its gaiety and stir, dazzled the young man. Its brilliant
+and luxurious life, its rustling silks and laces, set him dreaming. He
+found the girls of Paris charming creatures, and opened his heart to
+them without stint, and his purse too; and his heart was more opulent
+than his purse. Ere long he had spent his modest savings and sunk into
+want. He fell into bad company. His best friend, an apothecary’s
+assistant named Binguet, shared with him a mean garret in the Cul-de-sac
+du Coq, in the house of one Charmeleux, who let furnished lodgings. Than
+these two no greater rakes, wastrels, or thorough-paced rascals could
+have been found in all Paris. Danry in particular very soon got a name
+all over his neighbourhood for his riotous, threatening, and choleric
+temper. Dying of hunger, threatened with being ejected neck-and-crop
+from his lodging for nonpayment of rent, he was reduced at last to write
+for<a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a> money to his mother, who, poor thing, had barely enough for her own
+modest wants.</p>
+
+<p>As yet we are a long way from the “handsome officer of engineers” who
+lives in our remembrance: we see little likeness to the brilliant
+picture which Danry drew later of those youthful years during which he
+received, “by the care of his father the Marquis de La Tude, the
+education of a gentleman destined to serve his country and his king.”</p>
+
+<p>Having come now absolutely to the end of his resources, Danry took it
+into his head that, at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, he had been stripped
+by some soldiers of all his clothes but his shirt, and robbed of 678
+livres into the bargain. This story he worked up in a letter addressed
+to Moreau de Séchelles, commissary of the army in Flanders, hoping to
+get it corroborated by Guignard de La Garde, the commissary under whom
+he had himself served. In this letter he demanded compensation for the
+losses he had suffered while devoting himself under fire to the care of
+the wounded. But we read, in the <i>Memoirs</i> he wrote later, that so far
+from having been stripped and robbed, he had actually purchased at
+Bergen-op-Zoom a considerable quantity of goods of all kinds when they
+were sold off cheap after the sack of the town. However that may be, his
+experiment was a failure. But Danry was a man of resource, and not many
+days had passed before he had hit on another means of raising the wind.</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width:70%;">
+<a href="images/i_198_lg.png">
+<img class="enlargeimage"
+src="images/enlarge-image.jpg"
+alt="enlarge-image"
+title="enlarge-image"
+width="18"
+height="14" />
+</a><br /><img src="images/i_198_sml.png" width="550" height="441" alt="Cover of the explosive box sent by Danry to the Marquise de
+Pompadour. The words almost obliterated are: “Je vous prie, Madame,
+d’ouvrir le paquet en particulié.” Below is the record and the date
+of Danry’s examination, with his signature, and that of Berryer,
+the lieutenant of police.
+" />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">Cover of the explosive box sent by Danry to the Marquise de
+Pompadour. The words almost obliterated are: “Je vous prie, Madame,
+d’ouvrir le paquet en particulié.” Below is the record and the date
+of Danry’s examination, with his signature, and that of Berryer,
+the lieutenant of police.
+</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>At this time everybody was talking about the struggle<a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a> between the
+king’s ministers and the Marquise de Pompadour, which had just ended in
+a triumph for the lady. Maurepas was going into exile, but it was
+generally believed that he was a man who would wreak vengeance on his
+enemy, and the favourite herself openly declared that she went in fear
+of poison. A light dawned on the young surgeon’s mind as he heard such
+gossip as this; he caught a sudden glimpse of himself&mdash;even he, the
+ragged outcast&mdash;arrayed in cloth of gold and rolling in his carriage
+along the Versailles road.</p>
+
+<p>This was his plan. On April 27, 1749, in a shop under the arcade of the
+Palais-Royal, hard by the grand staircase, he bought of a small
+tradesman six of those little bottle-shaped toys, once called Prince
+Rupert’s Drops, out of which children used to get so much harmless
+amusement. They were globules of molten glass, which, on being thrown
+into cold water, had taken the shape of pears, and which, if the
+tapering end was suddenly snapped, crumbled with a loud report into
+dust. Four of these crackers Danry placed in a cardboard box, binding
+the thin ends together with a thread which he fixed in the lid. Over
+these he sprinkled some toilet powder, and this he covered with a layer
+of powdered vitriol and alum. The whole packet he then enclosed in a
+double wrapper, writing on the inner one, “I beg you, madam, to open the
+packet in private,” and on the outer one, “To Madame the Marquise de
+Pompadour, at court.”</p>
+
+<p>At eight o’clock in the evening of the next day,<a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a> Danry, having seen his
+packet safely in the post, hurried off himself to Versailles. He had
+hoped to gain admittance to the favourite herself, but being stopped by
+Gourbillon, her principal valet, in a voice trembling with emotion he
+related to him a frightful story. Happening to be at the Tuileries, he
+said, he had observed two men seated in animated conversation, and on
+going close to them heard them mouthing the most horrible threats
+against Madame de Pompadour. When they rose he dogged their footsteps,
+which led direct to the post office, where they consigned a packet to
+the box. Who the men were, and what was the nature of the packet, were
+natural questions to which Danry had no answer; all he could say was
+that, devoted to the interests of the Marquise, he had instantly sped
+off to reveal to her what he had seen.</p>
+
+<p>To understand the impression produced by the young man’s information, it
+is necessary to bear in mind the feverish excitement then prevailing at
+court. Maurepas, the witty and sprightly minister who had won Louis
+XV.’s special affection because of the charm with which he endowed mere
+business for “the man who was always bored”&mdash;Maurepas had just been
+exiled to Bourges. “Pontchartrain,” the king sent word to him, “is too
+near.” The struggle between the minister and the favourite had been one
+of extraordinary violence. Maurepas was for ever dashing off satirical
+verses on the girl who had reached the steps of the throne, and
+incessantly pursuing her with the cruel and insolent<a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a> shafts of his wit;
+his muse indeed did not shrink from the most brutal insults. Nor was the
+Marquise a whit more tender towards her foe: she openly dubbed him liar
+and knave, and assured everybody that he was trying to get her poisoned.
+A surgeon was actually required to be in constant attendance upon her,
+and she always had an antidote within reach. At table she was careful
+never to be the first to partake of any dish, and in her box at the
+theatre she would drink no lemonade but what had been prepared by her
+surgeon.</p>
+
+<p>The packet which Danry had posted arrived at Versailles on April 29, and
+Quesnay, the physician to the king and the Marquise, was requested to
+open it. Having done so with infinite precaution, he recognized the
+vitriol and alum and toilet powder, and declared at once that there was
+not a pennyworth of danger in the whole contrivance. But since alum and
+vitriol were substances capable of being turned to baneful uses, he
+thought that possibly it was a case of a criminal design clumsily
+executed.</p>
+
+<p>There is not a shadow of doubt that Louis XV. and his mistress were
+seriously alarmed. D’Argenson himself, who had upheld Maurepas against
+the favourite, had the greatest possible interest in seeing the affair
+cleared up as soon as possible. The first move was altogether in favour
+of the informer. D’Argenson wrote to Berryer that Danry was deserving of
+a reward.</p>
+
+<p>No time was lost in instituting a search for the authors<a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a> of the plot.
+The lieutenant of police selected the most skilful and intelligent of
+his officers, the detective Saint-Marc, who put himself in communication
+with Danry. But he had not spent two days with the assistant surgeon
+before he drew up a report demanding his arrest. “It is not unimportant
+to note that Danry is a surgeon, and his best friend an apothecary. In
+my opinion it is essential to apprehend both Danry and Binguet without
+further delay, and without letting either know of the other’s arrest,
+and at the same time to search their rooms.”</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly Danry was conveyed to the Bastille on May 1, 1749, and
+Binguet was secured the same day. Saint-Marc had taken the precaution to
+ask the assistant surgeon for a written account of his adventure. This
+document he put into the hands of an expert, who compared the
+handwriting with the address on the packet sent to Versailles. Danry was
+lost. Suspicion was but too well confirmed by the results of a search in
+his room. Being shut up in the Bastille, Danry knew nothing of all these
+proceedings, and when, on May 2, the lieutenant-general of police came
+to question him, he replied only with lies.</p>
+
+<p>Berryer, the lieutenant of police, was a man of much firmness, but
+honourable and kindly disposed. “He inspired one’s confidence,” wrote
+Danry himself, “by his urbanity and kindness.” This excellent man was
+vexed at the attitude taken up by the prisoner, and pointing out the
+danger he was incurring, he besought him to<a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a> tell the truth. But at a
+second examination Danry only persisted in his lies. Then all at once he
+changed his tactics and refused to answer the questions put to him.
+“Danry, here we do justice to every one,” said Berryer to him, to give
+him courage. But entreaties had no better success than threats. Danry
+maintained his obstinate silence; and D’Argenson wrote to Berryer: “The
+thorough elucidation of this affair is too important for you not to
+follow up any clue which may point towards a solution.”</p>
+
+<p>By his falsehoods, and then by his silence, Danry had succeeded in
+giving the appearance of a mysterious plot to what was really an
+insignificant piece of knavery.</p>
+
+<p>Not till June 15 did he make up his mind to offer a statement very near
+the truth, which was written down and sent at once to the king, who read
+it over several times and kept it in his pocket the whole day&mdash;a
+circumstance which indicates to what importance the affair had now
+swelled. Suspicions were not dispelled by the declaration of June 15.
+Danry had misrepresented the truth in his former examinations, and there
+was reason to believe that he was equally misrepresenting it in the
+third. Thus he owed his ruin to his silence and his self-contradictory
+depositions. Six months later, on October 7, 1749, when he was at
+Vincennes, Dr. Quesnay, who had shown much interest in the young
+surgeon, was sent to find out from him the name of the individual who
+had instigated the crime. On his<a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a> return the doctor wrote to Berryer,
+“My journey has been utterly useless. I only saw a blockhead, who
+persisted nevertheless in adhering to his former declarations.” Two
+years more had passed away when the lieutenant of police wrote to
+Quesnay:&mdash;“February 25, 1751. Danry would be very glad if you would pay
+him a visit, and your compliance might perhaps induce him to lay bare
+his secret soul, and make a frank confession to you of what up to the
+present he has obstinately concealed from me.”</p>
+
+<p>Quesnay at once repaired to the Bastille, bearing with him a conditional
+promise of liberty. Working himself up into a frenzy, Danry swore that
+“all his answers to the lieutenant of police had been strictly true.”
+When the doctor had taken his leave, Danry wrote to the minister: “M.
+Quesnay, who has been several times to see me in my wretchedness, tells
+me that your lordship is inclined to believe I had some accomplice in my
+fault whom I will not reveal, and that it is for this reason your
+lordship will not give me my liberty. I could wish, my lord, from the
+bottom of my heart, that your belief were true, for it would be much to
+my profit to put my guilt upon another, whether for having induced me to
+commit my sin or for not having prevented me from committing it.”</p>
+
+<p>It was the opinion of the ministers that Danry had been the instrument
+of a plot against the life of the Marquise de Pompadour directed by some
+person of high rank, and that at the critical moment he had either
+taken<a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a> fright, or else had made a clean breast of the matter at
+Versailles in the hope of reaping some advantage from both sides. These
+facts must be kept in mind if we are to understand the real cause of his
+confinement. Kept, then, in the Bastille, he was subjected to several
+examinations, the reports of which were regularly drawn up and signed by
+the lieutenant of police. Under the <i>ancien régime</i>, this officer was,
+as we have seen, a regular magistrate, indeed he has no other
+designation in the documents of the period; he pronounced sentence and
+awarded punishments in accordance with that body of customs which then,
+as to-day in England, constituted the law.</p>
+
+<p>Binguet, the apothecary, had been set at liberty immediately after
+Danry’s declaration of June 15. In the Bastille, Danry was treated with
+the utmost consideration, in accordance with the formal instructions of
+Berryer. He was provided with books, tobacco, and a pipe; he was
+permitted to play on the flute; and having declared that a solitary life
+bored him, he was given two room mates. Every day he was visited by the
+officers of the fortress, and on May 25 the governor came to tell him of
+the magistrate’s order: “That the utmost attention was to be shown him;
+if he needed anything he was to be requested to say so, and was to be
+allowed to want for nothing.” No doubt the lieutenant of police hoped,
+by dint of kindness, to persuade him to disclose the authors of the
+unfortunate plot which was the figment of his imagination.<a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a></p>
+
+<p>Danry did not remain long in the prison of the Suburb Saint-Antoine; on
+July 28 Saint-Marc transferred him to Vincennes, and we see from the
+report drawn up by the detective with what astonishment the Marquis du
+Châtelet, governor of the fortress, heard “that the court had resolved
+to send him such a fellow.” Vincennes, like the Bastille, was reserved
+for prisoners of good position; our hero was sent there by special
+favour, as he was told for his consolation by the surgeon who attended
+him: “Only persons of noble birth or the highest distinction are sent to
+Vincennes.” Danry was indeed treated like a lord. The best apartment was
+reserved for him, and he was able to enjoy the park, where he walked for
+two hours every day. At the time of his admission to the Bastille, he
+was suffering from some sort of indisposition which later on he ascribed
+to his long confinement. At Vincennes he complained of the same illness,
+with the same plea that his troubles had made him ill. He was attended
+by a specialist as well as by the surgeon of the prison.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime the lieutenant came again to see him, reiterating assurances of
+his protection, and advising him to write direct to Madame de Pompadour.
+Here is what Danry wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+“<span class="smcap">Vincennes</span>, <i>November 4, 1749</i>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">Madam</span>,&mdash;If wretchedness, goaded by famine, has driven me to commit
+a fault against your dear person, it was with no design of doing
+you any mischief. God is my<a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a> witness. If the divine mercy would
+assure you to-day, on my behalf, how my soul repents of its heinous
+fault, and how for 188 days I have done nothing but weep at the
+sight of my iron bars, you would have pity on me. Madam, for the
+sake of God who is enlightening you, let your just wrath soften at
+the spectacle of my repentance, my wretchedness, my tears. One day
+God will recompense you for your humanity. You are all-powerful,
+Madam; God has given you power with the greatest king on all the
+earth, His well-beloved; he is merciful, he is not cruel, he is a
+Christian. If the divine power moves your magnanimity to grant me
+my freedom, I would rather die, or sustain my life on nothing but
+roots, than jeopardize it a second time. I have staked all my hopes
+on your Christian charity. Lend a sympathetic ear to my prayer, do
+not abandon me to my unhappy fate. I hope in you, Madam, and God
+will vouchsafe an abundant answer to my prayers that your dear
+person may obtain your heart’s desires.</p>
+
+<p>“I have the honour to be, with a repentance worthy of pardon,
+Madam, your very humble and very obedient servant,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“<span class="smcap">Danry</span>.”<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A letter which it is a pleasure to quote, for it shows to great
+advantage beside the letters written later by the prisoner. It was only
+the truth that he had no evil design on the favourite’s life; but soon
+becoming more audacious, he wrote to Madame de Pompadour saying that if
+he had addressed the box to her at<a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a> Versailles, it was out of pure
+devotion to her, to put her on her guard against the machinations of her
+enemies, in short, to save her life.</p>
+
+<p>Danry’s letter was duly forwarded to the Marquise, but remained without
+effect. Losing patience, he resolved to win for himself the freedom
+denied him: on June 15, 1750, he escaped.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In his <i>Memoirs</i> Danry has related the story of this first escape in a
+manner as lively as imaginative. He really eluded his jailers in the
+simplest way in the world. Having descended to the garden at the usual
+hour for his walk, he found there a black spaniel frisking about. The
+dog happened to rear itself against the gate, and to push it with its
+paws. The gate fell open. Danry passed out and ran straight ahead,
+“till, towards four o’clock in the afternoon, he fell to the ground with
+fatigue, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Denis.”</p>
+
+<p>There he remained until nine o’clock in the evening. Then he struck into
+the road to Paris, passing the night beside the aqueduct near the
+Saint-Denis gate. At daybreak he entered the city.</p>
+
+<p>We know what importance was attached at court to the safe custody of the
+prisoner: there was still hope that he would make up his mind to speak
+of the grave conspiracy of which he held the secret. D’Argenson wrote at
+once to Berryer: “Nothing is more important or more urgent than to set
+on foot at once all conceivable means of recapturing the prisoner.”
+Accordingly<a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a> all the police were engaged in the search; the description
+of the prisoner was printed, a large number of copies being distributed
+by Inspector Rulhière among the mounted police.</p>
+
+<p>Danry took up his lodging with one Cocardon, at the sign of the Golden
+Sun; but he did not venture to remain for more than two days in the same
+inn. He expected his old chum Binguet to come to his assistance, but
+Binguet was not going to have anything more to do with the Bastille. It
+was a pretty girl, Annette Benoist, whom Danry had known when he was
+lodging with Charmeleux, that devoted herself heart and soul to him. She
+knew she herself was running the risk of imprisonment, and already
+strangers of forbidding appearance had come asking at the Golden Sun who
+she was. Little she cared; she found assistance among her companions:
+the girls carried Danry’s letters and undertook the search for a safe
+lodging. Meanwhile, Danry went to pass the night under the aqueducts; in
+the morning he shut himself in the lodging the girls had chosen for him,
+and there he remained for two days without leaving the house, Annette
+coming there to keep him company. Unluckily the young man had no money:
+how was he to pay his score? “What was to be done, what was to become of
+me?” he said later. “I was sure to be discovered if I showed myself; if
+I fled I ran no less risk.” He wrote to Dr. Quesnay, who had shown him
+so much kindness at Vincennes; but the police got wind of the letter,
+and Saint-Marc arrived and<a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a> seized the fugitive in the inn where he lay
+concealed. The unlucky wretch was haled back to the Bastille. Annette
+was arrested at the Golden Sun at the moment when she was asking for
+Danry’s letters; she too was shut up in the Bastille. The warders and
+sentinels who were on duty at Vincennes on the day of the escape had
+been thrown into the cells.</p>
+
+<p>By his escape from Vincennes, Danry had doubled the gravity of his
+offence. The regulations demanded that he should be sent down into the
+cells reserved for insubordinate prisoners. “M. Berryer came again to
+lighten my woes; outside the prison he demanded justice and mercy for
+me, inside he sought to calm my grief, which seemed less poignant when
+he assured me that he shared it.” The lieutenant of police ordered the
+prisoner to be fed as well as formerly, and to be allowed his books,
+papers, knick-knacks, and the privilege of the two hours’ walk he had
+enjoyed at Vincennes. In return for these kindnesses, the assistant
+surgeon sent to the magistrate “a remedy for the gout.” He asked at the
+same time to be allowed to breed little birds, whose chirping and lively
+movements would divert him. The request was granted. But instead of
+bearing his lot with patience, Danry grew more and more irritable every
+day. He gave free rein to his violent temper, raised a hubbub, shrieked,
+tore up and down his room, so that they came perforce to believe that he
+was going mad. On the books of the Bastille library, which circulated
+from room to room, he wrote ribald verses against the Marquise de
+Pompadour.<a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a> In this way he prolonged his sojourn in the cells. Gradually
+his letters changed their tone. “It is a little hard to be left for
+fourteen months in prison, a whole year of the time, ending to-day, in
+one cell where I still am.”</p>
+
+<p>Then Berryer put him back into a good room, about the end of the year
+1751. At the same time he gave him, at the king’s expense, a servant to
+wait on him.</p>
+
+<p>As to Annette Benoist, she had been set at liberty after a fortnight’s
+detention. Danry’s servant fell sick; as there was no desire to deprive
+the prisoner of society, he was given a companion. This was a certain
+Antoine Allègre, who had been there since May 29, 1750. The
+circumstances which had led to his imprisonment were almost identical
+with those to which Danry owed his confinement. Allègre was keeping a
+school at Marseilles when he learnt that the enemies of the Marquise de
+Pompadour were seeking to destroy her. He fabricated a story of a
+conspiracy in which he involved Maurepas, the Archbishop of Albi, and
+the Bishop of Lodève; he sent a denunciation of this plot to Versailles,
+and, to give it some semblance of truth, addressed to the favourite’s
+valet a letter in disguised handwriting, beginning with these words: “On
+the word of a gentleman, there are 100,000 crowns for you if you poison
+your mistress.” He hoped by this means to obtain a good situation, or
+the success of a business project he had in hand.</p>
+
+<p>Intelligent, with some education, and venturesome,<a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a> Danry and Allègre
+were just the men to get on well together, so much the better that the
+schoolmaster dominated the comrade to whom he was so much superior. The
+years that Danry spent in company with Allègre exercised so great an
+influence on his whole life that the lieutenant of police, Lenoir, could
+say one day: “Danry is the second volume of Allègre.” The letters of the
+latter, a large number of which have been preserved, bear witness to the
+originality and energy of his mind: their style is fine and fluent, of
+the purest French; the ideas expressed have distinction and are
+sometimes remarkable without eccentricity. He worked untiringly, and was
+at first annoyed at the presence of a companion: “Give me, I beg you, a
+room to myself,” he wrote to Berryer, “even without a fire: I like being
+alone, I am sufficient for myself, because I can find things to do, and
+seed to sow for the future.” His temperament was naturally mystical, but
+of that cold and acrid mysticism which we sometimes find in men of
+science, and mathematicians in particular. For Allègre’s principal
+studies were mathematics, mechanics, and engineering. The lieutenant of
+police procured for him works on fortification, architecture, mechanics,
+hydraulics. The prisoner used them to compile essays on the most diverse
+questions, which he sent to the lieutenant of police in the hope of
+their procuring his liberation. Those essays which we possess show the
+extent of his intelligence and his education. Danry followed his example
+by-and-by, in this as in everything else, but clumsily. Allègre was<a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a>
+also very clever with his fingers, and could make, so the officials of
+the château declared, whatever he pleased.</p>
+
+<p>Allègre was a dangerous man: the warders were afraid of him. Some time
+after his entrance into the Bastille he fell ill, and a man was set to
+look after him; the two men did not agree at all. Allègre sent complaint
+after complaint to the lieutenant of police. An inquiry was made which
+turned out not unfavourable to the keeper, and he was left with the
+prisoner. One morning&mdash;September 8, 1751&mdash;the officers of the Bastille
+heard cries and clamour in the “Well” tower. Hastily ascending, they
+found Allègre in the act of stabbing his companion, who lay on the floor
+held down by the throat, wallowing in the blood that streamed from a
+gash in the stomach. If Allègre had not been in the Bastille, the
+Parlement would have had him broken on the wheel in the Place de Grève:
+the Bastille was his safety, though he could no longer hope for a speedy
+liberation.</p>
+
+<p>Danry, in his turn, wore out the patience of his guardians. Major
+Chevalier, who was kindness itself, wrote to the lieutenant of police:
+“He is no better than Allègre, but though more turbulent and choleric,
+he is much less to be feared in every respect.” The physician of the
+Bastille, Dr. Boyer, a member of the Academy, wrote likewise: “I have
+good reason to distrust the man.” The temper of Danry became embittered.
+He began to revile the warders. One morning they were obliged to take
+from him a knife and other sharp<a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a> instruments he had concealed. He used
+the paper they gave him to open communications with other prisoners and
+with people outside. Paper was withheld: he then wrote with his blood on
+a handkerchief; he was forbidden by the lieutenant of police to write to
+him with his blood, so he wrote on tablets made of bread crumbs, which
+he passed out secretly between two plates.</p>
+
+<p>The use of paper was then restored to him, which did not prevent him
+from writing to Berryer: “My lord, I am writing to you with my blood on
+linen, because the officers refuse me ink and paper; it is now more than
+six times that I have asked in vain to speak to them. What are you
+about, my lord? Do not drive me to extremities. At least, do not force
+me to be my own executioner. Send a sentry to break my head for me; that
+is the very least favour you can do me.” Berryer, astonished at this
+missive, remarked on it to the major, who replied: “I have not refused
+paper to Danry.”</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width:60%;">
+<a href="images/i_215_lg.png">
+<img class="enlargeimage"
+src="images/enlarge-image.jpg"
+alt="enlarge-image"
+title="enlarge-image"
+width="18"
+height="14" />
+</a><br /><img src="images/i_215_sml.png" width="399" height="550" alt="Beginning of a letter written with blood on linen by Danry (Latude)
+while a prisoner at Vincennes, to Rougemont, the king’s lieutenant.
+" />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">Beginning of a letter written with blood on linen by Danry (Latude)
+while a prisoner at Vincennes, to Rougemont, the king’s lieutenant.
+</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>So the prisoner forced them more and more to the conclusion that he was
+a madman. On October 13, 1753, he wrote to Dr. Quesnay to tell him that
+he wished him well, but that being too poor to give him anything else,
+he was making him a present of his body, which was on the point of
+perishing, for him to make a skeleton of. To the paper on which he
+wrote, Danry had sewn a little square of cloth, adding: “God has given
+the garments of martyrs the virtue of healing all manner of diseases. It
+is now fifty-seven months since I have been suffering an enforced
+martyrdom. So there is no<a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a> doubt that to-day the cloth of my coat will
+work miracles; here is a bit for you.” This letter was returned to the
+lieutenant of police in December, and on it we find a marginal note in
+Berryer’s hand: “A letter worth keeping, as it reveals the prisoner’s
+mind.” We know in what fashion madmen were wont to be treated in the
+eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>But suddenly, to the great astonishment of the officers of the château,
+our two friends amended their character and their conduct. No more
+noises were heard in their room, and they answered politely anyone who
+came to speak to them. But their behaviour was even more odd than ever.
+Allègre used to walk up and down the room half naked, “to save his
+toggery,” he said, and he sent letter after letter to his brother and
+the lieutenant of police, asking them to send him things, particularly
+shirts and handkerchiefs. Danry followed suit. “This prisoner,” wrote
+Chevalier to the lieutenant of police, “is asking for linen. I shall not
+make a requisition, because he has seven very good shirts, four of them
+new; he has shirts on the brain.” But why decline to humour a prisoner’s
+whim? So the commissary of the Bastille had two dozen expensive shirts
+made&mdash;every one cost twenty livres, more than thirty-three shillings of
+our money&mdash;and some handkerchiefs of the finest cambric.</p>
+
+<p>If the wardrobe-keeper of the Bastille had kept her eyes open, she would
+have noticed that the serviettes and cloths which went into the room of
+the two companions<a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a> were of much smaller dimensions when they came out.
+Our friends had established communication with their neighbours above
+and below, begging twine and thread from them and giving tobacco in
+exchange. They had succeeded in loosening the iron bars which prevented
+climbing up the chimney; at night they used to mount to the platforms,
+whence they conversed down the chimneys with prisoners in the other
+towers. One of these hapless creatures believed himself to be a prophet
+of God; he heard at night the sound of a voice descending upon his cold
+hearth: he revealed the miracle to the officers, who only considered him
+still more insane than before. On the terrace Allègre and Danry found
+the tools left there in the evening by the masons and gardeners employed
+at the Bastille. Thus they got possession of a mallet, an auger, two
+sorts of pulleys, and some bits of iron taken from the gun-carriages.
+All these they concealed in the hollow between the floor of their room
+and the ceiling of the room below.</p>
+
+<p>Allègre and Danry escaped from the Bastille on the night of February 25,
+1756. They climbed up the chimney till they reached the platform, and
+descended by means of their famous rope ladder, fastened to a
+gun-carriage. A wall separated the Bastille moat from that of the
+Arsenal. By the aid of an iron bar they succeeded in working out a large
+stone, and they escaped through the hole thus made. Their rope ladder
+was a work of long patience and amazing skill. When in after days
+Allègre<a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a> went mad, Danry appropriated the whole credit of this
+enterprise which his friend had conceived and directed.</p>
+
+<p>At the moment of leaving, Allègre had written on a scrap of paper, for
+the officers of the Bastille, the following note, which is an excellent
+indication of his character:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“We have done no damage to the furniture of the governor, we have only
+made use of a few rags of coverlets of no possible use; the others are
+left just as they were. If some serviettes are missing, they will be
+found at the bottom of the water in the great moat, whither we are
+taking them to wipe our feet.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!</i></p>
+
+<p>“<i>Scito cor nostrum et cognosce semitas nostras.</i>”<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a></p>
+
+<p>Our two companions had provided themselves with a portmanteau, and they
+made haste to change their clothes as soon as they had cleared the
+precincts of the fortress. A foreman of works whom Danry knew interested
+himself in them, and conducted them to one Rouit, a tailor, who lodged
+them for some little time. Rouit even lent Danry forty-eight livres,
+which he promised to return as soon as he reached Brussels. At the end
+of a month our two friends were across the frontier.</p>
+
+<p>It is very difficult to follow Danry’s proceedings from the time when he
+left Rouit to the moment of his reincarceration<a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a> in the Bastille. He has
+left, it is true, two accounts of his sojourn in Flanders and Holland;
+but these accounts are themselves inconsistent, and both differ from
+some original documents which remain to us.</p>
+
+<p>The two fugitives had considered it advisable not to set out together.
+Allègre was the first to arrive at Brussels, whence he wrote an insolent
+letter to Madame de Pompadour. This letter led to his discovery. On
+reaching Brussels, Danry learnt that his friend had been arrested. He
+lost no time in making for Holland, and at Amsterdam he took service
+with one Paul Melenteau. From Rotterdam he had written to his mother,
+and the poor creature, collecting her little savings, sent him 200
+livres by post. But Saint-Marc had already struck on the track of the
+fugitive. “The burgomaster of Amsterdam readily and gladly granted the
+request made by Saint-Marc on behalf of the king, through the
+ambassador, for the arrest and extradition of Danry.” Louis XV. confined
+himself to claiming him as one of his subjects. Saint-Marc, disguised as
+an Armenian merchant, discovered him in his retreat. Danry was arrested
+in Amsterdam on June 1, 1756, conducted to a cell belonging to the town
+hall, and thence brought back to France and consigned to the Bastille on
+June 9. Word came from Holland that Saint-Marc was there regarded as a
+sorcerer.</p>
+
+<p>By his second escape the unhappy man had succeeded in making his case
+very serious. In the eighteenth century, escape from a state prison was
+punishable with<a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a> death. The English, great apostles of humanity as they
+were, were no more lenient than the French; and everyone knows what
+treatment was meted out by Frederick II. to Baron de Trenck. He was to
+have remained in prison only one year; but after his second escape he
+was chained up in a gloomy dungeon; at his feet was the grave in which
+he was to be buried, and on it his name and a death’s-head had been cut.</p>
+
+<p>The government of Louis XV. did not punish with such rigour as this. The
+fugitive was simply put in the cells for a time. At the Bastille the
+cells were damp and chilly dungeons. Danry has left in his <i>Memoirs</i> an
+account of the forty months spent in this dismal place,&mdash;an account
+which makes one’s hair stand on end; but it is packed full of
+exaggeration. He says that he spent three years with irons on his hands
+and feet: in November, 1756, Berryer offered to remove the irons from
+either hands or feet at his choice, and we see from a marginal note by
+Major Chevalier that he chose the feet. Danry adds that he lay all
+through the winter on straw without any coverlet: he was actually so
+well supplied with coverlets that he applied to Berryer for some others.
+To believe him you would think that when the Seine was in flood the
+water rose as high as his waist: as a fact, when the water threatened to
+invade the cell, the prisoner was removed. Again, he says that he passed
+there forty months in absolute darkness: the light of his prison was
+certainly not very brilliant, but it was sufficient to enable him to
+read and write, and<a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a> we learn from letters he sent to the lieutenant of
+police that he saw from his cell all that went on in the courtyard of
+the Bastille. Finally, he tells us of a variety of diseases he
+contracted at the time, and cites in this connection the opinion of an
+oculist who came to attend him. But this very report was forged by Danry
+himself, and the rest he invented to match.</p>
+
+<p>In this cell, where he professes to have been treated in so barbarous a
+manner, Danry, however, proved difficult enough to deal with, as we
+judge from the reports of Chevalier. “Danry has a thoroughly nasty
+temper; he sends for us at eight o’clock in the morning, and asks us to
+send warders to the market to buy him fish, saying that he never eats
+eggs, artichokes, or spinach, and that he insists on eating fish; and
+when we refuse, he flies into a furious passion.” That was on fast days;
+on ordinary days it was the same. “Danry swore like a trooper, that is,
+in his usual way, and after the performance said to me: ‘Major, when you
+give me a fowl, at least let it be stuffed!’” He was not one of the
+vulgar herd, he said, “one of those fellows you send to Bicêtre.” And he
+demanded to be treated in a manner befitting his condition.</p>
+
+<p>It was just the same with regard to clothes. One is amazed at the sight
+of the lists of things the lieutenant of police got made for him. To
+give him satisfaction, the administration did not stick at the most
+unreasonable expense, and it was by selling these clothes that Danry, at
+his various escapes, procured a part of the money he<a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a> was so much in
+need of. He suffered from rheumatism, so they provided him with
+dressing-gowns lined with rabbit-skin, vests lined with silk plush,
+gloves and fur hats, and first-rate leather breeches. In his <i>Memoirs</i>
+Danry lumps all these as “half-rotten rags.” Rochebrune, the commissary
+charged with the prisoners’ supplies, was quite unable to satisfy him.
+“You instructed me,” he wrote to the major, “to get a dressing-gown made
+for the Sieur Danry, who asks for a calamanco with red stripes on a blue
+ground. I have made inquiries for such stuff of a dozen tradesmen, who
+have no such thing, and indeed would be precious careful not to have it,
+for there is no sale for that kind of calamanco. I don’t see why I
+should satisfy the fantastic tastes of a prisoner who ought to be very
+well pleased at having a dressing-gown that is warm and well-fitting.”
+On another occasion, the major writes: “This man Danry has never up to
+the present consented to accept the breeches that M. de Rochebrune got
+made for him, though they are excellent, lined with good leather, with
+silk garters, and in the best style.” And Danry had his own pretty way
+of complaining. “I beg you,” he wrote to the governor, “to have the
+goodness to tell M. de Sartine in plain terms that the four
+handkerchiefs he sent me are not fit to give to a galley-slave, and I
+will not have them on any account; but that I request him kindly to give
+me six print handkerchiefs, blue, and large, and two muslin cravats.” He
+adds, “If there is no money in<a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a> the treasury, go and ask Madame de
+Pompadour for some.”</p>
+
+<p>One day Danry declared that something was wrong with his eyes.
+Grandjean, the king’s oculist, came more than once to see him, ordered
+aromatic fumigations for him, gave him ointments and eye-salve; but it
+was soon seen that all that was wrong was that Danry desired to get a
+spy-glass, and to smuggle out, with the doctor’s assistance, memoirs and
+letters.</p>
+
+<p>On September 1, 1759, Danry was removed from the cells and placed in a
+more airy chamber. He wrote at once to Bertin to thank him, and to tell
+him that he was sending him two doves. “You delight in doing good, and I
+shall have no less delight, my lord, if you favour me by accepting this
+slight mark of my great gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>“Tamerlaine allowed himself to be disarmed by a basket of figs presented
+to him by the inhabitants of a town he was proceeding to besiege. The
+Marquise de Pompadour is a Christian lady; I beg you to allow me to send
+her also a pair: perhaps she will allow her heart to be touched by these
+two innocent pigeons. I append a copy of the letter which will accompany
+them:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“‘<span class="smcap">Madam</span>,&mdash;Two pigeons used to come every day to pick grains out of
+my straw; I kept them, and they gave me young ones. I venture to
+take the liberty of presenting you with this pair as a mark of my
+respect and affection. I beseech you in mercy to be good enough to
+accept them, with as much pleasure as I have<a name="page_197" id="page_197"></a> in offering them to
+you. I have the honour to be, with the profoundest respect, Madam,
+your very humble and obedient servant,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+“‘<span class="smcap">Danry</span>, for eleven years at the Bastille.’”
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Why did not Danry always make so charming a use of the permission
+accorded him to write to the minister, the lieutenant of police, Madame
+de Pompadour, Dr. Quesnay, and his mother? He wrote incessantly, and we
+have letters of his in hundreds, widely differing one from another. Some
+are suppliant and pathetic: “My body is wasting away every day in tears
+and blood, I am worn out.” He writes to Madame de Pompadour:&mdash;“Madam,&mdash;I
+have never wished you anything but well; be then sensible to the voice
+of tears, of my innocence, and of a poor despairing mother of sixty-six
+years. Madam, you are well aware of my martyrdom. I beg you in God’s
+name to grant me my precious liberty; I am spent, I am dying, my blood
+is all on fire by reason of my groaning; twenty times in the night I am
+obliged to moisten my mouth and nostrils to get my breath.” Everyone
+knows the famous letter beginning with the words, “I have been suffering
+now for 100,000 hours.” He writes to Quesnay: “I present myself to you
+with a live coal upon my head, indicating my pressing necessity.” The
+images he uses are not always so happy: “Listen,” he says to Berryer,
+“to the voice of the just bowels with which you are arrayed”!</p>
+
+<p>In other letters the prisoner alters his tone; to plaints<a name="page_198" id="page_198"></a> succeed cries
+of rage and fury, “he steeps his pen in the gall with which his soul is
+saturated.” He no longer supplicates, he threatens. There is nothing to
+praise in the style of these epistles: it is incorrect and vulgar,
+though at times vigorous and coloured with vivid imagery. To the
+lieutenant of police he writes: “When a man is to be punished in this
+accursed prison, the air is full of it, the punishments fall quicker
+than the thunderbolt; but when it is a case of succouring a man who is
+unfortunate, I see nothing but crabs;” and he addresses to him these
+lines of Voltaire:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Perish those villains born, whose hearts of steel<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No touch of ruth for others’ woes can feel.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He predicts terrible retribution for the ministers, the magistrates, and
+Madame de Pompadour. To her he writes: “You will see yourself one day
+like that owl in the park of Versailles; all the birds cast water upon
+him to choke him, to drown him; if the king chanced to die, before two
+hours were past someone would set five or six persons at your heels, and
+you would yourself pack to the Bastille.” The accused by degrees becomes
+transformed into the accuser; he writes to Sartine: “I am neither a dog
+nor a criminal, but a man like yourself.” And the lieutenant of police,
+taking pity on him, writes on one of these letters sent to the minister
+of Paris: “When Danry writes thus, it is not that he is mad, but frantic
+from long imprisonment.” The magistrate counsels the prisoner “to keep
+out of his letters all bitterness, which can only do him harm.” Bertin<a name="page_199" id="page_199"></a>
+corrected with his own hand the petitions Danry sent to the Marquise de
+Pompadour; in the margin of one of them we read, “I should think I was
+prejudicing him and his interests if I sent on to Madame de Pompadour a
+letter in which he ventures to reproach her with having <i>abused his good
+faith and confidence</i>.” Having amended the letter, the lieutenant of
+police himself carried it to Versailles.</p>
+
+<p>The years of captivity, far from humbling the prisoner and abasing his
+pride, only made him the more arrogant; his audacity grew from day to
+day, and he was not afraid of speaking to the lieutenants of police
+themselves, who knew his history, about his fortune which had been
+ruined, his brilliant career which had been cut short, his whole family
+plunged into despair. At first the magistrate would shrug his shoulders;
+insensibly he would be won over by these unwavering assertions, by this
+accent of conviction; and he ends actually by believing in this high
+birth, this fortune, this genius, in all which Danry had perhaps come to
+believe himself. Then Danry takes a still higher tone: he claims not
+only his freedom, but compensation, large sums of money, honours. But
+one must not think that this sprang from a sordid sentiment unworthy of
+him: “If I propose compensation, my lord, it is not for the sake of
+getting money, it is only so that I may smooth away all the obstacles
+which may delay the end of my long suffering.”</p>
+
+<p>In return, he is very ready to give the lieutenant of<a name="page_200" id="page_200"></a> police some good
+advice&mdash;to indicate the means of advancement in his career, to show him
+how to set about getting appointed secretary of state, to compose for
+him the speech he is to make to the king at his first audience. He adds:
+“This very time is extremely favourable to you; it is the auspicious
+hour: profit by it. Before they take horse on the day of rejoicing for
+the conclusion of peace, you ought to be a counsellor of state.”</p>
+
+<p>He is very ready also to send to the king schemes conceived in his
+prison for the welfare of the realm. Now it is a suggestion to give
+sergeants and officers on the battlefield muskets instead of spontoons
+and pikes, by which the French arms would be strengthened by 25,000 good
+fusiliers. Now it is a suggestion for increasing postal facilities,
+which would augment the resources of the Treasury by several millions
+every year. He recommends the erection of public granaries in the
+principal towns, and draws up plans of battle for giving unheard-of
+strength to a column of men three deep. We might mention other and
+better suggestions. These notions were drowned in a flood of words, an
+unimaginable wealth of verbiage, with parallels drawn from the history
+of all periods and every country. His manuscripts were illustrated with
+pen and ink sketches. Danry copied and recopied them incessantly, sent
+them to all and sundry in all sorts of forms, persuaded the sentinels
+that these lofty conceptions intimately concerned the safety of the
+state and would win<a name="page_201" id="page_201"></a> him an immense fortune. Thus he induced these good
+fellows to compromise their situation by carrying the papers secretly to
+ministers, members of the Parlement, marshals of France; he threw them
+from the windows of his room, and, wrapped in snowballs, from the top of
+the towers. These memoirs are the work of a man whose open and active
+mind, of incredible activity indeed, plans, constructs, invents without
+cessation or repose.</p>
+
+<p>Among these bundles of papers we have discovered a very touching letter
+from the prisoner’s mother, Jeanneton Aubrespy, who wrote to her son
+from Montagnac on June 14, 1759:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“Do not do me the injustice of thinking that I have forgotten you,
+my dear son, my loving son. Could I shut you out of my thoughts,
+you whom I bear always in my heart? I have always had a great
+longing to see you again, but to-day I long more than ever, I am
+constantly concerned for you, I think of nothing but you, I am
+wholly filled with you. Do not worry, my dear son; that is the only
+favour I ask of you. Your misfortunes will come to an end, and
+perhaps it is not far off. I hope that Madame de Pompadour will
+pardon you; for that I am trying to win heaven and earth over to
+your cause. The Lord is putting my submission and yours to a long
+test, so as to make us better realize the worth of His favour. Do
+not distress yourself, my son. I hope to have the happiness of
+receiving you again, and of embracing you more tenderly than ever.
+Adieu, my son,<a name="page_202" id="page_202"></a> my dear son, my loving son, I love you, and I shall
+love you dearly to the grave. I beg you to give me news of your
+health. I am, and always shall be, your good mother,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Daubrespi</span>, <i>widow</i>.”
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Is not this letter charming in its artless pathos? The son’s reply is
+equally touching; but on reading it again one feels that it was to pass
+under the eyes of the lieutenant of police; on examining it closely, one
+sees the sentiments grimacing between the lines.</p>
+
+<p>No one knew better than Danry how to play on the souls of others, to
+awake in them, at his will, pity or tenderness, astonishment or
+admiration. No one has surpassed him in the art, difficult in very
+truth, of posing as a hero, a genius, and a martyr, a part that we shall
+see him sustain for twenty years without faltering.</p>
+
+<p>In 1759 there entered upon the office of lieutenant of police a man who
+was henceforth to occupy Danry’s mind almost exclusively&mdash;Gabriel de
+Sartine. He was a fine sceptic, of amiable character and pleasing
+manners. He was loved by the people of Paris, who boasted of his
+administrative abilities and his spirit of justice. He exerted himself
+in his turn to render the years of captivity less cruel to Danry. “He
+allowed me,” writes the latter, “what no other State prisoner has ever
+obtained, the privilege of walking along the top of the towers, in the
+open air, to preserve my health.” He cheered the prisoner with genial
+words, and urged him to behave well and no longer to fill his letters
+with insults.<a name="page_203" id="page_203"></a> “Your fate,” he told him, “is in your own hands.” He
+looked into Danry’s scheme for the construction of public granaries, and
+when he had read it said, “Really, there are excellent things, most
+excellent things in it.” He visited Danry in prison and promised to do
+his utmost to obtain his liberation. He himself put into the hands of
+Madame de Pompadour the <i>Grand Mémoire</i> which Danry had drawn up for
+her. In this memorial the prisoner told the favourite that in return for
+a service he had rendered her in sending her a “hieroglyphic symbol” to
+put her on her guard against the machinations of her enemies, she had
+caused him to suffer unjustly for twelve years. Moreover, he would now
+only accept his freedom along with an indemnity of 60,000 livres. He
+added: “Be on your guard! When your prisoners get out and publish your
+cruelties abroad, they will make you hateful to heaven and the whole
+earth!” It is not surprising that this <i>Grand Mémoire</i> had practically
+no result. Sartine promised that he would renew his efforts on his
+behalf. “If, unhappily, you should meet with some resistance to the
+entreaties you are about to make for me,” wrote Danry, “I take the
+precaution of sending you a copy of the scheme I sent to the king.”
+(This was the memorial suggesting that muskets should be given to the
+officers and sergeants.) “Now the king has been putting my scheme in
+operation for five years or more, and he will continue to avail himself
+of it every time we are at war.” Sartine proceeded to Versailles, this
+marvellous scheme in his pocket. He<a name="page_204" id="page_204"></a> showed it to the ministers and
+pleaded on behalf of this protégé of his who, from the depths of his
+dungeon, was doing his country service. But on his return he wrote to
+the major of the Bastille a note in regard to Danry, in which we read:
+“They have not made use, as he believes, of his military scheme.”</p>
+
+<p>Danry had asked several times to be sent to the colonies. In 1763 the
+government was largely occupied with the colonization of La Désirade. We
+find a letter of June 23, 1763, in which Sartine proposes to send Danry
+to La Désirade “with an introduction to the commanding officer.” But
+nothing came of these proposals.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>All his life, Danry sought to compass his ends by the aid of women. He
+was well aware of all the tenderness and devotion there is in these
+light heads; he knew that sentiment is always stronger in them than
+reason: “I was always looking out for women, and wished to find young
+women, for their gentle and loving soul is more susceptible of pity;
+misfortune moves them, stirs in them a more lively interest; their
+impressionability is less quickly dulled, and so they are capable of
+greater efforts.”</p>
+
+<p>While taking his walk on the towers of the Bastille in the fresh morning
+air, he tried by means of gestures and signals to open relations with
+the people of the neighbourhood. “One day I noticed two young persons
+working alone in a room, whose countenances struck me<a name="page_205" id="page_205"></a> as pretty and
+gentle. I was not deceived. One of them having glanced in my direction,
+I wafted her with my hand a salutation which I endeavoured to make
+respectful and becoming, whereupon she told her sister, who instantly
+looked at me too. I then saluted them both in the same manner, and they
+replied to me with an appearance of interest and kindliness. From that
+moment we set up a sort of correspondence between us.” The girls were
+two good-looking laundresses named Lebrun, the daughters of a wigmaker.
+And our rogue, the better to stimulate the little fools to enthusiastic
+service in his behalf, knocked at the door of their young hearts,
+willing enough to fly open. He spoke to them of youth, misfortune,
+love&mdash;and also of his fortune, prodigious, he said, the half of which he
+offered them. Glowing with ardour, the girls spared for him neither
+time, nor trouble, nor what little money they had.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner had put them in possession of several of his schemes, among
+others the military one, with letters for certain writers and persons of
+importance, and in addition a “terrible” indictment of Madame de
+Pompadour for the king, in which “her birth and her shame, all her
+thefts and cruelties were laid bare.” He begged the girls to have
+several copies made, which they were then to send to the addresses
+indicated. Soon large black crosses daubed on a neighbouring wall
+informed the prisoner that his instructions had been carried out. Danry
+seems no longer to have doubted that his woes were coming to an end,
+that the gates of the Bastille<a name="page_206" id="page_206"></a> were about to fly open before him, and
+that he would triumphantly leave the prison only to enter a palace of
+fortune: <i>Parta victoria!</i><a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> he exclaims in a burst of happiness.</p>
+
+<p>And so we come to one of the most extraordinary episodes in this strange
+life.</p>
+
+<p>In December, 1763, the Marquise of Pompadour was taken seriously ill.
+“An officer of the Bastille came up to my room and said to me: ‘Sir,
+write four words to the Marquise de Pompadour, and you may be sure that
+in less than a week you will have recovered your freedom.’ I replied to
+the major that prayers and tears only hardened the heart of that cruel
+woman, and that I would not write to her. However, he came back next day
+with the same story, and I replied in the same terms as on the previous
+day. Scarcely had he gone than Daragon, my warder, came into my room and
+said: ‘Believe the major when he tells you that within a week you will
+be free: if he tells you so, depend upon it he is sure of it.’ Next day
+but one the officer came to me for the third time: ‘Why are you so
+obstinate?’ I thanked him&mdash;it was Chevalier, major of the Bastille&mdash;for
+the third time, telling him that I would sooner die than write again to
+that implacable shrew.</p>
+
+<p>“Six or eight days after, my two young ladies came and kissed their
+hands to me, at the same time displaying a roll of paper on which were
+written in large characters the words: ‘Madame de Pompadour is dead!’
+The<a name="page_207" id="page_207"></a> Marquise de Pompadour died on April 19, 1764, and two months
+afterwards, on June 19, M. de Sartine came to the Bastille and gave me
+an audience; the first thing he said was that we would say no more about
+the past, but that at the earliest moment he would go to Versailles and
+demand of the minister the justice which was my due.” And we find, in
+truth, among the papers of the lieutenant of police, the following note,
+dated June 18, 1764: “M. Duval (one of the lieutenant’s secretaries)&mdash;to
+propose at the first inspection that Danry be liberated and exiled to
+his own part of the country.”</p>
+
+<p>Returning to his room, Danry reflected on these developments; for the
+lieutenant of police to show so much anxiety for his liberation was
+evidently a sign that he was afraid of him, and that his memorials had
+reached their destination and achieved their end. But he would be a
+great ass to be satisfied with a mere liberation: “100,000 livres” would
+scarcely suffice to throw oblivion over the injustices with which he had
+been overwhelmed.</p>
+
+<p>He revolved these thoughts in his head for several days. To accept
+freedom at the hands of his persecutors would be to pardon the past, a
+mistake he would never fall into. The door opened, the major entered,
+bearing in his hand a note written by de Sartine: “You will tell County
+Number 4 that I am working for his effectual liberation.” The officer
+went out; Danry immediately sat down at his table and wrote to the
+lieutenant of police a letter replete with threats, insults, and
+obscenity.<a name="page_208" id="page_208"></a> The original is lost, but we have an abstract made by Danry
+himself. He concluded with leaving to Sartine a choice: “he was either a
+mere lunatic, or else had allowed himself to be corrupted like a villain
+by the gold of the Marquis de Marigny, the Marquise de Pompadour’s
+brother.”</p>
+
+<p>“When Sartine received my letter, he wrote an answer which the major
+brought and read to me, in which these were his very words: that I was
+wrong to impute to him the length of my imprisonment, that if he had had
+his way I should long ago have been set free; and he ended by telling me
+that there was Bedlam for the mad. On which I said to the major: ‘We
+shall see in a few days whether he will have the power to put me in
+Bedlam.’ He did not deprive me of my walk on the towers; nine days
+after, he put me in the cells on bread and water.” But Danry was not
+easily put out. No doubt they were only meaning to put his assurance to
+the test. He went down to his cell singing, and for several days
+continued to manifest the most confident gaiety.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment the prisoner made himself insufferable to his
+guardians. It was yells and violence from morning to night. He filled
+the whole Bastille with bursts of his “voice of thunder.” Major
+Chevalier wrote to Sartine: “This prisoner would wear out the patience
+of the saintliest monk”; again: “He is full of gall and bitterness, he
+is poison pure and simple”; once more: “This prisoner is raving mad.<a name="page_209" id="page_209"></a>”</p>
+
+<p>The lieutenant of police suggested to Saint-Florentin, the minister, to
+transfer Danry to the keep of Vincennes. He was conducted there on the
+night of September 15, 1764. We are now entering on a new phase of his
+life. We shall find him still more wretched than in the past, but
+constantly swelling his demands and pretensions, and with reason, for he
+is now, mark you, a nobleman! He had learnt from a sentinel of the
+Bastille of the death of Henri Vissec de la Tude, lieutenant-colonel of
+a dragoon regiment, who had died at Sedan on January 31, 1761. From that
+day he determined that he was the son of that officer. And what were his
+reasons? Vissec de la Tude was from his own part of the country, he was
+a nobleman and rich, and he was dead. These arguments Danry considered
+excellent. He was, however, in complete ignorance of all that concerned
+his father and his new family; he did not know even the name “Vissec de
+la Tude,” of which he made “Masers de la Tude”; Masers was the name of
+an estate belonging to Baron de Fontès, a relation of Henri de Vissec.
+The latter was not a marquis, as Danry believed, but simply a chevalier;
+he died leaving six sons, whilst Danry represents him as dying without
+issue. It goes without saying that all that our hero relates about his
+father in his <i>Memoirs</i> is pure invention. The Chevalier de la Tude
+never knew of the existence of the son of Jeanneton Aubrespy, and when
+in later years Danry asked the children to recognize him as their
+natural brother, his pretensions were rejected. Nevertheless our<a name="page_210" id="page_210"></a>
+gentleman will henceforth sign his letters and memoirs “Danry, or rather
+Henri Masers d’Aubrespy,” then “de Masers d’Aubrespy,” then “de Masers
+de la Tude.” When Danry had once got an idea in his head, he never let
+it go. He repeated it unceasingly until he had forced it upon the
+conviction of all about him&mdash;pertinacity which cannot fail to excite our
+admiration. In the patent of Danry’s pension of 400 livres granted by
+Louis XVI. in 1784, the king calls the son of poor Jeanneton “Vicomte
+Masers de la Tude.”</p>
+
+<p>As may well be imagined, the Vicomte de la Tude could not accept his
+liberty on the same terms as Danry. The latter would have been satisfied
+with 60,000 livres: the viscount demands 150,000 and the cross of St.
+Louis to boot. So he writes to the lieutenant of police. Sartine was too
+sensible a man to be long obdurate to the prisoner on account of these
+extravagances. “I was transferred to the keep of Vincennes on the night
+of September 15, 1764. About nine hours after, the late M. de Guyonnet,
+king’s lieutenant, came and saw me in the presence of the major and the
+three warders, and said: ‘M. de Sartine has instructed me to inform you,
+on his behalf, that provided you behave yourself quietly for a short
+time, he will set you free. You have written him a very violent letter,
+and you must apologize for it.’” Danry adds: “When all is said and done,
+M. de Sartine did treat me well.” He granted him for two hours every day
+“the extraordinary promenade of the moats.” “When a lieutenant of<a name="page_211" id="page_211"></a>
+police,” says Danry, “granted this privilege to a prisoner, it was with
+the object of promptly setting him free.” On November 23, 1765, Danry
+was walking thus, in company with a sentinel, outside the keep. The fog
+was dense. Turning suddenly towards his keeper, Danry said, “What do you
+think of this weather?” “It’s very bad.” “Well, it’s just the weather to
+escape in.” He took five paces and was out of sight. “I escaped from
+Vincennes,” writes Danry, “without trickery; an ox would have managed it
+as well.” But in the speech he delivered later in the National Assembly,
+the matter took a new complexion. “Think,” he cried, “of the unfortunate
+Latude, in his third escape, pursued by twenty soldiers, and yet
+stopping and disarming under their very eyes the sentinel who had taken
+aim at him!”</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>When Latude was at large, he found himself without resources, as at his
+first escape. “I escaped with my feet in slippers and not a sou in my
+pocket; I hadn’t a thing to bless myself with.” He took refuge with his
+young friends, the Misses Lebrun.</p>
+
+<p>In their keeping he found a part of his papers, plans and projects,
+memorials and dissertations. He sent “a basketful” of these to Marshal
+de Noailles, begging him to continue to honour him with his protection,
+and imparting to him “four great discoveries he had just made; first,
+the true cause of the tides; secondly, the true cause of mountains, but
+for which the globe would<a name="page_212" id="page_212"></a> be brought to a standstill and become
+speedily vitrified; thirdly, the cause of the ceaseless turning of the
+globe; fourthly, the cause of the saltness of sea-water.” He wrote also
+to the Duke de Choiseul, minister of war, in order to obtain a reward
+for his military scheme; he wrote making overtures of peace to Sartine:
+in return for an advance of 10,000 crowns of the 150,000 livres due to
+him, he would overlook the past: “I was resolved,” he says, “to stake
+all on one cast.” In reply, he received a letter naming a house where he
+would find 1200 livres obtained for him by Dr. Quesnay. He proceeded to
+the address indicated&mdash;and was there captured.</p>
+
+<p>He was at once taken back to Vincennes. He declares that he was about to
+be set at liberty at the moment of his escape: and now a new detention
+was commencing. We shall not relate in detail the life he was now to
+lead. Materially he continued to be well treated, but his mind became
+affected, his rages became more and more violent, reaching at last
+paroxysms of fury. Here are some extracts from letters and memorials
+sent to Sartine: “By all the devils, this is coming it too strong. It is
+true, sir, that I’d defy the blackest devils in all hell to teach you
+anything in the way of cruelty; and that’s but poor praise for you.” He
+writes on another occasion: “The crime of every one of us is to have
+seen through your villainies: we are to perish, are we? how delighted
+you would be if some one told you that we had all strangled ourselves in
+our cells!” Danry reminds the lieutenant of police of the tortures of
+Enguerrand de Marigni, adding:<a name="page_213" id="page_213"></a> “Remember that more than a thousand
+wretches have been broken in the Place de Grève who had not committed
+the hundredth part of your crimes.”... “Not a single person would be
+astonished to see you flayed alive, your skin tanned, and your carcase
+thrown into the gutters for the dogs to eat.”... “But Monsieur laughs
+at everything, Monsieur fears neither God, nor king, nor devil, Monsieur
+swills down his crimes like buttermilk!”</p>
+
+<p>In prison Latude wrote memoirs which he filled with calumnies on the
+ministers and the court. These memoirs are composed in the most dramatic
+style, with an inimitable accent of sincerity. It was known that the
+prisoner found a thousand means of sending them outside the walls, and
+it was feared that they might be circulated among the populace, whose
+minds&mdash;the year is 1775&mdash;were beginning to ferment. Latude had just been
+flung into a cell in consequence of a fresh outbreak against his
+jailers. “On March 19, 1775, the king’s lieutenant entered, accompanied
+by the major and three warders, and said to me: ‘I have obtained leave
+to let you out of the cell, but on one condition: that you hand over
+your papers.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Hand over my papers! I tell you, sir, I’d rather be done to death in
+this cell than show the white feather so!’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Your trunk is upstairs in your room: I’ve only to say the word and the
+seals would be broken and your papers taken out.<a name="page_214" id="page_214"></a>’</p>
+
+<p>“I replied: ‘Sir, justice has formalities to which you are bound to
+conform, and you are not allowed to commit such outrages.’</p>
+
+<p>“He took five or six steps out of the cell, and as I did not call him
+back, he came back himself and said: ‘Just hand them to me for ten days
+to examine them, and I give you my word of honour that at the end of
+that time I will have them returned to your room.’</p>
+
+<p>“I replied: ‘I will not let you have them for two hours even.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘All right,’ he said; ‘as you won’t entrust them to me, you have only
+to stay where you are.’”</p>
+
+<p>Latude relates in his <i>Memoirs</i> with great indignation the story of a
+flute he had made, on which he used to play, his sole diversion during
+the long hours of solitude; his jailers had the barbarity to take it
+from him. The governor of the fortress, out of compassion, offered to
+restore it. “But it will only be on condition that you play by day only,
+and not at night.” At this stipulation, writes Latude in his <i>Rêveries</i>,
+“I could not refrain from bantering him, saying, ‘Why, don’t you know,
+sir, that forbidding a thing is just the way to make me eager for it?’”</p>
+
+<p>And so at Vincennes as at Paris they came to consider Danry as a madman.
+Among the books given him for his amusement there were some dealing with
+sorcery. These he read and re-read, and from that time onward he saw in
+all the incidents of his life nothing but the perpetual intervention of
+devils evoked by the witch<a name="page_215" id="page_215"></a> Madame de Pompadour and her brother the
+magician, the Marquis de Marigny.</p>
+
+<p>Sartine came again to see the prisoner on November 8, 1772. Danry begged
+him to send a police officer to make a copy of a memorial he had drawn
+up for his own justification; to send also an advocate to assist him
+with his advice, and a doctor, to examine the state of his health. The
+police officer arrived on the 24th. On the 29th, he wrote to the
+lieutenant of police: “I have the honour to report that in pursuance of
+your orders I proceeded to the château of Vincennes on the 24th curt.,
+to hear from Danry something which, he asserts, concerns the minister:
+it is impossible to hear anything which concerns him less. He began by
+saying that to write all he had to tell me I should have to remain for
+three weeks with him. He was bound to tell me the story of 180
+sorceries, and I was to copy the story, according to him, from a heap of
+papers he drew from a bag, the writing of which is undecipherable.”</p>
+
+<p>We know from Danry himself what passed at the visit of the advocate. He
+entered the prisoner’s room about noon. Danry handed him two memorials
+he had drawn up and explained their purport. “Instantly he cut me short,
+saying, ‘Sir, I have no belief whatever in witchcraft.’ I did not give
+in, but said, ‘Sir, I cannot show you the devil in bodily shape, but I
+am very certain I can convince you, by the contents of this memorial,
+that the late Marquise de Pompadour was a witch, and that the Marquis de
+Marigny, her brother,<a name="page_216" id="page_216"></a> is at this very time still having dealings with
+the devil.’</p>
+
+<p>“The advocate had read but a few pages when he stopped dead, put the
+manuscript on the table, and said, as though he had been wakened out of
+a deep sleep, ‘Would you not like to get out of prison?’ I replied:
+‘There’s no doubt of that.’ ‘And do you intend to remain in Paris, or to
+go to your home?’ ‘When I am free, I shall go home.’ ‘But have you any
+means?’ Upon this I took his hand and said: ‘My dear sir, I beg you not
+to take offence at what I am going to say.’ ‘Speak on,’ he said, ‘say
+whatever you like, I shall not be offended.’ ‘Well then, I see very
+clearly that the devil has already got hold of you.’”</p>
+
+<p>In the same year, Malesherbes made his celebrated inspection of the
+prisons. “This virtuous minister came to see me at the beginning of
+August, 1775, and listened to me with the most lively interest.” The
+historian who has the completest knowledge of everything relating to the
+Bastille, François Ravaisson, believed that Malesherbes left the
+wretched man in prison out of regard for his colleague Maurepas. “One
+would have thought that Maurepas’ first act on resuming office would
+have been to release his old accomplice.” This conjecture is destroyed
+by a letter from Malesherbes to the governor of Vincennes: “I am busy,
+sir, with the examination of the papers relating to your various
+prisoners. Danry, Thorin, and Maréchal are quite mad, according to the
+particulars furnished to me, and the two<a name="page_217" id="page_217"></a> first gave indubitable marks
+of madness in my presence.”</p>
+
+<p>In consequence, Danry was transferred to Charenton on September 27,
+1775, “on account of mental derangement, in virtue of a royal order of
+the 23rd of the said month, countersigned by Lamoignon. The king will
+pay for his keep.” On entering his new abode, Latude took the precaution
+to change his name a third time, and signed the register “Danger.”</p>
+
+<p>In passing from the fortress of Vincennes to the hospital of Charenton,
+Danry thought it was as well to rise still higher in dignity. So we see
+him henceforth styling himself “engineer, geographer, and royal
+pensioner at Charenton.”</p>
+
+<p>His situation was sensibly changed for the better. He speaks of the
+kindnesses shown him by the Fathers of La Charité.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> He had companions
+whose society pleased him. Halls were set apart for billiards,
+backgammon, and cards. He had company at his meals and in his walks. He
+met Allègre, his old fellow-prisoner, whom he came upon among the
+dangerous lunatics in the dungeons; Allègre had been removed in 1763
+from the Bastille, where he was shattering and destroying everything.
+His latest fancy was that he was God. As to Danry, he had taken so
+kindly to his rôle as nobleman that to see his aristocratic and
+well-to-do air, to hear his conversation,<a name="page_218" id="page_218"></a> full of reminiscences of his
+family and his early life, no one could have doubted that he actually
+was the brilliant engineer officer he set up for, who had fallen in the
+prime of life a victim to the intrigues of the favourite. He hobnobbed
+with the aristocratic section of society at Charenton and struck up an
+intimacy with one of his associates, the Chevalier de Moyria, son of a
+lieutenant-colonel, and a knight of Saint-Louis.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Parlement, which sent a commission every year to inspect
+the Charenton asylum&mdash;a commission before which Danry appeared on two
+separate occasions&mdash;did not decide that he ought to be set at liberty.
+But one fine day in September, 1776, the prior of the Fathers, who took
+a quite exceptional interest in the lot of his pensioner, meeting him in
+the garden, said to him abruptly: “We are expecting a visit from the
+lieutenant of police; get ready a short and taking address to say to
+him.” The lieutenant of police, Lenoir, saw Danry, and listened to him
+attentively, and as the prior’s account of him was entirely favourable,
+the magistrate promised him his liberty. “Then Father Prudentius, my
+confessor, who was behind me, drew me by the arm to get me away, fearing
+lest, by some imprudent word, I might undo the good that had been
+decided on”&mdash;a charming incident, much to the honour of Father
+Prudentius.</p>
+
+<p>But on consideration it appeared dangerous to fling so suddenly upon
+society a man who would be at a loss how to live, having neither
+relatives nor fortune, having no longer the means of gaining a
+livelihood, and a man,<a name="page_219" id="page_219"></a> moreover, whom there was only too much reason to
+mistrust. Lenoir asked the prisoner if, once set at liberty, he would
+find the wherewithal to assure his existence; if he had any property; if
+he could give the names of any persons willing to go bail for him.</p>
+
+<p>What did this mean&mdash;<i>if</i> he had any property, <i>if</i> he could find
+sureties? He, Masers de Latude! Why, his whole family, when the Marquise
+de Pompadour had him put in the Bastille, was occupying a brilliant
+position! Why, his mother, of whose death he had had the agony to hear,
+had left a house and considerable estates! Latude took his pen, and
+without hesitation wrote to M. Caillet, royal notary at Montagnac: “My
+dear friend, I would bet ten to one you believe me dead; see how
+mistaken you are!... You have but to say the word and before the
+carnival is over we shall eat a capital leveret together.” And he speaks
+to his friend the notary of the fortune left by his mother, and of his
+family, who all of them cannot fail to be interested in him. Latude
+himself was not greatly astonished at receiving no reply to this
+epistle: but it must have passed under the eyes of the lieutenant of
+police, and what more did he want?</p>
+
+<p>Latude’s new friend, the Chevalier de Moyria, had already been for some
+time at liberty. The prisoner hastened to send him a copy of his letter
+to the notary. “The reply is a long time coming, M. Caillet is dead,
+doubtless.” What is to become of him? These twenty-eight years of
+captivity have endangered his fortune, have made him lose his friends;
+how is he to find the<a name="page_220" id="page_220"></a> remnant of his scattered family? Happily there
+remains to him a friendship, a friendship still recent, but already
+strong, in which he places his whole confidence. “Chevalier, it would
+only need your intervention to deliver me, by inducing your good mother
+to write to M. Lenoir.” The Chevalier de Moyria sent an amiable reply.
+Danry wrote another and more urgent letter, with such success that not
+only the Chevalier’s mother, but also an old friend of the Moyria
+family, Mercier de Saint-Vigor, a colonel, and controller-general of the
+queen’s household, intervened, and made applications at Versailles. “On
+June 5, 1777, King Louis XVI. restored to me my freedom; I have in my
+pocket the warrant under his own hand!”</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>On leaving Charenton, Danry signed an undertaking to depart immediately
+for Languedoc, an undertaking which he did not trouble to fulfil. Paris
+was the only city in France where a man of his stamp could thrive. He
+was now fifty-two years old, but was still youthful in appearance, full
+of go and vigour; his hair, as abundant as it had been in youth, had not
+become white. He soon found means of borrowing some money, and then we
+see him opening a campaign, exerting himself to get in touch with the
+ministers, gaining the protection of the Prince de Beauvau, distributing
+memorials in which he claimed a reward for great services rendered, and
+launched out into invectives against his oppressors, Sartine in
+particular. Minister Amelot sent for him, and<a name="page_221" id="page_221"></a> in tones of severity
+notified him that he was to leave the city at once. Latude did not wait
+for the command to be repeated. He had reached Saint-Bris, about a
+hundred miles from the capital, when he was suddenly arrested by the
+police officer Marais. Brought back to Paris, he was locked up in the
+Châtelet on July 16, 1777, and on August 1 conducted to Bicêtre. The
+first use he had made of his liberty was to introduce himself to a lady
+of quality and extort money from her by menaces. The officer found a
+considerable sum in his possession.</p>
+
+<p>Bicêtre was not a state prison like the Bastille and Vincennes, or an
+asylum like Charenton; it was the thieves’ prison. On entering, Danry
+took the precaution of changing his name a fourth time, calling himself
+Jedor. He is, moreover, careful in his <i>Memoirs</i> to give us the reason
+of this fresh metamorphosis: “I would not sully my father’s name by
+inscribing it on the register of this infamous place.” From this day
+there begins for him a truly wretched existence; huddled with criminals,
+put on bread and water, his lodging is a cell. But his long martyrdom is
+nearing its end: the hour of his apotheosis is at hand!</p>
+
+<p>Louis XVI. had now been on the throne for several years, and France had
+become the most impressionable country in the world. Tears flowed at the
+slightest provocation. Was it the sentimental literature, which Rousseau
+made fashionable, that produced this moving result, or contrariwise, was
+the literature successful because it hit the taste of the day? At all
+events, the<a name="page_222" id="page_222"></a> time was ripe for Latude. His recent unlucky experience was
+not to dishearten him. On the contrary, it is with a greater energy, a
+more poignant emotion, and cries still more heartrending, that he
+resumes the story of his interminable sufferings. The victim of cruel
+oppressors, of cowardly foes who have their own reasons for smothering
+his voice, he will not bend his head under his abominable treatment; he
+will remain proud, self-assured, erect before those who load him with
+irons!</p>
+
+<p>On the birth of the Dauphin, Louis XVI. resolved to admit his wretched
+prisoners to a share of his joy and to pronounce a great number of
+pardons. A special commission, composed of eight counsellors of the
+Châtelet and presided over by Cardinal de Rohan, sat at Bicêtre. Danry
+appeared before it on May 17, 1782. His new judges, as he testifies,
+heard his story with interest. But the decision of the commission was
+not favourable to him. He was not so much surprised at this as might be
+supposed: “The impure breath of vice,” he wrote to the Marquis de
+Conflans, “has never tainted my heart, but there are magistrates who
+would let off guilty men with free pardons rather than expose themselves
+to the merited reproach of having committed injustice of the most
+revolting kind in keeping innocence for thirty-three years in irons.”</p>
+
+<p>Giving rein to the marvellous activity of his brain, he composed at
+Bicêtre new schemes, memorials, and accounts of his misfortunes. To the
+Marquis de Conflans he sends a scheme for a hydraulic press, “the<a name="page_223" id="page_223"></a>
+homage of an unfortunate nobleman who has grown old in irons”; he
+induces the turnkeys to carry memorials to all who may possibly interest
+themselves in him. The first to take compassion on him was a priest, the
+Abbé Legal, of the parish of St. Roch, and curate of Bicêtre. He visited
+him, consoled him, gave him money, showed him attentions. Cardinal de
+Rohan also took much interest in him, and sent him some assistance
+through his secretary. We are coming at last to Madame Legros. This
+wonderful story is so well known that we shall tell it briefly. A
+drunken turnkey chanced to lose one of Latude’s memorials at a corner of
+the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois: it was picked up and
+opened by a woman, a haberdasher in a small way. Her heart burned within
+her as she read of these horrible sufferings, depicted in strokes of
+fire. She inspired her husband with her own emotion; henceforth it was
+to be the aim in life of these worthy people to effect the unhappy man’s
+deliverance, and Madame Legros devoted herself to the self-imposed task
+with indefatigable ardour, courage, and devotion. “A grand sight,” cries
+Michelet, “to see this poor, ill-clad woman going from door to door,
+paying court to footmen to win entrance into mansions, to plead her
+cause before the great, to implore their support!” In many houses she
+was well received. President de Gourgues, President de Lamoignon,
+Cardinal de Rohan, aided her with their influence. Sartine himself took
+steps on behalf of the unhappy man. Two advocates of the Parlement of
+Paris,<a name="page_224" id="page_224"></a> Lacroix and Comeyras, devoted themselves to his cause. Copies
+were made of the prisoner’s memorials and distributed in every
+drawing-room; they penetrated even into the boudoir of the queen. All
+hearts were stirred by the accents of this harrowing voice.</p>
+
+<p>The Marquis de Villette, who had become celebrated through the
+hospitality he showed to Voltaire when dying, conceived a passionate
+enthusiasm for Danry. He sent his steward to Bicêtre to offer him a
+pension of 600 livres on the sole condition of the prisoner’s leaving
+his case entirely in the Marquis’s hands. Latude received this singular
+proposal with becoming dignity. “For two years a poor woman has been
+devoting herself to my cause. I should be an ungrateful wretch if I did
+not leave my fate in her hands.” He knew that this pension would not
+escape him, and it was not for 600 livres that he would have consented
+to rob his story of the touching and romantic features it was
+increasingly assuming.</p>
+
+<p>Further, the French Academy actually intervenes! D’Alembert is all fire
+and flame. From this time a stream of visitors of the highest
+distinction flows through the squalid prison. At length the king himself
+is led to look into the affair. He has the documentary evidence brought
+to him and examines it carefully. With what anxiety everyone awaits his
+decision! But Louis XVI., now acquainted with the case, replies that
+Latude will be released&mdash;<i>never</i>! At this decree, to all appearance
+irrevocable, all the<a name="page_225" id="page_225"></a> prisoner’s friends lose heart, except Madame
+Legros. The queen and Madame Necker are on her side. In 1783, Breteuil,
+the queen’s man, comes into power; on March 24, 1784, the release is
+signed! The Vicomte de Latude receives a pension of 400 livres, but is
+exiled to his own part of the country. New importunities, new
+applications; at last they succeed: Latude is free to live in Paris!</p>
+
+<p>This is the grandest period in the life of a great man! Latude is soon
+in occupation of a modest but decent and well-ordered suite of rooms on
+the fourth floor. He lives with his two benefactors, M. and Madame
+Legros, petted, spoilt in a thousand ways. The Duchess of Beauvau has
+obtained for Madame Legros from Calonne, out of funds intended for the
+support of distressed gentlefolk, a pension of 600 livres: the Duchess
+of Kingston<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> grants a pension of the same amount. In addition to the
+royal pension, Latude receives 500 livres a year from President Dupaty
+and 300 from the Duke d’Ayen. Moreover, a public subscription is opened,
+and the list is filled with the greatest names in France. An agreeable
+competency is assured to the Legros couple and their adopted son. At its
+sitting on March 24, the French Academy<a name="page_226" id="page_226"></a> solemnly awarded the Montyon
+prize to the valiant little haberdasher. “The Dame Legros came to
+receive the medal amid the acclamations of the whole assembly.”</p>
+
+<p>The name of Latude is on everyone’s lips; he wins admiration and pity on
+all sides. Ladies of the highest society are not above mounting to the
+fourth story, accompanied by their daughters, to bring the poor man “aid
+in money, with their tears.” The hero has left a complacent description
+of the throng: duchesses, marchionesses, grandees of Spain, wearers of
+the cross of St. Louis, presidents of the Parlement, all these met at
+his house. Sometimes there were six or eight persons in his room.
+Everyone listened to his story and lavished on him marks of the most
+affectionate compassion, and no one failed before going away “to leave a
+mark of his sensibility.” The wives of Marshals de Luxembourg and de
+Beauvau, the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, the Countess de Guimont, were
+among the most zealous. “Indeed,” says our hero, “it would be extremely
+difficult for me to tell which of these countesses, marchionesses,
+duchesses, and princesses had the most humane, the most compassionate
+heart.”</p>
+
+<p>Thus Latude became one of the lions of Paris: strangers flocked to his
+lodging, hostesses ran off with him. At table, when he spoke, all voices
+were hushed with an air of deference and respect; in the drawing-room
+you would find him seated in a gilt chair near the fireplace where great
+logs were blazing, and surrounded by a thick cluster of bright, silky,
+rustling robes. The<a name="page_227" id="page_227"></a> Chevalier de Pougens, son of the Prince de Conti,
+pressed him to come and stay at his house; Latude graciously consented.
+The American ambassador, the illustrious Jefferson, invited him to
+dinner.</p>
+
+<p>Latude has himself described this enchanted life: “Since I left prison,
+the greatest lords of France have done me the honour of inviting me to
+eat with them, but I have not found a single house&mdash;except that of the
+Comte d’Angevillier, where you could meet men of wit and learning in
+scores, and receive all sorts of civilities on the part of the countess;
+and that of M. Guillemot, keeper of the royal palaces, one of the most
+charming families to be found in Paris&mdash;where you are more at your ease
+than with the Marquis de Villette.</p>
+
+<p>“When a man has felt, as I have felt, the rage of hunger, he always
+begins by speaking of his food. The Marquis de Villette possesses a cook
+who is a match for the most skilful in his art: in a word, his table is
+first-rate. At the tables of the dukes and peers and marshals of France
+there is eternal ceremony, and everyone speaks like a book, whereas at
+that of the Marquis de Villette, men of wit and learning always form the
+majority of the company. All the first-class musicians have a cover set
+at his table, and on at least three days of the week he gives a little
+concert.”</p>
+
+<p>On August 26, 1788, died one of the benefactresses of Latude, the
+Duchess of Kingston, who did not fail to mention her protégé in her
+will. We see him dutifully assisting at the sale of the lady’s furniture
+and effects.<a name="page_228" id="page_228"></a> He even bought a few things, giving a <i>louis d’ or</i> in
+payment. Next day, the sale being continued, the auctioneer handed the
+coin back to Latude: it was bad. Bad! What! did they take the Vicomte de
+Latude for a sharper? The coin bad! Who, he would like to know, had the
+insolence to make “an accusation so derogatory to his honour and his
+reputation?” Latude raised his voice, and the auctioneer threatened to
+bundle him out of the room. The insolent dog! “Bundle out rogues, not
+gentlemen!” But the auctioneer sent for the police, who put “the Sieur
+de Latude ignominiously outside.” He went off calmly, and the same day
+summoned the auctioneer before the Châtelet tribunal, “in order to get a
+reparation as authoritative as the defamation had been public.”</p>
+
+<p>In the following year (1789) Latude made a journey into England. He had
+taken steps to sue Sartine, Lenoir, and the heirs of Madame de Pompadour
+in the courts in order to obtain the damages due to him. In England, he
+drew up a memorandum for Sartine, in which he informed the late
+lieutenant of police of the conditions on which he would withdraw his
+actions. “M. de Sartine, you will give me, as compensation for all the
+harm and damage you have made me suffer unjustly, the sum of 900,000
+livres; M. Lenoir, 600,000 livres; the heirs of the late Marquise de
+Pompadour and Marquis de Menars, 100,000 crowns; in all, 1,800,000
+livres;” that is to say, about £160,000 in English money of to-day.<a name="page_229" id="page_229"></a></p>
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<a href="images/i_258_lg.png">
+<img class="enlargeimage"
+src="images/enlarge-image.jpg"
+alt="enlarge-image"
+title="enlarge-image"
+width="18"
+height="14" />
+</a><br /><img src="images/i_258_sml.png" width="434" height="550" alt="Latude.
+
+From the Painting by Vestier (Hôtel Carnavalet)." />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">Latude.<br />
+From the Painting by Vestier (Hôtel Carnavalet).</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>The Revolution broke out. If the epoch of Louis XVI., with its mildness
+and fellow-feeling, had been favourable to our hero, the Revolution
+seems to have been ordained on purpose for him. The people rose against
+the tyranny of kings: the towers of the Bastille were overthrown.
+Latude, the victim of kings, the victim of the Bastille and arbitrary
+warrants, was about to appear in all his glory.</p>
+
+<p>He hastened to throw into the gutter his powdered peruque and viscount’s
+frock; listen to the revolutionist, fierce, inflexible, indomitable,
+<i>uncompromising</i>: “Frenchmen, I have won the right to tell you the
+truth, and if you are free, you cannot but love to hear it.</p>
+
+<p>“For thirty-five years I meditated in dungeons on the audacity and
+insolence of despots; with loud cries I was calling down vengeance, when
+France in indignation rose up as one man in one sublime movement and
+levelled despotism with the dust. The will to be free is what makes a
+nation free; and you have proved it. But to preserve freedom a nation
+must make itself worthy of it, and that is what remains for you to do!”</p>
+
+<p>In the Salon of 1789 there were two portraits of Latude with the famous
+ropeladder. Below one of these portraits, by Vestier, a member of the
+Royal Academy, these lines were engraved:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Instruit par ses malheurs et sa captivité<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A vaincre des tyrans les efforts et la rage,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Il apprit aux Français comment le vrai courage<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Peut conquérir la liberté.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="page_230" id="page_230"></a></p>
+
+<p>In 1787 the Marquis de Beaupoil-Saint-Aulaire had written, inspired by
+Latude himself, the story of the martyr’s captivity. Of this book two
+editions appeared in the same year. In 1789 Latude published the
+narrative of his escape from the Bastille, as well as his <i>Grand
+Mémoire</i> to the Marquise de Pompadour; finally, in 1790 appeared
+<i>Despotism Unmasked, or the Memoirs of Henri Masers de Latude</i>, edited
+by the advocate Thiéry. The book was dedicated to La Fayette. On the
+first page we see a portrait of the hero, his face proud and energetic,
+one hand on the ropeladder, the other extended towards the Bastille
+which workmen are in the act of demolishing. “I swear,” says the author
+at the commencement, “that I will not relate one fact which is not
+true.” The work is a tissue of calumnies and lies; and what makes a most
+painful impression on the reader is to see this man disowning his
+mother, forgetting the privations she endured out of love for her son,
+and ascribing the credit of what little the poor thing could do for her
+child to a Marquis de la Tude, knight of St. Louis, and
+lieutenant-colonel of the Orleans Dragoons!</p>
+
+<p>But the book vibrates with an incomparable accent of sincerity and of
+that profound emotion which Latude knew so well how to infuse into all
+those with whom he had to do. In 1793, twenty editions had been
+exhausted, the work had been translated into several languages; the
+journals had no praise strong enough for the boldness and genius of the
+author; the <i>Mercure de France</i><a name="page_231" id="page_231"></a> proclaimed that henceforth it was a
+parent’s duty to teach his children to read in this sublime work; a copy
+was sent to all the departments, accompanied by a model of the Bastille
+by the architect Palloy. With good reason could Latude exclaim in the
+National Assembly: “I have not a little contributed to the Revolution
+and to its consolidation.”</p>
+
+<p>Latude was not the man to neglect opportunities so favourable. To begin
+with, he sought to get his pension augmented, and presented to the
+Constituent Assembly a petition backed by representative Bouche. But
+Camus, “rugged Camus,” president of the committee appointed to
+investigate the matter, decided on rejection; and at the sitting of
+March 13, 1791, deputy Voidel delivered a very spirited speech; his view
+was that the nation had unhappy folk to succour more worthy of their
+concern than a man whose life had begun with roguery and villainy. The
+Assembly sided with him; not only was Latude’s pension not increased,
+but on consideration, the pension granted by Louis XVI. was altogether
+withdrawn.</p>
+
+<p>Horror and infamy! “What madness has seized on the minds of the
+representatives of the most generous nation in the world!... To slay a
+hapless wretch the mere sight of whom awakens pity and warms into life
+the most sluggish sensibility ... for death is not so terrible as the
+loss of honour!” The valiant Latude will not abide the stroke of such an
+insult. Ere long he has brought Voidel to retract; in the heart of the
+Assembly<a name="page_232" id="page_232"></a> he gains an influential supporter in the Marshal de Broglie.
+The Constituent Assembly is replaced by the Legislative, and Latude
+returns to the charge. He is admitted to the bar of the House on January
+26, 1792; the matter is re-committed and gone into a second time on
+February 25. We should like to be able to quote at length the speech
+which Latude himself composed for his advocate; here is a portion of the
+peroration:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“That a man, without any outside assistance, should have been able to
+escape three times, once from the Bastille and twice from Vincennes,
+yes, gentlemen, I venture to say he could not have succeeded except by a
+miracle, or else that Latude has more than extraordinary genius. Cast
+your eyes on this ladder of rope and wood, and on all the other
+instruments which Latude constructed with a mere knife, which you see
+here in the centre of this chamber. I resolved to bring before your own
+eyes this interesting object, which will for ever win admiration from
+men of intelligence. Not a single stranger comes to Paris without going
+to see this masterpiece of intelligence and genius, as well as his
+generous deliverer, Madame Legros. We have resolved to give you,
+gentlemen, the pleasure of seeing this celebrated woman, who
+unremittingly for forty months set despotism at defiance, and vanquished
+it by dint of virtue. Behold her there at the bar with M. de Latude,
+behold that incomparable woman, for ever to be the glory and the
+ornament of her sex!”</p>
+
+<p>It is not surprising that the Legislative Assembly was<a name="page_233" id="page_233"></a> deeply moved by
+this eloquent harangue and this exhibition of the lady, as touching as
+unexpected. It unanimously voted Latude a pension of 2000 livres,
+without prejudice to the pension of 400 livres previously awarded.
+Henceforth Latude will be able to say: “The whole nation adopted me!”</p>
+
+<p>However, the little mishap in the Constituent Assembly was to be the
+only check that Latude suffered in the course of his glorious martyr’s
+career. Presented to the Society of “Friends of the Constitution,” he
+was elected a member by acclamation, and the Society sent a deputation
+of twelve members to carry the civic crown to Madame Legros. The leader
+of the deputation said, in a voice broken by emotion, “This day is the
+grandest day of my life.” A deputation from the principal theatres of
+Paris offered Latude free admission to all performances, “so that he
+might go often and forget the days of his mourning.” He was surrounded
+by the highest marks of consideration; pleaders begged him to support
+their cases before the tribunals with the moral authority bestowed on
+him by his virtue. He took advantage of this to bring definitively
+before the courts his claims against the heirs of the Marquise de
+Pompadour. Citizen Mony argued the case for the first time before the
+court of the sixth arrondissement on July 16, 1793; on September 11 the
+case came again before the magistrates: Citizens Chaumette, Laurent, and
+Legrand had been designated by the Commune of Paris as counsel for the
+defence, and the whole Commune was present at the hearing.<a name="page_234" id="page_234"></a> Latude
+obtained 60,000 livres, 10,000 of which were paid him in cash.</p>
+
+<p>And now his life became more tranquil. Madame Legros continued to lavish
+her care on him. The 50,000 livres remaining due to him from the heirs
+of the Marquise were paid in good farm lands situated in La Beauce, the
+profits of which he regularly drew.</p>
+
+<p>Let us hasten to add that France did not find in Latude an ungrateful
+child. The critical situation in which the nation was then struggling
+pained him deeply. He sought the means of providing a remedy, and in
+1799 brought out a “Scheme for the valuation of the eighty departments
+of France to save the Republic in less than three months,” and a “Memoir
+on the means of re-establishing the public credit and order in the
+finances of France.”</p>
+
+<p>When the estates of Madame de Pompadour were sequestrated, the farms
+Latude had received were taken from him; but he induced the Directory to
+restore them. He was less fortunate in his requisition for a licence for
+a theatre and a gaming-house. But he found consolation. The subsidies he
+went on extorting from right and left, the proceeds of his farms, the
+sale of his books, and the money brought in by the exhibition of his
+ropeladder, which was exhibited by a showman in the different towns of
+France and England, provided him with a very comfortable income.</p>
+
+<p>The Revolution became a thing of the past. Latude hailed the dawning
+glory of Bonaparte, and when<a name="page_235" id="page_235"></a> Bonaparte became Napoleon, Latude made his
+bow to the emperor. We have a very curious letter in which he marks out
+for Napoleon I. the line of conduct he should pursue to secure his own
+welfare and the good of France. It begins as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">Sire</span>,&mdash;I have been five times buried alive, and am well acquainted with
+misfortune. To have a heart more sympathetic than the common run of men
+it is necessary to have suffered great ills.... At the time of the
+Terror I had the delightful satisfaction of saving the lives of
+twenty-two poor wretches.... To petition Fouquet d’Etinville on behalf
+of the royalists was to persuade him that I was one myself. When I
+braved death in order to save the lives of twenty-two citizens, judge,
+great Emperor, if my heart can do ought but take great interest in you,
+the saviour of my beloved country.”</p>
+
+<p>We are given some details of the last years of Latude’s life in the
+<i>Memoirs</i> of his friend, the Chevalier de Pougens, and in the <i>Memoirs</i>
+of the Duchess d’Abrantès. The Chevalier tells us that at the age of
+seventy-five years he still enjoyed good health; he was “active and gay,
+and appeared to enjoy to the full the delights of existence. Every day
+he took long walks in Paris without experiencing the least fatigue.
+People were amazed to find <i>no trace</i> of the cruel sufferings he had
+undergone in the cells during a captivity of thirty-five years.” His
+popularity suffered no diminution under the Empire. Junot awarded him a
+pension from funds at his disposal.<a name="page_236" id="page_236"></a> One day the general presented him
+to his wife, along with Madame Legros, whose side Latude never left.
+“When he arrived,” says the Duchess d’Abrantès, “I went to greet him
+with a respect and an emotion that must have been truly edifying. I took
+him by the hand, conducted him to a chair, and put a cushion under his
+feet; in fact, he might have been my grandfather, whom I could not have
+treated better. At table I placed him on my right. But,” adds the
+Duchess, “my enchantment was of short duration. He talked of nothing but
+his own adventures with appalling loquacity.”</p>
+
+<p>At the age of eighty, a few months before his death, Latude wrote in the
+most familiar terms to his protector, the Chevalier de Pougens, a member
+of the Institute: “Now I assure you in the clearest possible words, that
+if within ten days of the present time, the 11th Messidor, you have not
+turned up in Paris (the Chevalier was staying at his country estate), I
+shall start the next day and come to you with the hunger of a giant and
+the thirst of a cabby, and when I have emptied your cellar and eaten you
+out of house and home you will see me play the second act of the comedy
+of <i>Jocrisse</i><a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a>; you will see me run off with your plates, and dishes,
+and tankards,<a name="page_237" id="page_237"></a> and bottles&mdash;empty, you may be sure&mdash;and fling all your
+furniture out of the window!”</p>
+
+<p>On July 20, 1804, Latude compiled one more circular, addressed to the
+sovereigns of Europe: the kings of Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, the
+Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor; and to the President of the
+United States. To each of them he sent a copy of his <i>Memoirs</i>,
+accompanied by the famous scheme for replacing with muskets the pikes
+with which the sergeants were armed. He explained to each of the
+sovereigns that as the country he ruled was profiting by this child of
+his genius, it was only just that he should reap some benefit.</p>
+
+<p>Jean Henri, surnamed Danry, alias Danger, alias Jedor, alias Masers
+d’Aubrespy, alias De Masers de Latude, died of pneumonia at Paris, on
+January 1, 1805, aged eighty years.<a name="page_238" id="page_238"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.<br /><br />
+<small>THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY.</small></h2>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>N</small> the remarkable book entitled <i>Paris during the Revolution</i>, M.
+Adolphe Schmidt writes: “All the purely revolutionary events, the events
+of the Fourteenth of July, of October 5 and 6, 1789, were the work of an
+obscure minority of reckless and violent revolutionists. If they
+succeeded, it was only because the great majority of the citizens
+avoided the scene of operations or were mere passive spectators there,
+attracted by curiosity, and giving in appearance an enhanced importance
+to the movement.” Further on he says: “After the fall of the
+Gironde,<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> Dutard expressed himself in these terms: ‘If, out of 50,000
+Moderates, you succeed in collecting a compact body of no more than
+3000, I shall be much astonished; and if out of these 3000 there are to
+be found only 500 who are agreed, and courageous enough to express their
+opinion, I shall be still more astonished.<a name="page_239" id="page_239"></a> And these, in truth, must
+expect to be Septembrised.’<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> ‘Twelve maniacs, with their blood well
+up, at the head of the Sansculotte section,’ writes Dutard in another
+report, ‘would put to flight the other forty-seven sections of Paris.’
+Mercier, after the fall of the Gironde, thus expresses himself in regard
+to the reign of Terror: ‘Sixty brigands deluged France with blood:
+500,000 men within our walls were witnesses of their atrocities, and
+were not brave enough to oppose them.’”</p>
+
+<p>To enable the reader to understand the extraordinary and improbable
+event which is the subject of this chapter, it would be necessary to
+begin by explaining the circumstances and describing the material and
+moral state of things in which it happened; and that, unhappily, would
+occupy much space. Let us take the two principal facts, see what they
+led to, and then come to the events of the Fourteenth of July.</p>
+
+<p>For its task of governing France, the royal power had in its hands no
+administrative instrument, or, at any rate, administrative instruments
+of a very rudimentary character. It ruled through tradition and
+sentiment. The royal power had been created by the affection and
+devotion of the nation, and in this devotion and affection lay its whole
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>What, actually and practically, were the means of government in the
+hands of the king? “Get rid of <i>lettres de cachet</i>,” observed
+Malesherbes, “and you<a name="page_240" id="page_240"></a> deprive the king of all his authority, for the
+<i>lettre de cachet</i> is the only means he possesses of enforcing his will
+in the kingdom.” Now, for several years past, the royal power had
+practically renounced <i>lettres de cachet</i>. On the other hand, during the
+course of the eighteenth century, the sentiments of affection and
+devotion of which we have spoken had become enfeebled, or at least had
+changed their character. So it was that on the eve of the Revolution the
+royal power, which stood in France for the entire administration, had,
+if the expression may be allowed, melted into thin air.</p>
+
+<p>Below the royal power, the lords in the country, the upper ten in the
+towns, constituted the second degree in the government. The same remarks
+apply here also. And unhappily it is certain that, over the greater part
+of France, the territorial lords had forgotten the duties which their
+privileges and their station imposed. The old attachment of the
+labouring classes to them had almost everywhere disappeared, and in many
+particulars had given place to feelings of hostility.</p>
+
+<p>Thus on the eve of ’89 the whole fabric of the state had no longer any
+real existence: at the first shock it was bound to crumble into dust.
+And as, behind the fragile outer wall, there was no solid structure&mdash;no
+administrative machine, with its numerous, diverse, and nicely-balanced
+parts, like that which in our time acts as a buffer against the shocks
+of political crises,&mdash;the first blow aimed at the royal power was bound
+to plunge the whole country into a state of disorganization<a name="page_241" id="page_241"></a> and
+disorder from which the tyranny of the Terror, brutal, blood-stained,
+overwhelming as it was, alone could rescue it.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the first of the two facts we desire to make clear. We come now
+to the second. Ever since the year 1780, France had been almost
+continually in a state of famine. The rapidity and the abundance of the
+international exchanges which in our days supply us constantly from the
+remotest corners of the world with the necessaries of life, prevent our
+knowing anything of those terrible crises which in former days swept
+over the nations. “The dearth,” writes Taine, “permanent, prolonged,
+having already lasted ten years, and aggravated by the very outbreaks
+which it provoked, went on adding fuel to all the passions of men till
+they reached a blaze of madness.” “The nearer we come to the Fourteenth
+of July,” says an eye witness, “the greater the famine becomes.” “In
+consequence of the bad harvest,” writes Schmidt, “the price of bread had
+been steadily rising from the opening of the year 1789. This state of
+things was utilized by the agitators who aimed at driving the people
+into excesses: these excesses in turn paralyzed trade. Business ceased,
+and numbers of workers found themselves without bread.”</p>
+
+<p>A few words should properly be said in regard to brigandage under the
+<i>ancien régime</i>. The progress of manners and especially the development
+of executive government have caused it utterly to disappear. The
+reader’s imagination will supply all we have not space to<a name="page_242" id="page_242"></a> say. He will
+recollect the lengths of daring to which a man like Cartouche<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> could
+go, and recall what the forest of Bondy<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> was at the gates of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>So grew up towards the end of the <i>ancien régime</i> what Taine has so
+happily called a spontaneous anarchy. In the four months preceding the
+capture of the Bastille, one can count more than three hundred riots in
+France. At Nantes, on January 9, 1789, the town hall was invaded, and
+the bakers’ shops pillaged. All this took place to the cries of “Vive le
+roi!” At Bray-sur-Seine, on May 1, peasants armed with knives and clubs
+forced the farmers to lower the price of corn. At Rouen, on May 28, the
+corn in the market place was plundered. In Picardy, a discharged
+carabineer put himself at the head of an armed band which attacked the
+villages and carried off the corn. On all sides houses were looted from
+roof to cellar. At Aupt, M. de Montferrat, defending himself, was “cut
+into little pieces.” At La Seyne, the mob brought a coffin in front of
+the house of one of the principal burgesses; he was told to prepare for
+death, and they would do him the honour to bury him. He escaped, and his
+house was sacked. We cull these facts haphazard from among hundreds of
+others.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate neighbourhood of Paris was plunged<a name="page_243" id="page_243"></a> in terror. The batches
+of letters, still unpublished, preserved in the National Archives throw
+the most vivid light on this point. Bands of armed vagabonds scoured the
+country districts, pillaging the villages and plundering the crops.
+These were the “Brigands,” a term which constantly recurs in the
+documents, and more and more frequently as we approach the 14th of July.
+These armed bands numbered three, four, five hundred men. At Cosne, at
+Orleans, at Rambouillet, it was the same story of raids on the corn. In
+different localities of the environs of Paris, the people organized
+themselves on a military basis. Armed burghers patrolled the streets
+against the “brigands.” From all sides the people rained on the king
+demands for troops to protect them. Towns like Versailles, in dread of
+an invasion by these ruffians, implored the king for protection: the
+letters of the municipal council preserved in the National Archives are
+in the highest degree instructive.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment there had collected in the outskirts of Paris those
+troops whose presence was in the sequel so skilfully turned to account
+by the orators of the Palais-Royal. True, the presence of the troops
+made them uneasy. So far were the soldiers from having designs against
+the Parisians that in the secret correspondence of Villedeuil we find
+the court constantly urging that they should be reserved for the
+safeguarding of the adjoining districts, which were every day exposed to
+attack, and for the safe conduct of the convoys of corn coming up to
+Versailles and Paris. Bands mustered<a name="page_244" id="page_244"></a> around the capital. In the first
+weeks of May, near Villejuif, a troop of from five to six hundred
+ruffians met intending to storm Bicêtre and march on Saint-Cloud. They
+came from distances of thirty, forty, and fifty leagues, and the whole
+mass surged around Paris and was swallowed up there as into a sewer.
+During the last days of April the shopmen saw streaming through the
+barriers “a terrific number of men, ill clad and of sinister aspect.” By
+the first days of May, it was noticed that the appearance of the mob had
+altogether changed. There was now mingled with it “a number of strangers
+from all the country parts, most of them in rags, and armed with huge
+clubs, the mere aspect of them showing what was to be feared.” In the
+words of a contemporary, “one met such physiognomies as one never
+remembered having seen in the light of day.” To provide occupation for a
+part of these ill-favoured unemployed, whose presence everybody felt to
+be disquieting, workshops were constructed at Montmartre, where from
+seventeen to eighteen thousand men were employed on improvised tasks at
+twenty sous a day.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the electors chosen to nominate deputies to the National
+Assembly had been collecting. On April 22, 1789, Thiroux de Crosne, the
+lieutenant of police, speaking of the tranquillity with which the
+elections were being carried on, added: “But I constantly have my eye on
+the bakers.”</p>
+
+<p>On April 23, de Crosne referred to the irritation which was showing
+itself among certain groups of workmen in<a name="page_245" id="page_245"></a> the Suburb Saint-Antoine
+against two manufacturers, Dominique Henriot, the saltpetre-maker, and
+Réveillon, the manufacturer of wall-papers. Henriot was known, not only
+for his intelligence, but for his kindliness; in years of distress he
+had sacrificed a portion of his fortune for the support of the workmen;
+as to Réveillon, he was at this date one of the most remarkable
+representatives of Parisian industry. A simple workman to begin with, he
+was in 1789 paying 200,000 livres a year in salaries to 300 workers;
+shortly before, he had carried off the prize founded by Necker for the
+encouragement of useful arts. Henriot and Réveillon were said to have
+made offensive remarks against the workmen in the course of the recent
+electoral assemblies. They both denied, however, having uttered the
+remarks attributed to them, and there is every reason to believe that
+their denials were genuine.</p>
+
+<p>During the night of April 27 and the next day, howling mobs attacked the
+establishments of Henriot and Réveillon, which were thoroughly
+plundered. Commissary Gueullette, in his report of May 3, notes that a
+wild and systematic devastation was perpetrated. Only the walls were
+left standing. What was not stolen was smashed into atoms. The
+“brigands”&mdash;the expression used by the Commissary&mdash;threw a part of the
+plant out of the windows into the street, where the mob made bonfires of
+it. Part of the crowd were drunk; nevertheless they flung themselves
+into the cellars, and the casks were stove in. When casks and bottles
+were<a name="page_246" id="page_246"></a> empty, the rioters attacked the flasks containing colouring
+matter; this they absorbed in vast quantities, and reeled about with
+fearful contortions, poisoned. When these cellars were entered next day,
+they presented a horrible spectacle, for the wretches had come to
+quarrelling and cutting each other’s throats. “The people got on to the
+roofs,” writes Thiroux de Crosne, “whence they rained down upon the
+troops a perfect hailstorm of tiles, stones, &amp;c.; they even set rolling
+down fragments of chimneys and bits of timber; and although they were
+fired upon several times and some persons were killed, it was quite
+impossible to master them.”</p>
+
+<p>The riot was not quelled by the troops until 10 o’clock that night; more
+than a hundred persons were left dead in the street. M. Alexandre Tuetey
+has devoted some remarkable pages to Réveillon’s affair; he has
+carefully studied the interrogatories of rioters who were arrested. The
+majority, he says, had been drunk all day. Réveillon, as is well known,
+only found safety by taking refuge in the Bastille. He was the only
+prisoner whom the Bastille received throughout the year 1789.</p>
+
+<p>In the night following these bacchanalian orgies, the agents of the
+Marquis du Châtelet, colonel of the Gardes Françaises, having crept
+along one of the moats, “saw a crowd of brigands” collected on the
+further side of the Trône gate. Their leader was mounted on a table,
+haranguing them.</p>
+
+<p>We come upon them again in the report of Commissary Vauglenne, quoted by
+M. Alexandre Tuetey. “On<a name="page_247" id="page_247"></a> April 29, Vauglenne took the depositions of
+bakers, confectioners, and pork butchers of the Marais, who had been
+robbed by veritable bands of highwaymen, who proceed by burglary and
+violence; they may possibly be starving men, but they look and act
+uncommonly like gentlemen of the road.”</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, in the garden of the Palais-Royal, Camille Desmoulins was
+haranguing groups of the unemployed and ravenous outcasts, who were
+pressing round him with wide glaring eyes. Desmoulins vociferates: “The
+beast is in the trap; now to finish him!... Never a richer prey has ever
+been offered to conquerors! Forty thousand palaces, mansions, châteaux,
+two-fifths of the wealth of France will be the prize of valour. Those
+who have set up as our masters will be mastered in their turn, the
+nation will be purged!” It is easy to understand that in Paris the alarm
+had become as acute as in the country; everyone was in terror of the
+“brigands.” On June 25 it was decided to form a citizen militia for the
+protection of property. “The notoriety of these disorders,” we read in
+the minutes of the electors, “and the excesses committed by several mobs
+have decided the general assembly to re-establish without delay the
+militia of Paris.” But a certain time was necessary for the organization
+of this civil guard. On June 30, the doors of the Abbaye, where some
+Gardes Françaises had been locked up, some for desertion, others for
+theft, were broken in by blows from hatchets and hammers. The prisoners
+were led in triumph to the<a name="page_248" id="page_248"></a> Palais-Royal, where they were fêted in the
+garden. The extent of the disorders was already so great that the
+government, powerless to repress them, had perforce to grant a general
+pardon. From that day there was no longer any need to capture the
+Bastille, the <i>ancien régime</i> was lost.</p>
+
+<p>The disturbances at the Palais-Royal, the rendezvous of idlers, light
+women, and hot-headed fools, were becoming ever more violent. They began
+to talk of setting fire to the place. If some honest citizen plucked up
+courage to protest he was publicly whipped, thrown into the ponds, and
+rolled in the mud.</p>
+
+<p>On July 11, Necker was dismissed from the ministry and replaced by
+Breteuil. At this time Necker was very popular; Breteuil was not, though
+he ought to have been, particularly in the eyes of supporters of a
+revolutionary movement. Of all the ministers of the <i>ancien régime</i>, and
+of all the men of his time, Breteuil was the one who had done most for
+the suppression of <i>lettres de cachet</i> and of state prisons. It was he
+who had closed Vincennes and the Châtimoine tower of Caen, who had got
+the demolition of the Bastille decided on, who had set Latude at
+liberty, and how many other prisoners! who had drawn up and made
+respected, even in the remotest parts of the kingdom, those admirable
+circulars which will immortalize his name, by which he ordered the
+immediate liberation of all prisoners whose detention was not absolutely
+justified, and laid down such rigorous formalities for the future, that
+the arbitrary character of <i>lettres de cachet</i> may<a name="page_249" id="page_249"></a> be said to have been
+destroyed by them. Nevertheless the orators of the Palais-Royal
+succeeded in persuading many people that the advent of Breteuil to the
+ministry presaged a “St. Bartholomew of patriots.” The agitation became
+so vehement, the calumnies against the court and the government were
+repeated with so much violence, that the court, in order to avoid the
+slightest risk of the outbreak of a “St. Bartholomew,” ordered all the
+troops to be withdrawn and Paris to be left to itself.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Camille Desmoulins was continuing to thunder forth: “I have
+just sounded the people. My rage against the despots was turned to
+despair. I did not see the crowds, although keenly moved and dismayed,
+strongly enough disposed to insurrection.... I was rather lifted on to
+the table than mounted there myself. Scarcely was I there than I saw
+myself surrounded by an immense throng. Here is my short address, which
+I shall never forget: ‘Citizens! there is not a moment to lose. I come
+from Versailles; M. Necker is dismissed; this dismissal is the alarm
+bell of a St. Bartholomew of patriots; this evening all the Swiss and
+German battalions will march from the Champ de Mars to cut our throats.
+Only one resource remains to us: we must fly to arms!’”</p>
+
+<p>The Parisians were in an abject state of fright, but it was not the
+Swiss and German battalions which terrified them. The author of the
+<i>Memorable Fortnight</i>, devoted heart and soul as he was to the
+revolutionary movement,<a name="page_250" id="page_250"></a> acknowledges that during the days from the 12th
+to the 14th of July, all respectable people shut themselves up in their
+houses. And while the troops and decent people were retiring, the dregs
+were coming to the surface. During the night of July 12, the majority of
+the toll gates, where the town dues were collected, were broken open,
+plundered, and set on fire. “Brigands,” armed with pikes and clubs,
+scoured the streets, threatening the houses in which the trembling and
+agitated citizens had shut themselves. Next day, July 13, the shops of
+the bakers and wine merchants were rifled. “Girls snatched the earrings
+from women who went by; if the ring resisted, the ear was torn in two.”
+“The house of the lieutenant of police was ransacked, and Thiroux de
+Crosne had the utmost difficulty in escaping from the bands armed with
+clubs and torches. Another troop, with murderous cries, arrived at the
+Force, where prisoners for debt were confined: the prisoners were set
+free. The Garde-Meuble was ransacked. One gang broke in with their axes
+the door of the Lazarists, smashed the library, the cupboards, the
+pictures, the windows, the physical laboratory, dived into the cellar,
+stove in the wine-casks and got gloriously drunk. Twenty-four hours
+afterwards some thirty dead and dying were found there, men and women,
+one of the latter on the point of childbirth. In front of the house the
+street was full of débris and of brigands, who held in their hands, some
+eatables, others a pitcher, forcing wayfarers to drink and filling for
+all and sundry. Wine flowed in<a name="page_251" id="page_251"></a> torrents.” Some had possessed themselves
+of ecclesiastical robes, which they put on, and in this attire yelled
+and gesticulated down the street. In the minute books of the electors we
+read at this date: “On information given to the committee that the
+brigands who had been dispersed showed some disposition to reassemble
+for the purpose of attacking and pillaging the Royal Treasury and the
+Bank, the committee ordered these two establishments to be guarded.” On
+the same day, they luckily succeeded in disarming more than a hundred
+and fifty of these roisterers, who, drunk with wine and brandy, had
+fallen asleep inside the Hôtel de Ville. Meanwhile the outskirts of
+Paris were no safer than the city itself, and from the top of the towers
+of the Bastille they could see the conflagrations which were started in
+various quarters.</p>
+
+<p>The organization of the citizen militia against these disorders was
+becoming urgent. When evening came, the majority of the districts set
+actively to work. Twelve hundred good citizens mustered in the Petit
+Saint-Antoine district. It was a motley crew: tradesmen and artisans,
+magistrates and doctors, writers and scholars, cheek by jowl with
+navvies and carpenters. The future minister of Louis XVI., Champion de
+Villeneuve, filled the post of secretary. The twelve hundred citizens,
+as we read in the minutes, “compelled to unite by the too well founded
+alarm inspired in all the citizens by the danger which seems to threaten
+them each individually, and by the imminent necessity of taking prompt
+measures<a name="page_252" id="page_252"></a> to avert its effects, considering that a number of
+individuals, terrified perhaps by the rumours which doubtless
+evil-disposed persons have disseminated, are traversing, armed and in
+disorder, all the streets of the capital, and that the ordinary town
+guard either mingles with them or remains a passive spectator of the
+disorder it cannot arrest; considering also that the prison of the Force
+has been burst into and opened for the prisoners, and that it is
+threatened to force open in the same way the prisons which confine
+vagabonds, vagrants, and convicts ... in consequence, the assembled
+citizens decide to organize themselves into a citizen militia. Every man
+will carry while on duty whatever arms he can procure, save and except
+pistols, which are forbidden as dangerous weapons.... There will always
+be two patrols on duty at a time, and two others will remain at the
+place fixed for headquarters.” Most of the other districts imitated the
+proceedings of the Petit-Saint-Antoine. They sent delegates to the Hôtel
+des Invalides to ask for arms. The delegates were received by Besenval,
+who would have been glad to grant them what they requested; but he must
+have proper instructions. He writes in his <i>Memoirs</i> that the delegates
+were in a great state of fright, saying that the “brigands” were
+threatening to burn and pillage their houses. The author of the
+<i>Memorable Fortnight</i> dwells on the point that the militia of Paris was
+formed in self-defence against the excesses of the brigands. Speaking of
+the minute book of the Petit-Saint-Antoine district, an excellent
+authority, M. Charavay,<a name="page_253" id="page_253"></a> writes: “The burgesses of Paris, less alarmed
+at the plans of the court than at the men to whom the name of <i>brigands</i>
+had already been given, organized themselves into a militia to resist
+them: that was their only aim. The movement which on the next day swept
+away the Bastille might perhaps have been repressed by the National
+Guard if its organization had had greater stability.” The fact could not
+have been better put.</p>
+
+<p>The Hôtel de Ville was attacked, and one of the electors, Legrand, only
+cleared it of the hordes who were filling it with their infernal uproar
+by ordering six barrels of powder to be brought up, and threatening to
+blow the place up if they did not retire.</p>
+
+<p>During the night of July 13, the shops of the bakers and wine-sellers
+were pillaged. The excellent Abbé Morellet, one of the Encyclopædists,
+who, as we have seen, was locked up in the Bastille under Louis XV.,
+writes: “I spent a great part of the night of the 13th at my windows,
+watching the scum of the population armed with muskets, pikes, and
+skewers, as they forced open the doors of the houses and got themselves
+food and drink, money and arms.” Mathieu Dumas also describes in his
+<i>Souvenirs</i> these ragged vagabonds, several almost naked, and with
+horrible faces. During these two days and nights, writes Bailly, Paris
+ran great risk of pillage, and was only saved by the National Guard.</p>
+
+<p>The proceedings of these bandits and the work of the National Guard are
+described in a curious letter from an English doctor, named Rigby, to
+his wife. “It was<a name="page_254" id="page_254"></a> necessary not only to give arms to those one could
+rely on, but to disarm those of whom little protection could be expected
+and who might become a cause of disorder and harm. This required a good
+deal of skill. Early in the afternoon we began to catch a glimpse here
+and there among the swarms of people, where we saw signs of an
+irritation which might soon develop into excesses, of a man of decent
+appearance, carrying a musket with a soldierly air. These slowly but
+surely increased in number; their intention was evidently to pacify and
+at the same time to disarm the irregular bands. They had for the most
+part accomplished their task before nightfall. Then the citizens who had
+been officially armed occupied the streets almost exclusively: they were
+divided into several sections, some mounting guard at certain points,
+others patrolling the streets, all under the leadership of captains.
+When night came, only very few of those who had armed themselves the
+evening before could be seen. Some, however, had refused to give up
+their arms, and during the night it was seen how well founded had been
+the fears they had inspired, for they started to pillage. But it was too
+late to do so with impunity. The looters were discovered and seized, and
+we learnt next morning that several of these wretches, taken redhanded,
+had been executed.” Indeed, the repressive measures of the citizens were
+not wanting in energy. Here and there brigands were strung up to the
+lamp-posts, and then despatched, as they hung there, with musket shots.<a name="page_255" id="page_255"></a></p>
+
+<p>The author of the <i>Authentic History</i>, who left the best of the
+contemporary accounts of the taking of the Bastille which we possess,
+says rightly enough: “The riot began on the evening of July 12.” There
+was thus a combination of disorders and “brigandage” in which the
+capture of the Bastille, though it stands out more prominently than the
+other events, was only a part, and cannot be considered by itself.</p>
+
+<p>The morning of the Fourteenth dawned bright and sunny. A great part of
+the population had remained up all night, and daylight found them still
+harassed with anxiety and alarm. To have arms was the desire of all; the
+citizens and supporters of order, so as to protect themselves; the
+brigands, a part of whom had been disarmed, in order to procure or
+recover the means of assault and pillage. There was a rush to the
+Invalides, where the magazines of effective arms were. This was the
+first violent action of the day. The mob carried off 28,000 muskets and
+twenty-four cannon. And as it was known that other munitions of war were
+deposited in the Bastille, the cry of “To the Invalides!” was succeeded
+by the cry “To the Bastille!”</p>
+
+<p>We must carefully distinguish between the two elements of which the
+throng flocking to the Bastille was composed. On the one hand, a horde
+of nameless vagabonds, those whom the contemporary documents invariably
+style the “brigands”; and, on the other hand, the respectable
+citizens&mdash;these certainly formed the minority&mdash;who desired arms for the
+equipment of<a name="page_256" id="page_256"></a> the civil guard. The sole motive impelling this band to
+the Bastille was the wish to procure arms. On this point all documents
+of any value and all the historians who have studied the matter closely
+are in agreement. There was no question of liberty or of tyranny, of
+setting free the prisoners or of protesting against the royal authority.
+The capture of the Bastille was effected amid cries of “Vive le roi!”
+just as, for several months past in the provinces, the granaries had
+been plundered.</p>
+
+<p>About 8 o’clock in the morning, the electors at the Hôtel de Ville
+received some inhabitants of the Suburb Saint-Antoine who came to
+complain that the district was threatened by the cannon trained on it
+from the towers of the Bastille. These cannon were used for firing
+salutes on occasions of public rejoicing, and were so placed that they
+could do no harm whatever to the adjacent districts. But the electors
+sent some of their number to the Bastille, where the governor, de
+Launey, received the deputation with the greatest affability, kept them
+to lunch, and at their request withdrew the cannon from the embrasures.
+To this deputation there succeeded another, which, however, was quite
+unofficial, consisting of three persons, with the advocate Thuriot de la
+Rosière at the head. They were admitted as their predecessors had been.
+Thuriot was the eloquent spokesman, “in the name of the nation and the
+fatherland.” He delivered an ultimatum to the governor and harangued the
+garrison, consisting of 95 Invalides and 30 Swiss soldiers. Some<a name="page_257" id="page_257"></a>
+thousand men were thronging round the Bastille, vociferating wildly. The
+garrison swore not to fire unless they were attacked. De Launey said
+that without orders he could do no more than withdraw the cannon from
+the embrasures, but he went so far as to block up these embrasures with
+planks. Then Thuriot took his leave and returned to the Hôtel de Ville,
+the crowd meanwhile becoming more and more threatening.</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<a href="images/i_288_lg.png">
+<img class="enlargeimage"
+src="images/enlarge-image.jpg"
+alt="enlarge-image"
+title="enlarge-image"
+width="18"
+height="14" />
+</a><br /><img src="images/i_288_sml.png" width="550" height="344" alt="The Capture of the Bastille.
+
+From an anonymous contemporary painting now in the Hôtel Carnavalet." />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">The Capture of the Bastille.<br />
+From an anonymous contemporary painting now in the Hôtel Carnavalet.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>“The entrance to the first courtyard, that of the barracks, was open,”
+says M. Fernand Bournon in his admirable account of the events of this
+day; “but de Launey had ordered the garrison to retire within the
+enclosure, and to raise the outer drawbridge by which the court of the
+governor was reached, and which in the ordinary way used to be lowered
+during the day. Two daring fellows dashed forward and scaled the roof of
+the guard-house, one of them a soldier named Louis Tournay: the name of
+the other is unknown. They shattered the chains of the drawbridge with
+their axes, and it fell.”</p>
+
+<p>It has been said in a recent work, in which defects of judgment and
+criticism are scarcely masked by a cumbrous parade of erudition, that
+Tournay and his companion performed their feat under the fire of the
+garrison. At this moment the garrison did not fire a single shot,
+contenting themselves with urging the besiegers to retire. “While M. de
+Launey and his officers contented themselves with threats, these two
+vigorous champions succeeded in breaking in the doors and in lowering
+the outer drawbridge; then the horde<a name="page_258" id="page_258"></a> of brigands advanced in a body and
+dashed towards the second bridge, which they wished to capture, firing
+at the troops as they ran. It was then for the first time that M. de
+Launey, perceiving his error in allowing the operations at the first
+bridge to be managed so quietly, ordered the soldiers to fire, which
+caused a disorderly stampede on the part of the rabble, which was more
+brutal than brave; and it is at this point that the calumnies against
+the governor begin. Transposing the order of events, it has been
+asserted that he had sent out a message of peace, that the people had
+advanced in reliance on his word, and that many citizens were
+massacred.” This alleged treachery of de Launey, immediately hawked
+about Paris, was one of the events of the day. It is contradicted not
+only by all the accounts of the besieged, but by the besiegers
+themselves, and is now rejected by all historians.</p>
+
+<p>A wine-seller named Cholat, aided by one Baron, nicknamed La Giroflée,
+had brought into position a piece of ordnance in the long walk of the
+arsenal. They fired, but the gun’s recoil somewhat seriously wounded the
+two artillerymen, and they were its only victims. As these means were
+insufficient to overturn the Bastille, the besiegers set about devising
+others. A pretty young girl named Mdlle. de Monsigny, daughter of the
+captain of the company of Invalides at the Bastille, had been
+encountered in the barrack yard. Some madmen imagined that she was
+Mdlle. de Launey. They dragged her to the edge of the moat, and gave the
+garrison to<a name="page_259" id="page_259"></a> understand by their gestures that they were going to burn
+her alive if the place was not surrendered. They had thrown the unhappy
+child, who had fainted, upon a mattress, to which they had already set
+light. M. de Monsigny saw the hideous spectacle from a window of the
+towers, and, desperately rushing down to save his child, he was killed
+by two shots. These were tricks in the siege of strongholds of which
+Duguesclin would never have dreamed. A soldier named Aubin Bonnemère
+courageously interposed and succeeded in saving the girl.</p>
+
+<p>A detachment of Gardes Françaises, coming up with two pieces of
+artillery which the Hôtel de Ville had allowed to be removed, gave a
+more serious aspect to the siege. But the name of Gardes Françaises must
+not give rise to misapprehension: the soldiers of the regular army under
+the <i>ancien régime</i> must not be compared with those of the present day.
+The regiment of Gardes Françaises in particular had fallen into a
+profound state of disorganization and degradation. The privates were
+permitted to follow a trade in the city, by this means augmenting their
+pay. It is certain that in the majority of cases the trade they followed
+was that of the bully. “Almost all the soldiers in the Guards belong to
+this class,” we read in the <i>Encyclopédie méthodique</i>, “and many men
+indeed only enlist in the corps in order to live on the earnings of
+these unfortunates.” The numerous documents relating to the Gardes
+Françaises preserved in the archives of the<a name="page_260" id="page_260"></a> Bastille give the most
+precise confirmation to this statement. We see, for example, that the
+relatives of the engraver Nicolas de Larmessin requested a <i>lettre de
+cachet</i> ordering their son to be locked up in jail, where they would pay
+for his keep, “because he had threatened to enlist in the Gardes
+Françaises.”</p>
+
+<p>From the fifteen cannon placed on the towers, not a single shot was
+fired during the siege. Within the château, three guns loaded with grape
+defended the inner drawbridge; the governor had only one of them fired,
+and that only once. Not wishing to massacre the mob, de Launey
+determined to blow up the Bastille and find his grave among the ruins.
+The Invalides Ferrand and Béquart flung themselves upon him to prevent
+him from carrying out his intention. “The Bastille was not captured by
+main force,” says Elie, whose testimony cannot be suspected of
+partiality in favour of the defenders; “it surrendered before it was
+attacked, on my giving my word of honour as a French officer that all
+should escape unscathed if they submitted.”</p>
+
+<p>We know how this promise was kept, in spite of the heroic efforts of
+Elie and Hulin, to whom posterity owes enthusiastic homage. Is the mob
+to be reproached for these atrocious crimes? It was a savage horde, the
+scum of the population. De Launey, whose confidence and kindness had
+never faltered, was massacred with every circumstance of horror. “The
+Abbé Lefèvre,” says Dusaulx, “was an involuntary witness of his last
+moments: ‘I saw him fall,’ he told me, ‘without being able to help<a name="page_261" id="page_261"></a> him;
+he defended himself like a lion, and if only ten men had behaved as he
+did at the Bastille, it would not have been taken.’” His murderers
+slowly severed his head from his trunk with a penknife. The operation
+was performed by a cook’s apprentice named Desnot, “who knew, as he
+afterwards proudly said, how to manage a joint.” The deposition of this
+brute should be read. It has been published by M. Guiffrey in the <i>Revue
+historique</i>. To give himself courage, Desnot had gulped down brandy
+mixed with gunpowder, and he added that what he had done was done in the
+hope of obtaining a medal.</p>
+
+<p>“We learnt by-and-by,” continues Dusaulx, “of the death of M. de
+Losme-Salbray, which all good men deplored.” De Losme had been the good
+angel of the prisoners during his term of office as major of the
+Bastille: there are touching details showing to what lengths he carried
+his kindliness and delicacy of feeling. At the moment when the mob was
+hacking at him, there happened to pass the Marquis de Pelleport, who had
+been imprisoned in the Bastille for several years; he sprang forward to
+save him: “Stop!” he cried, “you are killing the best of men.” But he
+fell badly wounded, as also did the Chevalier de Jean, who had joined
+him in the attempt to rescue the unfortunate man from the hands of the
+mob. The adjutant Miray, Person the lieutenant of the Invalides, and
+Dumont, one of the Invalides, were massacred. Miray was led to the
+Grève, where the mob had resolved to execute him. Struck<a name="page_262" id="page_262"></a> with fists and
+clubs, stabbed with knives, he crawled along in his death agony. He
+expired, “done to death with pin-pricks,” before arriving at the place
+of execution. The Invalides Asselin and Béquart were hanged. It was
+Béquart who had prevented de Launey from blowing up the Bastille. “He
+was gashed with two sword-strokes,” we read in the <i>Moniteur</i>, “and a
+sabre cut had lopped off his wrist. They carried the hand in triumph
+through the streets of the city&mdash;the very hand to which so many citizens
+owed their safety.” “After I had passed the arcade of the Hôtel de
+Ville,” says Restif de la Bretonne, who has left so curious a page about
+the 14th of July, “I came upon some cannibals: one&mdash;I saw him with my
+own eyes&mdash;brought home to me the meaning of a horrible word heard so
+often since: he was carrying at the end of a <i>taille-cime</i><a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> the
+bleeding entrails of a victim of the mob’s fury, and this horrible
+top-knot caused no one to turn a hair. Farther on I met the captured
+Invalides and Swiss: from young and pretty lips&mdash;I shudder at it
+still&mdash;came screams of ‘Hang them! Hang them!’”</p>
+
+<p>Further, they massacred Flesselles, the provost of the guilds, accused
+of a treacherous action as imaginary as that of de Launey. They cut the
+throat of Foulon, an old man of seventy-four years, who, as Taine tells
+us, had spent during the preceding winter 60,000 francs in order to
+provide the poor with work. They assassinated Berthier, one of the
+distinguished men of the time. Foulon’s head was cut off; they tore
+Berthier’s heart<a name="page_263" id="page_263"></a> from his body to carry it in procession through
+Paris&mdash;charming touch!&mdash;in a bouquet of white carnations. For the fun
+was growing fast and furious. De Launey’s head was borne on a pike to
+the Palais Royal, then to the new bridge, where it was made to do
+obeisance three times to the statue of Henri IV., with the words,
+“Salute thy master!” At the Palais Royal, two of the conquerors had
+merrily set themselves down at a dining-table in an entresol. As we
+garnish our tables with flowers, so these men had placed on the table a
+trunkless head and gory entrails; but as the crowd below cried out for
+them, they shot them gaily out of the window.</p>
+
+<p>Those who had remained in front of the Bastille had dashed on in quest
+of booty. As at the pillage of the warehouses of Réveillon and Henriot,
+and of the convent of the Lazarists, the first impulse of the conquerors
+was to bound forward to the cellar. “This rabble,” writes the author of
+the <i>Authentic History</i>, “were so blind drunk that they made in one body
+for the quarters of the staff, breaking the furniture, doors, and
+windows. All this time their comrades, taking the pillagers for some of
+the garrison, were firing on them.”</p>
+
+<p>No one gave a thought to the prisoners, but the keys were secured and
+carried in triumph through Paris. The doors of the rooms in which the
+prisoners were kept had to be broken in. The wretched men, terrified by
+the uproar, were more dead than alive. These victims of arbitrary power
+were exactly seven in number. Four were forgers, Béchade, Laroche, La
+Corrège, and<a name="page_264" id="page_264"></a> Pujade; these individuals had forged bills of exchange, to
+the loss of two Parisian bankers: while their case was being dealt with
+in regular course at the Châtelet, they were lodged in the Bastille,
+where they consulted every day with their counsel. Then there was the
+young Comte de Solages, who was guilty of monstrous crimes meriting
+death; he was kept in the Bastille out of regard for his family, who
+defrayed his expenses. Finally there were two lunatics, Tavernier and de
+Whyte. We know what immense progress has been made during the past
+century in the methods of treating lunatics. In those days they locked
+them up. Tavernier and de Whyte were before long transferred to
+Charenton, where assuredly they were not so well treated as they had
+been at the Bastille.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the seven martyrs who were led in triumphant procession
+through the streets, amid the shouts of a deeply moved people.</p>
+
+<p>Of the besiegers, ninety-eight dead were counted, some of whom had met
+their death through the assailants’ firing on one another. Several had
+been killed by falling into the moat. Of this total, only nineteen were
+married, and only five had children. These are details of some interest.</p>
+
+<p>There was no thought of burying either the conquerors or the conquered.
+At midnight on Wednesday the 15th, the presence of the corpses of the
+officers of the Bastille, still lying in the Place de Grève, was
+notified to the commissaries of the Châtelet. In his admirable work<a name="page_265" id="page_265"></a> M.
+Furnand Bournon has published the ghastly report that was drawn up on
+that night. It is a fitting crown to the work of the great day: “We, the
+undersigned commissaries, duly noted down the declaration of the said
+Sieur Houdan, and having then gone down into the courtyard of the
+Châtelet (whither the corpses had just been carried), we found there
+seven corpses of the male sex, the first without a head, clothed in a
+coat, vest, breeches, and black silk stockings, with a fine shirt, but
+no shoes; the second also without a head, clothed in a vest of red
+stuff, breeches of nankeen with regimental buttons, blue silk stockings
+with a small black pattern worked in; the third also headless, clothed
+in a shirt, breeches, and white cotton stockings; the fourth also
+headless, clothed in a blood-stained shirt, breeches, and black
+stockings; the fifth clad in a shirt, blue breeches, and white gaiters,
+with brown hair, apparently about forty years old, and having part of
+his forearm cut off and severe bruises on his throat; the sixth clothed
+in breeches and white gaiters, with severe bruises on his throat; and
+the seventh, clothed in a shirt, breeches, and black silk stockings,
+disfigured beyond recognition.”</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the majority of the victors, the first moments of intoxication
+having passed, were hiding themselves like men who had committed a
+crime. The disorder in the city was extreme. “The commissioners of the
+districts,” writes the Sicilian ambassador, “seeing the peril in which
+the inhabitants were placed before this enormous number of armed men,
+including brigands<a name="page_266" id="page_266"></a> and men let out of prison on the previous days,
+formed patrols of the National Guard. They proclaimed martial law, or
+rather, they issued one solitary law declaring that whoever robbed or
+set fire to a house would be hanged. Indeed, not a day passed without
+five and even as many as ten persons suffering this penalty. To this
+salutary expedient we owe our lives and the safety of our houses.”</p>
+
+<p>More than one conqueror of the Bastille was hanged in this way, which
+was a great pity, for two days later his glorious brow might have been
+crowned with laurels and flowers!</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that the Bastille was captured by the people of Paris.
+But the number of the besiegers amounted to no more than a thousand,
+among whom, as Marat has already brought to our notice, there were many
+provincials and foreigners. As to the Parisians, they had come in great
+numbers, as they always do, to see what was going on. We have this too
+on the testimony of Marat. “I was present at the taking of the
+Bastille,” writes the Chancellor de Pasquier also: “what has been called
+the ‘fight’ was not serious, and of resistance there was absolutely
+none. A few musket shots were fired to which there was no reply, and
+four or five cannon shots. We know the results of this boasted victory,
+which has brought a shower of compliments upon the heads of the
+so-called conquerors: the truth is that this great fight did not give a
+moment’s uneasiness to the numerous spectators who had hurried up to see
+the<a name="page_267" id="page_267"></a> result. Among them there was many a pretty woman; they had left
+their carriages at a distance in order to approach more easily. I was
+leaning on the end of the barrier which closed in the garden skirting
+Beaumarchais’ garden in the direction of the Place de la Bastille. By my
+side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Comédie Française: we stayed to the end,
+and I gave her my arm to her carriage. As pretty as any woman could be,
+Mdlle. Contat added to the graces of her person an intelligence of the
+most brilliant order.”</p>
+
+<p>By next day there was quite another story. The Bastille had been
+“stormed” in a formidable and heroic assault lasting a quarter of an
+hour. The guns of the assailants had made a breach in its walls. These,
+it is true, were still standing intact; but that did not signify, the
+guns had made a breach, unquestionably! The seven prisoners who had been
+set free had been a disappointment, for the best will in the world could
+not make them anything but scoundrels and lunatics; some one invented an
+eighth, the celebrated Comte de Lorges, the white-headed hero and
+martyr. This Comte de Lorges had no existence; but that fact also is
+nothing to the purpose: he makes an admirable and touching story. There
+was talk of instruments of torture that had been discovered: “an iron
+corslet, invented to hold a man fast by all his joints, and fix him in
+eternal immobility:” it was really a piece of knightly armour dating
+from the middle ages, taken from the magazine of obsolete arms which was
+kept at the Bastille. Some one discovered also<a name="page_268" id="page_268"></a> a machine “not less
+destructive, which was brought to the light of day, but no one could
+guess its name or its special use”; it was a secret printing-press
+seized in the house of one François Lenormand in 1786. Finally, while
+digging in the bastion, some one came upon the bones of Protestants who
+had once been buried there, the prejudices of the time not allowing
+their remains to be laid in the consecrated ground of the cemetery: the
+vision of secret executions in the deepest dungeons of the Bastille was
+conjured up in the mind of the discoverers, and Mirabeau sent these
+terrible words echoing through France: “The ministers were lacking in
+foresight, they forgot to eat the bones!”</p>
+
+<p>The compilation of the roll of the conquerors of the Bastille was a
+laborious work. A great number of those who had been in the thick of the
+fray did not care to make themselves known: they did not know but that
+their laurel-crowned heads might be stuck aloft! It is true that these
+bashful heroes were speedily replaced by a host of fine fellows
+who&mdash;from the moment when it was admitted that the conquerors were
+heroes, deserving of honours, pensions, and medals&mdash;were fully persuaded
+that they had sprung to the assault, and in the very first rank. The
+final list contained 863 names.</p>
+
+<p>Victor Fournel in a charming book has sung the epic, at once ludicrous
+and lachrymose, of the men of the 14th of July. The book, which ought to
+be read, gives a host of delightful episodes it is impossible to
+abridge. In the sequel these founders of<a name="page_269" id="page_269"></a> liberty did not shine either
+through the services they rendered to the Republic, or through their
+fidelity to the immortal principles. The Hulins&mdash;Hulin, however, had
+done nobly in trying to save de Launey&mdash;the Palloys, the Fourniers, the
+Latudes, and how many others! were the most servile lackeys of the
+Empire, and those of them who survived were the most assiduous servants
+of the Restoration. Under the Empire, the conquerors of the Bastille
+tried to secure the Legion of Honour for the whole crew. They went about
+soliciting pensions even up to 1830, and at that date, after forty-three
+years, there were still 401 conquerors living. In 1848 the conquerors
+made another appearance. There was still mention of pensions for the
+conquerors of the Bastille in the budget of 1874&mdash;let us save the
+ladder, the ladder of Latude!</p>
+
+<p>This is the amusing side of their story. But there is a painful side
+too: their rivalries with the Gardes Françaises, who charged them with
+filching the glory from them, and with the “volunteers of the Bastille.”
+The heroes were acquainted with calumny and opprobrium. There were, too,
+deadly dissensions among their own body. There were the true conquerors,
+and others who, while they were true conquerors, were nevertheless not
+true: there were always “traitors” among the conquerors, as well as
+“patriots.” On July 1, 1790, two of the conquerors were found beaten to
+death near Beaumarchais’ garden, in front of the theatre of their
+exploits. Next day there was a violent quarrel between four conquerors
+and some soldiers. In December two<a name="page_270" id="page_270"></a> others were assassinated near the
+Champs de Mars. Early in 1791 two were wounded, and a third was
+discovered with his neck in a noose, in a ditch near the military
+school. Such were the nocturnal doings on the barriers.</p>
+
+<p>It remains to explain this amazing veering round of opinion, this
+legend, of all things the least likely, which transformed into great men
+the “brigands” of April, June, and July, 1789.</p>
+
+<p>The first reason is explained in the following excellent passage from
+<i>Rabagas</i><a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot2"><p><i>Carle.</i>&mdash;But how then do you distinguish a riot from a revolution?</p>
+
+<p><i>Boubard.</i>&mdash;A riot is when the mob is defeated ... they are all
+curs. A revolution is when the mob is the stronger: they are all
+heroes!</p></div>
+
+<p>During the night of July 14, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld woke Louis
+XVI. to announce to him the capture of the Bastille. “It’s a revolt
+then,” said the king. “Sire,” replied the duke, “it is a revolution.”</p>
+
+<p>The day on which the royal power, in its feebleness and irresolution,
+abandoned Paris to the mob, was the day of its abdication. The Parisians
+attempted to organize themselves into a citizen militia in order to
+shoot down the brigands. The movement on the Bastille was a stroke of
+genius on the part of the latter&mdash;instinctive, no doubt, but for all
+that a stroke of genius. The people now recognized its masters, and with
+its usual facility it hailed the new régime with adulation. “From that
+moment,” said a deputy, “there was an end<a name="page_271" id="page_271"></a> of liberty, even in the
+Assembly; France was dumb before thirty factionaries.”</p>
+
+<p>What rendered the national enthusiasm for the conquerors more easy was
+precisely all those legends to which credence was given, in all
+sincerity, by the most intelligent people in France&mdash;the legends on the
+horrors of the Bastille and the cruelties of arbitrary power. For fifty
+years they had been disseminated throughout the kingdom, and had taken
+firm root. The pamphlets of Linguet and Mirabeau, the recent stupendous
+success of the <i>Memoirs of Latude</i>, had given these stories renewed
+strength and vigour. Compelled to bow before the triumphant mob, people
+preferred to regard themselves&mdash;so they silenced their conscience&mdash;as
+hailing a deliverer. There was some sincerity in this movement of
+opinion, too. The same districts which on July 13 took arms against the
+brigands could exclaim, after the crisis had passed: “The districts
+applaud the capture of a fortress which, regarded hitherto as the seat
+of despotism, dishonoured the French name under a popular king.”</p>
+
+<p>In his edition of the <i>Memoirs of Barras</i>, M. George Duruy has well
+explained the transformation of opinion. “In the <i>Memoirs</i>, the capture
+of the Bastille is merely the object of a brief and casual mention.
+Barras only retained and transmits to us one single detail. He saw
+leaving the dungeons the ‘victims of arbitrary power, saved at last from
+rack and torture and from living tombs.’ Such a dearth of information is
+the more likely<a name="page_272" id="page_272"></a> to surprise us in that Barras was not only a spectator
+of the event, but composed, in that same year 1789, an account of it
+which has now been discovered. Now his narrative of 1789 is as
+interesting as the passage in the <i>Memoirs</i> is insignificant. The
+impression left by these pages, written while the events were vividly
+pictured in his mind, is, we are bound to say, that the famous capture
+of the Bastille was after all only a horrible and sanguinary saturnalia.
+There is no word of heroism in this first narrative: nothing about
+‘victims of arbitrary power’ snatched from ‘torture and living tombs’;
+but on the other hand, veritable deeds of cannibalism perpetrated by the
+victors. That is what Barras saw, and what he recorded on those pages
+where, at that period of his life, he noted down day by day the events
+of which he was a witness. Thirty years slip by. Barras has sat on the
+benches of the ‘Montagne.’<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> He has remained an inflexible
+revolutionist. He gathers his notes together in view of <i>Memoirs</i> he
+intends to publish. At this time, the revolutionist version of the
+capture of the Bastille is officially established. It is henceforth
+accepted that the Bastille fell before an impulse of heroism on the part
+of the people of Paris, and that its fall brought to light horrible
+mysteries of iniquity. This legend, which has so profoundly distorted
+the event, was contemporary with the event itself, a spontaneous fruit
+of the popular imagination. And Barras, having to speak of the capture
+in his<a name="page_273" id="page_273"></a> <i>Memoirs</i>, discovers his old narrative among his papers, and
+reads it, I imagine, with a sort of stupefaction. What! the capture of
+the Bastille was no more than that!&mdash;and he resolutely casts it aside.”</p>
+
+<p>In the provinces, the outbreak had a violent counterpart. “There
+instantly arose,” writes Victor Fournel, “a strange, extraordinary,
+grotesque panic, which swept through the greater part of France like a
+hurricane of madness, and which many of us have heard our grand-fathers
+tell stories about under the name of the ‘day of the brigands’ or ‘the
+day of the fear.’ It broke out everywhere in the second fortnight of
+July, 1789. Suddenly, one knew not whence, an awful rumour burst upon
+the town or village: the brigands are here, at our very gates: they are
+advancing in troops of fifteen or twenty thousand, burning the standing
+crops, ravaging everything! Dust-stained couriers appear, spreading the
+terrible news. An unknown horseman goes through at the gallop, with
+haggard cheeks and dishevelled hair: ‘Up, to arms, they are here!’ Some
+natives rush up: it is only too true: they have seen them, the bandits
+are no more than a league or two away! The alarm bell booms out, the
+people fly to arms, line up in battle order, start off to reconnoitre.
+In the end, nothing happens, but their terrors revive. The brigands have
+only turned aside: every man must remain under arms.” In the frontier
+provinces, there were rumours of foreign enemies. The Bretons and
+Normans shook in fear of an English descent: in<a name="page_274" id="page_274"></a> Champagne and Lorraine
+a German invasion was feared.</p>
+
+<p>Along with these scenes of panic must be placed the deeds of violence,
+the assassinations, plunderings, burnings, which suddenly desolated the
+whole of France. In a book which sheds a flood of light on these facts,
+Gustave Bord gives a thrilling picture of them. The châteaux were
+invaded, and the owner, if they could lay hands on him, was roasted on
+the soles of his feet. At Versailles the mob threw themselves on the
+hangman as he was about to execute a parricide, and the criminal was set
+free: the state of terror in which the town was plunged is depicted in
+the journals of the municipal assembly. On July 23, the governor of
+Champagne sends word that the rising is general in his district. At
+Rennes, at Nantes, at Saint-Malo, at Angers, at Caen, at Bordeaux, at
+Strasburg, at Metz, the mob engaged in miniature captures of the
+Bastille more or less accompanied with pillage and assassination. Armed
+bands went about cutting down the woods, breaking down the dikes,
+fishing in the ponds.<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> The disorganization was complete.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could more clearly show the character of the government under
+the <i>ancien régime:</i> it was wholly dependent on traditions. Nowhere was
+there a concrete organization to secure the maintenance of order and
+the<a name="page_275" id="page_275"></a> enforcement of the king’s decrees. France was a federation of
+innumerable republics, held together by a single bond, the sentiment of
+loyalty every citizen felt towards the crown. One puff of wind sent the
+crown flying, and then disorder and panic bewilderment dominated the
+whole nation. The door was open to all excesses, and the means of
+checking them miserably failed. Under the <i>ancien régime</i>, devotion to
+the king was the whole government, the whole administration, the whole
+life of the state. And thus arose the necessity for the domination of
+the Terror, and the legislative work of Napoleon.</p>
+
+<p class="c">THE END.</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_276" id="page_276"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_277" id="page_277"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+<p class="c"><a href="#A">A</a>,
+<a href="#B">B</a>,
+<a href="#C">C</a>,
+<a href="#D">D</a>,
+<a href="#E">E</a>,
+<a href="#F">F</a>,
+<a href="#G">G</a>,
+<a href="#H">H</a>,
+<a href="#J">J</a>,
+<a href="#K">K</a>,
+<a href="#L">L</a>,
+<a href="#M">M</a>,
+<a href="#N">N</a>,
+<a href="#P">P</a>,
+<a href="#Q">Q</a>,
+<a href="#R">R</a>,
+<a href="#S">S</a>,
+<a href="#T">T</a>,
+<a href="#V">V</a></p>
+
+<p class="nind">
+<a name="A" id="A"></a>A<small>LLÈGRE</small>, Latude’s fellow prisoner, <a href="#page_154">154</a>, <a href="#page_185">185-192</a>, <a href="#page_217">217</a>.<br />
+Ameilhon, city librarian, <a href="#page_055">55</a>.<br />
+Argenson, D’, <a href="#page_060">60</a>, <a href="#page_072">72</a>, <a href="#page_095">95</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_182">182</a>.<br />
+Arsenal library, <a href="#page_055">55</a>, <a href="#page_056">56</a>.<br />
+Atrocities of the mob, <a href="#page_258">258-266</a>.<br />
+Avedick, Armenian patriarch, <a href="#page_133">133</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="B" id="B"></a>B<small>ARRAS</small>, <a href="#page_272">272</a>.<br />
+Bastille, its situation, <a href="#page_047">47</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appearance, <a href="#page_048">48</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">repute, <a href="#page_049">49</a>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">archives, <a href="#page_050">50-56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">origin, <a href="#page_057">57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">site, <a href="#page_058">58</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">construction, <a href="#page_059">59</a>, <a href="#page_060">60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">additions to, <a href="#page_061">61</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appearance in later days, <a href="#page_061">61</a>, <a href="#page_062">62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early uses, <a href="#page_063">63</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes state prison, <a href="#page_063">63</a>, <a href="#page_064">64</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prisoners, <a href="#page_065">65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its administration, <a href="#page_066">66</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gradual transformation, <a href="#page_067">67</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">character of prisoners, <a href="#page_068">68</a>, <a href="#page_069">69</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">secretary, <a href="#page_070">70</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">office of lieutenant of police, <a href="#page_071">71</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his duties, <a href="#page_071">71</a>, <a href="#page_072">72</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes like modern prisons, <a href="#page_077">77</a>, <a href="#page_078">78</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">abolition of torture, <a href="#page_078">78</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">duration of prisoners’ detention, <a href="#page_080">80</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">expenses, <a href="#page_081">81</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">plans for altering, <a href="#page_081">81-83</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a <i>prison de luxe</i>, <a href="#page_085">85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">treatment of prisoners, <a href="#page_086">86</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the rooms, <a href="#page_087">87</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">manner of prisoners’ entrance, <a href="#page_088">88</a>, <a href="#page_089">89</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cells, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_093">93</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tower rooms, <a href="#page_093">93</a>, <a href="#page_094">94</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">furniture, <a href="#page_095">95</a>, <a href="#page_096">96</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">examination of prisoners, <a href="#page_096">96</a>, <a href="#page_097">97</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">indemnified if innocent, <a href="#page_098">98</a>, <a href="#page_099">99</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">allowed companions, <a href="#page_100">100</a>, <a href="#page_101">101</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prison fare, <a href="#page_102">102-107</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">clothes, <a href="#page_107">107</a>, <a href="#page_108">108</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">books, <a href="#page_108">108</a>, <a href="#page_109">109</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">exercise, <a href="#page_109">109</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">diversions, <a href="#page_109">109</a>, <a href="#page_110">110</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">funerals, <a href="#page_110">110</a>, <a href="#page_111">111</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">liberation, <a href="#page_111">111</a>, <a href="#page_112">112</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Iron Mask, <a href="#page_114">114-146</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">men of letters, <a href="#page_147">147-165</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">capture, <a href="#page_238">238-272</a>.</span><br />
+Berryer, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_176">176</a>, <a href="#page_178">178</a>, <a href="#page_184">184</a>, <a href="#page_188">188</a>, <a href="#page_189">189</a>, <a href="#page_193">193</a>.<br />
+Besmaus, de, <a href="#page_070">70</a>.<br />
+Binguet, <a href="#page_171">171</a>, <a href="#page_179">179</a>.<br />
+Bread riots, <a href="#page_242">242</a>, <a href="#page_243">243</a>.<br />
+Breteuil, <a href="#page_078">78</a>, <a href="#page_248">248</a>.<br />
+Brigands, <a href="#page_241">241</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>, <a href="#page_250">250</a>.<br />
+Burgaud, <a href="#page_135">135</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="C" id="C"></a>C<small>AMPAN</small>, Madame de, <a href="#page_144">144</a>, <a href="#page_145">145</a>.<br />
+Carutti’s theory of Iron Mask, <a href="#page_134">134</a>.<br />
+Cellamare conspiracy, <a href="#page_072">72</a>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>.<br />
+Character of French government and society, <a href="#page_239">239-241</a>.<br />
+Chevalier, major, <a href="#page_049">49</a>, <a href="#page_051">51</a>, <a href="#page_120">120</a>, <a href="#page_121">121</a>, <a href="#page_187">187</a>, <a href="#page_189">189</a>, <a href="#page_194">194</a>.<br />
+Citizen militia, <a href="#page_251">251-253</a>.<br />
+Clothes of prisoners, <a href="#page_107">107</a>, <a href="#page_108">108</a>.<br />
+Crosne, de, lieutenant of police, <a href="#page_244">244-246</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="D" id="D"></a>D’A<small>UBRESPY</small>, Jeanneton, <a href="#page_169">169</a>, <a href="#page_201">201</a>.<br />
+Dauger suggested as Iron Mask, <a href="#page_135">135</a>.<br />
+Desmoulins, <a href="#page_247">247</a>, <a href="#page_249">249</a>.<br />
+Diderot, <a href="#page_165">165</a>.<br />
+Diversions of prisoners, <a href="#page_109">109</a>, <a href="#page_110">110</a>.<br />
+Du Junca’s journal, <a href="#page_069">69</a>, <a href="#page_089">89</a>, <a href="#page_090">90</a>, <a href="#page_114">114-116</a>, <a href="#page_122">122</a>.<br />
+Dusaulx, <a href="#page_051">51</a>.<a name="page_278" id="page_278"></a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="E" id="E"></a>E<small>NCYCLOPÆDIA</small>, <a href="#page_080">80</a>.<br />
+Estrades, Abbé d’, <a href="#page_138">138-142</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="F" id="F"></a>F<small>OOD</small> of prisoners, <a href="#page_102">102-107</a>.<br />
+Funerals, <a href="#page_110">110</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="G" id="G"></a>G<small>AMES</small> of prisoners, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_102">102</a>.<br />
+Gleichen, baron, <a href="#page_130">130</a>.<br />
+Griffet, Father, <a href="#page_120">120</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="H" id="H"></a>H<small>EISS</small>, Baron, first to suggest true solution of Iron Mask, <a href="#page_136">136</a>.<br />
+Henriot, <a href="#page_245">245</a>.<br />
+Houdon, sculptor, <a href="#page_082">82</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="J" id="J"></a>J<small>ULY</small> 14th, <a href="#page_255">255-276</a>.<br />
+Jung’s theory of Iron Mask, <a href="#page_134">134</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="K" id="K"></a>K<small>INGSTON</small>, Duchess of, <a href="#page_225">225</a>, <a href="#page_227">227</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="L" id="L"></a>L<small>A</small> B<small>EAUMELLE</small>, <a href="#page_152">152-155</a>.<br />
+Lagrange-Chancel, <a href="#page_132">132</a>.<br />
+La Reynie, <a href="#page_071">71</a>.<br />
+Latude, <a href="#page_168">168-237</a>.<br />
+Launay, Mdlle. de, <i>see</i> Staal, Madame de.<br />
+Launey, de, governor, <a href="#page_256">256</a>, <a href="#page_258">258</a>, <a href="#page_260">260</a>.<br />
+Lauzun, <a href="#page_091">91</a>.<br />
+Legros, Madame de, <a href="#page_223">223-226</a>, <a href="#page_232">232</a>, <a href="#page_233">233</a>.<br />
+Lenoir, lieutenant of police, <a href="#page_186">186</a>.<br />
+<i>Lettres de cachet</i>, <a href="#page_240">240</a>.<br />
+Lieutenancy of police created, <a href="#page_097">97</a>.<br />
+Linguet, <a href="#page_163">163-165</a>.<br />
+Loiseleur’s theory of Iron Mask, <a href="#page_134">134</a>.<br />
+Loquin’s theory of Iron Mask, <a href="#page_133">133</a>.<br />
+Losme, de, <a href="#page_261">261</a>.<br />
+Louis XIV. and Iron Mask, <a href="#page_137">137-140</a>.<br />
+Louis XV. and Iron Mask, <a href="#page_144">144</a>.<br />
+Louis XVI. and Iron Mask, <a href="#page_144">144</a>.<br />
+Louvois, <a href="#page_070">70</a>, <a href="#page_141">141</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="M" id="M"></a>M<small>AISONROUGE</small>, king’s lieutenant, <a href="#page_073">73-76</a>.<br />
+Malesherbes, <a href="#page_078">78</a>, <a href="#page_156">156</a>, <a href="#page_216">216</a>.<br />
+Man in the Iron Mask, documents, <a href="#page_114">114-125</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">legends, <a href="#page_125">125-136</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">true solution, <a href="#page_136">136-146</a>.</span><br />
+Marmontel, <a href="#page_158">158-163</a>.<br />
+Mattioli, the Iron Mask, <a href="#page_136">136-146</a>.<br />
+Maurepas, <a href="#page_144">144</a>, <a href="#page_173">173-175</a>.<br />
+Mirabeau, <a href="#page_166">166</a>, <a href="#page_167">167</a>.<br />
+Morellet, <a href="#page_155">155-158</a>, <a href="#page_253">253</a>.<br />
+Moyria, de, <a href="#page_218">218-220</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="N" id="N"></a>N<small>ECKER</small>, <a href="#page_248">248</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="P" id="P"></a>P<small>ALATINE</small>, Madame, <a href="#page_125">125</a>.<br />
+Palteau, M. de, <a href="#page_118">118</a>, <a href="#page_119">119</a>.<br />
+Papon’s theory of Iron Mask, <a href="#page_127">127</a>.<br />
+Parlement, <a href="#page_076">76</a>, <a href="#page_077">77</a>.<br />
+Pensions to prisoners, <a href="#page_098">98</a>, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+Pompadour, Madame de, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_206">206</a>.<br />
+Pontchartrain, <a href="#page_069">69</a>.<br />
+Puget, king’s lieutenant, <a href="#page_083">83</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Q" id="Q"></a>Q<small>UESNAY</small>, Dr., <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>, <a href="#page_178">178</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="R" id="R"></a>R<small>AVAISSON</small>, librarian, <a href="#page_054">54</a>, <a href="#page_055">55</a>, <a href="#page_134">134</a>.<br />
+Register of St. Paul’s church, <a href="#page_117">117</a>, <a href="#page_142">142</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a>.<br />
+Regnier’s lines, <a href="#page_059">59</a>.<br />
+Renneville’s meals, <a href="#page_103">103</a>, <a href="#page_104">104</a>.<br />
+Réveillon, <a href="#page_245">245</a>, <a href="#page_246">246</a>.<br />
+Ricarville, companion of the Iron Mask, <a href="#page_123">123</a>, <a href="#page_124">124</a>.<br />
+Richelieu, Cardinal, <a href="#page_063">63-66</a>.<br />
+Richelieu, Duke de, <a href="#page_076">76</a>, <a href="#page_129">129</a>, <a href="#page_130">130</a>.<br />
+Rigby, Dr., <a href="#page_253">253</a>, <a href="#page_254">254</a>.<br />
+Risings in the provinces, <a href="#page_273">273</a>.<br />
+Rochebrune, commissary, <a href="#page_195">195</a>.<br />
+Rohan, Cardinal de, <a href="#page_222">222</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="S" id="S"></a>S<small>ADE</small>, Marquis de, <a href="#page_095">95</a>.<br />
+Saint-Mars, governor, <a href="#page_087">87</a>, <a href="#page_115">115-119</a>, <a href="#page_127">127</a>, <a href="#page_142">142</a>.<br />
+Saint-Marc, detective, <a href="#page_169">169</a>, <a href="#page_176">176</a>, <a href="#page_180">180</a>, <a href="#page_183">183</a>, <a href="#page_192">192</a>.<br />
+Sartine, de, <a href="#page_049">49</a>, <a href="#page_202">202</a>, <a href="#page_203">203</a>, <a href="#page_207">207</a>, <a href="#page_210">210</a>, <a href="#page_215">215</a>.<br />
+Sauvé, Madame de, her dress, <a href="#page_108">108</a>.<br />
+Solages, de, <a href="#page_084">84</a>.<br />
+Staal, Madame de, <a href="#page_073">73-76</a>, <a href="#page_094">94</a>, <a href="#page_095">95</a>, <a href="#page_102">102</a>.<a name="page_279" id="page_279"></a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="T" id="T"></a>T<small>AULÈS</small>, de, <a href="#page_132">132</a>.<br />
+Tavernier, <a href="#page_106">106</a>.<br />
+Theories on Iron Mask, <a href="#page_125">125-136</a>.<br />
+Thuriot de la Rosière, <a href="#page_256">256</a>.<br />
+Tirmont, companion of Iron Mask, <a href="#page_123">123</a>, <a href="#page_124">124</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="V" id="V"></a>V<small>IEUX</small>-M<small>AISONS</small>, Madame de, <a href="#page_128">128</a>.<br />
+Villette, Marquis de, <a href="#page_224">224</a>.<br />
+Vinache’s library, <a href="#page_109">109</a>.<br />
+Vincennes, <a href="#page_165">165-167</a>, <a href="#page_180">180</a>.<br />
+Voltaire, <a href="#page_099">99</a>, <a href="#page_126">126</a>, <a href="#page_128">128</a>, <a href="#page_129">129</a>, <a href="#page_148">148-152</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_280" id="page_280"></a></p>
+
+<p class="c">LONDON:<br />
+GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LD.<br />
+ST. JOHN’S HOUSE, CLERKENWELL, E.C.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><p class="cb">FOOTNOTES:</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The castle of Tours, 147 miles south-west of Paris, which
+Louis XI. made his favourite residence. See Scott’s <i>Quentin
+Durward</i>.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Jean Balue (1471-1491), chaplain to Louis XI. For
+traitorously divulging the king’s schemes to his enemy, the Duke of
+Burgundy, he was for eleven years shut up in the castle of Loches, in an
+iron-bound wooden cage.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> A French author (1624-1693) who was involved in the fall of
+Louis XIV.’s dishonest finance minister, Fouquet, in 1661, and was
+imprisoned for five years in the Bastille, amusing himself with reading
+the Fathers of the Church and taming a spider. See Kitchin’s <i>History of
+France</i>, iii. 155-157.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Antoine de Caumont, duc de Lauzun (1633-1723), a courtier
+of Louis XIV., whose favours to the Duke made Louvois, the minister, his
+bitter enemy. He was twice imprisoned in the Bastille, the second time
+at the instance of Madame de Montespan. He commanded the French
+auxiliaries of James II. in Ireland. See Macaulay’s <i>History</i>, Chaps.
+IX., XII., XV.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> A game played with a sort of box, in the top of which are
+cut holes of equal size, and with metal discs or balls, the object being
+to pitch the balls into the holes from a distance. A similar game may be
+seen at any English country fair.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> The famous president of the Cour des Aides and Minister of
+the Interior, renowned for his consistent support of the people against
+oppression. He was banished in 1771 for remonstrating against the abuses
+of law; but returning to Paris to oppose the execution of Louis XVI., he
+was guillotined in 1794.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Antonio del Giudice, prince de Cellamare (1657-1733), the
+Spanish ambassador, was the instigator of a plot against the Regent in
+1718. See Kitchin, <i>ib.</i> iii. 474.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> The Hôtel des Invalides, residence of pensioned soldiers,
+&amp;c. still a well-known building of Paris.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> A château, four miles east of Paris, notable as the place
+where St. Louis, the royal lawgiver of France, dispensed justice. The
+<i>donjon</i> still exists, serving now as a soldier’s barracks.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> One of the first prisons on the system of solitary
+confinement in cells erected in Paris. It dates from 1850.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> The Abbé de Buquoy (1653-1740) owed his imprisonment
+originally to having been found in company with dealers in contraband
+salt when the <i>gabelle</i>, or salt-tax, compelled the French people to buy
+salt, whether they wanted it or not, at a price <i>two thousand times</i> its
+true value. He was a man of very eccentric views, one of which was that
+woman was man’s chief evil, and that was why, when the patriarch Job was
+stripped of children, flocks, herds, &amp;c., his wife was left to him!&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> The madhouse, eight miles east of Paris.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> A château originally outside Paris, now included in the
+city itself, once used as a hospital and jail, now a hospital for aged
+and indigent poor and for lunatics. The first experiments with the
+guillotine were tried there.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> See <i>infra</i>, p. 83.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> The title rôle in a comedy by Henri Mounier, entitled
+<i>Grandeur et décadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme</i> (1852). He is a
+writing-master, very vain, given (like Mr. Micawber) to tall talk and
+long-winded periods. He has become typical of “much cry and little
+wool.” As an officer of the National Guard he says, “This sabre
+constitutes the finest day in my life! I accept it, and if ever I find
+myself at the head of your phalanxes, I shall know how to use it in
+defence of our institutions&mdash;and, if need arise, to fight for
+them!”&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> In the early days of the Revolution, Paris was divided
+into sections or wards, and as the <i>pike</i> had played a great part in the
+recent disturbances, one of the wards was known as the “Pike”
+section.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> A disciple of the Marquis de Sade (see p. 35), a notorious
+debauchee, whose book <i>Justine</i> was a disgusting mixture of brutality
+and obscenity.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> The pseudonym of Beffroy de Reigny (1757-1811), author of
+farces, and of a <i>Précis historique de la prise de la Bastille</i>.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> The name given to the constitutional struggles of the
+nobles and the Parlement of Paris against Mazarin and the royal power
+(1648-1654). The name is derived from <i>fronde</i>, a sling. A wit of the
+Parlement, one Bachaumont, “told the lawyers of that august body that
+they were like schoolboys playing in the town ditches with their slings,
+who run away directly the watchman appears, and begin again when his
+back is turned.” See Kitchin, iii. pp. 102-128.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> See <i>Monte-Cristo</i>.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> Delivered to the French Association for the Advancement of
+Science in 1893.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> The battle fought on August 10, 1557, in which Egmont with
+a combined force of Spaniards, Flemish, and English (sent by Queen Mary)
+routed Constable Montmorency and the finest chivalry of France. It was
+in commemoration of this victory that Philip II. built the palace of the
+Escurial, shaped like a gridiron because the battle was fought on St.
+Lawrence’s day.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> The following unpublished letter from Pontchartrain to
+Bernaville, intimating his probable nomination as governor of the
+Bastille, shows exactly what Louis XIV.’s government demanded of the
+head of the great state prison:-
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="r">
+“Versailles, September 28, 1707.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>“I have received your letter of yesterday. I can only repeat what I
+have already written: to pay constant attention to what goes on in
+the Bastille; to neglect none of the duties of a good governor; to
+maintain order and discipline among the soldiers of the garrison,
+seeing that they keep watch with all the necessary exactitude, and
+that their wages are regularly paid; to take care that the
+prisoners are well fed and treated with kindness, preventing them,
+however, from having any communication with people outside and from
+writing letters; finally, to be yourself especially prompt in
+informing me of anything particular that may happen at the
+Bastille. You will understand that in following such a line of
+action you cannot but please the king, and perhaps induce him to
+grant you the post of governor; on my part, you may count on my
+neglecting no means of representing your services to His Majesty in
+the proper light.
+</p>
+
+<p class="r">“I am, &amp;c.,<br />
+
+“<span class="smcap">Pontchartrain</span>.”<br />
+</p></div></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> The appellation of the eldest brother of the reigning
+king.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Under the <i>ancien régime</i>, there being no Minister of the
+Interior (Home Secretary), each of the ministers (the War Minister,
+Minister for Foreign Affairs, &amp;c.) had a part of France under his
+charge. The Minister of Paris was usually what we should call the Lord
+Chamberlain.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> The court which up to the time of the Revolution was the
+seat of justice, presided over by the Provost of Paris. It held its
+sittings in the castle known as the Châtelet.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> A judicial, not a legislative body. It was constantly in
+antagonism to the king.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> The famous Encyclopædia edited by D’Alembert and Diderot.
+It occupied twenty years of the life of the latter, and went through
+many vicissitudes; its free criticism of existing institutions provoking
+the enmity of the government. Voltaire was one of its largest
+contributors.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> This raised Linguet’s indignation. “The consideration of
+this enormous expense has given to some ministers, among others to M.
+Necker, a notion of reform; if this should come to anything, it would be
+very disgraceful to spring from no other cause. ‘Suppress the Bastille
+out of economy!’ said on this subject, a few days ago, one of the
+youngest and most eloquent orators of England.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> The Hôtel Carnavalet, museum in Paris, where a large
+number of documents and books are preserved relating to the history of
+the city.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> It may be noted that the different escapes contributed to
+the gradual tightening of the rules of the Bastille. After the escape of
+the Comte de Bucquoy, such ornaments as the prisoners could attach cords
+to were at once removed, and knives were taken from them; after the
+escape of Allègre and Latude, bars of iron were placed in the chimneys,
+and so forth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> The second of the four principal officers of the Bastille.
+The officers were: (1) the governor; (2) the king’s lieutenant; (3) the
+major; (4) the adjutant. There was also a doctor, a surgeon, a
+confessor, &amp;c. The garrison consisted of Invalides.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> The most surprising instance is that of an Englishman, who
+returned spontaneously from England to become a prisoner in the
+Bastille. “On Thursday, May 22, 1693, at nightfall, M. de Jones, an
+Englishman, returned from England, having come back to prison for
+reasons concerning the king’s service. He was located outside the
+château, in a little room where M. de Besmaus keeps his library, above
+his office, and he is not to appear for some days for his examination,
+and is to be taken great care of.”&mdash;Du Junca’s Journal.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> This was not the Lauzun already mentioned, but his nephew,
+Armand Louis de Gontaut, duke de Biron (1747-1793), who was notorious
+throughout Europe for his gallantries.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> An official of the royal council, whose function
+originally was to examine and report on petitions to the king. He became
+a sort of superior magistrate’s clerk.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> “1751, March 2. I have received a letter from Dr. Duval
+(secretary to the lieutenant of police), in which he tells me that M.
+Berryer (lieutenant of police) is struck with the cost of the clothes
+supplied to the prisoners for some time past; but, as you know, I only
+supply things when ordered by M. Berryer, and I try to supply good
+clothes, so that they may last and give the prisoners
+satisfaction.”&mdash;Letter from Rochebrune, commissary to the Bastille, to
+Major Chevalier.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> These extracts are translated literally, in order to
+preserve the clumsy constructions of the unlettered official.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Step-sister of Louis XIV. The following extracts from her
+correspondence show how, even in circles that might have been expected
+to be well informed, the legend had already seized on people’s
+imaginations:&mdash;
+</p><p>
+“Marly, October 10, 1711. A man remained long years in the Bastille, and
+has died there, masked. At his side he had two musketeers ready to kill
+him if he took off his mask. He ate and slept masked. No doubt there was
+some reason for this, for otherwise he was well treated and lodged, and
+given everything he wished for. He went to communion masked; he was very
+devout and read continually. No one has ever been able to learn who he
+was.”
+</p><p>
+“Versailles, October 22, 1711. I have just learnt who the masked man
+was, who died in the Bastille. His wearing a mask was not due to
+cruelty. He was an English lord who had been mixed up in the affair of
+the Duke of Berwick (natural son of James II.) against King William. He
+died there so that the king might never know what became of him.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> The insurgents who rose for the king against the
+Revolutionists in Brittany: see Balzac’s famous novel. The movement
+smouldered for a great many years.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> The Gregorian calendar was abolished by the National
+Convention in 1793, who decreed that September 22, 1792, should be
+regarded as the first day of a new era. The year was divided into twelve
+months, with names derived from natural phenomena. Nivose (snowy) was
+the fourth of these months. Thus, the period mentioned in the text
+includes from December 21, 1800, to January 19, 1801.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> Since M. Funck-Brentano’s book was published, his
+conclusions have been corroborated by Vicomte Maurice Boutry in a study
+published in the <i>Revue des Etudes historiques</i> (1899, p. 172). The
+Vicomte furnishes an additional proof. He says that the Duchess de
+Créquy, in the third book of her <i>Souvenirs</i>, gives a <i>résumé</i> of a
+conversation on the Iron Mask between Marshal de Noailles, the Duchess
+de Luynes, and others, and adds: “The most considerable and best
+informed persons of my time always thought that the famous story had no
+other foundation than the capture and captivity of the Piedmontese
+Mattioli.”&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> “I have seen these ills, and I am not twenty yet.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> These verses were, of course, in Latin.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> Palissot was a dramatist and critic who in his comedy <i>Les
+Philosophes</i> had bitterly attacked Rousseau, Diderot, and the
+Encyclopædists generally.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> The old prison of Paris. It was the debtors’ prison,
+famous also for the number of actors who were imprisoned there under the
+<i>ancien régime</i>. It was demolished in 1780.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a></p>
+<p class="c">“Not unto us, O Lord, but unto Thy name give glory!</p>
+<p class="c">“Know our heart and search out our ways.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> “The victory is won!”&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> Charenton was under the direction of a religious order
+known as the <i>Frères de la Charité</i>, who undertook the care of sick and
+weak-minded poor.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> This was Elizabeth Chudleigh (1720-1788), the notorious
+beauty who privately married the Hon. Augustus Hervey, afterwards Earl
+of Bristol, separated from him after three years, and became the
+mistress of the second Duke of Kingston, whom she bigamously married.
+After his death she was tried by the House of Lords for bigamy, and fled
+to France to escape punishment. Her gallantries and eccentricities were
+the talk of Europe.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> Instructed by his misfortunes and his captivity how to
+vanquish the efforts and the rage of tyrants, he taught the French how
+true courage can win liberty.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> Jocrisse is the stock French type of the booby, and as
+such is a character in many comedies. He breaks a plate, for instance;
+his master asks him how he managed to be so clumsy, and he instantly
+smashes another, saying, “<i>Just like that!</i>” His master asks him to be
+sure and wake him early in the morning; Jocrisse answers: “Right, sir,
+depend on me; <i>but of course you’ll ring</i>!”&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> The Girondists (so called from Gironde, a district of
+Bordeaux) were the more sober republican party in the Assembly, who were
+forced by circumstances to join the Jacobins against Louis XVI. With
+their fall from power in the early summer of 1792 the last hope of the
+monarchy disappeared.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> Referring to the horrible massacres of September, 1792,
+when about 1400 victims perished.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> The French Dick Turpin. Of good education, he formed when
+quite a youth a band of robbers, and became the terror of France. Like
+Turpin, he is the subject of dramas and stories.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> A forest near Paris, on the line to Avricourt. It was a
+famous haunt of brigands. There is a well-known story of a dog which
+attacked and killed the murderer of its master there.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> Literally “cut-top”: we have no equivalent in
+English.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> A five-act comedy by Victorien Sardou.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> The nickname given to the Jacobins, the extreme
+revolutionists, who sat on the highest seats on the left in the National
+Assembly.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> Which were the strict preserves of the aristocrats: to
+fish in them was as great a crime as to shoot a landlord’s rabbit was, a
+few years ago, in England.&mdash;T.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Legends of the Bastille, by Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
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+
+Title: Legends of the Bastille
+
+Author: Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
+Translator: George Maidment
+
+Release Date: July 16, 2013 [EBook #43231]
+
+Language: English
+
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+
+                        LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE
+
+[Illustration: MODEL OF THE BASTILLE, CARVED IN ONE OF THE STONES OF THE
+FORTRESS.
+
+_One of these models, made by the instructions of the architect Palloy,
+was sent to the chief-town of every department in France._]
+
+
+
+
+                               Legends of
+                              the Bastille
+
+                                   BY
+                         FRANTZ FUNCK-BRENTANO
+
+               _WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIEN SARDOU_
+
+                       AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
+                            GEORGE MAIDMENT
+
+                        WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                 LONDON
+                          DOWNEY & CO. LIMITED
+                                  1899
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+     _Legendes et Archives de la Bastille._ Paris: Hachette et Cie.,
+     1898; second edition, 1899. Crowned by the French Academy.
+
+     _Die Bastille in der Legende und nach historischen Documenten._
+     German translation by Oscar Marschall von Bieberstein. Breslau:
+     Schottlaender, 1899.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+In his own entertaining way, Mr. Andrew Lang has recently been taking
+the scientific historian to task, and giving him a very admirable lesson
+on "history as she ought to be wrote." But though the two professors to
+whom he mainly addresses himself are Frenchmen, it would be doing an
+injustice to France to infer that she is the _alma mater_ of the modern
+dryasdust. The exact contrary is the case: France is rich in historical
+writers like the Comte d'Haussonville, M. de Maulde la Claviere, M.
+Gaston Boissier, to name only a few, who know how to be accurate without
+being dull.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano, whom I have the honour of introducing here to the
+English public, belongs to the same class. Of literary parentage and
+connections--his uncle is Professor Lujo Brentano, whose work on the
+English trade gilds is a standard--he entered in his twentieth year the
+Ecole des Chartes, the famous institution which trains men in the
+methods of historical research. At the end of his three years' course,
+he was appointed to succeed Francois Ravaisson in the work of
+classifying the archives of the Bastille in the Arsenal Library,--a work
+which occupied him for more than ten years. One fruit of it is to be
+seen in the huge catalogue of more than one thousand pages, printed
+under official auspices and awarded the Prix Le Dissez de Penanrum by
+the Academie des Sciences morales et politiques. Another is the present
+work, which has been crowned by the French Academy. Meanwhile M.
+Funck-Brentano had been pursuing his studies at the Sorbonne and at
+Nancy, and his French thesis for the doctorate in letters was a volume
+on the origins of the Hundred Years' War, which obtained for him the
+highest possible distinction for a work of erudition in France, the
+Grand Prix Gobert. This volume he intends to follow up with two others,
+completing a social rather than a military history of the war, and this
+no doubt he regards as his _magnum opus_. He is known also as a lecturer
+in Belgium and Alsace as well as in Paris, and being general secretary
+of the Societe des Etudes historiques and deputy professor of history at
+the College of France as well as sub-librarian of the Arsenal Library,
+he leads a busy life.
+
+Trained in the rigorous methods of the Ecole des Chartes and inspired by
+the examples of Fustel de Coulanges and M. Paul Meyer, M. Funck-Brentano
+has developed a most interesting and conscientious method of his own. He
+depends on original sources, and subjects these to the most searching
+critical tests; but this is a matter of course: his individuality
+appears in regard to the publication of the results of his researches.
+When he has discoveries of importance to communicate, he gives them to
+the world first in the form of articles or studies in reviews of
+standing, thus preparing public opinion, and at the same time affording
+opportunities for the search-light of criticism to play on his work.
+Some of the chapters of this book thus appeared in the various _revues_,
+and have subsequently gone through a severe process of pruning and
+amending. It is now eleven years since the first appearance, in the
+pages of the _Revue des deux Mondes_, of the study of Latude which, in a
+much altered shape, now forms one of the most interesting portions of
+this book. The coming autumn will see the publication in France of a
+striking work by M. Funck-Brentano on the amazing poison-dramas at Louis
+XIV.'s court, and of this book also the several sections have been
+appearing at intervals for several years past.
+
+The present work, as I have already said, is the fruit of many years of
+research. Its startling revelations, so well summarized in M. Victorien
+Sardou's Introduction, have revolutionized public opinion in France, and
+in particular the solution of the old problem of the identity of the Man
+in the Iron Mask has been accepted as final by all competent critics.
+The _Athenaeum_, in reviewing the book in its French form the other day,
+said that it must be taken cautiously as an ingenious bit of special
+pleading, and that the Bastille appears in M. Funck-Brentano's pages in
+altogether too roseate hues, suggesting further that no such results
+could be obtained without prejudice from the same archives as those on
+which Charpentier founded his _La Bastille devoilee_ in 1789. This
+criticism seems to me to ignore several important points. Charpentier's
+book, written in the heat of the revolutionary struggle, is not a
+history, but a political pamphlet, which, in the nature of the case, was
+bound to represent the Bastille as a horror. Moreover, Charpentier could
+only have depended superficially on the archives, which, as M.
+Funck-Brentano shows, were thrown into utter disorder on the day of the
+capture of the Bastille. The later writer, on the other hand, approached
+the subject when the revolutionary ardours had quite burnt out, and with
+the independent and dispassionate mind of a trained official. He spent
+thirteen years in setting the rediscovered archives in order, after his
+predecessor Ravaisson had already spent a considerable time at the same
+work. He was able, further (as Charpentier certainly was not), to
+complete and check the testimony of the archives by means of the memoirs
+of prisoners--the Abbe Morellet, Marmontel, Renneville, Dumouriez, and a
+host of others. In these circumstances it would be surprising if his
+conclusions were not somewhat different from those of Charpentier a
+hundred years ago.
+
+The gravamen of the _Athenaeun's_ objection is that M. Funck-Brentano's
+description of the treatment of prisoners in the Bastille applies only
+to the favoured few, the implication being that M. Funck-Brentano has
+shut his eyes to the cases of the larger number. But surely the reviewer
+must have read the book too rapidly. M. Funck-Brentano shows, by means
+of existing and accessible documents, that the fact of being sent to the
+Bastille at all was itself, in the eighteenth century at least, a mark
+of favour. Once at the Bastille, the prisoner, whoever he might be, was
+treated without severity, unless he misbehaved. Prisoners of no social
+importance, such as Renneville, Latude (a servant's love-child),
+Tavernier (son of a house-porter), were fed and clothed and cared for
+much better than they would have been outside the prison walls. A young
+man named Estival de Texas, who was being exiled to Canada because he
+was a disgrace to his family, wrote to the minister of Paris on June 22,
+1726, from the roadstead of La Rochelle: "Your lordship is sending me to
+a wild country, huddled with mean wretches, and condemned to a fare very
+different from what your lordship granted me in the Bastille." Here was
+a friendless outcast looking back regretfully on his prison fare! On
+February 6, 1724, one of the king's ministers wrote to the lieutenant
+of police: "I have read to the duke of Bourbon the letter you sent me
+about the speeches of M. Queheon, and his royal highness has instructed
+me to send you an order and a _lettre de cachet_ authorizing his removal
+to the Bastille. But as he thinks that this is _an honour the fellow
+little deserves_, he wishes you to postpone the execution of the warrant
+for three days, in order to see if Queheon will not take the hint and
+leave Paris as he was commanded." It is on such documents as these,
+which are to be seen in hundreds at the Arsenal Library in Paris, that
+M. Funck-Brentano has founded his conclusions. Anyone who attacks him on
+his own ground is likely to come badly off.
+
+With M. Funck-Brentano's permission, I have omitted the greater part of
+his footnotes, which are mainly references to documents inaccessible to
+the English reader. On the other hand, I have ventured to supply a few
+footnotes in explanation of such allusions as the Englishman not reading
+French (and the translation is intended for no others) might not
+understand. On the same principle I have attempted rhymed renderings of
+two or three scraps of verse quoted from Regnier and Voltaire, to whom I
+make my apologies. The proofs have had the advantage of revision by M.
+Funck-Brentano, who is, however, in no way responsible for any
+shortcomings. The Index appears in the English version alone.
+
+The portrait of Latude and the views of the Bastille are reproduced from
+photographs of the originals specially taken by M. A. Bresson, of 40 Rue
+de Passy, Paris.
+
+GEORGE MAIDMENT.
+
+_August, 1899._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                           1
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ARCHIVES                                                          47
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE                                               57
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LIFE IN THE BASTILLE                                                  85
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK                                             114
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE                                       147
+
+  I. VOLTAIRE                                                        148
+
+ II. LA BEAUMELLE                                                    152
+
+III. THE ABBE MORELLET                                               155
+
+ IV. MARMONTEL                                                       158
+
+  V. LINGUET                                                         163
+
+ VI. DIDEROT                                                         165
+
+VII. THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU                                         166
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LATUDE                                                               168
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY                                               238
+
+INDEX                                                                277
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Model of the Bastille                                      _Frontispiece_
+
+Facsimile of Du Junca's note regarding the
+entry of the Iron Mask                                 _Facing page_ 115
+
+Facsimile of Du Junca's note regarding the
+death of the Iron Mask                                     "         116
+
+Facsimile of the Iron Mask's burial certificate            "         142
+
+Facsimile of the cover of Latude's explosive box           "         173
+
+Facsimile of Latude's writing with blood on linen          "         188
+
+Portrait of Latude                                         "         229
+
+The Capture of the Bastille                                "         257
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+At the great Exhibition of 1889 I visited, in company with some friends,
+the reproduction of the Bastille, calculated to give all who saw it--and
+the whole world must have seen it--an entirely false impression.
+
+You had barely cleared the doorway when you saw, in the gloom, an old
+man enveloped in a long white beard, lying on the "sodden straw" of
+tradition, rattling his chains and uttering doleful cries. And the guide
+said to you, not without emotion, "You see here the unfortunate Latude,
+who remained in this position, with both arms thus chained behind his
+back, for thirty-five years!"
+
+This information I completed by adding in the same tone: "And it was in
+this attitude that he so cleverly constructed the ladder, a hundred and
+eighty feet long, which enabled him to escape."
+
+The company looked at me with surprise, the guide with a scowl, and I
+slipped away.
+
+The same considerations that prompted my intervention have suggested to
+M. Funck-Brentano this work on the Bastille, in which he has set the
+facts in their true light, and confronted the legends which everyone
+knows with the truth of which many are in ignorance.
+
+For in spite of all that has been written on the subject by Ravaisson,
+in the introduction to his _Archives of the Bastille_, by Victor
+Fournel, in his _Men of the Fourteenth of July_, and by other writers,
+the popular idea of the internal administration of the Bastille in 1789
+holds by the description of Louis Blanc: "Iron cages, recalling
+Plessis-les-Tours[1] and the tortures of Cardinal La Balue![2]--underground
+dungeons, the loathsome haunts of toads, lizards, enormous rats,
+spiders--the whole furniture consisting of one huge stone covered with a
+little straw, where the prisoner breathed poison in the very air....
+Enveloped in the shades of mystery, kept in absolute ignorance of the
+crime with which he was charged, and the kind of punishment awaiting
+him, he ceased to belong to the earth!"
+
+If this Bastille of melodrama ever had any existence, the Bastille of
+the eighteenth century bore the least possible resemblance to it. In
+1789, these dungeons on the ground floor of the fortress, with windows
+looking on the moats, were no longer reserved, as under Louis XV., for
+prisoners condemned to death, dangerous madmen, or prisoners who had
+been insolent, obstreperous, or violent; nor for warders guilty of
+breaches of discipline. At the time of Necker's first ministry, the use
+of these dungeons had been abolished altogether.
+
+The prisoner, put through an interrogation in the early days of his
+detention, was never left in ignorance of the "delinquency" with which
+he was charged, and had no reason to be concerned about the kind of
+punishment awaiting him; for there had been neither torture nor
+punishment of any kind at the Bastille for a hundred years.
+
+Instead of a dungeon or a cage of iron, every prisoner occupied a room
+of fair size, its greatest defect being that it was rather poorly
+lighted by a narrow window, secured by bars, some of them projecting
+inwards. It was sufficiently furnished; and there was nothing to hinder
+the prisoner from getting in more furniture from outside. Moreover, he
+could procure whatever clothing and linen he desired, and if he had no
+means to pay for them, money was supplied. Latude complained of
+rheumatism, and furs were at once given him. He wanted a dressing-gown
+of "red-striped calamanco"; the shops were ransacked to gratify him. A
+certain Hugonnet complained that he had not received the shirts "with
+embroidered ruffles" which he had asked for. A lady named Sauve wanted a
+dress of white silk spotted with green flowers. In all Paris there was
+only a white dress with green stripes to be found, with which it was
+hoped that she would be satisfied.
+
+Every room was provided with a fireplace or a stove. Firewood was
+supplied, and light; the prisoner could have as many candles as he
+pleased. Paper, pens, and ink were at his disposal; though he was
+deprived of them temporarily if he made bad use of them, like Latude,
+who scribbled all day long only to heap insults in his letters on the
+governor and the lieutenant of police. He could borrow books from the
+library, and was at liberty to have books sent in from outside. La
+Beaumelle had six hundred volumes in his room. He might breed birds,
+cats, and dogs--by no means being reduced to taming the legendary spider
+of Pellisson,[3] which figures also in the story of Lauzun,[4] and,
+indeed, of all prisoners in every age. Instruments of music were
+allowed. Renneville played the fiddle, and Latude the flute. There were
+concerts in the prisoners' rooms and in the apartments of the governor.
+
+Every prisoner could work at embroidery, at the turning lathe, or the
+joiner's bench, at pleasure. All whose conduct was irreproachable were
+allowed to come and go, to pay each other visits, to play at
+backgammon, cards, or chess in their rooms; at skittles, bowls, or
+_tonneau_[5] in the courtyard. La Rouerie asked for a billiard table for
+himself and his friends, and he got it.
+
+The prisoners were permitted to walk on the platform of the fortress,
+from which they could see the people passing up and down the Rue
+Saint-Antoine and the vicinity, and watch the animated crowds on the
+boulevard at the hours when fashionable people were accustomed to take
+their drives. By the aid of telescopes and big letters written on boards
+they were able to communicate with the people of the neighbourhood, and,
+like Latude, to keep up a secret correspondence with the grisettes of
+the district. Michelet, with too obvious a design, declares that under
+Louis XVI. the regulations of the prison were more severe than under
+Louis XV., and that this promenade on the platform was done away with.
+There is not a word of truth in it. The promenade was forbidden only to
+those prisoners who, like the Marquis de Sade, took advantage of it to
+stir up riots among the passers-by; and from the accession of Louis
+XVI. and the visitation of Malesherbes,[6] the rule of the prison grew
+milder day by day.
+
+Certain of the prisoners were invited to dine with the governor, and to
+walk in his gardens, in excellent company. Some were allowed to leave
+the fortress, on condition of returning in the evening; others were even
+allowed to remain out all night!
+
+Those who had servants could have them in attendance if the servants
+were willing to share their captivity. Or they had room-mates, as was
+the case with Latude and Allegre.
+
+In regard to food, the prisoners are unanimous in declaring that it was
+abundant and good. "I had five dishes at dinner," says Dumouriez, "and
+five at supper, without reckoning dessert." The Provost de Beaumont
+declared that he had quitted the Bastille with regret, because there he
+had been able to eat and drink to his heart's content. Poultier
+d'Elmotte says: "M. de Launey had many a friendly chat with me, and
+sent me what dishes I wished for." Baron Hennequin, a hypochondriac who
+found fault with everything, confesses nevertheless that they gave him
+more meat than he could eat. The Abbe de Buquoy affirms that he fared
+sumptuously, and that it was the king's intention that the prisoners
+should be well fed. The splenetic Linguet owns, in his pamphlet, that he
+had three good meals a day, and that meat was supplied to him in such
+quantities that his suspicions were aroused: "They meant to poison me!"
+he says. But he omits to say that de Launey sent him every morning the
+menu for the day, on which he marked down with his own hand the dishes
+he fancied, "choosing always the most dainty, and in sufficient
+quantities to have satisfied five or six epicures."
+
+In Louis XIV.'s time, Renneville drew up the following list of dishes
+served to him: "Oysters, prawns, fowls, capons, mutton, veal, young
+pigeons; forcemeat pies and patties; asparagus, cauliflower, green peas,
+artichokes; salmon, soles, pike, trout, every kind of fish whether
+fresh-water or salt; pastry, and fruits in their season." We find Latude
+complaining that the fowls given him were not stuffed! M.
+Funck-Brentano tells the amusing story of Marmontel's eating by mistake
+the dinner intended for his servant, and finding it excellent.
+
+Mdlle. de Launay, afterwards Madame de Staal, who was imprisoned for
+complicity in the Cellamare[7] plot, relates that on the first evening
+of her sojourn in the Bastille, she and her maid were both terrified by
+the strange and prolonged sound, beneath their feet, of a mysterious
+machine, which conjured up visions of an instrument of torture. When
+they came to inquire, they found that their room was over the kitchen,
+and the terrible machine was the roasting-jack!
+
+The prisoners were not only allowed to receive visits from their
+relations and friends, but to keep them to dinner or to make up a
+rubber. Thus Madame de Staal held receptions in the afternoon, and in
+the evening there was high play. "And this time," she says, "was the
+happiest in my life."
+
+Bussy-Rabutin received the whole court, and all his friends--especially
+those of the fair sex. M. de Bonrepos--an assumed name--was so
+comfortable in the Bastille that when he was directed to retire to the
+Invalides,[8] he could only be removed by force.
+
+"I there spent six weeks," says Morellet, "so pleasantly, that I chuckle
+to this day when I think of them." And when he left, he exclaimed: "God
+rest those jolly tyrants!"
+
+Voltaire remained there for twelve days, with a recommendation from the
+lieutenant of police that he should be treated with all the
+consideration "due to his genius."
+
+The objection may be raised that these cases are all of great lords or
+men of letters, towards whom the government of those days was
+exceptionally lenient. (How delightful to find writers put on the same
+footing with peers!) But the objection is groundless.
+
+I have referred to Renneville and Latude, prisoners of very little
+account. The one was a spy; the other a swindler. In the three-volume
+narrative left us by Renneville, you hear of nothing but how he kept
+open house and made merry with his companions. They gambled and smoked,
+ate and drank, fuddled and fought, gossiped with their neighbours of
+both sexes, and passed one another pastry and excellent wine through the
+chimneys. How gladly the prisoners in our jails to-day would accommodate
+themselves to such a life! Renneville, assuredly, was not treated with
+the same consideration as Voltaire; but, frankly, would you have wished
+it?
+
+As to Latude--who was supplied with dressing-gowns to suit his
+fancy--the reader will see from M. Funck-Brentano's narrative that no
+one but himself was to blame if he did not dwell at Vincennes[9] or in
+the Bastille on the best of terms--or even leave his prison at the
+shortest notice, by the front gate, and with a well-lined pocket.
+
+For that was one of the harsh measures of this horrible Bastille--to
+send away the poor wretches, when their time was expired, with a few
+hundred livres in their pockets, and to compensate such as were found to
+be innocent! See what M. Funck-Brentano says of Sube, who, for a
+detention of eighteen days, received 3000 livres (L240 to-day), or of
+others, who, after an imprisonment of two years, were consoled with an
+annual pension of 2400 francs of our reckoning. Voltaire spent twelve
+days in the Bastille, and was assured of an annual pension of 1200
+livres for life. What is to be said now of our contemporary justice,
+which, after some months of imprisonment on suspicion, dismisses the
+poor fellow, arrested by mistake, with no other indemnity than the
+friendly admonition: "Go! and take care we don't catch you again!"
+
+Some wag will be sure to say that I am making out the Bastille to have
+been a palace of delight. We can spare him his little jest. A prison is
+always a prison, however pleasant it may be; and the best of cheer is no
+compensation for the loss of liberty. But there is a wide difference, it
+will be granted, between the reality and the notion generally
+held--between this "hotel for men of letters," as some one called it,
+and the hideous black holes of our system of solitary confinement. I
+once said that I should prefer three years in the Bastille to three
+months at Mazas.[10] I do not retract.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Linguet and Latude, unquestionably, were the two men whose habit of
+drawing the long bow has done most to propagate the fables about the
+Bastille, the falsity of which is established by incontrovertible
+documents. Party spirit has not failed to take seriously the interested
+calumnies of Linguet, who used his spurious martyrdom to advertise
+himself, and the lies of Latude, exploiting to good purpose a captivity
+which he had made his career.
+
+Let us leave Linguet, who, after having so earnestly urged the
+demolition of the Bastille, had reason to regret it at the Conciergerie
+at the moment of mounting the revolutionary tumbril, and speak a little
+of the other, this captive who was as ingenious in escaping from prison,
+when locked up, as in hugging his chains when offered the means of
+release.
+
+For the bulk of mankind, thirty-five years of captivity was the price
+Latude paid for a mere practical joke: the sending to Madame de
+Pompadour of a harmless powder that was taken for poison. The punishment
+is regarded as terrific: I do not wonder at it. But if, instead of
+relying on the gentleman's own fanfaronades, the reader will take the
+trouble to look at the biography written by M. Funck-Brentano and amply
+supported by documents, he will speedily see that if Latude remained in
+prison for thirty-five years, it was entirely by his own choice; and
+that his worst enemy, his most implacable persecutor, the author of all
+his miseries was--himself.
+
+If, after the piece of trickery which led to his arrest, he had followed
+the advice of the excellent Berryer, who counselled patience and
+promised his speedy liberation, he might have got off with a few months
+of restraint at Vincennes, where his confinement was so rigorous that he
+had only to push the garden gate to be free!
+
+That was the first folly calculated to injure his cause, for the new
+fault was more serious than the old. He was caught; he was locked in the
+cells of the Bastille: but the kind-hearted Berryer soon removed him.
+Instead of behaving himself quietly, however, our man begins to grow
+restless, to harangue, to abuse everybody, and on the books lent him to
+scribble insulting verses on the Pompadour. But they allow him an
+apartment, then give him a servant, then a companion, Allegre. And then
+comes the famous escape. One hardly knows which to wonder at the most:
+the ingenuity of the two rogues, or the guileless management of this
+prison which allows them to collect undisturbed a gimlet, a saw, a
+compass, a pulley, fourteen hundred feet of rope, a rope ladder 180 feet
+long, with 218 wooden rungs; to conceal all these between the floor and
+the ceiling below, without anyone ever thinking to look there; and,
+after having cut through a wall four and a half feet thick, to get clear
+away without firing a shot!
+
+They were not the first to get across those old walls. Renneville
+mentions several escapes, the most famous being that of the Abbe de
+Buquoy.[11] But little importance seems to have been attached to them.
+
+With Allegre and Latude it was a different matter. The passers-by must
+have seen, in the early morning, the ladder swinging from top to bottom
+of the wall, and the escape was no longer a secret. The Bastille is
+discredited. It is possible, then, to escape from it. The chagrined
+police are on their mettle. There will be laughter at their expense. The
+fugitives are both well known, too. They will take good care to spread
+the story of their escape, with plenty of gibes against the governor,
+the lieutenant of police, the ministry, the favourite, the king! This
+scandal must be averted at any cost; the fugitives must be caught!
+
+And we cannot help pitying these two wretches who, after a flight so
+admirably contrived, got arrested so stupidly: Allegre at Brussels,
+through an abusive letter written to the Pompadour; Latude in Holland,
+through a letter begging help from his mother.
+
+Latude is again under lock and key, and this time condemned to a
+stricter confinement. And then the hubbub begins again: outcries,
+demands, acts of violence, threats! He exasperates and daunts men who
+had the best will in the world to help him. He is despatched to the
+fortress of Vincennes, and promised his liberty if he will only keep
+quiet. His liberation, on his own showing, was but a matter of days. He
+is allowed to walk on the bank of the moat. He takes advantage of it to
+escape again!
+
+Captured once more, he is once more lodged at Vincennes, and the whole
+business begins over again. But they are good enough to consider him a
+little mad, and after a stay at Charenton,[12] where he was very well
+treated, he at last gets his dismissal, with the recommendation to
+betake himself to his own part of the country quietly. Ah, that would
+not be like Latude! He scampers over Paris, railing against De Sartine,
+De Marigny; hawking his pamphlets; claiming 150,000 livres as
+damages!--and, finally, extorting money from a charitable lady by
+menaces!
+
+This is the last straw. Patience is exhausted, and he is clapped into
+Bicetre[13] as a dangerous lunatic. Imagine his fury and disgust!
+
+Let us be just. Suppose, in our own days, a swindler, sentenced to a few
+months' imprisonment, insulting the police, the magistrates, the court,
+the president; sentenced on this account to a longer term, escaping
+once, twice, a third time; always caught, put in jail again, sentenced
+to still longer terms: then when at last released, after having done his
+time, scattering broadcast insulting libels against the chief of police,
+the ministers, the parliament, and insisting on the President of the
+Republic paying him damages to the tune of 150,000 francs; to crown it
+all, getting money out of some good woman by working on her fears! You
+will agree with me that such a swaggering blade would not have much
+difficulty in putting together thirty-five years in jail!
+
+But these sentences would of course be public, and provide no soil for
+the growth of those legends to which closed doors always give rise. Yet
+in all that relates to the causes and the duration of the man's
+imprisonment, his case would be precisely that of Latude--except that
+for him there would be no furs, no promenading in the gardens, no
+stuffed fowls for his lunch!
+
+Besides some fifty autograph letters from Latude, addressed from Bicetre
+to his good angel, Madame Legros, in which he shows himself in his true
+character, an intriguing, vain, insolent, bragging, insupportable
+humbug, I have one, written to M. de Sartine, which Latude published as
+a pendant to the pamphlet with which he hoped to move Madame de
+Pompadour to pity, and in which every phrase is an insult. This letter
+was put up at public auction, and these first lines of it were
+reproduced in the catalogue:--
+
+"I am supporting with patience the loss of my best years and of my
+fortune. I am enduring my rheumatism, the weakness of my arm, and a ring
+of iron around my body for the rest of my life!"
+
+A journalist, one of those who learn their history from Louis Blanc, had
+a vision of Latude for ever riveted by a ring of iron to a pillar in
+some underground dungeon, and exclaimed with indignation: "A ring of
+iron! How horrible!"
+
+And it was only a linen band!
+
+That fabulous iron collar is a type of the whole legend of the
+unfortunate Latude!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everything connected with the Bastille has assumed a fabulous character.
+
+What glorious days were those of the 13th and 14th of July, as the
+popular imagination conjures them up in reliance on Michelet, who, in a
+vivid, impassioned, picturesque, dramatic, admirable style, has
+written, not the history, but the romance of the French Revolution!
+
+Look at his account of the 13th. He shows you all Paris in revolt
+against Versailles, and with superb enthusiasm running to arms to try
+issues with the royal army. It is fine as literature. Historically, it
+is pure fiction.
+
+The Parisians were assuredly devoted to the "new ideas," that is, the
+suppression of the abuses and the privileges specified in the memorials
+of the States General; in a word, to the reforms longed for by the whole
+of France. But they had no conception of gaining them without the
+concurrence of the monarchy, to which they were sincerely attached. That
+crowd of scared men running to the Hotel de Ville to demand arms, who
+are represented by the revolutionary writers as exasperated by the
+dismissal of Necker and ready to undermine the throne for the sake of
+that Genevan, were much less alarmed at what was hatching at Versailles
+than at what was going on in Paris. If they wished for arms, it was for
+their own security. The dissolution of the National Assembly, which was
+regarded as certain, was setting all minds in a ferment, and
+ill-designing people took advantage of the general uneasiness and
+agitation to drive matters to the worst extremities, creating disorder
+everywhere. The police had disappeared; the streets were in the hands of
+the mob. Bands of ruffians--among them those ill-favoured rascals who
+since the month of May had been flocking, as at a word of command, into
+Paris from heaven knows where, and who had already been seen at work,
+pillaging Reveillon's[14] establishment--roamed in every direction,
+insulting women, stripping wayfarers, looting the shops, opening the
+prisons, burning the barriers. On July 13 the electors of Paris resolved
+on the formation of a citizen militia for the protection of the town,
+and the scheme was adopted on the same day by every district, with
+articles of constitution, quoted by M. Funck-Brentano, which specify the
+intentions of the signatories. It was expressly in self-defence against
+the "Brigands," as they were called, that the citizen militia was
+formed: "To protect the citizens," ran the minutes of the
+Petit-Saint-Antoine district, "against the dangers which threaten them
+each individually." "In a word," says M. Victor Fournel, "the
+dominating sentiment was fear. Up till the 14th of July, the Parisian
+middle-classes showed far more concern at the manifold excesses
+committed by the populace after Necker's dismissal than at the schemes
+of the court." And M. Jacques Charavay, who was the first to publish the
+text of the minutes in question, says not a word too much when he draws
+from them this conclusion: "The movement which next day swept away the
+Bastille might possibly have been stifled by the National Guard, if its
+organization had had greater stability."
+
+All that was wanting to these good intentions was direction, a man at
+the helm, and particularly the support of Besenval. But his conduct was
+amazing! He left Versailles with 35,000 men and an order signed by the
+king--obtained not without difficulty--authorizing him "to repel force
+by force." Now let us see a summary of his military operations:--
+
+On the 13th, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, a skirmish of the
+German regiment on the Place Vendome, where it came into collision with
+the "demonstration"--as we should say to-day--which was displaying busts
+of Necker and the Duke of Orleans, and dispersed it.
+
+At six o'clock, a march of the same horse soldiers to the
+swinging-bridge of the Tuileries, where they had five or six chairs
+thrown at their head; and the massacre, by M. de Lambesc, of the
+legendary grey-beard who, an hour after, was describing his tragic end
+at the Palais-Royal!
+
+At nine o'clock, a military promenade of the same regiment along the
+boulevards. A volley from the Gardes Francaises slew two of their
+number, and the regiment beat a retreat without returning fire, to the
+great surprise of M. de Maleissye, officer of the Guards. For, by his
+own confession, if the cavalry had charged, it would easily have routed
+the Gardes Francaises "in the state of drunkenness in which they then
+were."
+
+And Besenval, terrified at such a resistance, assembled all his troops,
+shut himself up with them in the Champ de Mars, and did not move another
+step!
+
+We ask ourselves, "Was he a fool? or was he a traitor?" He was a fool,
+for he thought he had "three hundred thousand men" in front of him, took
+every excited person for a rebel, and did not understand that out of
+every hundred Parisians there were ninety who were relying on him to
+bring the mutineers to reason.
+
+He had no confidence in his troops, he said.
+
+It was rather for them to have no confidence in him, and to lose heart
+utterly at such a spectacle of cowardice. But he was slandering them.
+One solitary regiment showed disloyalty. And if he had only given the
+Swiss the word to march, their conduct on August 10 gives ample proof
+that they could have been depended on.
+
+"And then," says he again, "I was fearful of letting loose civil war!"
+
+Indeed! And so a soldier going to suppress a revolt is not to run the
+risk of fighting!
+
+Last reason of all: "I requested orders from Versailles--and did not get
+them!"
+
+What, then, had he in his pocket?
+
+Finally, after having sent word to Flesselles and De Launey to maintain
+their position till he arrived, and after having allowed the arms of the
+Invalides to be looted under his eyes without a single effort to save
+them, he waited till the Bastille was taken before making up his mind to
+leave the Champ de Mars, and to return quietly to Versailles with his
+35,000 men, who had not fired a shot!
+
+Ah! those were the days for rioting!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"On July 13," says Michelet, "Paris was defending herself." (Against
+whom?) "On the 14th, she attacked! A voice wakened her and cried, 'On,
+and take the Bastille!' And that day was the day of the entire People!"
+
+Admirable poetry; but every word a lie!
+
+Listen to Marat, who is not open to suspicion, and who saw things at
+closer quarters. "The Bastille, badly defended, was captured by a
+handful of soldiers and a gang of wretches for the most part Germans and
+provincials. The Parisians, those everlasting star-gazers, came there
+out of curiosity!"
+
+In reality, Michelet's "entire people" reduces itself to a bare thousand
+assailants, of whom three hundred at most took part in the fight: Gardes
+Francaises and deserters of all arms, lawyers' clerks, and citizens who
+had lost their heads: fine fellows who thought themselves engaged in
+meritorious work in rushing on these inoffensive walls; bandits
+attracted by the riot which promised them theft and murder with
+impunity. And a number of mere spectators--spectators above all!
+
+"I was present," says Chancellor Pasquier, "at the taking of the
+Bastille. What is called the fight was not serious. The resistance was
+absolutely nil. The truth is, that this grand fight did not cause an
+instant's alarm to the spectators, who had flocked up to see the result.
+Among them there were many ladies of the greatest elegance. In order to
+get more easily to the front they had left their carriages at a
+distance. By my side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Comedie Francaise. We
+stayed to see the finish, and then I escorted her on my arm to her
+carriage in the Place Royale."
+
+"The Bastille was not taken; truth must be told, it surrendered." It is
+Michelet himself who makes this statement, and he adds: "what ruined it
+was its own evil conscience!"
+
+It would be too simple to acknowledge that it was the incapacity of its
+governor.
+
+There is no connoisseur in old prints but is acquainted with those
+last-century views which represent the taking of the Bastille. The
+platform of the fortress bristles with cannon all firing together,
+"belching forth death,"--without the slightest attention on the part of
+the assailants, for all the balls from this artillery, passing over
+their heads, would only kill inoffensive wayfarers without so much as
+scratching a single one of the besiegers!
+
+And the Bastille did not fire a single shot in self-defence!
+
+In the morning, at the request of Thuriot de la Roziere, De Launey had
+readily consented to the withdrawal of the fifteen cannon of the
+platform from their embrasures, and had blocked up the embrasures with
+planks. Of the three guns which later on he ranged batterywise before
+the entrance gate, not one was effective, and the discharge attributed
+to one of them came from a piece of ordnance on the wall.
+
+He placed such absolute reliance on succour from Besenval that, on
+evacuating the arsenal and getting the whole garrison together into the
+Bastille--eighty-two Invalides and M. de Flue's thirty-two Swiss--he had
+forgotten to increase his stock of provisions. Now, the Bastille had no
+reserve of provisions. Every morning, like a good housewife, it received
+the goods ordered the night before, brought by the different purveyors;
+on this day, they were intercepted. So it happened that at three o'clock
+in the afternoon the garrison was without its usual rations, and the
+Invalides, who had been for a week past going in and out of all the inns
+in the neighbourhood, and were disposed to open the doors to their good
+friends of the suburbs, used the scantiness of their rations as a
+pretext for mutiny, for refusing to fight, and for muddling the brains,
+never very clear, of the unhappy De Launey.
+
+"On the day of my arrival," says De Flue, "I was able to take this man's
+measure from the absolutely imbecile preparations which he made for the
+defence of his position. I saw clearly that we should be very poorly led
+in case of attack. He was so struck with terror at the idea of it that,
+when night came on, he took the shadows of trees for enemies! Incapable,
+irresolute, devoting all his attention to trifles and neglecting
+important duties--such was the man."
+
+Abandoned by Besenval, instead of cowing his Invalides into obedience by
+his energy, and maintaining his position to famishing point behind walls
+over which the balls of the besiegers flew without killing more than
+one man, De Launey lost his head, made a feint of firing the powder
+magazine, capitulated, and opened his gates to men who, as Chateaubriand
+says, "could never have cleared them if he had only kept them shut."
+
+If this poor creature had done his duty, and Besenval had done his,
+things would have had quite a different complexion. That is not to say
+that the Revolution would have been averted--far from it! The Revolution
+was legitimate, desirable, and, under the generous impulse of a whole
+nation, irresistible. But it would have followed another bent, and would
+have triumphed at a slighter cost, with less ruin and less bloodshed.
+The consequences of the 14th of July were disastrous. The mere words,
+"The Bastille is taken!" were the signal for the most frightful
+disorders throughout France. It seemed as though those old walls were
+dragging down with them in their fall all authority, all respect, all
+discipline; as though the floodgates were being opened to every kind of
+excess. Peasants went about in bands, ravaging, pillaging, firing the
+chateaux, the burghers' houses, and burning alive those who fell into
+their hands. The soldiers mutinied, insulted their chiefs, and fell to
+carousing with the malefactors whom they set free. There was not a town
+or village where the mob did not put on menacing airs, where decent
+people were not molested by the brawlers of the clubs and the
+street-corners. Such violence led to a rapid reaction, and there were
+numerous defections--of men who, on the very eve of the outbreak, among
+the magistracy, the army, the clergy, the nobility, though sympathizing
+with the new ideas, abruptly cut themselves loose from the movement,
+like the good Duke de la Rochefoucauld, who exclaimed, "Liberty is not
+entered by such a door as this!" Hovering between the desire and the
+fear of granting the promised reforms, urged on one side to resistance,
+on the other to submission, and more than ever destitute of all
+political acumen and all will power, the king went to Paris, and,
+bending before the revolt, approved of the assassination of his most
+faithful servants--and took, on that fatal day, his first step towards
+the scaffold! Henceforth, under the pressure of the populace, to whom
+its first success had shown the measure of its strength, and who became
+every day more exacting, more threatening, the Revolution was to go on
+in its perverse course, stumbling at every step, until it came to the
+orgy of '93, which, properly speaking, was only the systematizing of
+brigandage. Malouet was right indeed: what we symbolize in our festival
+of the 14th of July is not the rising sun, the dawn of Liberty; it is
+the first lurid lightning flash of the Terror!
+
+Doctor Rigby, after having walked up and down the whole afternoon in the
+Jardin Monceau without the least idea of what was going on in the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine, returned in the evening to his house near the
+Palais-Royal. He saw the mob reeling in drunkenness. Men and women were
+laughing, crying, and embracing one another: "The Bastille is taken! At
+last we are free!" And not the least enthusiastic were those very men of
+the citizen militia who, ready yesterday to fight the insurrection, were
+to-day hailing its triumph! The first sabre brandished by the first
+national guard was in point of fact that of Joseph Prudhomme![15]
+
+All at once this delirious crowd shudders, parts asunder with cries of
+horror!
+
+Down the Rue Saint-Honore comes a yelling mob of wine-soaked
+malefactors, bearing along, at the ends of two pikes, the still bleeding
+heads of De Launey and De Flesselles!
+
+And the silly folk, so madly rejoiced by the fall of an imaginary
+tyranny which has not even the wits to defend itself, go their several
+ways, struck dumb with consternation.
+
+For here the Real is making its entrance!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Do not fancy that because the Bastille has opened its gates, the legends
+which give it so cruel a name are going to vanish into thin air, like
+the phantoms of an ancient chateau when light is let in.
+
+While Michelet's "entire Paris" is making short work of the Invalides
+who surrendered the place; cutting in pieces the man who prevented its
+blowing up; slaughtering Major de Losme, the friend and benefactor of
+the prisoners; torturing the hapless De Launey, who, from the Bastille
+to the Hotel de Ville, stabbed, slashed, hacked with sabres and pikes
+and bayonets, is finally decapitated by the aid of a short knife--an
+episode which Michelet skilfully slurs over--while all the criminals of
+the district, crowding along in the wake of the combatants, are rushing
+to the official buildings, looting, smashing, throwing into the moats
+furniture, books, official papers, archives, the remnants of which will
+be collected with such difficulty--some good people are saying to
+themselves: "But come now, there are some prisoners! Suppose we go and
+set them free?"
+
+Here let us see what Louis Blanc has to say:--
+
+"Meanwhile the doors of the cells" (he insists on the cells) "were burst
+in with a mighty effort; the prisoners were free! Alas! for three of
+them it was too late! The first, whose name was the Comte de Solages, a
+victim for seven years of the incomprehensible vengeance of an
+implacable father, found neither relatives who would consent to
+acknowledge him, nor his property, which had become the prey of covetous
+collateral heirs! The second was called Whyte. Of what crime was he
+guilty, accused, of, at any rate, suspected? No one has ever known! The
+man himself was questioned in vain. In the Bastille he had lost his
+reason. The third, Tavernier, at the sight of his deliverers, fancied he
+saw his executioners coming, and put himself on the defensive. Throwing
+their arms round his neck they undeceived him; but next day he was met
+roaming through the town, muttering wild and whirling words. He was
+mad!"
+
+As many wilful errors as there are words!
+
+The Comte de Solages was an execrable libertine, confined at the request
+of his family for "atrocious and notorious crimes." His relatives
+nevertheless had the humanity to take him in after his deliverance, and
+it was with them that he died in 1825.
+
+Whyte and Tavernier did not go mad in the Bastille. They were in the
+Bastille because they were mad; and the second was, further, implicated
+in an assassination. Finding shelter with a perruquier of the
+neighbourhood, he set about smashing all his host's belongings, which
+necessitated his banishment to Charenton, where Whyte soon rejoined him.
+It was not worth the trouble of changing their quarters!
+
+Four other prisoners who were set free, Correge, Bechade, Pujade, and
+Laroche, were imprisoned for forgery. And so Louis Blanc is careful
+silently to pass them over!
+
+Ten days before, another victim of tyranny had been groaning in
+irons--the Marquis de Sade, who, from the height of the platform, used
+to provoke the passers-by with the aid of a speaking trumpet. De Launey
+was compelled to transfer him to Vincennes, thus depriving the victors
+of the glory of liberating the future author of _Justine_. The Republic
+took its revenge in making him later secretary of the "Pike" ward,[16]
+an office for which he was marked out by his virtues!
+
+But of all these prisoners the most celebrated, the most popular, the
+man whose misfortunes all Paris deplored, was the famous Comte de
+Lorges, who, according to the biographical sketch devoted to him by the
+unknown author of his deliverance, had been shut up for thirty-two
+years. The story must be read in the pamphlet of Citizen Rousselet,
+conqueror of the Bastille: "The tide of humanity penetrates into ways
+narrowed by mistrust. An iron door opens: what does one see? Is this a
+man? Good heavens! this old man loaded with irons! the splendour of his
+brow, the whiteness of his beard hanging over his breast! What majesty!
+the fire still flashing from his eyes seems to shed a gentle light in
+this lugubrious abode!"
+
+Surprised at seeing so many armed men, he asks them if Louis XV. is
+still alive. They set him free, they lead him to the Hotel de Ville.
+
+For fifteen days all Paris went to visit the black dungeon in which this
+unhappy wretch had been shut up for so many years without other light
+than that which escaped "from his eyes"! A stone from that dungeon had a
+place in the Curtius Museum. His portrait was published. A print
+represents him at the moment when his chains were broken, seated on a
+chair in his cell, a pitcher of water by his side!
+
+And this hapless greybeard--he was never seen! He never existed!
+
+In reality there were in the Bastille, on the 14th of July, only seven
+prisoners--two madmen, a _Sadique_,[17] and four forgers. But about
+their number and their right to imprisonment Michelet remains dumb: to
+discuss that would spoil his epic! And he excels in making the most of
+everything that can support his case, and in ignoring everything that
+damages it. And so he contents himself with speaking of the two who had
+"gone mad"!--a prevarication worthy of Louis Blanc, nay, unworthy even
+of him!
+
+The conquerors were somewhat surprised at the small number of victims,
+more surprised still to find them comfortably installed in rooms, some
+of which were furnished with arm-chairs in Utrecht velvet! The author of
+_The Bastille Unmasked_ exclaims: "What! No corpses! No skeletons! No
+men in chains!" "The taking of the Bastille," said "Cousin Jacques,"[18]
+"has opened the eyes of the public on the kind of captivity experienced
+there."
+
+But in this he was greatly mistaken. Legends die hard! A Bastille
+without cells, dungeons, cages of iron! Public opinion did not admit
+that it could have been deceived on that point.
+
+"Several prisoners," says the _History of Remarkable Events_, "were set
+at liberty; but some, and perhaps the greater number, had already died
+of hunger, because men could not find their way about this monstrous
+prison. Some of these prisoners confined within four walls received food
+only through holes cut in the wall. A party of prisoners was found
+starved to death, because their cells were not discovered till several
+days had elapsed!"
+
+Another pamphlet on the underground cells discovered in the Bastille,
+resuscitating an old fable which had already done duty for the Cardinal
+de Richelieu, shows us a prisoner taken from his cell and led by the
+governor into "a room which had nothing sinister in its appearance. It
+was lit by more than fifty candles. Sweet-scented flowers filled it with
+a delicious perfume. The tyrant chatted amicably with his prisoner....
+Then he gave the horrible signal: a bascule let into the floor opened,
+and the wretched man disappeared, falling upon a wheel stuck with razors
+and set in motion by invisible hands." And the author winds up with this
+magnificent reflection:--"Such a punishment, so basely contrived, is not
+even credible--and yet it was at Paris, in that beautiful and
+flourishing city, that this took place!"
+
+Dorat-Cubieres, who was one of the literary disgraces of the eighteenth
+century, goes further! He saw, with his own eyes, one of those dens
+where the captive, shut up with enough bread to last him a week, had
+thereafter nothing else to subsist on but his own flesh. "In this den,"
+he says, "we came upon a horrible skeleton, the sight of which made me
+shrink back with horror!"
+
+And the popular picture-mongers did not fail to propagate these
+insanities. I have an engraving of the time nicely calculated to stir
+sensitive hearts. Upon the steps of a gloomy cellar the conquerors are
+dragging along a man whom his uniform shows to be one of the defenders
+of the Bastille, and are pointing out to him an old man being carried
+away, another being cut down from the ceiling where he is hanging by the
+arms; yet others lying on a wheel furnished with iron teeth, chained to
+it, twisted into horrible contortions by abominable machines; and in a
+recess behind a grating appears the skeleton--which Dorat-Cubieres never
+saw!
+
+The non-existence of these dungeons and holes with skeletons was too
+great a shock to settled beliefs. This Bastille _must_ contain concealed
+below ground some unknown cells where its victims were moaning! And
+naturally enough, when one bent down the ear, one heard their despairing
+appeals! But after having pierced through vaults, sunk pits, dug,
+sounded everywhere, there was no help for it but to give up these
+fancies, though--an agreeable thing to have to say!--with regret.
+
+They fell back then on instruments of torture. For though the rack had
+been abolished for a hundred years, how was it possible to conceive of
+the Bastille without some slight instruments of torture?
+
+They had no difficulty in finding them--"chains," says Louis Blanc,
+"which the hands of many innocent men had perhaps worn, machines of
+which no one could guess the use: an old iron corslet which seemed to
+have been invented to reduce man to everlasting immobility!"
+
+As a matter of fact, these chains belonged to two statuettes of
+prisoners which stood on either side of the great clock in the
+courtyard. The machines, the use of which no one could guess, were the
+fragments of a clandestine printing-press that had been pulled to
+pieces. And the iron corslet was a piece of fifteenth-century armour!
+
+Skeletons, too, were missing, though indeed some bones were found in the
+apartment of the surgeon of the fortress; but the utmost bad faith could
+not but be compelled to acknowledge that these were anatomical
+specimens. Happily for the legend, a more serious discovery was made:
+"two skeletons, chained to a cannon-ball," as the register of the
+district of Saint-Louis la Culture declared.
+
+They both came to light in the rubbish dug out during the construction
+of the bastion afterwards turned into a garden for the governor. "One,"
+says the report of Fourcroy, Vicq-d'Azyr, and Sabatier, instructed to
+examine them, "was found turned head downwards on the steps of a steep
+staircase, entirely covered with earth, and appears to be that of a
+workman who had fallen by accident down this dark staircase, where he
+was not seen by the men working at the embankment. The other, carefully
+buried in a sort of ditch, had evidently been laid there a long time
+previously, before there was any idea of filling up the bastion."
+
+As to the cannon-ball, it must have dated back to the Fronde.[19]
+
+But skeletons were necessary! They had found some: they might as well
+profit by them!
+
+The demolisher of the Bastille, that charlatan Palloy, exhibited them to
+the veneration of the faithful in a cellar by the light of a funereal
+lamp, after which they were honoured with a magnificent funeral, with
+drums, clergy, a procession of working men, between two lines of
+National Guards, from the Bastille to the Church of St. Paul. And
+finally, in the graveyard adjoining the church, they raised to them,
+amid four poplars, a monument of which a contemporary print has
+preserved the likeness.
+
+After such a ceremony, dispute if you dare the authenticity of the
+relics!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The memory of the Man in the Iron Mask is so closely bound up with the
+story of the Bastille that M. Funck-Brentano could not neglect this
+great enigma about which for two hundred years so much ink has been
+spilt. He strips off this famous mask--which, by the way, was of
+velvet--and shows us the face which the world has been so anxious to
+see: the face of Mattioli, the confidant of the Duke of Mantua and the
+betrayer of both Louis XIV. and his own master.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano's demonstration is so convincing as to leave no room
+for doubt. But one dare not hope that the good public will accept his
+conclusions as final. To the public, mystery is ever more attractive
+than the truth. There is a want of prestige about Mattioli; while about
+a twin brother of Louis XIV.--ah, _there_ is something that appeals to
+the imagination!
+
+And then there are the guides, the showmen, to reckon with--those
+faithful guardians of legends, whose propaganda is more aggressive than
+that of scholars. When you reflect that every day, at the Isles of
+Saint-Marguerite, the masked man's cell is shown to visitors by a good
+woman who retails all the traditional fables about the luxurious life of
+the prisoner, his lace, his plate, and the attentions shown him by M.
+de Saint-Mars, you will agree that a struggle with this daily discourse
+would be hopeless. And you would not come off with a whole skin!
+
+I was visiting the Chateau d'If before the new buildings were erected.
+The show-woman of the place, another worthy dame, pointed out to us the
+ruined cells of the Abbe Faria and Edmond Dantes.[20] And the spectators
+were musing on the story as they contemplated the ruins.
+
+"It seems to me," I said, "that these cells are rather near one another,
+but surely Alexandre Dumas put them a little farther apart!"
+
+"Oh, well!" replied the good creature, withering me with a glance of
+contempt, "if, when I'm relating gospel truth, the gentleman begins
+quoting a novelist--!"
+
+To come nearer home. Follow, one of these days, a batch of Cook's
+tourists at Versailles, shown round by an English cicerone. You will see
+him point out the window from which Louis XVI. issued, on a flying
+bridge, to reach his scaffold, erected in the marble court! The guide is
+no fool. He knows well enough that the Place de la Concorde would not
+appeal to the imagination of his countrymen; while it is quite natural
+to them to draw a parallel in their minds between the scaffold of Louis
+XVI. at Versailles and that of Charles I. at Whitehall.
+
+And the conclusion of the whole matter is this: that whatever may be
+said or written, nothing will prevail against the popular beliefs that
+the Bastille was "the hell of living men," and that it was taken by
+storm. Legends are the history of the people, especially those which
+flatter their instincts, prejudices, and passions. You will never
+convince them of their falsity.
+
+M. Funck-Brentano must also expect to be treated as a "reactionary," for
+such is, to many people, any one who does not unreservedly decry the
+_ancien regime_. It had, assuredly, its vices and abuses, which the
+Revolution swept away--to replace them by others, much more tolerable,
+to be sure; but that is no reason for slandering the past and painting
+it blacker than it really was. The fanatical supporters of the
+Revolution have founded in its honour a sort of cult whose intolerance
+is often irritating. To hear them you would fancy that before its birth
+there was nothing but darkness, ignorance, iniquity, and wretchedness!
+And so we are to give it wholehearted admiration, and palliate its
+errors and its crimes; even gilding, as Chateaubriand said, the iron of
+its guillotine. These idolaters of the Revolution are very injudicious.
+By endeavouring to compel admiration for all that it effected, good and
+ill without distinction, they provoke the very unreasonable inclination
+to regard its whole achievement with abhorrence. It could well dispense
+with such a surplusage of zeal, for it is strong enough to bear the
+truth; and its work, after all, is great enough to need no justification
+or glorification by means of legends.
+
+VICTORIEN SARDOU.
+
+
+
+
+LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ARCHIVES.
+
+
+"The Bastille," wrote Sainte-Foix, "is a castle which, without being
+strong, is one of the most formidable in Europe, and about it I shall
+say nothing." "Silence is safer than speech on that subject," was the
+saying in Paris.
+
+At the extremity of the Rue Saint-Antoine, as one entered the suburb,
+appeared the eight lofty towers, sombre, massive, plunging their
+moss-grown feet into pools of muddy water. Their walls were pierced at
+intervals with narrow, iron-barred windows: they were crowned with
+battlements. Situated not far from the Marais, the blithe and wealthy
+quarter, and quite near to the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where industry
+raised its perpetual hum, the Bastille, charged with gloom and silence,
+formed an impressive contrast.
+
+The common impression it made is conveyed by Restif de la Bretonne in
+his _Nights of Paris_: "It was a nightmare, that awesome Bastille, on
+which, as I passed each evening along the Rue Saint-Gilles, I never
+dared to turn my eyes."
+
+The towers had an air of mystery, harsh and melancholy, and the royal
+government threw mystery like a cloud around them. At nightfall, when
+the shutters were closed, a cab would cross the drawbridge, and from
+time to time, in the blackness of night, funeral processions, vague
+shadows which the light of a torch set flickering on the walls, would
+make their silent exit. How many of those who had entered there had ever
+been seen again? And if perchance one met a former prisoner, to the
+first question he would reply that on leaving he had signed a promise to
+reveal nothing of what he had seen. This former prisoner had, as a
+matter of fact, never seen anything to speak of. Absolute silence was
+imposed upon the warders. "There is no exchanging of confidences in this
+place," writes Madame de Staal, "and the people you come across have all
+such freezing physiognomies that you would think twice before asking the
+most trifling question." "The first article of their code," says
+Linguet, "is the impenetrable mystery which envelops all their
+operations."
+
+We know how legends are formed. Sometimes you see them open out like
+flowers brilliant under the sun's bright beams, you see them blossom
+under the glorious radiance that lights up the life of heroes. The man
+himself has long gone down into the tomb; the legend survives; it
+streams across the ages, like a meteor leaving its trail of light; it
+grows, broadens out, with ever-increasing lustre and glow: in this light
+we see Themistocles, Leonidas, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon.
+
+Or may be, on the contrary, the legend is born in some remote corner,
+covered with shade and silence. There men have lived their lives, there
+it has been their lot to suffer. Their moans have risen in solitude and
+confinement, and the only ears that heard them were harder than their
+stone walls. These moans, heard by no compassionate soul, the great
+resounding soul of the people catches up, swelling them with all its
+might. Soon, among the mass of the people, there passes a blast
+irresistible in its strength, like the tempest that upheaves the
+restless waves. Then is the sea loosed from its chains: the tumultuous
+breakers dash upon the affrighted shore: the sea-walls are all swept
+away!
+
+In a letter written by Chevalier, the major of the Bastille, to Sartine,
+the chief of the police, he spoke of the common gossip on the Bastille
+that was going about. "Although utterly false," he said, "I think it
+very dangerous on account of its dissemination through the kingdom, and
+that has now been going on for several years." No attention was paid to
+Chevalier's warning. Mystery continued to be the rule at the Bastille
+and in all that related to it. "The mildness of manners and of the
+government," writes La Harpe, "had caused needlessly harsh measures in
+great part to disappear. They lived on in the imagination of the
+people, augmented and strengthened by the tales which credulity and hate
+seize upon." Ere long the _Memoirs_ of Latude and of Linguet appeared.
+Latude concealed his grievous faults, to paint his long sufferings in
+strokes of fire. Linguet, with his rare literary talent, made of the
+Bastille a picture dark in the extreme, compressing the gist of his
+pamphlet into the sentence: "Except perhaps in hell, there are no
+tortures to approach those of the Bastille." At the same period, the
+great Mirabeau was launching his powerful plea against _lettres de
+cachet_, "arbitrary orders." These books produced a mighty
+reverberation. The Revolution broke out like a clap of thunder. The
+Bastille was disembowelled. The frowning towers crumbled stone by stone
+under the picks of the demolishers, and, as if they had been the
+pedestal of the _ancien regime_, that too toppled over with a crash.
+
+One of the halls of the Bastille contained, in boxes carefully arranged,
+the entire history of the celebrated fortress from the year 1659, at
+which date the foundation of this precious store of archives had been
+begun. There were collected the documents concerning, not only the
+prisoners of the Bastille, but all the persons who had been lodged
+there, either under sentence of exile, or simply arrested within the
+limits of the generality of Paris in virtue of a _lettre de cachet_.
+
+The documents in this store-room had been in charge of archivists, who
+throughout the eighteenth century had laboured with zeal and
+intelligence at putting in order papers which, on the eve of the
+Revolution, were counted by hundreds of thousands. The whole mass was
+now in perfect order, classified and docketed. The major of the chateau,
+Chevalier, had even been commissioned to make these documents the basis
+of a history of the prisoners.
+
+The Bastille was taken. In the disorder, what was the fate of the
+archives? The ransacking of the papers continued for two days, writes
+Dusaulx, one of the commissioners elected by the Assembly for the
+preservation of the archives of the Bastille. "When, on Thursday the
+16th, my colleagues and myself went down into the sort of cellar where
+the archives were, we found the boxes in very orderly arrangement on the
+shelves, but they were already empty. The most important documents had
+been carried off: the rest were strewn on the floor, scattered about the
+courtyard, and even in the moats. However, the curious still found some
+gleanings there." The testimony of Dusaulx is only too well confirmed.
+"I went to see the siege of the Bastille," writes Restif de la Bretonne;
+"when I arrived it was all over, the place was taken. Infuriated men
+were throwing papers, documents of great historical value, from the top
+of the towers into the moats." Among these papers, some had been burnt,
+some torn, registers had been torn to shreds and trailed in the mud. The
+mob had invaded the halls of the chateau: men of learning and mere
+curiosity hunters strove eagerly to get possession of as many of these
+documents as possible, in which they thought they were sure to find
+startling revelations. "There is talk of the son of a celebrated
+magistrate," writes Gabriel Brizard, "who went off with his carriage
+full of them." Villenave, then twenty-seven years of age and already a
+collector, gathered a rich harvest for his study, and Beaumarchais, in
+the course of a patriotic ramble through the interior of the captured
+fortress, was careful to get together a certain number of these papers.
+
+The papers purloined from the archives on the day of the capture and the
+day following became dispersed throughout France and Europe. A large
+packet came into the hands of Pierre Lubrowski, an attache in the
+Russian embassy. Sold in 1805, with his whole collection, to the Emperor
+Alexander, the papers were deposited in the Hermitage Palace. To-day
+they are preserved in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg.
+
+Fortunately, the custody of the captured fortress was entrusted on July
+15 to the company of arquebusiers, which received orders to prevent the
+removal of any more papers. On July 16 one of the members present at a
+sitting of the Electoral Assembly, sprang forward to the table and
+cried, "Ah, gentlemen, let us save the papers! It is said that the
+papers of the Bastille are being plundered; let us hasten to collect the
+remnants of these old title-deeds of an intolerable despotism, so that
+we may inspire our latest posterity with their horror!" There was
+rapturous applause. A committee was nominated, consisting of Dusaulx, De
+Chamseru, Gorneau, and Cailleau. Let us follow the style of the period:
+"Before the Bastille the commissioners received a triumphant reception.
+Amid the cheers of the people, who had been informed of their mission,
+ten distinguished men of letters besought them to lead the commissioners
+into the heart of that famous fortress, so long detested." When they got
+into the Bastille, the commissioners were not long in perceiving that
+they were a little behind the fair: "Many boxes were empty, and there
+was an immense heap of papers in complete disorder."
+
+The question of the papers of the Bastille grew day by day
+extraordinarily popular. The Electoral Assembly had just appointed
+commissioners to collect them; La Fayette, commander of the National
+Guards, imposed a similar duty on the St. Elizabeth district; Bailly,
+the mayor of Paris, delegated Dusaulx to the same office. In the
+Constituent Assembly, the Comte de Chatenay-Lanty proposed that the
+municipality of Paris should be instructed to get together the papers
+found at the Bastille, so that they might be arranged, and that extracts
+from them might be printed and published, "in order to keep for ever
+alive in the hearts of Frenchmen, by means of this reading, the
+detestation of arbitrary orders and the love of liberty"! This book was
+to be the preface to the constitution. Finally, the district of St. Roch
+took the initiative in calling upon the electors to restore to the
+nation the papers carried off from the Bastille by Beaumarchais.
+
+In the sitting of July 24, the Electoral Assembly passed a resolution
+enjoining such citizens as were in possession of papers from the
+Bastille to bring them back to the Hotel de Ville. The appeal was
+responded to, and the restitutions were numerous.
+
+When the pillage and destruction had been stopped and possession had
+been regained of a part of the stolen documents, the papers were
+consigned to three different depositories; but it was not long before
+they were deposited all together in the convent of St. Louis la Culture.
+At length, on November 2, 1791, the Commune of Paris resolved to have
+the precious documents placed in the city library. The decision was so
+much the more happy in that the transfer, while placing the papers under
+the guardianship of trained men and genuine librarians, did not
+necessitate removal, since the city library at that date occupied the
+same quarters as the archives of the Bastille, namely, the convent of
+St. Louis la Culture.
+
+To the revolutionary period succeeded times of greater calm. The
+archives of the Bastille, after being the object of so much discussion,
+and having occupied the Constituent Assembly, the Electoral Assembly,
+the Paris Commune, the press, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, all Paris,
+the whole of France, fell into absolute oblivion. They were lost from
+sight; the very recollection of them was effaced. In 1840, a young
+librarian named Francois Ravaisson discovered them in the Arsenal
+library at the bottom of a veritable dungeon. How had they got stranded
+there?
+
+Ameilhon, the city librarian, had been elected on April 22, 1797, keeper
+of the Arsenal library. Anxious to enrich the new depository of which he
+had become the head, he obtained a decree handing over the papers of the
+Bastille to the Arsenal library. The librarians recoiled in dismay
+before this invasion of documents, more than 600,000 in number and in
+the most admired disorder. Then, having put their heads together, they
+had the papers crammed into a dusty back-room, putting off the sorting
+of them from day to day. Forty years slipped away. And if it happened
+that some old antiquary, curious and importunate, asked to be allowed to
+consult the documents he had heard spoken of in his youth, he was
+answered--no doubt in perfect good faith--that they did not know what he
+was talking about.
+
+In 1840 Francois Ravaisson had to get some repairs done in his kitchen
+at the Arsenal library. The slabs of the flooring were raised, when
+there came to view, in the yawning hole, a mass of old papers. It
+happened by the merest chance that, as he drew a leaf out of the heap,
+Ravaisson laid his hand on a _lettre de cachet_. He understood at once
+that he had just discovered the lost treasure. Fifty years of laborious
+effort have now restored the order which the victors of the 14th of July
+and successive removals had destroyed. The archives of the Bastille
+still constitute, at the present day, an imposing collection, in spite
+of the gaps made by fire and pillage in 1789, for ever to be regretted.
+The administration of the Arsenal library has acquired copies of the
+documents coming from the Bastille which are preserved at St.
+Petersburg. The archives of the Bastille are now open to inspection by
+any visitor to the Arsenal library, in rooms specially fitted up for
+them. Several registers had holes burnt in them on the day of the
+capture of the Bastille, their binding is scorched black, their leaves
+are yellow. In the boxes the documents are now numbered, and they are
+daily consulted by men of letters. The catalogue has been compiled and
+published recently, through the assiduity of the minister of public
+instruction.
+
+It is by the light of these documents, of undeniable genuineness and
+authority, that the black shade which so long brooded over the Bastille
+has at length been dispelled. The legends have melted away in the clear
+light of history, as the thick cloak of mist with which night covers the
+earth is dissipated by the morning sun; and enigmas which mankind,
+wearied of fruitless investigations, had resigned itself to declare
+insoluble, have now at last been solved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Julius Caesar describes a structure three stories high which his
+legionaries used rapidly to erect in front of towns they were besieging.
+Such was the remote origin of the "bastides" or "bastilles," as these
+movable fortresses were called in the Middle Ages. Froissart, speaking
+of a place that was being invested, says that "bastides were stationed
+on the roads and in the open country" in such a manner that the town
+could get no food supplies. It was not long before the designation was
+applied to the fixed towers erected on the ramparts for the defence of
+the towns, and more particularly to those which were constructed at the
+entrance gates.
+
+In 1356, the chroniclers mention some important works that had been done
+on the circumvallations of Paris. These were constructions interrupting
+the wall at intervals, and so placed as to protect either an entrance
+gate or the wall itself. The special designations of _eschiffles_,
+_guerites_, or _barbacanes_ were applied to such of these buildings as
+rose between two gates of the city, while the _bastilles_ or _bastides_
+were those which defended the gates. The first stone of the edifice
+which for more than four centuries was to remain famous under the name
+of the Bastille was laid on April 22, 1370, by the mayor of Paris in
+person, Hugh Aubriot, the object being to strengthen the defences of the
+city against the English. To reproach the king, Charles V., with the
+construction of a cruel prison would be almost as reasonable as to
+reproach Louis-Philippe with the construction of the fortress of Mont
+Valerien. We borrow these details from M. Fernand Bournon's excellent
+work on the Bastille in the _Histoire generale de Paris_.
+
+"The Bastille," writes M. Bournon, "at the time of its capture on July
+14, 1789, was still identical, except in some trifling particulars, with
+the work of the architects of the fourteenth century." The Place de la
+Bastille of the present day does not correspond exactly to the site of
+the fortress. Mentally to restore that site it is necessary to take away
+the last houses of the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV.;
+the ground they occupy was then covered with the chateau and its glacis.
+The round towers, however, must have extended considerably in advance of
+the line of the houses and have encroached upon the pavement. The plan
+reproducing the site exactly is to-day marked by lines of white stones,
+by means of which all Parisians may get some notion of it if they go to
+the Place de la Bastille.
+
+M. Auge de Lassus, who drew so largely upon the works of M. Bournon and
+ourselves for his lecture on the Bastille,[21] will permit us in our
+turn to borrow from him the description he gave of the Bastille, so far
+as its construction is concerned. Prints of the commonest kind which
+have circulated in thousands, the more recent reconstruction which in
+1889 gave Paris so much entertainment, have familiarized us with the
+aspect of the Bastille, whose eight circular towers, connected by
+curtains of equal height, give us the impression of a box all of a
+piece, or, if you prefer it, an enormous sarcophagus. The eight towers
+all had their names. There were the Corner, the Chapel, and the Well
+towers, names readily accounted for by their position or by details of
+their construction. Then came the Bertaudiere and Baziniere towers,
+baptized by the names of two former prisoners. The Treasure tower was so
+called because it had received on many occasions, notably under Henri
+IV., the custody of the public money. The excellent poet Mathurin
+Regnier alludes to this fact in these oft-quoted lines:--
+
+    "Now mark these parsons, sons of ill-got gain,
+     Whose grasping sires for years have stolen amain,
+     Whose family coffers vaster wealth conceal,
+     Than fills that royal store-house, the Bastille."
+
+The seventh tower was known as the County tower, owing its name, as M.
+Bournon conjectures, to the feudal dignity called the County of Paris.
+"The hypothesis," he adds, "derives the greater weight from the fact
+that the mayors of Paris were called, up to the end of the _ancien
+regime_, mayors of the town and viscounty of Paris." The eighth tower
+bore a name which, for the tower of a prison, is very remarkable. It was
+called the Tower of Liberty. This odd appellation had come to it from
+the circumstance that it had been the part of the Bastille where
+prisoners were lodged who enjoyed exceptionally favourable treatment,
+those who had the "liberty" of walking during the day in the courtyards
+of the chateau. These prisoners were said to be "in the liberty of the
+court"; the officers of the chateau called them the "prisoners of the
+liberty" in contradistinction to the prisoners "in durance"; and that
+one of the eight towers in which they were lodged was thus, quite
+naturally, called "the Tower of Liberty."
+
+The towers of the Chapel and the Treasure, which were the oldest, had
+flanked the original gateway, but this was soon walled up, leaving
+however in the masonry the outline of its arch, and even the statues of
+saints and crowned princes that had been the only ornaments of its bare
+walls. "In accordance with custom," says M. Auge de Lassus, "the
+entrance to the Bastille was single and double at the same time; the
+gate for vehicles, defended by its drawbridge, was flanked by a smaller
+gate reserved for foot passengers, and this, too, was only accessible
+when a small drawbridge was lowered."
+
+In the first of the two courtyards of the Bastille, D'Argenson had
+placed a monumental clock held up by large sculptured figures
+representing prisoners in chains. The heavy chains fell in graceful
+curves around the clock-face, as a kind of ornamentation. D'Argenson and
+his artists had a ferocious taste.
+
+On the morrow of the defeat at St. Quentin,[22] the fear of invasion
+decided Henri II., under the advice of Coligny, to strengthen the
+Bastille. It was then, accordingly, that there was constructed, in front
+of the Saint-Antoine gate, the bastion which was at a later date to be
+adorned with a garden for the prisoners to walk in.
+
+Around the massive and forbidding prison, in the course of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, quite a little town sprang up and
+flourished, as in the Middle Ages happened around lofty and impressive
+cathedrals. Barbers, cobblers, drink-sellers, poulterers, cheesemongers,
+and general dealers had their shops there. These new buildings
+encroached on the Rue Saint-Antoine, and extended as far as the convent
+of the Visitation, the chapel of which, converted into a Protestant
+place of worship, still exists.
+
+"In its latter days," writes M. de Lassus, "the Bastille with its
+appendages presented an appearance somewhat as follows:--On the Rue
+Saint-Antoine, a gateway of considerable size, and, with its trophies of
+arms, making some pretensions to a triumphal arch, gave access to a
+first court skirted with shops, and open, at least during the day, to
+all comers. People might pass through it freely, but were not allowed to
+loiter there. Then appeared a second entrance, a double one for horse
+and foot traffic, each gate defended by its drawbridge. Admittance
+through this was more difficult, and the sentry's instructions more
+rigorous; this was the outer guard. As soon as this entrance was passed,
+one came to the court of the governor, who received the more or less
+voluntary visitor. On the right stretched the quarters of the governor
+and his staff, contiguous to the armoury. Then there were the moats,
+originally supplied by the waters of the Seine--at that time people
+frequently fell in and were drowned, the moats not being protected by
+any railing--in later times they were for the most part dry. Then rose
+the lofty towers of the citadel, encircled, nearly a hundred feet up, by
+their crown of battlements; and then one found the last drawbridge, most
+often raised, at any rate before the carriage gate, the door for foot
+passengers alone remaining accessible, under still more rigorous
+conditions."
+
+These conditions, so rigorous for contemporaries--the Czar Peter the
+Great himself found them inflexible--are removed for the historian:
+thanks to the numerous memoirs left by prisoners, thanks to the
+documents relating to the administration of the Bastille now in the
+Arsenal library, and to the correspondence of the lieutenants of police,
+we shall penetrate into the interior of these well-fenced precincts and
+follow the life of the prisoners day by day.
+
+In its early days, then, the Bastille was not a prison, though it became
+such as early as the reign of Charles VI. Yet for two centuries it kept
+its character as a military citadel. Sometimes the kings gave lodgment
+there to great personages who were passing through Paris. Louis XI. and
+Francis I. held brilliant fetes there, of which the chroniclers speak
+with admiration.
+
+It is Richelieu who must be considered the founder of the Bastille--the
+Bastille, that is, as a royal prison, the Bastille of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries. Before him, imprisonment in the old fortress
+was merely casual; it is to him that we must trace the conception of the
+state prison as an instrument of government. Here we shall be arrested
+by the question, what is to be understood by a state prison? The term,
+vague and open to discussion, is explained by M. Bournon. "By a state
+prison--taking the Bastille as a particular instance--must be understood
+a prison for those who have committed a crime or misdemeanour not
+provided for by the common law; for those who, rightly or wrongly, have
+appeared dangerous to the safety of the state, whether the nation itself
+is concerned, or its head, or a body more or less considerable of
+citizens, a body sometimes no larger than the family of the suspect. If
+we add to this class of prisoners personages too conspicuous to be
+punished for a crime at common law on equal terms with the ordinary
+malefactor, and for whom it would appear inevitable that an exceptional
+prison should be reserved, we shall have passed in review the different
+kinds of delinquents who expiated their misdeeds at the Bastille from
+the time of Richelieu to the Revolution."
+
+The administration of the Bastille, which, up to the reign of Louis
+XIII., was entrusted to great lords, dukes, constables, marshals of
+France--the Marshal de Bassompierre, the Constable de Luynes, the
+Marshal de Vitry, the Duke of Luxemburg, to mention only the last of
+them--was placed by Richelieu in the hands of a real jailer, Leclerc du
+Tremblay, brother of Pere Joseph.[23]
+
+Documents throwing any light on the Bastille at the time when the Red
+Man, as Victor Hugo named Richelieu, was supreme, are however very
+rare. An advocate, Maton de la Varenne, published in 1786, in his
+_Revolutions of Paris_, a letter which ostensibly had been written on
+December 1, 1642, to Richelieu, at that time ill. In it we read: "I,
+whom you are causing to rot in the Bastille for having disobeyed your
+commandment, which would have brought upon my soul condemnation to
+eternal hell, and would have made me appear in eternity with hands
+stained with blood----" It is impossible to guarantee the authenticity
+of this document. To us it appears suspicious, the text having been
+published at a time when many apocryphal documents were produced as
+coming from the archives of the Bastille. More worthy of arresting our
+attention is the "return of the prisoners who are in the chateau of the
+Bastille," a document of Richelieu's time which M. Bournon discovered in
+the archives of the Foreign Office. This catalogue, containing
+fifty-three names, is the oldest list of prisoners of the Bastille known
+up to the present time. Among the prisoners several are suspected or
+convicted of evil designs against "Monsieur le cardinal," some are
+accused of an intention to "complot," that is, to conspire against the
+throne, or of being spies. There is an "extravagant" priest, a monk who
+had "opposed Cluni's election," three hermits, three coiners, the
+Marquis d'Assigny, condemned to death, but whose punishment had been
+commuted to perpetual imprisonment, a score or so of lords designated as
+"madmen, vile scoundrels, evil wretches," or accused of some definite
+crime, theft or murder; finally, those whose name is followed by the
+simple note, "Queen-mother," or "Monsieur,"[24] whence we may conclude
+that the clerk had no exact information about the prisoners of the
+cardinal. We shall give later the list of the prisoners in the Bastille
+on the day of its capture, July 14, 1789; and the comparison between the
+two lists at the two periods, the remotest and the most recent that we
+could select, will be instructive. We have also, to assist us in forming
+a judgment of the Bastille in Richelieu's time, the memoirs of
+Bassompierre and of Laporte, which transport us into a state prison,
+elegant, we might almost say luxurious, reserved for prisoners of birth
+and breeding, where they lived observing all social usages in their
+mutual relations, paying and returning calls. But the Bastille preserved
+its military character for many more years, and among the prisoners we
+find especially a number of officers punished for breaches of
+discipline. Prisoners of war were confined there, and foreign personages
+of high rank arrested by way of reprisal, secret agents and spies
+employed in France by hostile nations; finally, powerful lords who had
+incurred the king's displeasure. The court intrigues under Richelieu and
+Mazarin contributed to the diversion of the Bastille from its original
+intention: they began to incarcerate there _valets de chambre_ who had
+somehow become mixed up in the plots of sovereigns.
+
+Religious persecution was revived by the government of Louis XIV., and
+ere long a whole world of gazetteers and "novelists," the journalists of
+the period, were seen swarming like flies in the sun. Louis XIV. was not
+precisely a stickler for the liberty of the press, but on the other hand
+he shrank from cooping up men of letters, Jansenists and Protestants
+convinced of the truth of their beliefs, pell-mell with the vagabonds
+and thiefs confined at Bicetre, Saint-Lazare, and the other prisons of
+Paris. He threw open to them, too generously no doubt, the portals of
+his chateau in the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where they mixed with young men
+of family undergoing a mild course of the Bastille at the request of
+their parents, and with quarrelsome nobles whom the marshals of France,
+anxious to avoid duels, used to send there to forget their animosities.
+Further, the reign of Louis XIV. was marked by some great trials which
+produced a strange and appalling impression, and threw around the
+accused a halo of mystery--trials for magic and sorcery, cases of
+poisoning and base coining. The accused parties in these cases were
+confined in the Bastille. And here we encounter a fresh departure from
+the primitive character of the old fortress; prisoners were sent there
+whose cases were tried by the regularly constituted judges. Henceforth
+prisoners who appeared before the court of the Arsenal were divided
+between the Bastille and the fortress of Vincennes.
+
+This is the grand epoch in the history of the Bastille: it is now a
+veritable prison of state. Writers can speak of its "nobleness." It
+shows itself to us in colours at once charming and awe-inspiring,
+brilliant, majestic, now filled with sounds of merriment, now veiled
+with an appalling silence. From the gloomy regions within the massive
+walls there come to us the sounds of song and laughter mingled with
+cries of despair, with sobs and tears. This is the period of the Iron
+Mask: the period when the governor receives mysterious letters from the
+court. "I beg you, sir, to see that, if anyone comes to ask for news of
+the prisoner whom Desgrez conducted to the Bastille this morning by
+order of the king, nothing be said about him, and that, if possible, in
+accordance with the intention of His Majesty and the accompanying
+instructions, no one may get to know him or even his name." "M. de
+Bernaville (the name of one of the governors of the Bastille), having
+given orders for the conveyance of an important prisoner to the prison
+of my chateau of the Bastille, I send this letter to inform you of my
+intention that you receive him there and keep him closely guarded until
+further orders, warning you not to permit him, under any pretext
+whatever, to hold communication with any person, either by word of mouth
+or in writing." The prisoners surrounded with so absolute a silence
+almost all belonged to the same category, namely, distinguished spies,
+who seem to have been rather numerous in France at the full tide of
+Louis XIV.'s wars, and who were hunted down with an eagerness which grew
+in proportion as fortune frowned on the royal armies. We read in the
+Journal kept by the King's lieutenant, Du Junca: "On Wednesday,
+December 22, about ten o'clock in the morning, M. de la Coste, provost
+of the King's armies, came here, bringing and leaving in our custody a
+prisoner whom for greater secrecy he caused to enter by our new gate,
+which allows us to pass into or out of the garden of the Arsenal at all
+hours--the which prisoner, M. d'Estingen by name, a German, but married
+in England, was received by the governor by order of the King sent by
+the hand of the Marquis de Barbezieux, with explicit instructions to
+keep the prisoner's presence a secret and to prevent him from holding
+communication with anyone, in speech or writing: the which prisoner is a
+widower, without children, a man of intelligence, and doing a brisk
+trade in news of what is happening in France, sending his information to
+Germany, England, and Holland: a gentlemanly spy." On February 10, 1710,
+Pontchartrain wrote to Bernaville, governor of the Bastille: "I cannot
+refrain from telling you that you and the Chevalier de la Croix speak a
+good deal too much and too openly about the foreign prisoners you have.
+Secrecy and mystery is one of your first duties, as I must ask you to
+remember. Neither D'Argenson nor any other than those I have apprized
+you of should see these prisoners. Give explicit warning to the Abbe
+Renaudot and to de la Croix of the necessity of maintaining an
+inviolable and impenetrable secrecy."
+
+It happened also at that period that a prisoner remained in complete
+ignorance of the reason of his incarceration: "The prisoner at the
+Bastille named J. J. du Vacquay," writes Louvois to the governor, "has
+complained to the King that he has been kept there for thirteen years
+without knowing the reason: be good enough to let me know what minister
+signed the warrant under which he is detained, so that I may report to
+His Majesty."
+
+As the greater part of the papers relating to the arrest were destroyed
+as soon as the incarceration was effected, it sometimes happened that in
+certain cases the reasons were not known even in the offices of the
+ministers. Thus Seignelay writes to the governor, M. de Besmaus: "The
+King has commanded me to write and ask you who is a certain prisoner
+named Dumesnil, how long he has been at the Bastille, and for what
+reason he was placed there." "The demoiselle de Mirail, a prisoner at
+the Bastille, having demanded her liberty of the King, His Majesty has
+instructed me to write and ask you the reason of her detention; if you
+know it, be good enough to inform me at your earliest convenience."
+Again, we find Louvois writing to the same effect: "I am sending you a
+letter from M. Coquet, in regard to which the King has commanded me to
+ask who signed the warrant under which he was sent to the Bastille, and
+whether you know the reason of his being sent there." "Sir, I am writing
+a line merely to ask you to let me know who is Piat de la Fontaine, who
+has been five years at the Bastille, and whether you do not remember why
+he was placed there."
+
+Letters of this kind are, it is true, very rare; yet if one compares the
+state of things they disclose with the extraordinary comfort and luxury
+with which the prisoners were surrounded, they help to characterize the
+celebrated prison at this epoch of its history, namely, the seventeenth
+century.
+
+In 1667 the office of lieutenant of police had been created. The first
+to hold the title was Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, a man of the
+greatest worth. It is very important to note that under the _ancien
+regime_ the lieutenant of police had a double function, being at the
+same time a subordinate of the minister of Paris[25] and a member of the
+Chatelet.[26] His duties were thus of a twofold nature, administrative
+and judicial. Now the Bastille, as a state prison, was more especially
+an administrative institution; but gradually, owing to the character of
+the persons brought there as prisoners, it became difficult to avoid
+turning it also into a judicial institution, and the minister of Paris
+became accustomed to delegate his subordinate, the lieutenant of police,
+to conduct the examination of the prisoners at the Bastille. Though La
+Reynie took practically the whole responsibility of the administration
+of the Bastille, his visits to the prison itself were nevertheless
+relatively rare, and on every occasion a permit signed by Louis XIV. or
+by Colbert was necessary.
+
+La Reynie was succeeded by D'Argenson. Under him the powers of the
+lieutenant of police were very largely extended, and the Bastille was
+comprised within his jurisdiction. Henceforth the lieutenant of police
+will enter the state prison whenever it seems good to him, as lord and
+master, accompanied by his subordinates at the Chatelet, clerks and
+inspectors of police; the prisoners will be in direct and constant
+communication with him, and he will make an inspection of all the
+chambers at least once a year. We find that at every change in the
+lieutenancy of police, it sufficed for the minister of Paris to send the
+name of the new officer to the governor. Dating from this period, the
+prison in the Suburb Saint-Antoine remained under the authority of a
+magistrate.
+
+The Regency was a transition period between the reigns of Louis XIV. and
+Louis XV., and there was a corresponding transition period in the
+history of the Bastille. The incarcerations were less numerous and less
+rigorous, but the rule of the prison lost something of that aristocratic
+air which had characterized it. The most important episode in the
+history of the Bastille during the Regency was the incarceration of
+those who were accused of complicity in the Cellamare conspiracy. Among
+these was Mdlle de Launay, later to be known as Madame de Staal. She
+has left some charming pages about her imprisonment, in which we find,
+related with a fluent and subtle pen, the little romance which we
+proceed to outline.
+
+Mdlle de Launay was secretary to the Duchess of Maine. She had had some
+part in drawing up the scheme of the Cellamare conspiracy, which, if it
+had succeeded, would have placed the king of Spain on the throne of
+France. On December 10, 1718, the Regent sent her, with several of her
+accomplices, to the Bastille, less with the idea of punishing her for
+machinations against the state than to obtain from her details of the
+conspiracy. At that period of her life she was of but moderate fortune
+and rank, and it would not have been strange if she had been treated
+with rigour. She found at the Bastille, on the contrary, unexpected
+comfort and consideration. In her _Memoirs_, she writes that her sojourn
+at the Bastille was the pleasantest time of her life. Her maid, Rondel,
+was permitted to live with her. She was installed in a veritable suite
+of rooms. She complained of the mice there, and a cat was given her, to
+drive out the mice and provide some amusement. By and by there were
+kittens, and the sportive tricks of the numerous little family cheered
+her wonderfully, she said. Mdlle de Launay was regularly invited to dine
+with the governor; she spent her days in writing and card-playing. The
+king's lieutenant, Maisonrouge, a man well on in years, who held, after
+the governor, the first place in the administration of the chateau,
+conceived a profound and pathetic passion for the fair prisoner. He
+declared that nothing would give him greater happiness than to make her
+his wife. His apartments happened to be near those of Mdlle de Launay.
+Unhappily for the king's lieutenant, there was in the neighbourhood a
+third suite, occupied by a young and brilliant nobleman, the Chevalier
+de Menil, who also was implicated in the Cellamare affair. The fair
+prisoner was not acquainted with him. Maisonrouge impresses us as a man
+of great dignity, and rare nobility of character. He spoke to the two
+young prisoners about each other, hoping, by bringing them into
+communication, to provide them with fresh distractions, more
+particularly the lady, whom he loved. The Chevalier de Menil and Mdlle
+de Launay could not see each other; they had never met. They began by
+exchanging epistles in verse. Like everything that came from her pen,
+the verses of Mdlle de Launay were full of animation and charm. The good
+Maisonrouge played post between them, happy to see his little friend's
+delight in the diversion she owed to him. It was not long before the
+verses carried from one room to the other by Maisonrouge began to speak
+of love, and this love--surprising as it may seem, but not difficult to
+understand in the sequestered life of the Bastille--ere long became real
+in the consciousness of the young people, who saw each other in
+imagination under the most charming colours. Maisonrouge was soon
+induced to contrive an interview between them. It is a delightful
+moment. The two captives had never seen each other, yet loved each
+other passionately: what will their mutual impressions be? Mdlle de
+Launay's impression, when she saw the gay chevalier, was of unmixed
+enthusiasm; the chevalier's, maybe, was more subdued; but if it is true,
+as someone has said, that to nuns the gardener represents mankind, to a
+prisoner every young woman must be an exquisite creature. The interviews
+continued under the benevolent eye of Maisonrouge, who watched the
+development of Mdlle de Launay's love for Menil--the love of the girl
+whom he himself loved intensely, but whose happiness he preferred to his
+own. There are delightful details which may be found delightfully
+described in Mdlle de Launay's _Memoirs_. It is M. Bournon's opinion
+that, according to the testimony of Mdlle de Launay herself, this idyll
+of the Bastille had "the denouement that might have been foretold." We
+have caught no hint of the sort in the _Memoirs_ of Madame de Staal, but
+then, M. Bournon is no doubt the better psychologist. At any rate, the
+governor of the Bastille got wind of the diversions of the lovers. He
+put his foot down. Menil was transferred to a distant tower, Mdlle de
+Launay shed tears, and, incredible as it seems, Maisonrouge, while
+redoubling his efforts to please her, sympathized with her lot to the
+point of arranging fresh and more difficult interviews with the sparkish
+chevalier. Mdlle de Launay left the prison in the spring of 1720, after
+having sent to the Regent a detailed statement of the facts of the
+conspiracy, which hitherto she had refused to furnish. Once at liberty,
+she vainly implored the Chevalier de Menil to fulfil his pledges and
+make her his wife. Maisonrouge died in the following year, of
+disappointment, says the gay coquette, at his failure to get from her,
+during her imprisonment, the promise of marriage which now she would
+have been glad enough to fulfil.
+
+It seems as though under the Regency everything at the Bastille turned
+on love--a reflection of the epoch itself. The young Duke de Richelieu
+was locked up there because he did not love his wife. The brilliant
+nobleman was kept under lock and key for several weeks, "in solitude and
+gloom," he says, when suddenly the door of his room flew open and Madame
+de Richelieu appeared, a wonder of grace, brightness and charm: "The
+fair angel," writes the duke, "who flew from heaven to earth to set
+Peter free was not so radiant."
+
+We have seen how the Bastille had been transformed from a military
+citadel into a prison of state. We shall now witness, under the
+government of the Duke of Orleans, another transformation, betokened by
+an event which is of little apparent importance. The Duke de Richelieu
+was imprisoned in the Bastille a second time as the result of a duel: a
+judge of the Parlement went there to question him and the Parlement
+tried his case. The Parlement[27] at the Bastille, in the prison of the
+king! From that moment the fortress continued year by year to grow more
+like our modern prisons. "Under the Cardinal de Fleury," writes La
+Harpe, "this famous chateau was inhabited by hardly any but Jansenist
+writers: it then became the enforced residence of champions of
+philosophy and authors of clandestine satires, and acted as a foil to
+their obscurity and shame." It became increasingly the practice to
+confine there accused persons whose cases were regularly tried at the
+Chatelet or even before the Parlement. By the second half of the
+eighteenth century accused persons had come to be incarcerated in the
+Bastille by direct order of the Chatelet, which would have seemed
+incredible to a contemporary of Louis XIV. The summoning officer would
+post himself before the towers, and there, while the prisoner pressed
+his head close against the bars of the window, the officer would shout
+the terms of the writ at him across the moat. The advocates defending
+the accused obtained permission to go and consult their clients, and
+they were the only persons who were permitted to interview the prisoners
+in private. On the appointed day the prisoner was transferred to the law
+courts quietly and by night to avoid the curiosity of the crowd.
+
+Under Louis XVI. the judges of the Parlement visited the Bastille as
+they visited the other prisons; at length the minister Breteuil sent
+instructions to the officials informing them that no more _lettres de
+cachet_ would be issued without stating the duration of the penalty to
+which the guilty person was condemned and the grounds for his
+punishment. The Bastille was now merely a prison like the others,
+except that the prisoners were better treated there.
+
+In 1713 Voysin, the Secretary of State, wrote to D'Argenson:
+"Beaumanielle is not sufficiently deserving of consideration to warrant
+his removal from the Chatelet to the Bastille." La Harpe has well
+described the transformation which from this time came over the great
+state prison by saying that, from the beginning of the century, none of
+the prisoners who had been placed there "had merited the honour." His
+remark receives corroboration from Linguet: "It is not, in these latter
+days especially, for criminals of state that the Bastille is reserved:
+it has become in some sort the antichambre of the conciergerie."
+
+If the glories of the Bastille paled as it grew older, on the other hand
+torture, which, it is true, had never been applied except by order of
+the courts, had completely disappeared. From the beginning of the
+eighteenth century, the cells and chains were merely a temporary
+punishment reserved for insubordinate prisoners: from the accession of
+Louis XVI. they had fallen into disuse. Breteuil forbade any person
+whatever to be placed in the cells, which were the rooms on the lowest
+floor of each tower, a sort of damp and gloomy vaults. On September 11,
+1775, Malesherbes writes: "No prisoner should be refused material for
+reading and writing. The abuse it is pretended that they may make of it
+cannot be dangerous, confined so closely as they are. Nor should any
+refusal be made to the desire of such as may wish to devote themselves
+to other occupations, provided they do not require you to leave in their
+hands tools of which they might avail themselves to effect their escape.
+If any of them should wish to write to his family and his friends, he
+must be permitted to receive replies, and to send replies to their
+letters after having read them. In all this you must be guided by your
+prudence and your humanity." The reading of the gazettes, formerly
+rigidly forbidden, was now authorised.
+
+It must further be remarked that the number of prisoners confined in the
+Bastille was not so large as might be thought. During the whole reign of
+Louis XVI. the Bastille received no more than two hundred and forty
+prisoners, an average of sixteen a year; while it had room for forty-two
+in separate apartments.
+
+Under Louis XIV., at the period when the government was most liberal in
+dispensing its _lettres de cachet_, an average of only thirty prisoners
+a year entered the chateau, and their captivity was for the most part of
+short duration. Dumouriez informs us in his _Memoirs_ that during his
+detention he had never more than eighteen fellow prisoners, and that
+more than once he had only six. M. Alfred Begis has drawn up a list of
+the prisoners detained in the Bastille from 1781 to 1789. In May, 1788,
+it contained twenty-seven prisoners, the highest figure reached during
+these eight year; in September, 1782, it contained ten; in April, 1783,
+seven; in June of the same year, seven; in December, 1788, nine; in
+February, 1789, nine; at the time of its capture, July 14, 1789, there
+were seven.
+
+True, not only men were locked up in the Bastille, but also books when
+they appeared dangerous. The royal warrant under which they were
+incarcerated was even drawn up on the model of the _lettres de cachet_.
+M. Bournon has published a specimen of these. The books were shut up in
+a closet between the towers of the Treasure and the County, over an old
+passage communicating with the bastion. In 1733 the lieutenant of police
+instructed the governor of the Bastille to receive at the chateau "all
+the apparatus of a clandestine printing-press which had been seized in a
+chamber of the Saint-Victor abbey: the which you will be good enough to
+have placed in the store room of the Bastille." When the books ceased to
+appear dangerous, they were set at liberty. In this way the
+_Encyclopaedia_[28] was liberated after a detention of some years.
+
+We have just seen that during the reign of Louis XVI. the Bastille did
+not receive more than sixteen prisoners a year, on an average. Several
+of these were only detained for a few days. From 1783 to 1789 the
+Bastille remained almost empty, and would have been absolutely empty if
+it had not been decided to place there prisoners who should properly
+have been elsewhere. As early as February, 1784, the fortress of
+Vincennes, which served as a sort of overflow pipe to the Bastille, had
+been shut for lack of prisoners. The system of _lettres de cachet_ was
+slipping away into the past. On the other hand, the Bastille was a
+source of great expense to the King. The governor alone received 60,000
+livres annually. When you add the salaries and board of the officers of
+the garrison, the turnkeys, the physicians, the surgeon, the apothecary,
+the chaplains; when you add the food--this alone in 1774 came to 67,000
+livres--and the clothing of the prisoners, and the upkeep of the
+buildings, the total will appear outrageous, for the figures given above
+must be tripled to represent the value of the present day. So Necker,
+seeing that the Bastille was of no further utility, thought of
+suppressing it "for economy's sake,"[29] and he was not the only one in
+high places to speak of this suppression. The Carnavalet[30] museum
+possesses a scheme drawn up in 1784 by Corbet, the superintending
+architect to the city of Paris, whence the project has an official
+character: it is a scheme for a "Place Louis XVI." to be opened up on
+the site of the old fortress. We learn from Millin that other artists
+"were occupied with a scheme for erecting a monument on the site of the
+Bastille." One of these schemes deserves special mention. Seven of the
+eight towers were to be destroyed, the eighth to remain standing, but in
+a significant state of dilapidation: on the site of the demolished
+towers a monument was to be erected to the glory of Louis XVI. This
+monument was to consist of a pedestal formed by piling up chains and
+bolts taken from the state prison, above which would rise a statue of
+the king, one hand extended towards the ruined tower with the gesture of
+a deliverer. It is to be regretted, if not for the beauty, at least, for
+the picturesqueness of Paris, that this scheme was never put into
+execution. Davy de Chavigne, king's counsellor and auditor to the
+treasury, was allowed to present to the Royal Academy of Architecture,
+at its sitting on June 8, 1789, "a plan for a monument on the site of
+the Bastille, to be decreed by the States General to Louis XVI. as the
+restorer of the public liberty." On this subject the famous sculptor
+Houdon wrote to Chavigne: "I am very anxious for the plan to be adopted.
+The idea of erecting a monument to liberty on the very spot where
+slavery has reigned up to the present, appears to me particularly well
+conceived, and well calculated to inspire genius. I shall think myself
+only too fortunate to be among the artists who will celebrate the epoch
+of the regeneration of France."
+
+We have seen prints, long anterior to 1789--one of them the frontispiece
+of the edition of Linguet's _Memoirs_ that appeared in 1783--representing
+Louis XVI. extending his hand towards the lofty towers, which workmen
+are in the act of demolishing.
+
+Among the archives of the Bastille are preserved two reports drawn up in
+1788 by the king's lieutenant, Puget, the most important personage in
+the fortress after the governor. He proposes the suppression of the
+state prison, the demolition of the old chateau, and the sale of the
+ground for the benefit of the crown. It may be said of these schemes, as
+of the plan of the architect Corbet, that they would not have been
+propounded if they had not been approved in high places.
+
+Further, in the year 1784, an ardent supporter of the old state of
+things cried: "Oh! if our young monarch ever committed a fault so great,
+if he so far belied the most ancient usages of this government, if it
+were possible that one day he could be tempted to destroy you" (the
+author is apostrophizing the Bastille) "to raise on your ruins a
+monument to the liberator-king...." The demolition of the Bastille was
+decided on; and it would have been accomplished as a government
+undertaking but for the outbreak of the Revolution.
+
+From January 1 to July 14, 1789, that is to say for more than six
+months, only one solitary prisoner entered the Bastille; and what a
+prisoner!--Reveillon, the paper manufacturer of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine, who was shut up on May 1 at his own request, in order to
+escape the fury of the mob. The same year, the lieutenant of police, de
+Crosne, made an inspection of the Bastille, accompanied by a judge of
+the Parlement; their object was to arrange officially about the
+destruction of the state prison.
+
+Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, the Bastille no longer existed,
+though its towers were still standing.
+
+The victors of the 14th of July set free seven prisoners: four forgers
+whose arrest had been ordered by the Chatelet, whose case had been
+regularly tried, and whose proper place was an ordinary prison; two
+madmen who ought to have been at Charenton; and the Comte de Solages, a
+young nobleman who had been guilty of a monstrous crime over which it
+was desired to throw a veil out of regard for his family; he was
+maintained on a pension paid by his father. The conquerors of the
+Bastille destroyed an old fortified castle: the state prison no longer
+existed. They "broke in an open door." That was said of them even in
+1789.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LIFE IN THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Having sketched rapidly and with bold strokes the outlines of the
+history of the Bastille from its foundation to its fall, we intend to
+show how the rule to which prisoners in the fortress of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine were submitted underwent its own process of
+transformation, parallel with the transformation of the prison itself.
+To understand the facts which follow, and which are of a kind to astound
+the mind of everyone in these days, it is necessary to remember what we
+have already said as to the character of the Bastille. It was the prison
+of luxury, the aristocratic prison of the _ancien regime_, the _prison
+de luxe_ at a period when it was no dishonour, as we shall see later, to
+be confined there. We must remember the phrase of the minister of Paris
+writing to D'Argenson, in regard to a personage of but modest rank, that
+this individual did not deserve "consideration" enough to be put in the
+Bastille. Let us reflect on this observation of Mercier in his excellent
+_Pictures of Paris_: "The people fear the Chatelet more than the
+Bastille. Of the latter they have no dread, because it is almost unknown
+to them."
+
+We have shown how the Bastille, originally a military citadel, had
+become a prison of state; then, little by little, had approximated to
+the ordinary prisons, until the day when it died a natural death ere it
+could be assassinated. The same transformation took place in the
+treatment of the prisoners. Midway in the seventeenth century, the
+Bastille had none of the characteristics of a prison, but was simply a
+chateau in which the king caused certain of his subjects to sojourn, for
+one cause or another. They lived there just as they thought proper,
+furnishing their rooms according to their fancy with their own
+furniture, indulging their tastes in regard to food at their own
+expense, and waited on by their own servants. When a prisoner was rich
+he could live at the Bastille in princely style; when he was poor, he
+lived there very wretchedly. When the prisoner had no property at all,
+the king did not for that reason give him furniture or food; but he gave
+him money which he might use as seemed good to him in providing himself
+with furniture and food: money of which he could retain a part--a number
+of prisoners did not fail to do so--these savings becoming his own
+property. This system, the character of which it is important to
+recognize, underwent gradual modification during the course of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, approximating, without ever
+becoming identical with, the system of our modern prisons. Thus the
+king, instead of granting pensions individually to the poorest of the
+prisoners, came to endow the Bastille with a certain fixed number of
+pensions for the less fortunate prisoners. The recipients of these
+pensions continued to enjoy them for long years, and if they did not
+wish the whole of the money to be expended on their support, the balance
+was handed over to them. So we see certain individuals getting little
+fortunes together by the mere fact of their having been prisoners in the
+Bastille--a circumstance which has so much surprised historians because
+they have not sought its cause. It even happened that prisoners, when
+their liberation was announced to them, asked to remain a little longer
+in order to swell their savings, a favour which was sometimes granted
+them. In the course of the eighteenth century the money destined to the
+maintenance of the prisoners at the Bastille could not be diverted from
+its purpose; the prisoners were no longer able to appropriate a part;
+the whole sum had to be expended.
+
+It was only in the second half of the seventeenth century that the king
+had some rooms at the Bastille furnished for such prisoners as were
+without means of procuring furniture themselves. And it is very
+interesting to note that it was only at the extreme end of the century,
+under the administration of Saint-Mars, that certain apartments of the
+Bastille were arranged in the prison style with bars and bolts. Until
+then they had been simply the rooms of a stronghold.[31]
+
+Let us follow the prisoner from his entrance to his exit.
+
+When the _lettre de cachet_ had been signed, it was usually a sort of
+sheriff's officer who effected the arrest. He appeared in company with
+five or six men-at-arms, and signified the arrest by touching his quarry
+with a white staff. A coach was in waiting. The police officer politely
+begged the person he was instructed to secure to step into the coach,
+and took his place beside him. And, according to the testimony of
+various memoirs, while the vehicle was rolling along with lowered
+blinds, there was a pleasant conversational exchange of courtesies up to
+the moment of the prisoner's finding himself within the walls of the
+Bastille. A certain Lafort was living in furnished apartments with a
+young and pretty Englishwoman whom he had abducted, when one evening,
+about sunset, a police officer arrived. The coach was at the door.
+Preliminaries were settled on both sides with as much politeness as if a
+visit or an evening party had been the topic of discussion. They all got
+into the vehicle, even the young man's lackey who, beguiled by
+appearances, mounted behind. Arrived at the Bastille, the lackey lost no
+time in descending to open the door: there was general astonishment,
+especially on the part of the poor servant, when he learnt that since he
+had entered the Bastille along with his master, he must stay with him.
+
+Most often the officer and his companions surprised their quarry early
+in the morning, on rising from bed. Imagine then the coach with the
+prisoner and the police officer inside, arriving before the Bastille, in
+the first court in front of the castle keep. "Who goes there?" cries the
+sentinel. "The king's writ!" replies the officer. At this, the shops we
+have seen attached to the flanks of the chateau are bound at once to be
+shut. The soldiers on guard have to turn their faces to the wall, or
+perhaps to pull their hats over their eyes. The coach passes the
+outpost, a bell sounds. "Advance!" cries the officer on duty. The
+drawbridge is lowered and the coach rattles over the stout iron-clamped
+boards. For greater secrecy, spies and prisoners of war were taken in by
+a private door leading to the gardens of the Arsenal.
+
+Officers and noblemen presented themselves before the Bastille alone,
+unless they were accompanied by relatives or friends. "It is my
+intention," the king had written to them, "that you betake yourselves to
+my chateau of the Bastille." And no one dreamt of declining the royal
+invitation. Further, when the governor desired to transfer one of them
+from one prison to another, he contented himself with telling him so. We
+find in the Journal of Du Junca, king's lieutenant[32] at the Bastille,
+several notes like the following: "Monday, December 26, 1695, about ten
+o'clock in the morning, M. de Villars, lieutenant-colonel of the
+regiment of Vosges infantry, came and reported himself a prisoner, as
+ordered by M. Barbezieux, though he was a prisoner in the citadel of
+Grenoble, whence he came direct without being brought by anyone."[33] On
+the arrival of the prisoner, the king's lieutenant, accompanied by the
+captain of the gates, came to receive him as he got out of his carriage.
+The officers of the chateau at once led the new-comer into the presence
+of the governor, who received him civilly, invited him to sit down, and
+after having endorsed the _lettre de cachet_ conversed with him for some
+time. Under Louis XIV. the governor in most cases even kept his new
+guest, as well as the persons who had accompanied him, to lunch or
+dinner. Meanwhile his quarters had been got ready. We read in Du Junca's
+Journal that on January 26, 1695, a certain De Courlandon, a colonel of
+cavalry, presented himself for incarceration at the Bastille. There
+being no room ready to receive him, the governor asked him to go and
+pass the night in a neighbouring inn, at the sign of the _Crown_, and
+to return next day. "Whereupon M. de Courlandon did not fail to return
+about eleven o'clock in the morning, having dined with M. de Besmaus
+(the governor), and in the afternoon he entered the chateau."
+
+The reader will not be surprised at learning that the prospect of
+incarceration at the Bastille did not always strike the future prisoner
+with terror. We read in the _Memoirs_ of the Duke de Lauzun:[34]
+"Scolded for two hours on end by everybody who fancied himself entitled
+to do so, I thought I could not do better than go to Paris and await
+developments. A few hours after my arrival, I received a letter from my
+father telling me that it had been decided to put us all in the
+Bastille, and that I should probably be arrested during the night. I
+determined at least to finish gaily, so I invited some pretty girls from
+the Opera to supper, so that I might await the officer without
+impatience. Seeing that he did not arrive, I determined on the bold move
+of going to Fontainebleau and joining the king's hunt. He did not speak
+to me once during the chase, which was such a confirmation of our
+disgrace that on our return no one gave us the customary salute. But I
+did not lose heart; in the evening I was in attendance, and the king
+came to me. 'You are all,' he said, 'hotheaded rips, but funny dogs all
+the same; come along and have supper, and bring M. de Guemene and the
+Chevalier de Luxembourg.'"
+
+Before the new arrival was installed in the chamber prepared for him, he
+was taken to the great council hall, where he was requested to empty his
+pockets. Only notorious rogues were searched. If the prisoner had upon
+him money, jewels, or other articles such as knives and scissors, the
+use of which was not allowed by the regulations, they were done up in a
+parcel which he himself sealed, with his own seal if he had one; if not,
+with the seal of the Bastille. Finally, he was conducted to the room
+reserved for him.
+
+Each of the eight towers of the Bastille contained four or five stories
+of rooms or cells. The worst of these rooms were on the lowest floor,
+and these were what were called the "cells,"--octagonal vaults, cold and
+damp, partly under ground; the walls, grey with mould, were bare from
+floor to ceiling, the latter a groined arch. A bench and a bed of straw
+covered with a paltry coverlet, formed the whole appointments. Daylight
+feebly flickered through the vent-hole opening on to the moat. When the
+Seine was in flood, the water came through the walls and swamped the
+cells; and then any prisoners who might happen to be in them were
+removed. During the reign of Louis XIV. the cells were sometimes
+occupied by prisoners of the lowest class and criminals condemned to
+death. Later, under Louis XV., the cells ceased to be used except as a
+place of punishment for insubordinate prisoners who assaulted their
+guardians or fellow-prisoners, or for turnkeys and sentinels of the
+chateau who had committed breaches of discipline. They stayed in the
+cells for a short time in irons. The cells had fallen into disuse by
+the time the Revolution broke out; since the first ministry of Necker,
+it had been forbidden to confine in them any one whatever, and none of
+the warders questioned on July 18 remembered having seen any one placed
+in them. The two prisoners, Tavernier and Bechade, whom the conquerors
+of the 14th of July found in one of these dungeons, had been placed
+there, at the moment of the attack, by the officers of the chateau, for
+fear lest amid the rain of bullets some harm should befall them.
+
+The worst rooms after the cells were the _calottes_, the rooms on the
+floor above. In summer the heat was extreme in them, and in winter the
+cold, in spite of the stoves. They were octagons whose ceilings, as the
+name implies, were shaped like a skull-cap. High enough in the centre,
+they gradually diminished in height towards the sides. It was impossible
+to stand upright except in the middle of the room.
+
+The prisoners were only placed in the cells and _calottes_ under
+exceptional circumstances. Every tower had two or three floors of lofty
+and airy chambers, and in these the prisoners lived. They were octagons
+from fifteen to sixteen feet in diameter and from fifteen to twenty feet
+high. Light entered through large windows approached by three steps. We
+have said that it was only towards the end of Louis XIV.'s reign that
+these rooms were arranged like prison cells with bars and bolts. They
+were warmed with open fireplaces or stoves. The ceiling was whitewashed,
+the floor of brick. On the walls the prisoners had chalked verses,
+mottoes, and designs.
+
+One artistic prisoner amused himself by decorating the bare walls with
+paintings. The governor, delighted at seeing him thus find relaxation,
+moved him from room to room; when he had finished filling one with his
+designs and arabesques, he was placed in another. Some of these rooms
+were decorated with portraits of Louis XIV. placed above the
+chimney-piece, a characteristic detail which helps to show what the
+Bastille was at this period: the chateau of the king, where the king
+received a certain number of his subjects as his willing or unwilling
+guests.
+
+The best rooms in the Bastille were those that were fitted up in the
+eighteenth century for the accommodation of the staff. These were what
+were called the "suites." In these were placed invalids and prisoners of
+distinction.
+
+At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the furniture of these
+apartments was still extremely simple: they were absolutely empty. The
+reason of this we have indicated above. "I arrived," says Madame de
+Staal, "at a room where there was nothing but four walls, very filthy,
+and daubed all over by my predecessors for want of something better to
+do. It was so destitute of furniture that someone went and got a little
+straw chair for me to sit on, and two stones to support a lighted
+faggot, and a little candle-end was neatly stuck on the wall to give me
+light."
+
+The prisoners sent to their own homes for a table, bed, and chair, or
+they hired these from the upholsterer of the Bastille. When they had
+nothing to bless themselves with, the government, as we have already
+said, did not provide them with furniture. It gave them money, sometimes
+considerable sums, which permitted them to adorn their rooms after their
+own fancy. This was the case in regard to all prisoners up to 1684. At
+this date the king ordered the administration to supply furniture to
+those of the prisoners whose detention was to be kept secret, for, by
+getting in bedding from their own houses or the houses of friends, they
+made known their arrest. D'Argenson had half a dozen of the rooms
+permanently furnished, others were furnished under Louis XV.; under
+Louis XVI., almost all were furnished. The appointments were very
+modest: a bed of green baize with curtains, one or two tables, several
+chairs, fire-dogs, a shovel, and a small pair of tongs. But after having
+undergone examination, the prisoner retained the right of getting in
+furniture from outside. And in this way the rooms of the prisoners were
+sometimes adorned with great elegance. Madame de Staal relates that she
+had hers hung with tapestry; the Marquis de Sade covered the bare walls
+with long and brilliant hangings: other prisoners ornamented their rooms
+with family portraits: they procured chests of drawers, desks, round
+tables, dressing-cases, armchairs, cushions in Utrecht velvet; the
+inventories of articles belonging to the prisoners show that they
+managed to secure everything they thought necessary. The Abbe Brigault,
+who was imprisoned at the same time as Madame de Staal and for the same
+affair, brought into the Bastille five arm-chairs, two pieces of
+tapestry, eleven serge hangings, eight chairs, a bureau, a small table,
+three pictures, &c. The list of effects taken out of the Bastille by the
+Comte de Belle-Isle when he was set at liberty includes a library
+consisting of 333 volumes and ten atlases, a complete service of fine
+linen and plate for the table, a bed furnished with gold-bordered red
+damask, four pieces of tapestry on antique subjects, two mirrors, a
+screen of gold-bordered red damask matching the bed, two folding
+screens, two armchairs with cushions, an armchair in leather, three
+chairs in tapestry, an overmantel of gilt copper, tables, drawers,
+stands, candlestick of plated copper, &c. We might multiply examples,
+even from among prisoners of middle station.
+
+It was the rule that prisoners newly arrived at the Bastille should be
+examined within twenty-four hours. It sometimes happened, however, that
+one or another remained for two or three weeks before appearing before
+the magistrate. The Chatelet commissioner, specially delegated to the
+Bastille for these examinations, founded his questions on notes supplied
+him by the lieutenant of police, who, indeed, often went in person to
+see the prisoners. A special commission was appointed for affairs of
+importance. Dumouriez says that he was examined after nine hours of
+detention by three commissioners: "The president was an old councillor
+of state named Marville, a man of intelligence, but coarse and
+sarcastic. The second was M. de Sartine, lieutenant of police and
+councillor of state, a man of polish and refinement. The third was a
+_maitre des requetes_[35] named Villevaux, a very insincere and
+disputatious fellow. The clerk, who had more intelligence than any of
+them, was an advocate named Beaumont."
+
+We have found many instances of prisoners who spoke in high terms of
+their judges. And it cannot be said that prisoners at the Bastille
+escaped judgment. A Chatelet commissioner examined them and sent the
+official report of his examination, with a statement of his opinion, to
+the lieutenant of police. He decided whether the arrest should be
+sustained. Moreover, it would be a mistake to compare the lieutenant of
+police under the _ancien regime_ with the prefect of police of to-day;
+the lieutenants of police, selected from former _maitres des requetes_,
+had a judicial character: the documents of the period call them
+"magistrates"; they issued decrees without appeal and pronounced penal
+sentences, even condemning to the galleys; they were at the same time
+justices of the peace with an extensive jurisdiction. In addition to the
+examination held on the entrance of a prisoner, the lieutenants of
+police, in the course of their frequent visits, addressed to the
+ministers of Paris reports on the prisoners,--reports in which they
+discussed the evidence, and which constituted veritable judgments.
+
+When the prisoner was recognized as innocent, a new _lettre de cachet_
+soon set him at liberty. The verdict of "no true bill" often supervened
+with a rapidity which the decisions of our police magistrates would do
+well to emulate. A certain Barbier, who entered the Bastille on February
+15, 1753, was found not guilty and set at liberty the next day. Of the
+279 persons imprisoned in the Bastille during the last fifteen years of
+the _ancien regime_, thirty-eight benefited by the dropping of the
+indictment.
+
+Finally--and here is a point on which the new method might well model
+itself on that of the Bastille--when a detention was recognized as
+unjust, the victim was indemnified. A great number of examples might be
+mentioned. An advocate named Sube left the Bastille on June 18, 1767,
+after a detention of eighteen days; he had been falsely accused of the
+authorship of a book against the king, and received compensation to the
+tune of 3000 livres, more than L240 of our money. A certain Pereyra,
+imprisoned in the Bastille from November 7, 1771, to April 12, 1772, and
+then from July 1 to September 26, 1774, having been found to be
+innocent, was reinstated in all his property, and received from the king
+a life pension of 1200 livres, more than L100 to-day. A certain number
+of those accused in the Canada case, when the charge was withdrawn,
+received a life pension on leaving the Bastille. At other times, the
+detention of an individual might throw his family into want. He was kept
+in the Bastille, if it was thought he deserved it, but his people were
+assisted. Under date September 3, 1763, the Duke de Choiseul writes to
+the lieutenant of police: "I have received the letter you did me the
+honour of writing to me in favour of the children of the Sieur
+Joncaire-Chabert. I have the pleasure to inform you that I have got for
+them a second subsidy of 300 livres (nearly L30 to-day) in consideration
+of the sad condition you informed me they were in." Louis XIV.
+guaranteed to Pellisson, at his liberation, a pension of 2000 crowns.
+The Regent granted to Voltaire, when he left the Bastille, a pension of
+1200 livres. Louis XVI. awarded to Latude an annuity of 400 livres, and
+to La Rocheguerault an annuity of 400 crowns. The minister Breteuil
+pensioned all the prisoners whom he set at liberty. Brun de Condamine,
+confined from 1779 to 1783, received on leaving a sum of 600 livres.
+Renneville speaks of a prisoner to whom Seignelay gave an important
+situation in compensation for his detention at the Bastille. We hear of
+one, Toussaint Socquart, a commissioner of the Chatelet and of police
+whose offices were restored to him when he came out of the Bastille. In
+fact, contrary to detention in our modern prisons, incarceration in the
+Bastille did not cast the slightest slur on the prisoner's character,
+even in the eyes of those to whom his arrest was due, and instances have
+been known of men who, on their release from the Bastille, not only
+were reinstated in public offices, but reached the highest positions.
+
+Until his examinations were quite completed, the prisoner was kept in
+close confinement. None but the officers of the chateau were allowed to
+communicate with him. And during this time he lived in solitude, unless
+he had brought a servant with him. The administration readily permitted
+the prisoners to avail themselves of the services of their valets, who
+were boarded at the king's expense. It even happened that the government
+sometimes gave their prisoners valets, paying not only for their board,
+but also their wages at the rate of 900 livres a year. One might cite
+prisoners of inferior rank who thus had servants to wait on them. Two or
+three prisoners were sometimes put together in one room. Prison life has
+no greater terror than solitude. In absolute solitude many of the
+prisoners became mad. In company, the hours of captivity seemed less
+tedious and oppressive. Father and son, mother and daughter, aunt and
+niece, lived together. Many might be named. On September 7, 1693, a lady
+named De la Fontaine was taken to the Bastille for the second time. The
+first time, she had been imprisoned quite alone; but this new detention
+evoked the compassion of the lieutenant of police, who, to please the
+poor lady, sent her husband to the Bastille, locked him up with her, and
+gave them a lackey to wait on them.
+
+The examinations being ended, the prisoners enjoyed a greater liberty.
+They could then enter into communication with the people of the town.
+They obtained permission to see their relatives and friends. These
+sometimes paid them visits in their rooms; but as a rule the interviews
+took place in the council-hall, in presence of one of the officers of
+the chateau. They were usually permitted to discuss only family affairs
+and business matters. All conversation on the Bastille and the reasons
+for their imprisonment was forbidden. The rules of the prison increased
+in severity as time went on. Towards the end of Louis XV.'s reign the
+lieutenant of police went so far as to prescribe the subjects of
+conversation which would alone be permitted in the course of the visits
+the prisoners received. "They may talk to the prisoner about the harvest
+his vineyards will yield this year, about cancelling a lease, about a
+match for his niece, about the health of his parents." But it is
+necessary to read the _Memoirs_ of Gourville, Fontaine, Bussy-Rabutin,
+Hennequin, Madame de Staal, the Duke de Richelieu, to form a general
+idea of life at the Bastille under Louis XIV. and under the Regent.
+Several prisoners were free to move about through the chateau wherever
+it seemed good to them; they entered the rooms of their fellow-prisoners
+at all hours of the day. The governor contented himself with locking
+them in their own rooms at night. The prisoners who had the "liberty of
+the court" organized games of bowls or _tonneau_, and hobnobbed with the
+officers of the garrison. Fontaine relates that they might have been
+seen from the top of the towers, collected fifty at a time in the inner
+court Bussy-Rabutin's room was open to all comers: his wife and friends
+visited him; he gave dinners to persons from court, plotted love
+intrigues there, and corresponded freely with his friends and relatives.
+Several prisoners even had permission to take a walk into the town on
+condition of their returning to the chateau in the evening. Two brothers
+were placed in the Bastille together. They went out when they pleased,
+taking turns; it was sufficient for one or other to be always at the
+chateau. The officers of the staff gossiped with the prisoners and gave
+them advice as to the best means of obtaining their liberty.
+
+This animated, courtly, and elegant life is described with infinite
+charm by Madame de Staal, whom we have already cited. "We all used to
+spend a part of the day with the governor. We dined with him, and after
+dinner I enjoyed a rubber of ombre with Messieurs de Pompadour and de
+Boisdavis, Menil advising me. When it was over we returned to our own
+apartments. The company met again in my rooms before supper, for which
+we returned to the governor's, and after that we all went to bed."
+
+As to the manner in which the prisoners were fed and looked after, that
+is surprising indeed, and what we shall say about it, though rigidly
+accurate, will perhaps be regarded as an exaggeration. The governor drew
+three livres a day for the maintenance of a man of inferior rank; five
+livres for the maintenance of a tradesman; ten livres for a banker, a
+magistrate, or a man of letters; fifteen livres for a judge of the
+Parlement; thirty-six livres for a marshal of France. The Cardinal de
+Rohan had 120 francs a day spent on him. The Prince de Courlande, during
+a stay of five months at the Bastille, spent 22,000 francs. These
+figures must be doubled and trebled to give the value they would
+represent to-day.
+
+We read, too, with the greatest astonishment the description of the
+meals the prisoners made. Renneville, whose evidence is the more
+important in that his book is a pamphlet against the administration of
+the Bastille, speaks in these terms of his first meal: "The turnkey put
+one of my serviettes on the table and placed my dinner on it, which
+consisted of pea soup garnished with lettuce, well simmered and
+appetizing to look at, with a quarter of fowl to follow; in one dish
+there was a juicy beef-steak, with plenty of gravy and a sprinkling of
+parsley, in another a quarter of forcemeat pie well stuffed with
+sweetbreads, cock's combs, asparagus, mushrooms, and truffles; and in a
+third a ragout of sheep's tongue, the whole excellently cooked; for
+dessert, a biscuit and two pippins. The turnkey insisted on pouring out
+my wine. This was good burgundy, and the bread was excellent. I asked
+him to drink, but he declared it was not permitted. I asked if I should
+pay for my food, or whether I was indebted to the king for it. He told
+me that I had only to ask freely for whatever would give me pleasure,
+that they would try to satisfy me, and that His Majesty paid for it
+all." The "most Christian" king desired that his guests should fast on
+Fridays and in Lent, but he did not treat them any the worse on that
+account. "I had," says Renneville, "six dishes, and an admirable prawn
+soup. Among the fish there was a very fine weever, a large fried sole,
+and a perch, all very well seasoned, with three other dishes." At this
+period Renneville's board cost ten francs a day; later he was reduced to
+the rate of the prisoners of a lower class. "They much reduced my usual
+fare," he says; "I had, however, a good soup with fried bread crumbs, a
+passable piece of beef, a ragout of sheep's tongue, and two custards for
+dessert. I was treated in pretty much the same manner the whole time I
+was in this gloomy place; sometimes they gave me, after my soup, a wing
+or leg of fowl, sometimes they put two little patties on the edge of the
+dish."
+
+Towards the end of Louis XV.'s reign, Dumouriez eulogizes the cookery of
+the Bastille in almost the same terms. On the day of his entrance,
+noticing that they were serving a fish dinner, he asked for a fowl to be
+got from a neighbouring eating-house. "A fowl!" said the major, "don't
+you know that to-day is Friday?" "Your business is to look after me and
+not my conscience. I am an invalid, for the Bastille itself is a
+disease," replied the prisoner. In an hour's time the fowl was on the
+table. Subsequently he asked for his dinner and supper to be served at
+the same time, between three and four o'clock. His valet, a good cook,
+used to make him stews. "You fared very well at the Bastille; there
+were always five dishes at dinner and three at supper, without the
+dessert, and the whole being put on the table at once, appeared
+magnificent." There is a letter from the major of the Bastille addressed
+in 1764 to the lieutenant of police, discussing a prisoner named Vieilh,
+who never ate butcher's meat; so they had to feed him exclusively on
+game and poultry. Things were much the same under Louis XVI., as
+Poultier d'Elmotte testifies: "De Launey, the governor, used to come and
+have a friendly chat with me; he got them to consult my taste as regards
+food, and to supply me with anything I wished for." The bookseller
+Hardy, transferred in 1766 to the Bastille with the members of the
+Breton deputation, declares frankly that they were all treated in the
+best possible way. Finally, Linguet himself, in spite of his desire to
+paint the lot of the victims of the Bastille in the most sombre colours,
+is obliged to confess that food was supplied in abundance. Every morning
+the cook sent up to him a menu on which he marked the dishes he fancied.
+
+The account books of the Bastille confirm the testimony of former
+prisoners. The following, according to these documents, are the meals
+that La Bourdonnais enjoyed during July, 1750. Every day the menu
+contains soup, beef, veal, beans, French beans, two eggs, bread,
+strawberries, cherries, gooseberries, oranges, two bottles of red wine,
+and two bottles of beer. In addition to this regular bill of fare we
+note on July 2, a fowl and a bottle of Muscat; on the 4th, a bottle of
+Muscat; on the 7th, tea; on the 12th, a bottle of brandy; on the 13th,
+some flowers; on the 14th, some quails; on the 15th, a turkey; on the
+16th, a melon; on the 17th, a fowl; on the 18th, a young rabbit; on the
+19th, a bottle of brandy; on the 20th, a chicken and ham sausage and two
+melons; and so on.
+
+Tavernier was a prisoner of mean station, son of a doorkeeper of Paris
+de Montmartel. He was implicated in a plot against the King's life, and
+was one of the seven prisoners set free on the 14th of July. He was
+found out of his mind in his cell. After he had been led in triumph
+through the streets of Paris, he was shut up at Charenton. He was a
+martyr, people exclaimed. He was certainly not so well off in his new
+abode as he had been at the Bastille. We have an account of what was
+supplied to him at the Bastille in addition to the ordinary meals, in
+November, 1788, in March and May, 1789, three of the last months of his
+imprisonment. In November we find: tobacco, four bottles of brandy,
+sixty bottles of wine, thirty bottles of beer, two pounds of coffee,
+three pounds of sugar, a turkey, oysters, chestnuts, apples, and pears;
+in March: tobacco, four bottles of brandy, forty-four bottles of wine,
+sixty bottles of beer, coffee, sugar, fowls, cheese; in May: tobacco,
+four bottles of brandy, sixty-two bottles of wine, thirty-one bottles of
+beer, pigeons, coffee, sugar, cheese, &c. We have the menus of the
+Marquis de Sade for January, 1789: chocolate cream, a fat chicken
+stuffed with chestnuts, pullets with truffles, potted ham, apricot
+marmalade, &c.
+
+The facts we are describing were the rule. The prisoners who were
+treated with the least consideration fed very well. Only those who were
+sent down to the cells were sometimes put on bread and water, but that
+was only a temporary punishment.
+
+When a complaint was formulated by any prisoner in regard to his food, a
+reprimand to the governor soon followed. Then the lieutenant of police
+inquired of the person concerned if he was better treated than formerly.
+"His Majesty tells me," writes Pontchartrain to De Launey, "that
+complaints have been raised about the bad food of the prisoners; he
+instructs me to write to you to give the matter great attention." And
+Sartine wrote jokingly to Major de Losmes: "I am quite willing for you
+to get the clothes of Sieur Dubois enlarged, and I hope all your
+prisoners may enjoy as excellent health."
+
+Further, the king clothed those of the prisoners who were too poor to
+buy their own clothes. He did not give them a prison uniform, but
+dressing-gowns padded or lined with rabbit skin, breeches of coloured
+stuff, vests lined with silk plush and fancy coats.[36] The commissary
+at the Bastille appointed to look after the supplies took the prisoners'
+measure, and inquired about their tastes, and the colours and styles
+that suited them best. A lady prisoner named Sauve asked to have made
+for her a dress of white silk, dotted with green flowers. The wife of
+commissary Rochebrune spent several days in going the round of the Paris
+shops, and then wrote in despair that no dressmaker had such a material,
+the nearest approach to it being a white silk with green stripes: if
+Madame Sauve would be satisfied with that, they would send to take her
+measure. "Monsieur le major," writes a prisoner named Hugonnet, "the
+shirts they brought me yesterday are not a bit what I asked for, for I
+remember having written 'fine, and with embroidered ruffles'; instead of
+which these things are coarse, made of wretched linen, and with ruffles
+at best only fit for a turnkey; and so I shall be glad if you will send
+them back to the commissary; and let him keep them, for I declare I
+won't have them."
+
+The governor also saw that the prisoners had some means of diversion.
+The poorest he provided with pocket-money and tobacco.
+
+About the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Neapolitan named
+Vinache died at the Bastille, after founding a library there for the use
+of his fellow-prisoners. This library was gradually augmented by
+donations from the governors, by gifts from various prisoners, and even
+by the generosity of a citizen of Paris whose compassion had been
+excited for the lot of the prisoners. The books consisted of romances,
+works of science and philosophy, and religious books, light literature
+predominating. The lieutenant of police, Berryer, struck out of the
+list of books that were being sent one day to the binder a "poem on the
+greatness of God," as being on "too melancholy a subject for prisoners."
+The prisoners also procured books from outside. We have mentioned the
+Comte de Belle-Isle, who had more than three hundred books and atlases
+at the Bastille. La Beaumelle collected a library of more than 600
+volumes. The administration, moreover, never refused to get for the
+prisoners, out of the royal funds and sometimes at considerable expense,
+such works as they said were necessary to their studies. The works of
+Voltaire and Puffendorf were readily placed in their hands. Finally,
+under Louis XVI., they were allowed to read the gazettes.
+
+After the permission to have books and to write, the most coveted favour
+was that of walking exercise. Refusal of this was rare. The prisoners
+might walk, either on the towers of the Bastille, or in the inner
+courts, or lastly along the bastion, which was transformed into a
+garden. To fresh invigorating air the platform of the towers added the
+attraction of the finest view. Fontaine relates that Sacy went to the
+top of the towers every day after dinner. He there walked about in
+company with the officers, who gave him news of the town and the
+prisoners.
+
+In their rooms the prisoners amused themselves with feeding cats and
+birds and animals of all kinds: they taught dogs tricks. Some were
+allowed to have a violin or a clavecin. Pellisson was shut up with a
+Basque who used to play to him on the musette. The Duke de Richelieu
+boasts of the operatic airs he sang in parts with his neighbours in the
+Bastille, Mdlle. de Launay among them, with her head at the bars of her
+window; "we got up choruses of a sort, with fine effect."
+
+Other prisoners killed time with embroidery, weaving or knitting; some
+made ornaments for the chapel of the chateau. Some devoted themselves to
+carpentry, turned wood, made small articles of furniture. Artists
+painted and sketched. "The occupation of M. de Villeroi was somewhat
+singular: he had very fine clothes, which he was for ever unpicking and
+sewing together again with much cleverness." The prisoners who lived
+several in one room played at cards, chess, and backgammon. In 1788, at
+the time of the troubles in Brittany, a dozen noblemen of that country
+were shut up in the Bastille. They lived together, and asked for a
+billiard table to amuse themselves; the table was set up in the
+apartments of the major, and there these gentlemen went for their games.
+
+The prisoners who died in the Bastille were interred in the graveyard of
+St. Paul's; the funeral service was held in the church of St. Paul, and
+the burial certificate, bearing the family name of the deceased, was
+drawn up in the vestry. It is not true that the names of the deceased
+were wrongly stated in the register in order that their identity might
+be concealed from the public. The Man in the Iron Mask was inscribed on
+the register of St. Paul's under his real name. Jews, Protestants, and
+suicides were buried in the garden of the chateau, the prejudices of the
+period not allowing their remains to be laid in consecrated ground.
+
+Those who were liberated had a happier fate. Their dismissal was ordered
+by a _lettre de cachet_, as their incarceration had been. These orders
+for their liberation, so anxiously expected, were brought by the court
+"distributors of packets" or by the ordinary post; sometimes relatives
+and friends themselves brought the sealed envelope, in order to have the
+joy of taking away at once those whose deliverance they came to effect.
+
+The governor, or, in his absence, the king's lieutenant, came into the
+prisoner's chamber and announced that he was free. The papers and other
+effects which had been taken from him on entrance were restored to him,
+the major getting a receipt for them; then he signed a promise to reveal
+nothing of what he had seen at the chateau. Many of the prisoners
+refused to submit to this formality, and were liberated notwithstanding;
+others, after having signed, retailed everywhere all they knew about the
+prison, and were not interfered with. When the prisoner only recovered
+his freedom under certain conditions, he was required to give an
+undertaking to submit to the king's pleasure.
+
+All these formalities having been completed, the governor, with that
+feeling for good form which characterized the men of the _ancien
+regime_, had the man who had been his guest served for the last time
+with an excellent dinner. If the prisoner was a man of good society,
+the governor would even go so far as to invite him to his own table, and
+then, the meal over and the good-byes said, he placed his own carriage
+at the prisoner's disposal, and often entered it himself to accompany
+him to his destination.
+
+More than one prisoner thus restored to the world must have felt greatly
+embarrassed before a day was past, and have been at a loss what to do or
+where to go. The administration of the Bastille sometimes gave money to
+one and another to enable them to get along for a time. In December,
+1783, a certain Dubu de la Tagnerette, after being set at liberty, was
+lodged in the governor's house for a fortnight until he had found
+apartments that would suit him. Moreover, many of the prisoners were
+actually annoyed at being dismissed: we could cite examples of persons
+who sought to get themselves sent to the Bastille; others refused to
+accept their liberty, and others did their best to get their detention
+prolonged.
+
+"Many come out," says Renneville, "very sad at having to leave." Le
+Maistre de Sacy and Fontaine affirm that the years spent at the Bastille
+were the best years in their lives. "The innocent life we lived," says
+Renneville again, "Messieurs Hamilton, Schrader, and myself, seemed so
+pleasant to M. Hamilton that he begged me to write a description of it
+in verse." The _Memoirs_ of Madame de Staal represent her years at the
+Bastille as the happiest she ever knew. "In my heart of hearts, I was
+very far from desiring my liberty." "I stayed at the Bastille for six
+weeks," observes the Abbe Morellet, "which sped away--I chuckle still as
+I think of them--very pleasantly for me." And later, Dumouriez declares
+that at the Bastille he was happy and never felt dull.
+
+Such was the rule of the celebrated state prison. In the last century
+there was no place of detention in Europe where the prisoners were
+surrounded with so many comforts and attentions: there is no such place
+in these days.
+
+But in spite of these very real alleviations, it would be absurd to
+pretend that the prisoners were in general reconciled to their
+incarceration. Nothing is a consolation for the loss of liberty. How
+many poor wretches, in their despair, have dashed their heads against
+the thick walls while wife and children and concerns of the utmost
+gravity were summoning them from without! The Bastille was the cause of
+ruin to many; within its walls were shed tears which were never dried.
+
+An eighteenth-century writer thus defined the state prison: "A bastille
+is any house solidly built, hermetically sealed, and diligently guarded,
+where any person, of whatever rank, age, or sex, may enter without
+knowing why, remain without knowing how long, hoping to leave it, but
+not knowing how." These lines, written by an apologist for the old state
+prison, contain its condemnation, without appeal, before the modern
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.
+
+
+For two centuries no question has excited public opinion more than that
+of the Man in the Iron Mask. The books written on the subject would fill
+a library. People despaired of ever lifting the veil. "The story of the
+Iron Mask," says Michelet, "will probably remain for ever obscure," and
+Henri Martin adds: "History has no right to pronounce judgment on what
+will never leave the domain of conjecture." To-day, the doubt no longer
+exists. The problem is solved. Before disclosing the solution which
+criticism has unanimously declared correct, we propose to transcribe the
+scanty authentic documents that we possess on the masked man, and then
+to state the principal solutions which have been proposed, before
+arriving at the true solution.
+
+
+1. THE DOCUMENTS.
+
+_The Register of the Bastille._--To begin with, let us quote the text
+which is the origin and foundation of all the works published on the
+question of the Iron Mask.
+
+[Illustration: Note in Du Junca's Journal regarding the entrance to the
+Bastille (September 18, 1698) of the Man in the Iron Mask.]
+
+Etienne du Junca, king's lieutenant at the Bastille, in a journal
+which he began to keep on October 2, 1690, when he entered upon his
+office--a sort of register in which he recorded day by day the details
+concerning the arrival of the prisoners--writes, under date September
+18, 1698, these lines,[37] which the popular legend has rendered
+memorable:--
+
+"Thursday, September 18 (1698), at three o'clock in the afternoon, M. de
+Saint-Mars, governor of the chateau of the Bastille, made his first
+appearance, coming from his governorship of the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite-Honorat, bringing with him, in his conveyance, a
+prisoner he had formerly at Pignerol, whom he caused to be always
+masked, whose name is not mentioned; directly he got out of the carriage
+he put him in the first room of the Baziniere tower, waiting till night
+for me to take him, at nine o'clock, and put him with M. de Rosarges,
+one of the sergeants brought by the governor, alone in the third room of
+the Bertaudiere tower, which I had had furnished with all necessaries
+some days before his arrival, having received orders to that effect from
+M. de Saint-Mars: the which prisoner will be looked after and waited on
+by M. de Rosarges, and maintained by the governor."
+
+In a second register, supplementary to the first, in which du Junca
+records details of the liberation or the death of the prisoners, we
+read, under date November 19, 1703:--
+
+"On the same day, November 19, 1703, the unknown prisoner, always masked
+with a mask of black velvet, whom M. de Saint-Mars, the governor,
+brought with him on coming from the Isles de Sainte-Marguerite, whom he
+had kept for a long time, the which happening to be a little ill
+yesterday on coming from mass, he died to-day, about ten o'clock at
+night, without having had a serious illness; it could not have been
+slighter. M. Giraut, our chaplain, confessed him yesterday, is surprised
+at his death. He did not receive the sacrament, and our chaplain
+exhorted him a moment before he died. And this unknown prisoner, kept
+here for so long, was buried on Tuesday at four o'clock p.m., November
+20, in the graveyard of St. Paul, our parish; on the register of burial
+he was given a name also unknown. M. de Rosarges, major, and Arreil,
+surgeon, signed the register."
+
+And in the margin:--
+
+"I have since learnt that they called him M. de Marchiel on the
+register, and that forty livres was the cost of the funeral."
+
+The registers of du Junca were preserved among the ancient archives of
+the Bastille, whence they passed to the Arsenal library, where they are
+now kept. They are drawn up in the clumsy handwriting of a soldier, with
+little skill in penmanship. The spelling is bad. But the facts are
+stated with precision, and have always proved accurate when checked.
+
+[Illustration: Notice in Du Junca's Journal of the death of the masked
+prisoner in the Bastille (November 19, 1703).]
+
+The extract from the second register shows that the mysterious
+prisoner wore, not a mask of iron, but one of black velvet.
+
+Further, the entry on the register of St. Paul's church has been
+discovered. It reads:--
+
+"On the 19th, Marchioly, aged 45 years or thereabouts, died in the
+Bastille, whose body was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul, his
+parish, the 20th of the present month, in the presence of M. Rosage
+(_sic_), major of the Bastille, and of M. Reglhe (_sic_), surgeon major
+of the Bastille, who signed.--(Signed) ROSARGES, REILHE."
+
+Such are the fundamental documents for the story of the Iron Mask; we
+shall see by and by that they are sufficient to establish the truth.
+
+_The Letter of the Governor of Sainte-Marguerite._--We have just seen,
+from the register of du Junca, that the masked man had been at the Isles
+of Sainte-Marguerite under the charge of Saint-Mars, who, on being
+appointed governor of the Bastille, had brought the prisoner with him.
+In the correspondence exchanged between Saint-Mars and the minister
+Barbezieux, occurs the following letter, dated January 6, 1696, in which
+Saint-Mars describes his method of dealing with the prisoners, and the
+masked man is referred to under the appellation "my ancient prisoner."
+
+     "MY LORD,--You command me to tell you what is the practice, when I
+     am absent or ill, as to the visits made and precautions taken daily
+     in regard to the prisoners committed to my charge. My two
+     lieutenants serve the meals at the regular hours, just as they
+     have seen me do, and as I still do very often when I am well. The
+     first of my lieutenants, who takes the keys of the prison of _my
+     ancient prisoner_, with whom we commence, opens the three doors and
+     enters the chamber of the prisoner, who politely hands him the
+     plates and dishes, put one on top of another, to give them into the
+     hands of the lieutenant, who has only to go through two doors to
+     hand them to one of my sergeants, who takes them and places them on
+     a table two steps away, where is the second lieutenant, who
+     examines everything that enters and leaves the prison, and sees
+     that there is nothing written on the plate; and after they have
+     given him the utensil, they examine his bed inside and out, and
+     then the gratings and windows of his room, and very often the man
+     himself: after having asked him very politely if he wants anything
+     else, they lock the doors and proceed to similar business with the
+     other prisoners."
+
+_The Letter of M. de Palteau._--On June 19, 1768, M. de Formanoir de
+Palteau addressed from the chateau of Palteau, near Villeneuve-le-Roi,
+to the celebrated Freron, editor of the _Annee Litteraire_, a letter
+which was inserted in the number for June 30, 1768. The author of this
+letter was the grand-nephew of Saint-Mars. At the time when the latter
+was appointed governor of the Bastille, the chateau of Palteau belonged
+to him, and he halted there with his prisoner on the way from the Isles
+of Sainte-Marguerite to Paris.
+
+"In 1698," writes M. de Palteau, "M. de Saint-Mars passed from the
+governorship of the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite to that of the Bastille.
+On his way to take up his duties, he stayed with his prisoner on his
+estate at Palteau. The masked man arrived in a conveyance which preceded
+that of M. de Saint-Mars; they were accompanied by several horsemen. The
+peasants went to meet their lord: M. de Saint-Mars ate with his
+prisoner, who had his back turned to the windows of the dining-hall
+looking on the courtyard. The peasants whom I have questioned could not
+see whether he ate with his mask on; but they observed very well that M.
+de Saint-Mars, who was opposite him at table, had two pistols beside his
+plate. They had only one footman to wait on them, and he fetched the
+dishes from an ante-room where they were brought him, carefully shutting
+the door of the dining-hall behind him. When the prisoner crossed the
+courtyard, he always had his black mask over his face; the peasants
+noticed that his lips and teeth were not covered, that he was tall and
+had white hair. M. de Saint-Mars slept in a bed that was put up for him
+near that of the masked man."
+
+This account is marked throughout with the stamp of truth. M. de
+Palteau, the writer, makes no attempt to draw inferences from it. He
+declares for none of the hypotheses then under discussion in regard to
+the identity of the mysterious unknown. He is content to report the
+testimony of those of his peasants who saw the masked man when he passed
+through their lord's estates. The only detail in the story which we are
+able to check--a characteristic detail, it is true--is that of the black
+mask of which M. de Palteau speaks: it corresponds exactly to the mask
+of black velvet mentioned in du Junca's register.
+
+The chateau of Palteau is still in existence. In his work on
+Superintendent Fouquet, M. Jules Lair gives a description of it. "The
+chateau of Palteau, situated on an eminence among woods and vines,
+presented at that time, as it does to-day, the aspect of a great lordly
+mansion in the style of the time of Henri IV. and Louis XIII. First
+there is a wide courtyard, then two wings; within, the principal
+building and the chapel. The lower story is supported on arches, and its
+lofty windows go right up into the roof, and light the place from floor
+to attic." Since the eighteenth century, however, the chateau has
+undergone some modifications. The room in which Saint-Mars dined with
+his prisoner is now used as a kitchen.
+
+_The Notes of Major Chevalier._--In addition to the entries in du
+Junca's Journal which we have transcribed, scholars are accustomed to
+invoke, as equally worthy of credence though later in date, the
+testimony of Father Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and that of Major
+Chevalier.
+
+The extracts from du Junca quoted above were published for the first
+time in 1769 by Father Griffet, who added the following comments: "The
+memory of the masked prisoner was still preserved among the officers,
+soldiers, and servants of the Bastille, when M. de Launey, who has long
+been the governor, came to occupy a place on the staff of the garrison.
+Those who had seen him with his mask, when he crossed the courtyard on
+his way to attend mass, said that after his death the order was given to
+burn everything he had used, such as linen, clothes, cushions,
+counterpanes, &c.: that the very walls of the room he had occupied had
+to be scraped and whitewashed again, and that all the tiles of the
+flooring were taken up and replaced by others, because they were so
+afraid that he had found the means to conceal some notes or some mark,
+the discovery of which would have revealed his name."
+
+The testimony of Father Griffet happens to be confirmed by some notes
+from the pen of a major of the Bastille named Chevalier. The major was
+not a personage of the highest rank in the administration of the
+Bastille, since above him were the governor and the king's lieutenant:
+but he was the most important personage. The whole internal
+administration, so far as the prisoners were concerned, was entrusted to
+him. Chevalier fulfilled these duties for nearly thirty-eight years,
+from 1749 to 1787. M. Fernand Bournon's estimate of him is as follows:
+"Chevalier is a type of the devoted hard-working official who has no
+ambition to rise above a rather subordinate rank. It would be impossible
+to say how much the administration of the Bastille owed to his zeal and
+to his perfect familiarity with a service of extraordinary difficulty."
+
+Among notes put together with a view to a history of the Bastille,
+Chevalier gives in condensed form the information furnished by du
+Junca's register, and adds: "This is the famous masked man whom no one
+has ever known. He was treated with great distinction by the governor,
+and was seen only by M. de Rosarges, major of the said chateau, who had
+sole charge of him; he was not ill except for a few hours, and died
+rather suddenly: interred at St. Paul's, on Tuesday, November 20, 1703,
+at 4 o'clock p.m., under the name of Marchiergues. He was buried in a
+new white shroud, given by the governor, and practically everything in
+his room was burnt, such as his bed, chairs, tables, and other bits of
+furniture, or else melted down, and the whole was thrown into the
+privies."
+
+These notes of Father Griffet and Major Chevalier have derived great
+force, in the eyes of historians, from their exact agreement; but a
+close examination shows that the testimony of Chevalier was the source
+of Father Griffet's information; in fact, Chevalier was major of the
+Bastille when the Jesuit compiled his work, and it is doubtless upon his
+authority that the latter depended.
+
+Documents recently published in the _Revue Bleue_ upset these
+assertions, which appeared to be based on the firmest foundations.
+
+In the Journal of du Junca, which we have already mentioned, we read
+under date April 30, 1701: "Sunday, April 30, about 9 o'clock in the
+evening, M. Aumont the younger came, bringing and handing over to us a
+prisoner named M. Maranville, alias Ricarville, who was an officer in
+the army, a malcontent, too free with his tongue, a worthless fellow:
+whom I received in obedience to the king's orders sent through the Count
+of Pontchartrain: whom I have had put along with the man Tirmon, in the
+second room of the Bertaudiere tower, with the _ancient prisoner_, both
+being well locked in."
+
+The "ancient prisoner" here referred to is no other than the masked man.
+When he entered the Bastille, as we have seen, on September 18, 1698, he
+was placed in the third room of the Bertaudiere tower. In 1701, the
+Bastille happened to be crowded with prisoners, and they had to put
+several together in one and the same room; so the man in the mask was
+placed with two companions. One of them, Jean-Alexandre de Ricarville,
+also called Maranville, had been denounced as a "retailer of ill speech
+against the State, finding fault with the policy of France and lauding
+that of foreigners, especially that of the Dutch." The police reports
+depict him as a beggarly fellow, poorly dressed, and about sixty years
+old. He had formerly been, as du Junca says, an officer in the royal
+troops. Maranville left the Bastille on October 19, 1708. He was
+transferred to Charenton, where he died in February, 1709. It must be
+pointed out that Charenton was then an "open" prison, where the
+prisoners associated with one another and had numerous relations with
+the outside world.
+
+The second of the fellow-prisoners of the man in the mask,
+Dominique-Francois Tirmont, was a servant. When he was placed in the
+Bastille, on July 30, 1700, he was nineteen years old. He was accused of
+sorcery and of debauching young girls. He was put in the second room of
+the Bertaudiere tower, where he was joined by Maranville and the man in
+the mask. On December 14, 1701, he was transferred to Bicetre. He lost
+his reason in 1703 and died in 1708.
+
+The man in the mask was taken out of the third room of the Bertaudiere
+tower, in which he had been placed on his entrance to the Bastille, on
+March 6, 1701, in order to make room for a woman named Anne Randon, a
+"witch and fortune-teller," who was shut up alone in it. The masked
+prisoner was then placed in the "second Bertaudiere" with Tirmont, who
+had been there, as we have just seen, since July 30, 1700. Maranville
+joined them on April 30, 1701. Not long after, the masked man was
+transferred to another room, with or without Maranville. Tirmont had
+been taken to Bicetre in 1701. We find that on February 26, 1703, the
+Abbe Gonzel, a priest of Franche-Comte, accused of being a spy, was shut
+up alone in the "second Bertaudiere."
+
+These facts are of undeniable authenticity, and one sees at a glance the
+consequences springing from them. At the time when the masked prisoner
+shared the same room with fellow-captives, other prisoners at the
+Bastille were kept rigorously isolated, in spite of the crowded state of
+the prison, so much more important did the reasons for their
+incarceration seem! The man in the mask was associated with persons of
+the lowest class, who were soon afterwards to leave and take their
+places with the ruck of prisoners at Charenton and Bicetre. We read in a
+report of D'Argenson that there was even some talk of enlisting one of
+them, Tirmont, in the army. Such, then, was this strange personage, the
+repository of a terrible secret of which Madame Palatine[38] was already
+speaking in mysterious terms, the man who puzzled kings, Louis XV.,
+Louis XVI., who puzzled the very officers of the Bastille, and caused
+them to write stories as remote as possible from the reality!
+
+
+2. THE LEGEND.
+
+If the very officers of the Bastille indulged such wild freaks of
+imagination, what flights into dreamland might not the thoughts of the
+public be expected to take? The movement is a very curious one to
+follow. To begin with, we have the light Venetian mask transforming
+itself into an iron mask with steel articulations which the prisoner
+was never without. The consideration--imaginary, as we have seen--with
+which the prisoner is supposed to have been treated, and which is
+referred to in the notes of Major Chevalier, becomes transformed into
+marks of a boundless deference shown by the jailers towards their
+captive. The story was that Saint-Mars, the governor, a knight of St.
+Louis, never spoke to the prisoner except standing, with bared head,
+that he served him at table with his own hands and on silver plate, and
+that he supplied him with the most luxurious raiment his fancy could
+devise. Chevalier says that after his death his room at the Bastille was
+done up like new, to prevent his successor from discovering any
+tell-tale evidence in some corner. Speaking of the time when the masked
+man was at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, Voltaire relates: "One day
+the prisoner wrote with a knife on a silver dish, and threw the dish out
+of the window towards a boat moored on the shore, almost at the foot of
+the tower. A fisherman, to whom the boat belonged, picked up the dish
+and carried it to the governor. Astonished, he asked the fisherman,
+'Have you read what is written on this dish, and has anyone seen it in
+your hands?' 'I cannot read,' replied the fisher, 'I have only just
+found it, and no one has seen it.' The poor man was detained until the
+governor was assured he could not read and that no one had seen the
+dish. 'Go,' he said, 'it is lucky for you that you can't read!'"
+
+In Father Papon's _History of Provence_, linen takes the place of the
+dish. The upshot is more tragic: "I found in the citadel an officer of
+the Free Company, aged 79 years. He told me several times that a barber
+of that company saw one day, under the prisoner's window, something
+white floating on the water; he went and picked it up and carried it to
+M. de Saint-Mars. It was a shirt of fine linen, folded with no apparent
+care, and covered with the prisoner's writing. M. de Saint-Mars, after
+unfolding it and reading a few lines, asked the barber, with an air of
+great embarrassment, if he had not had the curiosity to read what was on
+it. The barber protested over and over again that he had read nothing;
+but, two days after, he was found dead in his bed."
+
+And the fact that Saint-Mars had had the body of the prisoner buried in
+a white cloth struck the imagination, and was developed in its turn into
+an extraordinary taste on the part of the prisoner for linen of the
+finest quality and for costly lace--all which was taken to prove that
+the masked man was a son of Anne of Austria, who had a very special
+love, it was declared, for valuable lace and fine linen.
+
+_A Brother of Louis XIV._--We are able to fix with precision, we
+believe, the origin of the legend which made the Iron Mask a brother of
+Louis XIV. Moreover, it was due to this suggestion, which was hinted at
+from the first, that the story of the prisoner made so great a noise.
+The glory of it belongs to the most famous writer of the eighteenth
+century. With a boldness of imagination for which to-day he would be
+envied by the cleverest journalistic inventor of sensational paragraphs,
+Voltaire started this monstrous hoax on its vigorous flight.
+
+In 1745 there had just appeared a sort of romance entitled _Notes
+towards the History of Persia_, which was attributed, not without some
+reason, to Madame de Vieux-Maisons. The book contained a story within a
+story, in which the mysterious prisoner, who was beginning to be talked
+about everywhere, was identified with the Duke de Vermandois, and to
+this fact was due the sensation which the book caused. Voltaire
+immediately saw how he could turn the circumstance to account. He had
+himself at one time been confined in the Bastille, which was one reason
+for speaking of it; but he did not dare put in circulation suddenly,
+without some preparation, the terrible story he had just conceived, and,
+with a very delicate sensitiveness to public opinion, he contented
+himself with printing the following paragraph in the first edition of
+his _Age of Louis XIV._: "A few months after the death of Mazarin there
+occurred an event which is unexampled in history, and, what is not less
+strange, has been passed over in silence by all the historians. There
+was sent with the utmost secrecy to the chateau of the Isle of
+Sainte-Marguerite, in the Sea of Provence, an unknown prisoner, of more
+than ordinary height, young, and with features of rare nobility and
+beauty. On the way, this prisoner wore a mask the chinpiece of which was
+fitted with springs of steel, which allowed him to eat freely with the
+mask covering his face. The order had been given to kill him if he
+uncovered. He remained in the island until an officer in whom great
+confidence was placed, named Saint-Mars, governor of Pignerol, having
+been made governor of the Bastille, came to the Isle of
+Sainte-Marguerite to fetch him, and conducted him to the Bastille,
+always masked. The Marquis de Louvois saw him in the island before his
+removal, and remained standing while he spoke to him, with a
+consideration savouring of respect." Voltaire, however, does not say who
+this extraordinary prisoner was. He observed the impression produced on
+the public by his story. Then he ventured more boldly, and in the first
+edition of his _Questions on the Encyclopaedia_ insinuated that the
+motive for covering the prisoner's face with a mask was fear lest some
+too striking likeness should be recognized. He still refrained from
+giving his name, but already everyone was on tip-toe with the
+expectation of startling news. At last, in the second edition of
+_Questions on the Encyclopaedia_, Voltaire intrepidly added that the man
+in the mask was a uterine brother of Louis XIV., a son of Mazarin and
+Anne of Austria, and older than the king. We know what incomparable
+agitators of public opinion the Encyclopaedists were.
+
+Once hatched, the story was not long in producing a numerous progeny,
+which grew in their turn and became a monstrous brood.
+
+We read in the _Memoirs_ of the Duke de Richelieu, compiled by his
+secretary the Abbe Soulavie, that Mdlle. de Valois, the Regent's
+daughter and at this date the mistress of Richelieu, consented, at the
+instigation of the latter, to prostitute herself to her
+father--tradition has it that the Regent was enamoured of his
+daughter--in order to get sight of an account of the Iron Mask drawn up
+by Saint-Mars. According to this story, which the author of the
+_Memoirs_ prints in its entirety, Louis XIV. was born at noon, and at
+half-past eight in the evening, while the king was at supper, the queen
+was brought to bed of a second son, who was put out of sight so as to
+avoid subsequent dissensions in the state.
+
+The Baron de Gleichen goes still farther. He is at the pains to prove
+that it was the true heir to the throne who was put out of sight, to the
+profit of a child of the queen and the cardinal. Having became masters
+of the situation at the death of the king, they substituted their son
+for the Dauphin, the substitution being facilitated by a strong likeness
+between the children. One sees at a glance the consequences of this
+theory, which nullifies the legitimacy of the last Bourbons.
+
+But the career of imagination was not yet to be checked. The legend came
+into full bloom under the first empire. Pamphlets then appeared in which
+the version of Baron de Gleichen was revived. Louis XIV. had been only a
+bastard, the son of foreigners; the lawful heir had been imprisoned at
+the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, where he had married the daughter of one
+of his keepers. Of this marriage was born a child who, as soon as he was
+weaned, was sent to Corsica, and entrusted to a reliable person, as a
+child coming of "good stock," in Italian, _Buona-parte_. Of that child
+the Emperor was the direct descendant. The right of Napoleon I. to the
+throne of France established by the Iron Mask!--there is a discovery
+which the great Dumas missed. But, incredible as it seems, there were
+men who actually took these fables seriously. In a Vendean manifesto
+circulated among the Chouans,[39] in Nivose of the year IX,[40] we read:
+"It is not wise for the Royalist party to rely on the assurances given
+by some emissaries of Napoleon, that he seized the throne only to
+restore the Bourbons; everything proves that he only awaits the general
+pacification to declare himself, and that he means to base his right on
+the birth of the children of the Iron Mask!"
+
+We shall not stay to refute the hypothesis which makes the Iron Mask a
+brother of Louis XIV. Marius Topin has already done so in the clearest
+possible manner. The notion, moreover, has long been abandoned. The last
+writers who adhered to it date from the revolutionary period.
+
+_The Successive Incarnations of the Iron Mask._--"Never has an Indian
+deity," says Paul de Saint-Victor, speaking of the Iron Mask, "undergone
+so many metempsychoses and so many avatars." It would take too long
+merely to enumerate all the individuals with whom it has been attempted
+to identify the Iron Mask: even women have not escaped. We shall cite
+rapidly the theories which have found most credence amongst the public,
+or those which have been defended in the most serious works, in order to
+arrive finally at the identification--as will be seen, it is one of
+those proposed long ago--which is beyond doubt the true one.
+
+The hypothesis which, after that of a brother of Louis XIV., has most
+powerfully excited public opinion, is that which made the mysterious
+unknown Louis, Comte de Vermandois, admiral of France, and son of the
+charming Louise de la Valliere. This was indeed the belief of Father
+Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille, and even of the officers of the
+staff. But the conjecture is disproved in a single line: "The Comte de
+Vermandois died at Courtrai, on November 18, 1683." A precisely similar
+fact refutes the theory identifying the Iron Mask with the Duke of
+Monmouth, the natural son of Charles II. and Lucy Walters. Monmouth
+perished on the scaffold in 1683. Lagrange-Chancel throws much ardour
+and talent into a defence of the theory which made the Iron Mask Francis
+of Vendome, Duke de Beaufort, who, under the Fronde, was called "King of
+the Markets." The Duke de Beaufort died at the siege of Candia, June 25,
+1669.
+
+To Lagrange-Chancel succeeds the Chevalier de Taules. "I have discovered
+the Man in the Mask," he cries, "and it is my duty to impart my
+discovery to Europe and posterity!" This discovery brings forward one
+Avedick, an Armenian patriarch of Constantinople and Jerusalem,
+kidnapped in the East at the instigation of the Jesuits, and transported
+to France. Vergennes, on entering the ministry for foreign affairs, set
+investigations on foot. They confirmed the statement that Avedick had
+actually been arrested in the circumstances indicated, but after 1706;
+and so he could not be identified with the Iron Mask.
+
+Such were the theories of the eighteenth century. We come now to those
+of our own time. Since mystery and sinister machinations were involved,
+the Jesuits could not be long left out of the business. We have just
+seen them at their tricks with the Armenian patriarch. People dreamt of
+an innocent youth thrown into a dungeon at their instigation for having
+written a couple of verses against them. But even this fancy was
+completely cast into the shade in a work published in 1885 under the
+pseudonym of "Ubalde," the author of which was unquestionably M. Anatole
+Loquin. This is his conclusion: "The more I reflect, the more I believe
+I recognize in the Man in the Iron Mask, without any elaborate theory,
+without prejudice on my part, no other than J. B. Poquelin de Moliere."
+The Jesuits have got their revenge for _Tartufe_!
+
+Let us come now to the conjectures which have almost hit the truth and
+have been defended by genuine scholars.
+
+Superintendent Fouquet is the solution of the bibliophile Jacob (Paul
+Lacroix). M. Lair has shown that Fouquet died at Pignerol, of a sort of
+apoplexy, on March 23, 1680, at the very moment when there was an idea
+at court of sending him to the waters at Bourbon, as a first step
+towards his final liberation.
+
+Francois Ravaisson, the learned and charming keeper of the Arsenal
+library, whose work in classifying the archives of the Bastille we have
+had the honour to continue, believed for a moment that the celebrated
+prisoner might have been the young Count de Keroualze who had fought at
+Candia under the orders of Admiral de Beaufort. Ravaisson put forth his
+theory with much hesitation, and as, in the sequel, he was himself led
+to abandon it, we need not dwell any longer upon it.
+
+M. Loiseleur, in the course of his brilliant controversy with Marius
+Topin, suggested "an obscure spy arrested by Catinat in 1681," and his
+opponent refuted him in the most piquant manner by discovering Catinat
+in the very prisoner he was said to have arrested!
+
+General Jung published a large volume in support of the claims of a
+certain Oldendorf, a native of Lorraine, a spy and poisoner, arrested on
+March 29, 1673, in a trap laid for him at one of the passages of the
+Somme. The theory was refuted by M. Loiseleur. As M. Lair pointed out,
+General Jung did not even succeed in proving that his nominee entered
+Pignerol, an essential condition to his being the Man in the Mask.
+
+Baron Carutti urged the claims of a mad Jacobin, a prisoner at Pignerol
+whose name remains unknown; but this Jacobin died at Pignerol towards
+the close of 1693.'
+
+The recent work of M. Emile Burgaud, written in collaboration with
+Commandant Bazeries, made a great sensation. He fixes on General Vivien
+Labbe de Bulonde, whom Louvois arrested for having shown dereliction of
+a general's duty before Coni. M. Geoffroy de Grandmaison published in
+the _Univers_ of January 9, 1895, two receipts signed by General de
+Bulonde, one in 1699, when the masked man was in rigorous isolation at
+the Bastille, the other in 1705, when he had been dead for two years.
+
+We come at last to the hypothesis which is the most probable of
+all--after the true hypothesis, of course. Eustache Dauger, whom M. Lair
+identifies with the masked prisoner, was a valet, who had been put into
+jail at Pignerol on July 28, 1669. But it must be noted that the masked
+prisoner was kept guarded in rigorous secrecy in the early days of his
+detention, as long as he was at Pignerol and the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite. Now, when Dauger went to Pignerol, his case seemed of
+such slight importance that Saint-Mars thought of making him into a
+servant for the other prisoners, and in fact, in 1675, Louvois gave him
+as a valet to Fouquet, who for some time past had seen the rigour of his
+confinement sensibly mitigated, receiving visits, walking freely in the
+courts and purlieus of the fortress, Dauger accompanying him. Further,
+we know that the masked man was transferred direct from Pignerol to the
+Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, whilst Dauger was transferred in 1681 to
+Exiles, whence he only went to the Isles in 1687.
+
+We now come to the correct solution.
+
+
+3. MATTIOLI.
+
+To Baron Heiss, once captain in the Alsace regiment, and one of the most
+distinguished bibliophiles of his time, belongs the honour of being the
+first, in a letter dated from Phalsbourg, June 28, 1770, and published
+by the _Journal encyclopedique_, to identify the masked prisoner with
+Count Mattioli, secretary of state to the Duke of Mantua. After him,
+Dutens, in 1783, in his _Intercepted Correspondence_; Baron de
+Chambrier, in 1795, in a Memoir presented to the Academy of Berlin;
+Roux-Fazillac, member of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, in
+a remarkable work printed in 1801; then successively, Reth, Delort,
+Ellis, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul de Saint-Victor,
+and M. Gallien, in a series of publications more or less important,
+endeavoured to prove that the Man in the Mask was the Duke of Mantua's
+secretary of state. The scholars most intimate with the history of Louis
+XIV.'s government, Depping, Cheruel, Camille Rousset, have not hesitated
+to pronounce in favour of the same view; while against them,
+singlehanded like his D'Artagnan, Alexandre Dumas resisted the efforts
+of twenty scholars, and the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_--giving a new lease
+of life to the legend about the brother of Louis XIV., put in
+circulation by Voltaire, and reinforced by the Revolution--drove back
+into their dust among the archives the documents which students had
+exhumed.
+
+We have no longer to deal with so formidable an adversary, and we hope
+that the following pages will not leave the shadow of a doubt.
+
+We know how, under the influence of Louvois, the able and insinuating
+policy directed first by Mazarin, then by Lionne, gave way to a military
+diplomacy, blunt and aggressive. Louis XIV. was master of Pignerol,
+acquired in 1632. He was induced by Louvois to cast covetous glances at
+Casal. In possession of these two places, the French armies could not
+but dominate Upper Italy, and hold the court of Turin directly at their
+mercy. The throne of Mantua was then occupied by a young duke, Charles
+IV. of Gonzago, frivolous, happy-go-lucky, dissipating his wealth at
+Venice in fetes and pleasures. In 1677 he had pledged to the Jews the
+crown revenues for several years. Charles IV. was also Marquis of
+Montferrat, of which Casal was the capital. Noting with watchful eye the
+frivolity and financial straits of the young prince, the court of
+Versailles conceived the bold scheme of buying Casal for hard cash.
+
+At this date, one of the principal personages in Mantua was Count
+Hercules Antony Mattioli. He was born at Bologna on December 1, 1640, of
+a distinguished family. A brilliant student, he had barely passed his
+twentieth year when he was elected a professor at the University of
+Bologna. Afterwards he established himself at Mantua, where Charles
+III., whose confidence he had won, made him his secretary of state.
+Charles IV., continuing the favour of his father, not only maintained
+Mattioli in his office as minister of state, but appointed him an
+honorary senator, a dignity which was enhanced by the title of Count.
+
+Louis XIV. was employing at the capital of the Venetian republic a
+keen-witted and enterprising ambassador, the Abbe d'Estrades. He saw
+through the ambitious and intriguing nature of Mattioli, and, towards
+the end of 1677, succeeded in winning over his support for the designs
+of the French court on Casal.
+
+On January 12, 1678, Louis XIV. with his own hand wrote expressing his
+thanks to Mattioli, who by-and-by came to Paris. On December 8, the
+contract was signed, the Duke of Mantua receiving in exchange for Casal
+100,000 crowns. In a private audience, Louis XIV. presented Mattioli
+with a costly diamond and paid him the sum of a hundred double louis.
+
+Scarcely two months after Mattioli's journey to France, the courts of
+Vienna, Madrid, Turin, and the Venetian Republic were simultaneously
+informed of all that had taken place. In order to reap a double harvest
+of gold, Mattioli had cynically betrayed both his master Charles IV. and
+the King of France. Like a thunderbolt there came to Versailles the news
+of the arrest of Baron d'Asfeld, the envoy appointed by Louis XIV. to
+exchange ratifications with Mattioli. The governor of Milan had caused
+him to be seized and handed over to the Spaniards. The rage of Louis
+XIV. and of Louvois, who had urged the opening of negotiations, taken
+an active part in them, and begun preparations for the occupation of
+Casal, may well be imagined. The Abbe d'Estrades, not less irritated,
+conceived a scheme of the most daring kind, proposing to Versailles
+nothing less than the abduction of the Mantuan minister. But Louis XIV.
+was determined to have no scandal. Catinat was charged with carrying out
+the scheme in person. The Abbe d'Estrades, in his dealings with
+Mattioli, feigned ignorance of the double game the Count was playing. He
+led him to believe, on the contrary, that the balance of the sums
+promised at Versailles was about to be paid. A meeting was fixed for May
+2, 1679. On that day d'Estrades and Mattioli got into a carriage, the
+passing of which was awaited by Catinat accompanied by some dozen men.
+At two o'clock in the afternoon, Mattioli was in the fortress of
+Pignerol, in the hands of jailer Saint-Mars. When we remember the rank
+held by the Italian minister, we are confronted with one of the most
+audacious violations of international law of which history has preserved
+a record.
+
+Early in the year 1694, Mattioli was transferred to the Isles of
+Sainte-Marguerite; we have seen that he entered the Bastille on
+September 18, 1698, and died there on November 19, 1703.
+
+The details that we possess of the imprisonment of Mattioli at Pignerol
+and afterwards at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite show that he was at the
+outset treated with the consideration due to his rank and to the
+position he occupied at the time of his arrest. Eventually the respect
+which the prisoner had at first inspired gradually diminished: as years
+went on the attentions shown him grew less and less until the day when,
+at the Bastille, he was given a room in common with persons of the
+basest class. On the other hand, the rigour of his confinement, so far
+as the secrecy in which he was kept was concerned, was more and more
+relaxed; what it was material to conceal was the circumstances under
+which Mattioli had been arrested, and with the lapse of time this secret
+continually diminished in importance. As to the mask of black velvet
+which Mattioli had among his possessions when he was arrested, and which
+he put on, without a doubt, only for the occasion, this in reality
+constituted a relief to his captivity, for it permitted the prisoner to
+leave his room, while the other state prisoners were rigorously mewed up
+in theirs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It remains to prove that the masked prisoner was really Mattioli.
+
+1. In the despatch sent by Louis XIV. to the Abbe d'Estrades five days
+before the arrest, the king approves the scheme of his ambassador and
+authorizes him to secure Mattioli, "since you believe you can get him
+carried off without the affair giving rise to any scandal." The prisoner
+is to be conducted to Pignerol, where "instructions are being sent to
+receive him and keep him there without anybody having knowledge of it."
+The king's orders close with these words: "You must see to it that no
+one knows what becomes of this man." The capture effected, Catinat wrote
+on his part to Louvois: "It came off without any violence, and no one
+knows the name of the knave, not even the officers who helped to arrest
+him." Finally, we have a very curious pamphlet entitled _La Prudenza
+triomfante di Casale_, written in 1682, that is, little more than two
+years after the event, and--this slight detail is of capital
+importance--thirty years before there was any talk of the Man in the
+Mask. In this we read: "The secretary (Mattioli) was surrounded by ten
+or twelve horsemen, who seized him, disguised him, _masked_ him, and
+conducted him to Pignerol"--a fact, moreover, confirmed by a tradition
+which in the eighteenth century was still rife in the district, where
+scholars succeeded in culling it.
+
+Is there any need to insist on the strength of the proofs afforded by
+these three documents, taken in connection one with another?
+
+2. We know, from du Junca's register, that the masked man was shut up at
+Pignerol under the charge of Saint-Mars. In 1681, Saint-Mars gave up the
+governorship of Pignerol for that of Exiles. We can determine with
+absolute precision the number of prisoners Saint-Mars had then in his
+keeping. It was exactly five. A dispatch from Louvois, dated June 9, is
+very clear. In the first paragraph, he orders "the two prisoners in the
+lower tower" to be removed; in the second, he adds: "The rest of the
+prisoners in your charge." Here there is a clear indication of the
+"rest": what follows settles the number: "The Sieur du Chamoy has orders
+to pay two crowns a day for the board of these _three_ prisoners." This
+account, as clear as arithmetic can make it, is further confirmed by the
+letter addressed by Saint-Mars to the Abbe d'Estrades on June 25, 1681,
+when he was setting out for Exiles: "I received yesterday the warrant
+appointing me governor of Exiles: I am to keep charge of two jailbirds I
+have here, who have no other name than 'the gentlemen of the lower
+tower'; Mattioli will remain here with two other prisoners."
+
+The prisoners, then, were five in number, and the masked man is to be
+found, of necessity, among them. Now we know who these five were: (1) a
+certain La Riviere, who died at the end of December, 1686; (2) a
+Jacobin, out of his mind, who died at the end of 1693; (3) a certain
+Dubreuil, who died at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite about 1697. There
+remain Dauger and Mattioli. The Man in the Mask is, without possible
+dispute, the one or the other. We have explained above the reasons which
+lead us to discard Dauger. The mysterious prisoner, then, was Mattioli.
+The proof is mathematically exact.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Burial certificate of the masked prisoner (November 20, 1703),
+     reproduced from the facsimile in the sixth edition of _The Man in
+     the Iron Mask_, by Marius Topin, 1883. The original, in the city
+     archives of Paris, was destroyed in the conflagration of 1871.
+]
+
+3. Opposite this page will be found a facsimile reproduction of the
+death certificate of the masked prisoner as inscribed on the registers
+of the church of St. Paul. It is the very name of the Duke of Mantua's
+former secretary that is traced there: "Marchioly." It must be
+remembered that "Marchioly" would be pronounced in Italian "Markioly,"
+and that Saint-Mars, governor of the Bastille, who furnished the
+information on which the certificate was drawn up, almost always wrote
+in his correspondence--a characteristic detail--not "Mattioli," but
+"Martioly": that is the very name on the register, less distorted than
+the name of the major of the Bastille, who was called "Rosarges," and
+not "Rosage," as given on the register; and the name of the surgeon, who
+was called "Reilhe," and not "Reglhe."
+
+It has been shown above how, as time went on, the rigorous seclusion to
+which the masked prisoner had been condemned was relaxed. What it had
+been thought necessary to conceal was the manner in which Mattioli had
+been captured, and with time that secret itself had lost its importance.
+As the Duke of Mantua had declared himself very well pleased with the
+arrest of the minister by whom he, no less than Louis XIV., had been
+deceived, there was nothing to prevent the name from being inscribed on
+a register of death, where, moreover, no one would ever have thought of
+looking for it.
+
+Let us add that, in consequence of error or carelessness on the part of
+the officer who supplied the information for the register, or perhaps on
+the part of the parson or beadle who wrote it, the age is stated
+incorrectly, "forty-five years or thereabouts," while Mattioli was
+sixty-three when he died. However, the register was filled up without
+the least care, as a formality of no importance.
+
+4. The Duke de Choiseul pressed Louis XV. to reveal to him the clue to
+the enigma. The king escaped with an evasion. One day, however, he said
+to him: "If you knew all about it, you would see that it has very little
+interest;" and some time after, when Madame de Pompadour, at de
+Choiseul's instigation, pressed the king on the subject, he told her
+that the prisoner was "the minister of an Italian prince."
+
+In the _Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette_ by her
+principal lady in waiting, Madame de Campan, we read that the queen
+tormented Louis XVI., who did not know the secret, to have a search made
+among the papers of the various ministries. "I was with the queen," says
+Madame de Campan, "when the king, having finished his researches, told
+her that he had found nothing in the secret papers which had any bearing
+on the existence of this prisoner; that he had spoken on the subject to
+M. de Maurepas, whose age brought him nearer the time when the whole
+story must have been known to the ministers (Maurepas had been minister
+of the king's household as a very young man, in the early years of the
+eighteenth century, having the department of the _lettres de cachet_),
+and that M. de Maurepas had assured him that the prisoner was simply a
+man of a very dangerous character through his intriguing spirit, and a
+subject of the Duke of Mantua. He was lured to the frontier, arrested,
+and kept a prisoner, at first at Pignerol, then at the Bastille."
+
+These two pieces of evidence are of such weight that they alone would
+be sufficient to fix the truth. When they were written, there was no
+talk of Mattioli, of whose very name Madame de Campan was ignorant.
+Supposing that Madame de Campan had amused herself by inventing a
+fable--an absurd and improbable supposition, for what reason could she
+have had for so doing?--it is impossible to admit that her imagination
+could have hit upon fancies so absolutely in accord with facts.[41]
+
+And so the problem is solved. The legend, which had reared itself even
+as high as the throne of France, topples down. The satisfaction of the
+historian springs from his reflection that all serious historical works
+for more than a century, resting on far-reaching researches and
+eschewing all preoccupations foreign to science--such, for example, as
+the desire of attaining a result different from the solutions proposed
+by one's predecessors--have arrived at the same conclusion, which proves
+to be the correct solution. Heiss, Baron de Chambrier, Reth,
+Roux-Fazillac, Delort, Carlo Botta, Armand Baschet, Marius Topin, Paul
+de Saint-Victor, Camille Rousset, Cheruel, Depping, have not hesitated
+to place under the famous mask of black velvet the features of
+Mattioli. But at each new effort made by science, legend throws itself
+once more into the fray, gaining new activity from the passions produced
+by the Revolution.
+
+The truth, in history, sometimes suggests to our mind's eye those white
+or yellow flowers which float on the water among broad flat leaves; a
+breeze springs up, a wave rises and submerges them, they disappear; but
+only for a moment: then they come to the surface again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE.
+
+
+Speaking of men of letters in France under the _ancien regime_, Michelet
+calls them "the martyrs of thought"; he adds: "The world thinks, France
+speaks. And that is precisely why the Bastille of France, the Bastille
+of Paris--I would rather say, the prison-house of thought--was, among
+all bastilles, execrable, infamous, and accursed." In the course of the
+article devoted to the Bastille in the _Grande Encyclopedie_, M. Fernand
+Bournon writes: "After Louis XIV. and throughout the eighteenth century,
+the Bastille was especially employed to repress, though it could not
+stifle, that generous and majestic movement (the glory of the human
+spirit) towards ideas of emancipation and enfranchisement; it was the
+epoch when philosophers, publicists, pamphleteers, the very booksellers,
+were imprisoned there in large numbers." And to substantiate this
+eloquent apostrophe, M. Bournon cites the names of Voltaire, La
+Beaumelle, the Abbe Morellet, Marmontel, and Linguet, imprisoned in the
+Bastille; and of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau placed in the
+chateau of Vincennes.
+
+Let us recall the story of these poor victims in turn, and trace the
+history of their martyrdom.
+
+
+VOLTAIRE.
+
+The most illustrious and the earliest in date of the writers mentioned
+by M. Bournon is Voltaire. He was sent to the Bastille on two different
+occasions. His first imprisonment began on May 17, 1717. At that date
+the poet was only twenty-two years of age and of no reputation; he did
+not even bear the name of Voltaire, which he only took after his
+discharge from the Bastille on April 14, 1718. The cause of his
+detention was not "the generous and majestic movement towards ideas of
+enfranchisement which is the glory of the human spirit," but some
+scurrilities which, to speak plainly, brought him what he deserved:
+coarse verses against the Regent and his daughter, and public utterances
+coarser still. Many authors state that Voltaire was imprisoned for
+writing the _J'ai vu_, a satire against the government of Louis XIV.,
+each stanza of which ended with the line:--
+
+    J'ai vu ces maux, et je n'ai pas vingt ans.[42]
+
+This is a mistake. Voltaire was imprisoned for having written the _Puero
+regnante_, some verses on the Regent and his daughter, the Duchess of
+Berry, which it would be impossible to translate. To these he added
+observations whose reproduction would be equally impossible. At the
+Bastille Voltaire underwent examinations in the usual way, in the course
+of which he lied with impudence; after that he was allowed considerable
+liberty. "It was at the Bastille," wrote Condorcet, "that the young poet
+made the first draft of his poem _La Ligue_, corrected his tragedy of
+_OEdipe_, and composed some very lively lines on the ill-luck of being
+there."
+
+The following are the most respectable lines of this production:--
+
+    So one fine faultless morning in the spring,
+    When Whitsun splendour brighten'd everything,
+    A strange commotion startled me from sleep.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    At last I reach'd my chamber in the keep.
+    A clownish turnkey, with an unctuous smile,
+    Of my new lodging 'gan to praise the style:
+    "What ease, what charms, what comforts here are yours!
+    For never Phoebus in his daily course
+    Will blind you here with his too brilliant rays;
+    Within these ten-foot walls you'll spend your days
+    In cool sequester'd blithefulness always."
+    Then bidding me admire my cloistral cell--
+    The triple doors, the triple locks as well,
+    The bolts, the bars, the gratings all around--
+    "'Tis but," says he, "to keep you safe and sound!"
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Behold me, then, lodged in this woful place,
+    Cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined in narrow space;
+    Sleepless by night, and starving half the day;
+    No joys, no friend, no mistress--wellaway![43]
+
+When Voltaire was set at liberty, the Regent, whom, as we have just
+said, he had reviled, made him a very handsome offer of his protection.
+The poet's reply is well known: "My lord, I thank your royal highness
+for being so good as to continue to charge yourself with my board, but
+I beseech you no longer to charge yourself with my lodging." The young
+writer thus obtained from the Regent a pension of 400 crowns, which
+later on the latter augmented to 2000 livres.
+
+Voltaire was sent to the Bastille a second time in April, 1726. For this
+new detention there was no justification whatever. He had had a violent
+quarrel, one evening at the Opera, with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot.
+On another occasion, at the Comedie Francaise, the poet and the nobleman
+had a warm altercation in the box of Mdlle. Lecouvreur. Rohan raised his
+stick, Voltaire put his hand on his sword, and the actress fainted. Some
+days later "the gallant chevalier, assisted by half a dozen ruffians,
+behind whom he courageously posted himself," gave our poet a thrashing
+in broad daylight. When relating the adventure later, the Chevalier said
+pleasantly: "I commanded the squad." From that moment Voltaire sought
+his revenge. "The police reports reveal curious details of the loose,
+erratic, and feverish life he lived between the insult and his arrest,"
+writes the careful biographer of Voltaire, Desnoiresterres. From one of
+these police reports we see that the young writer established relations
+with soldiers of the guard: several notorious bullies were constantly
+about him. A relative who attempted to calm him found him more irritated
+and violent in his language than ever. It appears certain that he was
+meditating some act of violence, which indeed would not have been
+without justification. But the Cardinal de Rohan contrived that he
+should be arrested on the night of April 17, 1726, and placed in the
+Bastille.
+
+Speaking of this new imprisonment Marshal de Villars writes: "The
+public, disposed to find fault all round, came to the conclusion on this
+occasion that everybody was in the wrong: Voltaire for having offended
+the Chevalier de Rohan, the latter for having dared to commit a capital
+offence in causing a citizen to be beaten, the government for not having
+punished a notorious crime, and for having sent the injured party to the
+Bastille to pacify the injurer." Nevertheless, we read in the report of
+Herault, the lieutenant of police: "The Sieur de Voltaire was found
+armed with pocket pistols, and his family, when informed of the matter,
+unanimously and universally applauded the wisdom of an order which saves
+this young man the ill effects of some new piece of folly and the worthy
+people who compose his family the vexation of sharing his shame."
+
+Voltaire remained at the Bastille for _twelve days_: he was permitted to
+have a servant of his own choice to wait on him, who was boarded at the
+king's expense; as for himself, he took his meals whenever he pleased at
+the governor's table, going out of the Bastille, as the governor's
+residence stood outside the prison. Relatives and friends came to see
+him; his friend Thieriot dined with him; he was given pens, paper,
+books, whatever he desired in order to divert himself. "Using and
+abusing these opportunities," writes Desnoiresterres, "Voltaire believed
+that he could give audience to all Paris. He wrote to those of his
+friends who had not yet shown a sense of their duty, exhorting them to
+give him proof they were alive." "I have been accustomed to all
+misfortunes," he wrote to Thieriot, "but not yet to that of being
+utterly abandoned by you. Madame de Bernieres, Madame du Deffand, the
+Chevalier des Alleurs really ought to come and see me. They only have to
+ask permission of M. Herault or M. de Maurepas." At the time of the
+poet's entrance to the Bastille, the lieutenant of police had written to
+the governor: "The Sieur de Voltaire is of a _genius_ that requires
+humouring. His Serene Highness has approved of my writing to tell you
+that the king's intention is that you should secure for him mild
+treatment and the internal liberty of the Bastille, so far as these do
+not jeopardize the security of his detention." The warrant setting him
+at liberty was signed on April 26.
+
+
+LA BEAUMELLE.
+
+In M. Bournon's list La Beaumelle comes second. The circumstances under
+which he was put into the Bastille were as follows. After having fallen
+out at Berlin with Voltaire, whom he had compared to a monkey, La
+Beaumelle returned to Paris, whence he had been exiled. There he got
+printed a new edition of Voltaire's _Age of Louis XIV._, unknown to the
+author, and interpolated therein odes insulting to the house of Orleans.
+"La Beaumelle," exclaimed Voltaire, "is the first who dared to print
+another man's work in his lifetime. This miserable Erostrates of the
+_Age of Louis XIV._ has discovered the secret of changing into an
+infamous libel, for fifteen ducats, a work undertaken for the glory of
+the nation."
+
+La Beaumelle became an inmate of the Bastille in April, 1753, and
+remained there for six months. Writing on May 18, 1753, to M. Roques,
+Voltaire said that "there was scarcely any country where he would not
+inevitably have been punished sooner or later, and I know from a certain
+source that there are two courts where they would have inflicted a
+chastisement more signal than that which he is undergoing here."
+
+It was not long before La Beaumelle issued his edition of _Notes towards
+the History of Madame de Maintenon and that of the past century_, with
+nine volumes of correspondence. He had fabricated letters which he
+attributed to Madame de Saint-Geran and Madame de Frontenac, and
+published a correspondence of Madame de Maintenon which M. Geffroy, in a
+work recognized as authoritative, regards as full of barefaced
+falsehoods and foul and scurrilous inventions. He had inserted in his
+work the following phrase: "The court of Vienna has been long accused of
+having poisoners always in its pay."
+
+It must be observed that La Beaumelle's publication owed its great vogue
+to special circumstances. The author's reputation abroad, the very title
+of the book, lent it great importance; and France, then engaged in the
+Seven Years' War, found it necessary to keep in Austria's good graces.
+La Beaumelle was conveyed to the Bastille a second time. The lieutenant
+of police, Berryer, put him through the usual examination. La Beaumelle
+was a man of the world, so witty that in the course of their quarrels he
+drove Voltaire himself to despair. He showed himself such in his
+examination. "La Beaumelle," said Berryer to him, "this is wit you are
+giving me when what I ask of you is plain sense." On his expressing a
+wish for a companion, he was placed with the Abbe d'Estrades. The
+officers of the chateau had all his manuscripts brought from his house,
+so that he might continue his literary work. He had at the Bastille a
+library of 600 volumes, ranged on shelves which the governor ordered to
+be made for him. He there finished a translation of the _Annals_ of
+Tacitus and the _Odes_ of Horace. He had permission to write to his
+relatives and friends, and to receive visits from them; he had the
+liberty of walking in the castle garden, of breeding birds in his room,
+and of having brought from outside all the luxuries to which he was
+partial. The principal secretary of the lieutenant of police, Duval,
+reports the following incident: "Danry (the famous Latude) and Allegre
+(his companion in confinement and ere long in escape) found means to
+open a correspondence with all the prisoners in the Bastille. They
+lifted a stone in a closet of the chapel, and put their letters
+underneath it. La Beaumelle pretended to be a woman in his letters to
+Allegre, and as he was a man of parts and Allegre was of keen
+sensibility and an excellent writer, the latter fell madly in love with
+La Beaumelle, to such a degree that, though they mutually agreed to
+burn their letters, Allegre preserved those of his fancied mistress,
+which he had not the heart to give to the flames; with the result that,
+the letters being discovered at an inspection of his room, he was put in
+the cells for some time. The prisoner amused himself also by composing
+verses which he recited at the top of his voice. This gave much concern
+to the officers of the garrison, and Chevalier, the major, wrote to the
+lieutenant of police on the matter: "The Sieur de la Beaumelle seems to
+have gone clean out of his mind; he seems to be a maniac; he amuses
+himself by declaiming verses in his room for a part of the day: for the
+rest of the time he is quiet."
+
+This second detention lasted from August, 1756, till August, 1757.
+
+
+THE ABBE MORELLET.
+
+We come to the Abbe Morellet, a man of fine and fascinating mind, one of
+the best of the Encyclopaedists, who died in 1819 a member of the
+Institute and the object of general esteem. He was arrested on June 11,
+1760, for having had printed and distributed, without privilege or
+permission, a pamphlet entitled: _Preface to the Philosophers' Comedy;
+or, the Vision of Charles Palissot_.[44] These are the terms in which,
+later on, Morellet himself judged his pamphlet: "I must here make my
+confession. In this work, I went far beyond the limits of a literary
+pleasantry regarding the Sieur Palissot, and to-day I am not without
+remorse for my fault." And further, as J. J. Rousseau, in whose favour
+the pamphlet had been in part composed, had to acknowledge, the Abbe
+"very impudently" insulted a young and pretty woman, Madame de Robecq,
+who was dying of decline, spitting blood, and did actually die a few
+days later.
+
+The arrest of Morellet was demanded by Malesherbes, then censor of the
+press, one of the most generous and liberal spirits of the time, the
+inspirer of the famous remonstrances of the Court of Taxation against
+_lettres de cachet_--the man who, as M. H. Monin testifies, "being
+elected censor of the press, protected philosophers and men of letters,
+and by his personal efforts facilitated the publication of the
+_Encyclopaedia_." Speaking of the _Preface to the Comedy_, Malesherbes
+writes to Gabriel de Sartine, lieutenant-general of police: "It is an
+outrageous pamphlet, not only against Palissot, but against respectable
+persons whose very condition should shelter them against such insults. I
+beg you, sir, to be good enough to put a stop to this scandal. I believe
+it to be a matter of public importance that the punishment should be
+very severe, and that this punishment should not stop at the Bastille or
+the For-l'Eveque,[45] because a very wide distinction must be drawn
+between the delinquencies of men of letters tearing each other to
+pieces and the insolence of those who attack persons of the highest
+consideration in the State. I do not think that Bicetre would be too
+severe for these last. If you have to ask M. de Saint-Florentin for the
+royal authority for your proceedings, I hope you will be good enough to
+inform him of the request I am making."
+
+It will be observed that, on Malesherbes' showing, the Bastille would
+not suffice to punish the _Preface to the Comedy_, nor even the
+For-l'Eveque; he asks for the most stringent of the prisons, Bicetre.
+Before long, it is true, this excellent man returned to milder
+sentiments. An imprisonment at Bicetre, he wrote, would be infamous.
+Saint-Florentin and Sartine were not hard to convince. Morellet was
+taken to the Bastille. "The warrant for his arrest," wrote one of his
+agents to Malesherbes, "was executed this morning by Inspector D'Hemery
+with all the amenities possible in so unpleasant a business. D'Hemery
+knows the Abbe Morellet, and has spoken of him to M. de Sartine in the
+most favourable terms."
+
+When he entered the Bastille the Abbe calculated that his imprisonment
+would last six months, and after acknowledging that he at that time
+viewed his detention without great distress, he adds: "I am bound to
+say, to lower the too high opinion that may be formed of me and my
+courage, that I was marvellously sustained by a thought which rendered
+my little virtue more easy. I saw some literary glory illumining the
+walls of my prison; persecuted, I must be better known. The men of
+letters whom I had avenged, and the philosophy for which I was a
+martyr, would lay the foundation of my reputation. The men of the world,
+who love satire, would receive me better than ever. A career was opening
+before me, and I should be able to pursue it at greater advantage. These
+six months at the Bastille would be an excellent recommendation, and
+would infallibly make my fortune."
+
+The Abbe remained at the Bastille, not six months, but six weeks, "which
+slipped away," he observes "--I chuckle still as I think of them--very
+pleasantly for me." He spent his time in reading romances, and, with
+admirable humour, in writing a _Treatise on the Liberty of the Press_.
+Afterwards the good Abbe informs us that the hopes which he had indulged
+were not deceived. On issuing from the Bastille he was a made man.
+Little known two months before, he now met everywhere with the reception
+he desired. The doors of the salons of Madame de Boufflers, Madame
+Necker, the Baron d'Holbach, flew open before him; women pitied him and
+admired him, and men followed their example. Why have we not to-day a
+Bastille to facilitate the career of writers of talent!
+
+
+MARMONTEL.
+
+To Marmontel his stay at the royal prison appeared as pleasant as the
+Abbe Morellet had found his. He had amused himself by reciting at Madame
+Geoffrin's a mordant satire in which the Duke d'Aumont, first groom of
+the stole to the king, was cruelly hit. The duke expostulated;
+Marmontel wrote to him declaring that he was not the author of the
+satire; but the nobleman stood his ground.
+
+"I am helpless," said the Count de Saint-Florentin, who countersigned
+the _lettre de cachet_, to Marmontel; "the Duke d'Aumont accuses you,
+and is determined to have you punished. It is a satisfaction he demands
+in recompense for his services and the services of his ancestors. The
+king has been pleased to grant him his wish. So you will go and find M.
+de Sartine; I am addressing to him the king's order; you will tell him
+that it was from my hand you received it."
+
+"I went to find M. de Sartine," writes Marmontel, "and I found with him
+the police officer who was to accompany me. M. de Sartine was intending
+that he should go to the Bastille in a separate carriage; but I myself
+declined this obliging offer, and we arrived at the Bastille, my
+introducer and myself, in the same hack.... The governor, M. d'Abadie,
+asked me if I wished my servant to be left with me.... They made a
+cursory inspection of my packets and books, and then sent me up to a
+large room furnished with two beds, two tables, a low cupboard, and
+three cane chairs. It was cold, but a jailer made us a good fire and
+brought me wood in abundance. At the same time they gave me pens, ink,
+and paper, on condition of my accounting for the use I made of them and
+the number of sheets they allowed me.
+
+"The jailer came back to ask if I was satisfied with my bed. After
+examining it I replied that the mattresses were bad and the coverlets
+dirty. In a minute all was changed. They sent to ask me what was my
+dinner hour. I replied, 'The same as everybody's.' The Bastille had a
+library: the governor sent me the catalogue, giving me free choice among
+the books. I merely thanked him for myself, but my servant asked for the
+romances of Prevost, and they were brought to him."
+
+Let us go on with Marmontel's story. "For my part," he says, "I had the
+means of escape from ennui. Having been for a long time impatient of the
+contempt shown by men of letters for Lucan's poem, which they had not
+read, and only knew in the barbarous fustian of Brebeuf's version, I had
+resolved to translate it more becomingly and faithfully into prose; and
+this work, which would occupy me without fatiguing my brain, was the
+best possible employment for the solitary leisure of my prison. So I had
+brought the _Pharsalia_ with me, and, to understand it the better, I had
+been careful to bring with it the _Commentaries_ of Caesar. Behold me
+then at the corner of a good fire, pondering the quarrel of Caesar and
+Pompey, and forgetting my own with the Duke d'Aumont. And there was Bury
+too (Marmontel's servant) as philosophical as myself, amusing himself by
+making our beds placed at two opposite corners of my room, which was at
+this moment lit up by the beams of a fine winter sun, in spite of the
+bars of two strong iron gratings which permitted me a view of the Suburb
+Saint-Antoine.
+
+"Two hours later, the noise of the bolts of the two doors which shut me
+in startled me from my profound musings, and the two jailers, loaded
+with a dinner I believed to be mine, came in and served it in silence.
+One put down in front of the fire three little dishes covered with
+plates of common earthenware; the other laid on that one of the two
+tables which was clear a tablecloth rather coarse, indeed, but white. I
+saw him place on the table a very fair set of things, a pewter spoon and
+fork, good household bread, and a bottle of wine. Their duty done, the
+jailers retired, and the two doors were shut again with the same noise
+of locks and bolts.
+
+"Then Bury invited me to take my place, and served my soup. It was a
+Friday. The soup, made without meat, was a _puree_ of white beans, with
+the freshest butter, and a dish of the same beans was the first that
+Bury served me with. I found all this excellent. The dish of cod he gave
+me for second course was better still. It was served with a dash of
+garlic, which gave it a delicacy of taste and odour which would have
+flattered the taste of the daintiest Gascon. The wine was not
+first-rate, but passable; no sweets: of course one must expect to be
+deprived of something. On the whole, I thought that dinner in prison was
+not half bad.
+
+"As I was rising from table, and Bury was about to sit down--for there
+was enough for his dinner in what was left--lo and behold! in came my
+two jailers again, with pyramids of dishes in their hands. At this
+display of fine linen, fine china-ware, spoon and fork of silver, we
+recognized our mistake; but we made not the ghost of a sign, and when
+our jailers, having laid down their burden, had retired, 'Sir,' said
+Bury, 'you have just eaten my dinner, you will quite agree to my having
+my turn and eating yours.' 'That's fair,' I replied, and the walls of my
+room were astonished, I fancy, at the sound of laughter.
+
+"This dinner was not vegetarian; here are the details: an excellent
+soup, a juicy beef-steak, a boiled capon's leg streaming with gravy and
+melting in one's mouth, a little dish of artichokes fried in pickle, a
+dish of spinach, a very fine William pear, fresh-cut grapes, a bottle of
+old burgundy, and best Mocha coffee; this was Bury's dinner, with the
+exception of the coffee and the fruit, which he insisted on reserving
+for me.
+
+"After dinner the governor came to see me, and asked me if I found the
+fare sufficient, assuring me that I should be served from his table,
+that he would take care to cut my portions himself, and that no one
+should touch my food but himself. He suggested a fowl for my supper; I
+thanked him and told him that what was left of the fruit from my dinner
+would suffice. The reader has just seen what my ordinary fare was at the
+Bastille, and from this he may infer with what mildness, or rather
+reluctance, they brought themselves to visit on me the wrath of the Duke
+d'Aumont.
+
+"Every day I had a visit from the governor. As he had some smack of
+literature and even of Latin, he took some interest in following my
+work, in fact, enjoyed it; but soon, tearing himself away from these
+little dissipations, he said, 'Adieu, I am going to console men who are
+more unfortunate than you.'"
+
+Such was the imprisonment of Marmontel. It lasted for eleven days.
+
+
+LINGUET.
+
+Linguet, advocate and journalist, was arrested for a breach of the press
+laws and for slander. He was a man of considerable ability, but little
+character. Attorney-general Cruppi has devoted to the story of Linguet a
+work as extensive as it is eloquent. He has a wealth of indulgence for
+his hero; yet, despite the goodwill he shows for him and endeavours to
+impart to the reader, his book reveals between the lines that Linguet
+was worthy of little esteem, and that his professional brethren were
+justified in removing his name from the roll of the advocates of Paris.
+
+Linguet's captivity lasted for two years. He has left a description of
+it in his _Memoirs on the Bastille_, which made a great noise, and of
+which the success has endured down to our own day. His book, like
+everything which came from his pen, is written in a fluent style, with
+spirit and brilliance; the facts cited are for the most part correct,
+but the author, aiming at making a sensation, has cleverly presented
+them in a light which distorts their real character. "There are means,"
+says Madame de Staal, "of so distributing light and shade on the facts
+one is exhibiting, as to alter their appearance without altering the
+groundwork." Take, for instance, the description that Linguet gives of
+his belongings while in the Bastille: "Two worm-eaten mattresses, a cane
+chair the seat of which was only held to it by strings, a folding table,
+a jug for water, two earthenware pots, one of them for drinking, and two
+stone slabs to make a fire on." A contemporary could say of Linguet's
+_Memoirs_, "It is the longest lie that ever was printed." And yet, if we
+take the facts themselves which are related by the clever journalist,
+and disengage them from the deceitful mirage in which he has enwrapped
+them, we do not see that his life in the Bastille was so wretched as he
+endeavours to make us believe. He is forced to acknowledge that his food
+was always most abundant, adding, it is true, that that was because they
+wished to poison him! He owed his life, he is convinced, "only to the
+obstinate tenacity of his constitution." He marked, nevertheless, on the
+menu for the day, which was sent up every morning by the Bastille cook,
+the dishes he fancied; and later on he had his room furnished after his
+own heart. He still enjoyed, moreover, enough liberty to write during
+his imprisonment a work entitled, _The Trials of Three Kings, Louis
+XVI., Charles III., and George III._, which appeared in London in 1781.
+Let us recall once more the famous saying of Linguet to the wig-maker of
+the Bastille on the first day that he presented himself to trim the
+prisoner's beard: "To whom have I the honour of speaking?" "I am, sir,
+the barber to the Bastille." "Gad, then, why don't you raze it?"
+
+In June, 1792, some years after his liberation, Linguet was prosecuted a
+second time for breach of the press laws. The revolutionary tribunal
+condemned him to death. As he mounted the steps of the scaffold, the
+ardent pamphleteer thought, mayhap, with bitterly ironical regret, of
+that Bastille whose destruction he had so clamorously demanded.
+
+
+DIDEROT.
+
+We have still to speak of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who were
+not incarcerated at the Bastille, but at Vincennes, not in the castle
+keep, but in the chateau itself, which constituted a separate place of
+imprisonment. They placed in the chateau only prisoners guilty of minor
+offences, who were sentenced to a temporary detention, and to whom they
+wished to show some consideration. This was, as we have just said, the
+abode of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot was arrested on
+July 24, 1749. His last book, _Letters on the Blind for the Use of those
+Who Can See_, contained theories which appeared to have but little title
+to the description of "moral." But in the course of his examination he
+stoutly denied that he was its author, as also he denied the authorship
+of the _Thoughts of a Philosopher_ he had published some years before.
+The lieutenant of police gave instructions to the governor of Vincennes
+that, short of being set at liberty, Diderot was to be granted all
+possible comforts--allowed to walk in the garden and park; "that the
+king's desire was, in consideration of the literary work on which he was
+engaged (the _Encyclopaedia_), to permit him to communicate freely with
+persons from without who might come for that purpose or on family
+business." And so Diderot received a visit from his wife and walked with
+her in the wood; Rousseau and D'Alembert spent their afternoons with
+him, and, as in the "good old days" of Plato and Socrates, our
+philosophers chatted of metaphysics and love, seated on the green grass
+under the shade of mighty oaks. The booksellers and printers who had
+undertaken the publication of the _Encyclopaedia_ were, as we have seen,
+in constant communication with Diderot at Vincennes; he corrected in
+prison the proofs of the publication, which the court looked on with no
+favourable eye. And we know, too, that at night, with the secret
+complicity of the governor, our philosopher cleared the park walls to
+hurry to a fair lady at Paris, one Madame de Puysieux, whom he loved
+with a passion by no means platonic; ere the sun was up, the jailers
+found him safely back under lock and key. This irksome captivity lasted
+little more than three months.
+
+
+THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU.
+
+The imprisonment of Mirabeau lasted only ten days. The _lettre de
+cachet_ had been obtained by the clique of financiers, who took fright
+at the audacious conceptions of the _Theory of Taxation_. "I fancy I
+deserved my punishment," wrote the Marquis, "like the ass in the fable,
+for a clumsy and misplaced zeal." In regard to the arrest, Madame
+d'Epinay sent word to Voltaire: "Never before was a man arrested as this
+one was. The officer said to him, 'Sir, my orders do not state I am to
+hurry you: to-morrow will do, if you haven't time to-day.' 'No, sir, one
+cannot be too prompt in obeying the king's orders, I am quite ready.'
+And off he went with a bag crammed with books and papers." At Vincennes
+the Marquis had a servant with him. His wife came to see him. The king
+spent for his support fifteen livres a day, more than twenty-five
+shillings of our money. He was liberated on December 24, 1760. His
+brother, Bailie Mirabeau, speaking of this detention, wrote to him of "a
+week's imprisonment in which you were shown every possible
+consideration."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have exhausted M. Bournon's list of the writers who were victims of
+arbitrary authority. Such are the "martyrs" for whom that excellent
+historian, and Michelet and others, have shown the most affecting
+compassion. The foregoing facts do not call for comment. Men of letters
+were the spoilt children of the eighteenth century much more than of our
+own, and never has an absolute government shown a toleration equal to
+that of the monarchy under the _ancien regime_ towards writers whose
+doctrines, as events have proved, tended directly to its destruction.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LATUDE.
+
+
+Few historical figures have taken a higher place in the popular
+imagination than Masers de Latude. That celebrated prisoner seems to
+have accumulated in his life of suffering all the wrongs that spring
+from an arbitrary government. The novelists and playwrights of the
+nineteenth century have made him a hero; the poets have draped his woes
+in fine mourning robes, our greatest historians have burnt for him the
+midnight oil; numerous editions of his _Memoirs_ have appeared in quick
+succession down to our own days. Even by his contemporaries he was
+regarded as a martyr, and posterity has not plucked the shining crown of
+martyrdom from his head, hoary with the snows of long captivity. His
+legend is the creature of his own unaided brain. When in 1790 he
+dictated the story of his life, he made greater calls on his glowing
+southern imagination than on his memory; but the documents relating to
+his case in the archives of the Bastille have been preserved. At the
+present time they are to be found dispersed among various libraries, at
+the Arsenal, at Carnavalet, at St. Petersburg. Thanks to them it is
+easy to establish the truth.
+
+On March 23, 1725, at Montagnac in Languedoc, a poor girl named
+Jeanneton Aubrespy gave birth to a male child who was baptized three
+days later under the name of Jean Henri, given him by his god-parents,
+Jean Bouhour and Jeanne Boudet. Surname the poor little creature had
+none, for he was the illegitimate child of a father unknown. Jeanneton,
+who had just passed her thirtieth year, was of respectable middle-class
+family, and lived near the Lom gate in a little house which seems to
+have been her own. Several cousins of hers held commissions in the army.
+But from the day when she became a mother, her family had no more to do
+with her, and she fell into want. Happily she was a woman of stout
+heart, and by her spinning and sewing she supported her boy, who shot up
+into a lad of keen intelligence and considerable ambition. She succeeded
+in getting him some sort of education, and we find Jean Henri at the age
+of seventeen acting as assistant surgeon in the army of Languedoc.
+Surgeons, it is true, made no great figure in the eighteenth century;
+they combined the duties of barber and dentist as well as leech. But the
+situation was good enough. "Assistant surgeons in the army," wrote
+Saint-Marc the detective, "who really worked at their trade, made a good
+deal of money." At this time, being reluctant to bear his mother's name,
+the young man ingeniously transformed his double forename into Jean
+Danry, under which he is designated in a passport for Alsace, given him
+on March 25, 1743, by the general commanding the royal forces in
+Languedoc. In the same year 1743, Danry accompanied the army of Marshal
+de Noailles in its operations on the Maine and the Rhine, receiving from
+the Marshal, towards the end of the season, a certificate testifying to
+his good and faithful service throughout the campaign.
+
+Four years later we find Danry at Brussels, employed in the
+field-hospital of the army in Flanders, at a salary of 500 livres a
+month. He was present at the famous siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, the
+impregnable fortress which the French so valiantly stormed under the
+command of the Comte de Lowendal. But peace being concluded at
+Aix-la-Chapelle, the armies were disbanded, and Danry went to Paris. He
+had in his pocket a letter of recommendation to Descluzeaux, the surgeon
+of Marshal de Noailles, and a certificate signed by Guignard de La
+Garde, chief of the commissariat, testifying to the ability and good
+conduct of "the aforesaid Jean Danry, assistant surgeon." These two
+certificates formed the most substantial part of his fortune.
+
+Danry arrived in Paris about the end of the year 1748. On any afternoon
+he might have been seen strolling about the Tuileries in a grey frock
+and red waistcoat, carrying his twenty-three years with a good grace. Of
+middle height and somewhat spare figure, wearing his brown hair in a
+silk net, having keen eyes and an expression of much intelligence, he
+would probably have been thought a handsome fellow but for the marks
+which smallpox had indelibly stamped on his face. His accent had a
+decided Gascon tang, and it is obvious, from the spelling of his
+letters, not only that he could not boast of a literary education, but
+that his speech was that of a man of the people. Yet, what with his
+brisk temperament, his professional skill, and his favour with his
+superiors, he was in a fair way to attain an honourable position, which
+would have enabled him at length to support his mother, then living in
+solitary friendlessness at Montagnac, centring on him, in her forlorn
+condition, all her affection and her dearest hopes.
+
+Paris, with its gaiety and stir, dazzled the young man. Its brilliant
+and luxurious life, its rustling silks and laces, set him dreaming. He
+found the girls of Paris charming creatures, and opened his heart to
+them without stint, and his purse too; and his heart was more opulent
+than his purse. Ere long he had spent his modest savings and sunk into
+want. He fell into bad company. His best friend, an apothecary's
+assistant named Binguet, shared with him a mean garret in the Cul-de-sac
+du Coq, in the house of one Charmeleux, who let furnished lodgings. Than
+these two no greater rakes, wastrels, or thorough-paced rascals could
+have been found in all Paris. Danry in particular very soon got a name
+all over his neighbourhood for his riotous, threatening, and choleric
+temper. Dying of hunger, threatened with being ejected neck-and-crop
+from his lodging for nonpayment of rent, he was reduced at last to write
+for money to his mother, who, poor thing, had barely enough for her own
+modest wants.
+
+As yet we are a long way from the "handsome officer of engineers" who
+lives in our remembrance: we see little likeness to the brilliant
+picture which Danry drew later of those youthful years during which he
+received, "by the care of his father the Marquis de La Tude, the
+education of a gentleman destined to serve his country and his king."
+
+Having come now absolutely to the end of his resources, Danry took it
+into his head that, at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, he had been stripped
+by some soldiers of all his clothes but his shirt, and robbed of 678
+livres into the bargain. This story he worked up in a letter addressed
+to Moreau de Sechelles, commissary of the army in Flanders, hoping to
+get it corroborated by Guignard de La Garde, the commissary under whom
+he had himself served. In this letter he demanded compensation for the
+losses he had suffered while devoting himself under fire to the care of
+the wounded. But we read, in the _Memoirs_ he wrote later, that so far
+from having been stripped and robbed, he had actually purchased at
+Bergen-op-Zoom a considerable quantity of goods of all kinds when they
+were sold off cheap after the sack of the town. However that may be, his
+experiment was a failure. But Danry was a man of resource, and not many
+days had passed before he had hit on another means of raising the wind.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Cover of the explosive box sent by Danry to the Marquise de
+     Pompadour. The words almost obliterated are: "Je vous prie, Madame,
+     d'ouvrir le paquet en particulie." Below is the record and the date
+     of Danry's examination, with his signature, and that of Berryer,
+     the lieutenant of police.
+]
+
+At this time everybody was talking about the struggle between the
+king's ministers and the Marquise de Pompadour, which had just ended in
+a triumph for the lady. Maurepas was going into exile, but it was
+generally believed that he was a man who would wreak vengeance on his
+enemy, and the favourite herself openly declared that she went in fear
+of poison. A light dawned on the young surgeon's mind as he heard such
+gossip as this; he caught a sudden glimpse of himself--even he, the
+ragged outcast--arrayed in cloth of gold and rolling in his carriage
+along the Versailles road.
+
+This was his plan. On April 27, 1749, in a shop under the arcade of the
+Palais-Royal, hard by the grand staircase, he bought of a small
+tradesman six of those little bottle-shaped toys, once called Prince
+Rupert's Drops, out of which children used to get so much harmless
+amusement. They were globules of molten glass, which, on being thrown
+into cold water, had taken the shape of pears, and which, if the
+tapering end was suddenly snapped, crumbled with a loud report into
+dust. Four of these crackers Danry placed in a cardboard box, binding
+the thin ends together with a thread which he fixed in the lid. Over
+these he sprinkled some toilet powder, and this he covered with a layer
+of powdered vitriol and alum. The whole packet he then enclosed in a
+double wrapper, writing on the inner one, "I beg you, madam, to open the
+packet in private," and on the outer one, "To Madame the Marquise de
+Pompadour, at court."
+
+At eight o'clock in the evening of the next day, Danry, having seen his
+packet safely in the post, hurried off himself to Versailles. He had
+hoped to gain admittance to the favourite herself, but being stopped by
+Gourbillon, her principal valet, in a voice trembling with emotion he
+related to him a frightful story. Happening to be at the Tuileries, he
+said, he had observed two men seated in animated conversation, and on
+going close to them heard them mouthing the most horrible threats
+against Madame de Pompadour. When they rose he dogged their footsteps,
+which led direct to the post office, where they consigned a packet to
+the box. Who the men were, and what was the nature of the packet, were
+natural questions to which Danry had no answer; all he could say was
+that, devoted to the interests of the Marquise, he had instantly sped
+off to reveal to her what he had seen.
+
+To understand the impression produced by the young man's information, it
+is necessary to bear in mind the feverish excitement then prevailing at
+court. Maurepas, the witty and sprightly minister who had won Louis
+XV.'s special affection because of the charm with which he endowed mere
+business for "the man who was always bored"--Maurepas had just been
+exiled to Bourges. "Pontchartrain," the king sent word to him, "is too
+near." The struggle between the minister and the favourite had been one
+of extraordinary violence. Maurepas was for ever dashing off satirical
+verses on the girl who had reached the steps of the throne, and
+incessantly pursuing her with the cruel and insolent shafts of his wit;
+his muse indeed did not shrink from the most brutal insults. Nor was the
+Marquise a whit more tender towards her foe: she openly dubbed him liar
+and knave, and assured everybody that he was trying to get her poisoned.
+A surgeon was actually required to be in constant attendance upon her,
+and she always had an antidote within reach. At table she was careful
+never to be the first to partake of any dish, and in her box at the
+theatre she would drink no lemonade but what had been prepared by her
+surgeon.
+
+The packet which Danry had posted arrived at Versailles on April 29, and
+Quesnay, the physician to the king and the Marquise, was requested to
+open it. Having done so with infinite precaution, he recognized the
+vitriol and alum and toilet powder, and declared at once that there was
+not a pennyworth of danger in the whole contrivance. But since alum and
+vitriol were substances capable of being turned to baneful uses, he
+thought that possibly it was a case of a criminal design clumsily
+executed.
+
+There is not a shadow of doubt that Louis XV. and his mistress were
+seriously alarmed. D'Argenson himself, who had upheld Maurepas against
+the favourite, had the greatest possible interest in seeing the affair
+cleared up as soon as possible. The first move was altogether in favour
+of the informer. D'Argenson wrote to Berryer that Danry was deserving of
+a reward.
+
+No time was lost in instituting a search for the authors of the plot.
+The lieutenant of police selected the most skilful and intelligent of
+his officers, the detective Saint-Marc, who put himself in communication
+with Danry. But he had not spent two days with the assistant surgeon
+before he drew up a report demanding his arrest. "It is not unimportant
+to note that Danry is a surgeon, and his best friend an apothecary. In
+my opinion it is essential to apprehend both Danry and Binguet without
+further delay, and without letting either know of the other's arrest,
+and at the same time to search their rooms."
+
+Accordingly Danry was conveyed to the Bastille on May 1, 1749, and
+Binguet was secured the same day. Saint-Marc had taken the precaution to
+ask the assistant surgeon for a written account of his adventure. This
+document he put into the hands of an expert, who compared the
+handwriting with the address on the packet sent to Versailles. Danry was
+lost. Suspicion was but too well confirmed by the results of a search in
+his room. Being shut up in the Bastille, Danry knew nothing of all these
+proceedings, and when, on May 2, the lieutenant-general of police came
+to question him, he replied only with lies.
+
+Berryer, the lieutenant of police, was a man of much firmness, but
+honourable and kindly disposed. "He inspired one's confidence," wrote
+Danry himself, "by his urbanity and kindness." This excellent man was
+vexed at the attitude taken up by the prisoner, and pointing out the
+danger he was incurring, he besought him to tell the truth. But at a
+second examination Danry only persisted in his lies. Then all at once he
+changed his tactics and refused to answer the questions put to him.
+"Danry, here we do justice to every one," said Berryer to him, to give
+him courage. But entreaties had no better success than threats. Danry
+maintained his obstinate silence; and D'Argenson wrote to Berryer: "The
+thorough elucidation of this affair is too important for you not to
+follow up any clue which may point towards a solution."
+
+By his falsehoods, and then by his silence, Danry had succeeded in
+giving the appearance of a mysterious plot to what was really an
+insignificant piece of knavery.
+
+Not till June 15 did he make up his mind to offer a statement very near
+the truth, which was written down and sent at once to the king, who read
+it over several times and kept it in his pocket the whole day--a
+circumstance which indicates to what importance the affair had now
+swelled. Suspicions were not dispelled by the declaration of June 15.
+Danry had misrepresented the truth in his former examinations, and there
+was reason to believe that he was equally misrepresenting it in the
+third. Thus he owed his ruin to his silence and his self-contradictory
+depositions. Six months later, on October 7, 1749, when he was at
+Vincennes, Dr. Quesnay, who had shown much interest in the young
+surgeon, was sent to find out from him the name of the individual who
+had instigated the crime. On his return the doctor wrote to Berryer,
+"My journey has been utterly useless. I only saw a blockhead, who
+persisted nevertheless in adhering to his former declarations." Two
+years more had passed away when the lieutenant of police wrote to
+Quesnay:--"February 25, 1751. Danry would be very glad if you would pay
+him a visit, and your compliance might perhaps induce him to lay bare
+his secret soul, and make a frank confession to you of what up to the
+present he has obstinately concealed from me."
+
+Quesnay at once repaired to the Bastille, bearing with him a conditional
+promise of liberty. Working himself up into a frenzy, Danry swore that
+"all his answers to the lieutenant of police had been strictly true."
+When the doctor had taken his leave, Danry wrote to the minister: "M.
+Quesnay, who has been several times to see me in my wretchedness, tells
+me that your lordship is inclined to believe I had some accomplice in my
+fault whom I will not reveal, and that it is for this reason your
+lordship will not give me my liberty. I could wish, my lord, from the
+bottom of my heart, that your belief were true, for it would be much to
+my profit to put my guilt upon another, whether for having induced me to
+commit my sin or for not having prevented me from committing it."
+
+It was the opinion of the ministers that Danry had been the instrument
+of a plot against the life of the Marquise de Pompadour directed by some
+person of high rank, and that at the critical moment he had either
+taken fright, or else had made a clean breast of the matter at
+Versailles in the hope of reaping some advantage from both sides. These
+facts must be kept in mind if we are to understand the real cause of his
+confinement. Kept, then, in the Bastille, he was subjected to several
+examinations, the reports of which were regularly drawn up and signed by
+the lieutenant of police. Under the _ancien regime_, this officer was,
+as we have seen, a regular magistrate, indeed he has no other
+designation in the documents of the period; he pronounced sentence and
+awarded punishments in accordance with that body of customs which then,
+as to-day in England, constituted the law.
+
+Binguet, the apothecary, had been set at liberty immediately after
+Danry's declaration of June 15. In the Bastille, Danry was treated with
+the utmost consideration, in accordance with the formal instructions of
+Berryer. He was provided with books, tobacco, and a pipe; he was
+permitted to play on the flute; and having declared that a solitary life
+bored him, he was given two room mates. Every day he was visited by the
+officers of the fortress, and on May 25 the governor came to tell him of
+the magistrate's order: "That the utmost attention was to be shown him;
+if he needed anything he was to be requested to say so, and was to be
+allowed to want for nothing." No doubt the lieutenant of police hoped,
+by dint of kindness, to persuade him to disclose the authors of the
+unfortunate plot which was the figment of his imagination.
+
+Danry did not remain long in the prison of the Suburb Saint-Antoine; on
+July 28 Saint-Marc transferred him to Vincennes, and we see from the
+report drawn up by the detective with what astonishment the Marquis du
+Chatelet, governor of the fortress, heard "that the court had resolved
+to send him such a fellow." Vincennes, like the Bastille, was reserved
+for prisoners of good position; our hero was sent there by special
+favour, as he was told for his consolation by the surgeon who attended
+him: "Only persons of noble birth or the highest distinction are sent to
+Vincennes." Danry was indeed treated like a lord. The best apartment was
+reserved for him, and he was able to enjoy the park, where he walked for
+two hours every day. At the time of his admission to the Bastille, he
+was suffering from some sort of indisposition which later on he ascribed
+to his long confinement. At Vincennes he complained of the same illness,
+with the same plea that his troubles had made him ill. He was attended
+by a specialist as well as by the surgeon of the prison.
+
+Meantime the lieutenant came again to see him, reiterating assurances of
+his protection, and advising him to write direct to Madame de Pompadour.
+Here is what Danry wrote:--
+
+"VINCENNES, _November 4, 1749_.
+
+     "MADAM,--If wretchedness, goaded by famine, has driven me to commit
+     a fault against your dear person, it was with no design of doing
+     you any mischief. God is my witness. If the divine mercy would
+     assure you to-day, on my behalf, how my soul repents of its heinous
+     fault, and how for 188 days I have done nothing but weep at the
+     sight of my iron bars, you would have pity on me. Madam, for the
+     sake of God who is enlightening you, let your just wrath soften at
+     the spectacle of my repentance, my wretchedness, my tears. One day
+     God will recompense you for your humanity. You are all-powerful,
+     Madam; God has given you power with the greatest king on all the
+     earth, His well-beloved; he is merciful, he is not cruel, he is a
+     Christian. If the divine power moves your magnanimity to grant me
+     my freedom, I would rather die, or sustain my life on nothing but
+     roots, than jeopardize it a second time. I have staked all my hopes
+     on your Christian charity. Lend a sympathetic ear to my prayer, do
+     not abandon me to my unhappy fate. I hope in you, Madam, and God
+     will vouchsafe an abundant answer to my prayers that your dear
+     person may obtain your heart's desires.
+
+     "I have the honour to be, with a repentance worthy of pardon,
+     Madam, your very humble and very obedient servant,
+
+"DANRY."
+
+
+
+A letter which it is a pleasure to quote, for it shows to great
+advantage beside the letters written later by the prisoner. It was only
+the truth that he had no evil design on the favourite's life; but soon
+becoming more audacious, he wrote to Madame de Pompadour saying that if
+he had addressed the box to her at Versailles, it was out of pure
+devotion to her, to put her on her guard against the machinations of her
+enemies, in short, to save her life.
+
+Danry's letter was duly forwarded to the Marquise, but remained without
+effect. Losing patience, he resolved to win for himself the freedom
+denied him: on June 15, 1750, he escaped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In his _Memoirs_ Danry has related the story of this first escape in a
+manner as lively as imaginative. He really eluded his jailers in the
+simplest way in the world. Having descended to the garden at the usual
+hour for his walk, he found there a black spaniel frisking about. The
+dog happened to rear itself against the gate, and to push it with its
+paws. The gate fell open. Danry passed out and ran straight ahead,
+"till, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, he fell to the ground with
+fatigue, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Denis."
+
+There he remained until nine o'clock in the evening. Then he struck into
+the road to Paris, passing the night beside the aqueduct near the
+Saint-Denis gate. At daybreak he entered the city.
+
+We know what importance was attached at court to the safe custody of the
+prisoner: there was still hope that he would make up his mind to speak
+of the grave conspiracy of which he held the secret. D'Argenson wrote at
+once to Berryer: "Nothing is more important or more urgent than to set
+on foot at once all conceivable means of recapturing the prisoner."
+Accordingly all the police were engaged in the search; the description
+of the prisoner was printed, a large number of copies being distributed
+by Inspector Rulhiere among the mounted police.
+
+Danry took up his lodging with one Cocardon, at the sign of the Golden
+Sun; but he did not venture to remain for more than two days in the same
+inn. He expected his old chum Binguet to come to his assistance, but
+Binguet was not going to have anything more to do with the Bastille. It
+was a pretty girl, Annette Benoist, whom Danry had known when he was
+lodging with Charmeleux, that devoted herself heart and soul to him. She
+knew she herself was running the risk of imprisonment, and already
+strangers of forbidding appearance had come asking at the Golden Sun who
+she was. Little she cared; she found assistance among her companions:
+the girls carried Danry's letters and undertook the search for a safe
+lodging. Meanwhile, Danry went to pass the night under the aqueducts; in
+the morning he shut himself in the lodging the girls had chosen for him,
+and there he remained for two days without leaving the house, Annette
+coming there to keep him company. Unluckily the young man had no money:
+how was he to pay his score? "What was to be done, what was to become of
+me?" he said later. "I was sure to be discovered if I showed myself; if
+I fled I ran no less risk." He wrote to Dr. Quesnay, who had shown him
+so much kindness at Vincennes; but the police got wind of the letter,
+and Saint-Marc arrived and seized the fugitive in the inn where he lay
+concealed. The unlucky wretch was haled back to the Bastille. Annette
+was arrested at the Golden Sun at the moment when she was asking for
+Danry's letters; she too was shut up in the Bastille. The warders and
+sentinels who were on duty at Vincennes on the day of the escape had
+been thrown into the cells.
+
+By his escape from Vincennes, Danry had doubled the gravity of his
+offence. The regulations demanded that he should be sent down into the
+cells reserved for insubordinate prisoners. "M. Berryer came again to
+lighten my woes; outside the prison he demanded justice and mercy for
+me, inside he sought to calm my grief, which seemed less poignant when
+he assured me that he shared it." The lieutenant of police ordered the
+prisoner to be fed as well as formerly, and to be allowed his books,
+papers, knick-knacks, and the privilege of the two hours' walk he had
+enjoyed at Vincennes. In return for these kindnesses, the assistant
+surgeon sent to the magistrate "a remedy for the gout." He asked at the
+same time to be allowed to breed little birds, whose chirping and lively
+movements would divert him. The request was granted. But instead of
+bearing his lot with patience, Danry grew more and more irritable every
+day. He gave free rein to his violent temper, raised a hubbub, shrieked,
+tore up and down his room, so that they came perforce to believe that he
+was going mad. On the books of the Bastille library, which circulated
+from room to room, he wrote ribald verses against the Marquise de
+Pompadour. In this way he prolonged his sojourn in the cells. Gradually
+his letters changed their tone. "It is a little hard to be left for
+fourteen months in prison, a whole year of the time, ending to-day, in
+one cell where I still am."
+
+Then Berryer put him back into a good room, about the end of the year
+1751. At the same time he gave him, at the king's expense, a servant to
+wait on him.
+
+As to Annette Benoist, she had been set at liberty after a fortnight's
+detention. Danry's servant fell sick; as there was no desire to deprive
+the prisoner of society, he was given a companion. This was a certain
+Antoine Allegre, who had been there since May 29, 1750. The
+circumstances which had led to his imprisonment were almost identical
+with those to which Danry owed his confinement. Allegre was keeping a
+school at Marseilles when he learnt that the enemies of the Marquise de
+Pompadour were seeking to destroy her. He fabricated a story of a
+conspiracy in which he involved Maurepas, the Archbishop of Albi, and
+the Bishop of Lodeve; he sent a denunciation of this plot to Versailles,
+and, to give it some semblance of truth, addressed to the favourite's
+valet a letter in disguised handwriting, beginning with these words: "On
+the word of a gentleman, there are 100,000 crowns for you if you poison
+your mistress." He hoped by this means to obtain a good situation, or
+the success of a business project he had in hand.
+
+Intelligent, with some education, and venturesome, Danry and Allegre
+were just the men to get on well together, so much the better that the
+schoolmaster dominated the comrade to whom he was so much superior. The
+years that Danry spent in company with Allegre exercised so great an
+influence on his whole life that the lieutenant of police, Lenoir, could
+say one day: "Danry is the second volume of Allegre." The letters of the
+latter, a large number of which have been preserved, bear witness to the
+originality and energy of his mind: their style is fine and fluent, of
+the purest French; the ideas expressed have distinction and are
+sometimes remarkable without eccentricity. He worked untiringly, and was
+at first annoyed at the presence of a companion: "Give me, I beg you, a
+room to myself," he wrote to Berryer, "even without a fire: I like being
+alone, I am sufficient for myself, because I can find things to do, and
+seed to sow for the future." His temperament was naturally mystical, but
+of that cold and acrid mysticism which we sometimes find in men of
+science, and mathematicians in particular. For Allegre's principal
+studies were mathematics, mechanics, and engineering. The lieutenant of
+police procured for him works on fortification, architecture, mechanics,
+hydraulics. The prisoner used them to compile essays on the most diverse
+questions, which he sent to the lieutenant of police in the hope of
+their procuring his liberation. Those essays which we possess show the
+extent of his intelligence and his education. Danry followed his example
+by-and-by, in this as in everything else, but clumsily. Allegre was
+also very clever with his fingers, and could make, so the officials of
+the chateau declared, whatever he pleased.
+
+Allegre was a dangerous man: the warders were afraid of him. Some time
+after his entrance into the Bastille he fell ill, and a man was set to
+look after him; the two men did not agree at all. Allegre sent complaint
+after complaint to the lieutenant of police. An inquiry was made which
+turned out not unfavourable to the keeper, and he was left with the
+prisoner. One morning--September 8, 1751--the officers of the Bastille
+heard cries and clamour in the "Well" tower. Hastily ascending, they
+found Allegre in the act of stabbing his companion, who lay on the floor
+held down by the throat, wallowing in the blood that streamed from a
+gash in the stomach. If Allegre had not been in the Bastille, the
+Parlement would have had him broken on the wheel in the Place de Greve:
+the Bastille was his safety, though he could no longer hope for a speedy
+liberation.
+
+Danry, in his turn, wore out the patience of his guardians. Major
+Chevalier, who was kindness itself, wrote to the lieutenant of police:
+"He is no better than Allegre, but though more turbulent and choleric,
+he is much less to be feared in every respect." The physician of the
+Bastille, Dr. Boyer, a member of the Academy, wrote likewise: "I have
+good reason to distrust the man." The temper of Danry became embittered.
+He began to revile the warders. One morning they were obliged to take
+from him a knife and other sharp instruments he had concealed. He used
+the paper they gave him to open communications with other prisoners and
+with people outside. Paper was withheld: he then wrote with his blood on
+a handkerchief; he was forbidden by the lieutenant of police to write to
+him with his blood, so he wrote on tablets made of bread crumbs, which
+he passed out secretly between two plates.
+
+The use of paper was then restored to him, which did not prevent him
+from writing to Berryer: "My lord, I am writing to you with my blood on
+linen, because the officers refuse me ink and paper; it is now more than
+six times that I have asked in vain to speak to them. What are you
+about, my lord? Do not drive me to extremities. At least, do not force
+me to be my own executioner. Send a sentry to break my head for me; that
+is the very least favour you can do me." Berryer, astonished at this
+missive, remarked on it to the major, who replied: "I have not refused
+paper to Danry."
+
+[Illustration:
+
+     Beginning of a letter written with blood on linen by Danry (Latude)
+     while a prisoner at Vincennes, to Rougemont, the king's lieutenant.
+]
+
+So the prisoner forced them more and more to the conclusion that he was
+a madman. On October 13, 1753, he wrote to Dr. Quesnay to tell him that
+he wished him well, but that being too poor to give him anything else,
+he was making him a present of his body, which was on the point of
+perishing, for him to make a skeleton of. To the paper on which he
+wrote, Danry had sewn a little square of cloth, adding: "God has given
+the garments of martyrs the virtue of healing all manner of diseases. It
+is now fifty-seven months since I have been suffering an enforced
+martyrdom. So there is no doubt that to-day the cloth of my coat will
+work miracles; here is a bit for you." This letter was returned to the
+lieutenant of police in December, and on it we find a marginal note in
+Berryer's hand: "A letter worth keeping, as it reveals the prisoner's
+mind." We know in what fashion madmen were wont to be treated in the
+eighteenth century.
+
+But suddenly, to the great astonishment of the officers of the chateau,
+our two friends amended their character and their conduct. No more
+noises were heard in their room, and they answered politely anyone who
+came to speak to them. But their behaviour was even more odd than ever.
+Allegre used to walk up and down the room half naked, "to save his
+toggery," he said, and he sent letter after letter to his brother and
+the lieutenant of police, asking them to send him things, particularly
+shirts and handkerchiefs. Danry followed suit. "This prisoner," wrote
+Chevalier to the lieutenant of police, "is asking for linen. I shall not
+make a requisition, because he has seven very good shirts, four of them
+new; he has shirts on the brain." But why decline to humour a prisoner's
+whim? So the commissary of the Bastille had two dozen expensive shirts
+made--every one cost twenty livres, more than thirty-three shillings of
+our money--and some handkerchiefs of the finest cambric.
+
+If the wardrobe-keeper of the Bastille had kept her eyes open, she would
+have noticed that the serviettes and cloths which went into the room of
+the two companions were of much smaller dimensions when they came out.
+Our friends had established communication with their neighbours above
+and below, begging twine and thread from them and giving tobacco in
+exchange. They had succeeded in loosening the iron bars which prevented
+climbing up the chimney; at night they used to mount to the platforms,
+whence they conversed down the chimneys with prisoners in the other
+towers. One of these hapless creatures believed himself to be a prophet
+of God; he heard at night the sound of a voice descending upon his cold
+hearth: he revealed the miracle to the officers, who only considered him
+still more insane than before. On the terrace Allegre and Danry found
+the tools left there in the evening by the masons and gardeners employed
+at the Bastille. Thus they got possession of a mallet, an auger, two
+sorts of pulleys, and some bits of iron taken from the gun-carriages.
+All these they concealed in the hollow between the floor of their room
+and the ceiling of the room below.
+
+Allegre and Danry escaped from the Bastille on the night of February 25,
+1756. They climbed up the chimney till they reached the platform, and
+descended by means of their famous rope ladder, fastened to a
+gun-carriage. A wall separated the Bastille moat from that of the
+Arsenal. By the aid of an iron bar they succeeded in working out a large
+stone, and they escaped through the hole thus made. Their rope ladder
+was a work of long patience and amazing skill. When in after days
+Allegre went mad, Danry appropriated the whole credit of this
+enterprise which his friend had conceived and directed.
+
+At the moment of leaving, Allegre had written on a scrap of paper, for
+the officers of the Bastille, the following note, which is an excellent
+indication of his character:--
+
+"We have done no damage to the furniture of the governor, we have only
+made use of a few rags of coverlets of no possible use; the others are
+left just as they were. If some serviettes are missing, they will be
+found at the bottom of the water in the great moat, whither we are
+taking them to wipe our feet.
+
+"_Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!_
+
+"_Scito cor nostrum et cognosce semitas nostras._"[46]
+
+Our two companions had provided themselves with a portmanteau, and they
+made haste to change their clothes as soon as they had cleared the
+precincts of the fortress. A foreman of works whom Danry knew interested
+himself in them, and conducted them to one Rouit, a tailor, who lodged
+them for some little time. Rouit even lent Danry forty-eight livres,
+which he promised to return as soon as he reached Brussels. At the end
+of a month our two friends were across the frontier.
+
+It is very difficult to follow Danry's proceedings from the time when he
+left Rouit to the moment of his reincarceration in the Bastille. He has
+left, it is true, two accounts of his sojourn in Flanders and Holland;
+but these accounts are themselves inconsistent, and both differ from
+some original documents which remain to us.
+
+The two fugitives had considered it advisable not to set out together.
+Allegre was the first to arrive at Brussels, whence he wrote an insolent
+letter to Madame de Pompadour. This letter led to his discovery. On
+reaching Brussels, Danry learnt that his friend had been arrested. He
+lost no time in making for Holland, and at Amsterdam he took service
+with one Paul Melenteau. From Rotterdam he had written to his mother,
+and the poor creature, collecting her little savings, sent him 200
+livres by post. But Saint-Marc had already struck on the track of the
+fugitive. "The burgomaster of Amsterdam readily and gladly granted the
+request made by Saint-Marc on behalf of the king, through the
+ambassador, for the arrest and extradition of Danry." Louis XV. confined
+himself to claiming him as one of his subjects. Saint-Marc, disguised as
+an Armenian merchant, discovered him in his retreat. Danry was arrested
+in Amsterdam on June 1, 1756, conducted to a cell belonging to the town
+hall, and thence brought back to France and consigned to the Bastille on
+June 9. Word came from Holland that Saint-Marc was there regarded as a
+sorcerer.
+
+By his second escape the unhappy man had succeeded in making his case
+very serious. In the eighteenth century, escape from a state prison was
+punishable with death. The English, great apostles of humanity as they
+were, were no more lenient than the French; and everyone knows what
+treatment was meted out by Frederick II. to Baron de Trenck. He was to
+have remained in prison only one year; but after his second escape he
+was chained up in a gloomy dungeon; at his feet was the grave in which
+he was to be buried, and on it his name and a death's-head had been cut.
+
+The government of Louis XV. did not punish with such rigour as this. The
+fugitive was simply put in the cells for a time. At the Bastille the
+cells were damp and chilly dungeons. Danry has left in his _Memoirs_ an
+account of the forty months spent in this dismal place,--an account
+which makes one's hair stand on end; but it is packed full of
+exaggeration. He says that he spent three years with irons on his hands
+and feet: in November, 1756, Berryer offered to remove the irons from
+either hands or feet at his choice, and we see from a marginal note by
+Major Chevalier that he chose the feet. Danry adds that he lay all
+through the winter on straw without any coverlet: he was actually so
+well supplied with coverlets that he applied to Berryer for some others.
+To believe him you would think that when the Seine was in flood the
+water rose as high as his waist: as a fact, when the water threatened to
+invade the cell, the prisoner was removed. Again, he says that he passed
+there forty months in absolute darkness: the light of his prison was
+certainly not very brilliant, but it was sufficient to enable him to
+read and write, and we learn from letters he sent to the lieutenant of
+police that he saw from his cell all that went on in the courtyard of
+the Bastille. Finally, he tells us of a variety of diseases he
+contracted at the time, and cites in this connection the opinion of an
+oculist who came to attend him. But this very report was forged by Danry
+himself, and the rest he invented to match.
+
+In this cell, where he professes to have been treated in so barbarous a
+manner, Danry, however, proved difficult enough to deal with, as we
+judge from the reports of Chevalier. "Danry has a thoroughly nasty
+temper; he sends for us at eight o'clock in the morning, and asks us to
+send warders to the market to buy him fish, saying that he never eats
+eggs, artichokes, or spinach, and that he insists on eating fish; and
+when we refuse, he flies into a furious passion." That was on fast days;
+on ordinary days it was the same. "Danry swore like a trooper, that is,
+in his usual way, and after the performance said to me: 'Major, when you
+give me a fowl, at least let it be stuffed!'" He was not one of the
+vulgar herd, he said, "one of those fellows you send to Bicetre." And he
+demanded to be treated in a manner befitting his condition.
+
+It was just the same with regard to clothes. One is amazed at the sight
+of the lists of things the lieutenant of police got made for him. To
+give him satisfaction, the administration did not stick at the most
+unreasonable expense, and it was by selling these clothes that Danry, at
+his various escapes, procured a part of the money he was so much in
+need of. He suffered from rheumatism, so they provided him with
+dressing-gowns lined with rabbit-skin, vests lined with silk plush,
+gloves and fur hats, and first-rate leather breeches. In his _Memoirs_
+Danry lumps all these as "half-rotten rags." Rochebrune, the commissary
+charged with the prisoners' supplies, was quite unable to satisfy him.
+"You instructed me," he wrote to the major, "to get a dressing-gown made
+for the Sieur Danry, who asks for a calamanco with red stripes on a blue
+ground. I have made inquiries for such stuff of a dozen tradesmen, who
+have no such thing, and indeed would be precious careful not to have it,
+for there is no sale for that kind of calamanco. I don't see why I
+should satisfy the fantastic tastes of a prisoner who ought to be very
+well pleased at having a dressing-gown that is warm and well-fitting."
+On another occasion, the major writes: "This man Danry has never up to
+the present consented to accept the breeches that M. de Rochebrune got
+made for him, though they are excellent, lined with good leather, with
+silk garters, and in the best style." And Danry had his own pretty way
+of complaining. "I beg you," he wrote to the governor, "to have the
+goodness to tell M. de Sartine in plain terms that the four
+handkerchiefs he sent me are not fit to give to a galley-slave, and I
+will not have them on any account; but that I request him kindly to give
+me six print handkerchiefs, blue, and large, and two muslin cravats." He
+adds, "If there is no money in the treasury, go and ask Madame de
+Pompadour for some."
+
+One day Danry declared that something was wrong with his eyes.
+Grandjean, the king's oculist, came more than once to see him, ordered
+aromatic fumigations for him, gave him ointments and eye-salve; but it
+was soon seen that all that was wrong was that Danry desired to get a
+spy-glass, and to smuggle out, with the doctor's assistance, memoirs and
+letters.
+
+On September 1, 1759, Danry was removed from the cells and placed in a
+more airy chamber. He wrote at once to Bertin to thank him, and to tell
+him that he was sending him two doves. "You delight in doing good, and I
+shall have no less delight, my lord, if you favour me by accepting this
+slight mark of my great gratitude.
+
+"Tamerlaine allowed himself to be disarmed by a basket of figs presented
+to him by the inhabitants of a town he was proceeding to besiege. The
+Marquise de Pompadour is a Christian lady; I beg you to allow me to send
+her also a pair: perhaps she will allow her heart to be touched by these
+two innocent pigeons. I append a copy of the letter which will accompany
+them:--
+
+     "'MADAM,--Two pigeons used to come every day to pick grains out of
+     my straw; I kept them, and they gave me young ones. I venture to
+     take the liberty of presenting you with this pair as a mark of my
+     respect and affection. I beseech you in mercy to be good enough to
+     accept them, with as much pleasure as I have in offering them to
+     you. I have the honour to be, with the profoundest respect, Madam,
+     your very humble and obedient servant,
+
+"'DANRY, for eleven years at the Bastille.'"
+
+Why did not Danry always make so charming a use of the permission
+accorded him to write to the minister, the lieutenant of police, Madame
+de Pompadour, Dr. Quesnay, and his mother? He wrote incessantly, and we
+have letters of his in hundreds, widely differing one from another. Some
+are suppliant and pathetic: "My body is wasting away every day in tears
+and blood, I am worn out." He writes to Madame de Pompadour:--"Madam,--I
+have never wished you anything but well; be then sensible to the voice
+of tears, of my innocence, and of a poor despairing mother of sixty-six
+years. Madam, you are well aware of my martyrdom. I beg you in God's
+name to grant me my precious liberty; I am spent, I am dying, my blood
+is all on fire by reason of my groaning; twenty times in the night I am
+obliged to moisten my mouth and nostrils to get my breath." Everyone
+knows the famous letter beginning with the words, "I have been suffering
+now for 100,000 hours." He writes to Quesnay: "I present myself to you
+with a live coal upon my head, indicating my pressing necessity." The
+images he uses are not always so happy: "Listen," he says to Berryer,
+"to the voice of the just bowels with which you are arrayed"!
+
+In other letters the prisoner alters his tone; to plaints succeed cries
+of rage and fury, "he steeps his pen in the gall with which his soul is
+saturated." He no longer supplicates, he threatens. There is nothing to
+praise in the style of these epistles: it is incorrect and vulgar,
+though at times vigorous and coloured with vivid imagery. To the
+lieutenant of police he writes: "When a man is to be punished in this
+accursed prison, the air is full of it, the punishments fall quicker
+than the thunderbolt; but when it is a case of succouring a man who is
+unfortunate, I see nothing but crabs;" and he addresses to him these
+lines of Voltaire:--
+
+    "Perish those villains born, whose hearts of steel
+     No touch of ruth for others' woes can feel."
+
+He predicts terrible retribution for the ministers, the magistrates, and
+Madame de Pompadour. To her he writes: "You will see yourself one day
+like that owl in the park of Versailles; all the birds cast water upon
+him to choke him, to drown him; if the king chanced to die, before two
+hours were past someone would set five or six persons at your heels, and
+you would yourself pack to the Bastille." The accused by degrees becomes
+transformed into the accuser; he writes to Sartine: "I am neither a dog
+nor a criminal, but a man like yourself." And the lieutenant of police,
+taking pity on him, writes on one of these letters sent to the minister
+of Paris: "When Danry writes thus, it is not that he is mad, but frantic
+from long imprisonment." The magistrate counsels the prisoner "to keep
+out of his letters all bitterness, which can only do him harm." Bertin
+corrected with his own hand the petitions Danry sent to the Marquise de
+Pompadour; in the margin of one of them we read, "I should think I was
+prejudicing him and his interests if I sent on to Madame de Pompadour a
+letter in which he ventures to reproach her with having _abused his good
+faith and confidence_." Having amended the letter, the lieutenant of
+police himself carried it to Versailles.
+
+The years of captivity, far from humbling the prisoner and abasing his
+pride, only made him the more arrogant; his audacity grew from day to
+day, and he was not afraid of speaking to the lieutenants of police
+themselves, who knew his history, about his fortune which had been
+ruined, his brilliant career which had been cut short, his whole family
+plunged into despair. At first the magistrate would shrug his shoulders;
+insensibly he would be won over by these unwavering assertions, by this
+accent of conviction; and he ends actually by believing in this high
+birth, this fortune, this genius, in all which Danry had perhaps come to
+believe himself. Then Danry takes a still higher tone: he claims not
+only his freedom, but compensation, large sums of money, honours. But
+one must not think that this sprang from a sordid sentiment unworthy of
+him: "If I propose compensation, my lord, it is not for the sake of
+getting money, it is only so that I may smooth away all the obstacles
+which may delay the end of my long suffering."
+
+In return, he is very ready to give the lieutenant of police some good
+advice--to indicate the means of advancement in his career, to show him
+how to set about getting appointed secretary of state, to compose for
+him the speech he is to make to the king at his first audience. He adds:
+"This very time is extremely favourable to you; it is the auspicious
+hour: profit by it. Before they take horse on the day of rejoicing for
+the conclusion of peace, you ought to be a counsellor of state."
+
+He is very ready also to send to the king schemes conceived in his
+prison for the welfare of the realm. Now it is a suggestion to give
+sergeants and officers on the battlefield muskets instead of spontoons
+and pikes, by which the French arms would be strengthened by 25,000 good
+fusiliers. Now it is a suggestion for increasing postal facilities,
+which would augment the resources of the Treasury by several millions
+every year. He recommends the erection of public granaries in the
+principal towns, and draws up plans of battle for giving unheard-of
+strength to a column of men three deep. We might mention other and
+better suggestions. These notions were drowned in a flood of words, an
+unimaginable wealth of verbiage, with parallels drawn from the history
+of all periods and every country. His manuscripts were illustrated with
+pen and ink sketches. Danry copied and recopied them incessantly, sent
+them to all and sundry in all sorts of forms, persuaded the sentinels
+that these lofty conceptions intimately concerned the safety of the
+state and would win him an immense fortune. Thus he induced these good
+fellows to compromise their situation by carrying the papers secretly to
+ministers, members of the Parlement, marshals of France; he threw them
+from the windows of his room, and, wrapped in snowballs, from the top of
+the towers. These memoirs are the work of a man whose open and active
+mind, of incredible activity indeed, plans, constructs, invents without
+cessation or repose.
+
+Among these bundles of papers we have discovered a very touching letter
+from the prisoner's mother, Jeanneton Aubrespy, who wrote to her son
+from Montagnac on June 14, 1759:--
+
+     "Do not do me the injustice of thinking that I have forgotten you,
+     my dear son, my loving son. Could I shut you out of my thoughts,
+     you whom I bear always in my heart? I have always had a great
+     longing to see you again, but to-day I long more than ever, I am
+     constantly concerned for you, I think of nothing but you, I am
+     wholly filled with you. Do not worry, my dear son; that is the only
+     favour I ask of you. Your misfortunes will come to an end, and
+     perhaps it is not far off. I hope that Madame de Pompadour will
+     pardon you; for that I am trying to win heaven and earth over to
+     your cause. The Lord is putting my submission and yours to a long
+     test, so as to make us better realize the worth of His favour. Do
+     not distress yourself, my son. I hope to have the happiness of
+     receiving you again, and of embracing you more tenderly than ever.
+     Adieu, my son, my dear son, my loving son, I love you, and I shall
+     love you dearly to the grave. I beg you to give me news of your
+     health. I am, and always shall be, your good mother,
+
+DAUBRESPI, _widow_."
+
+
+
+Is not this letter charming in its artless pathos? The son's reply is
+equally touching; but on reading it again one feels that it was to pass
+under the eyes of the lieutenant of police; on examining it closely, one
+sees the sentiments grimacing between the lines.
+
+No one knew better than Danry how to play on the souls of others, to
+awake in them, at his will, pity or tenderness, astonishment or
+admiration. No one has surpassed him in the art, difficult in very
+truth, of posing as a hero, a genius, and a martyr, a part that we shall
+see him sustain for twenty years without faltering.
+
+In 1759 there entered upon the office of lieutenant of police a man who
+was henceforth to occupy Danry's mind almost exclusively--Gabriel de
+Sartine. He was a fine sceptic, of amiable character and pleasing
+manners. He was loved by the people of Paris, who boasted of his
+administrative abilities and his spirit of justice. He exerted himself
+in his turn to render the years of captivity less cruel to Danry. "He
+allowed me," writes the latter, "what no other State prisoner has ever
+obtained, the privilege of walking along the top of the towers, in the
+open air, to preserve my health." He cheered the prisoner with genial
+words, and urged him to behave well and no longer to fill his letters
+with insults. "Your fate," he told him, "is in your own hands." He
+looked into Danry's scheme for the construction of public granaries, and
+when he had read it said, "Really, there are excellent things, most
+excellent things in it." He visited Danry in prison and promised to do
+his utmost to obtain his liberation. He himself put into the hands of
+Madame de Pompadour the _Grand Memoire_ which Danry had drawn up for
+her. In this memorial the prisoner told the favourite that in return for
+a service he had rendered her in sending her a "hieroglyphic symbol" to
+put her on her guard against the machinations of her enemies, she had
+caused him to suffer unjustly for twelve years. Moreover, he would now
+only accept his freedom along with an indemnity of 60,000 livres. He
+added: "Be on your guard! When your prisoners get out and publish your
+cruelties abroad, they will make you hateful to heaven and the whole
+earth!" It is not surprising that this _Grand Memoire_ had practically
+no result. Sartine promised that he would renew his efforts on his
+behalf. "If, unhappily, you should meet with some resistance to the
+entreaties you are about to make for me," wrote Danry, "I take the
+precaution of sending you a copy of the scheme I sent to the king."
+(This was the memorial suggesting that muskets should be given to the
+officers and sergeants.) "Now the king has been putting my scheme in
+operation for five years or more, and he will continue to avail himself
+of it every time we are at war." Sartine proceeded to Versailles, this
+marvellous scheme in his pocket. He showed it to the ministers and
+pleaded on behalf of this protege of his who, from the depths of his
+dungeon, was doing his country service. But on his return he wrote to
+the major of the Bastille a note in regard to Danry, in which we read:
+"They have not made use, as he believes, of his military scheme."
+
+Danry had asked several times to be sent to the colonies. In 1763 the
+government was largely occupied with the colonization of La Desirade. We
+find a letter of June 23, 1763, in which Sartine proposes to send Danry
+to La Desirade "with an introduction to the commanding officer." But
+nothing came of these proposals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All his life, Danry sought to compass his ends by the aid of women. He
+was well aware of all the tenderness and devotion there is in these
+light heads; he knew that sentiment is always stronger in them than
+reason: "I was always looking out for women, and wished to find young
+women, for their gentle and loving soul is more susceptible of pity;
+misfortune moves them, stirs in them a more lively interest; their
+impressionability is less quickly dulled, and so they are capable of
+greater efforts."
+
+While taking his walk on the towers of the Bastille in the fresh morning
+air, he tried by means of gestures and signals to open relations with
+the people of the neighbourhood. "One day I noticed two young persons
+working alone in a room, whose countenances struck me as pretty and
+gentle. I was not deceived. One of them having glanced in my direction,
+I wafted her with my hand a salutation which I endeavoured to make
+respectful and becoming, whereupon she told her sister, who instantly
+looked at me too. I then saluted them both in the same manner, and they
+replied to me with an appearance of interest and kindliness. From that
+moment we set up a sort of correspondence between us." The girls were
+two good-looking laundresses named Lebrun, the daughters of a wigmaker.
+And our rogue, the better to stimulate the little fools to enthusiastic
+service in his behalf, knocked at the door of their young hearts,
+willing enough to fly open. He spoke to them of youth, misfortune,
+love--and also of his fortune, prodigious, he said, the half of which he
+offered them. Glowing with ardour, the girls spared for him neither
+time, nor trouble, nor what little money they had.
+
+The prisoner had put them in possession of several of his schemes, among
+others the military one, with letters for certain writers and persons of
+importance, and in addition a "terrible" indictment of Madame de
+Pompadour for the king, in which "her birth and her shame, all her
+thefts and cruelties were laid bare." He begged the girls to have
+several copies made, which they were then to send to the addresses
+indicated. Soon large black crosses daubed on a neighbouring wall
+informed the prisoner that his instructions had been carried out. Danry
+seems no longer to have doubted that his woes were coming to an end,
+that the gates of the Bastille were about to fly open before him, and
+that he would triumphantly leave the prison only to enter a palace of
+fortune: _Parta victoria!_[47] he exclaims in a burst of happiness.
+
+And so we come to one of the most extraordinary episodes in this strange
+life.
+
+In December, 1763, the Marquise of Pompadour was taken seriously ill.
+"An officer of the Bastille came up to my room and said to me: 'Sir,
+write four words to the Marquise de Pompadour, and you may be sure that
+in less than a week you will have recovered your freedom.' I replied to
+the major that prayers and tears only hardened the heart of that cruel
+woman, and that I would not write to her. However, he came back next day
+with the same story, and I replied in the same terms as on the previous
+day. Scarcely had he gone than Daragon, my warder, came into my room and
+said: 'Believe the major when he tells you that within a week you will
+be free: if he tells you so, depend upon it he is sure of it.' Next day
+but one the officer came to me for the third time: 'Why are you so
+obstinate?' I thanked him--it was Chevalier, major of the Bastille--for
+the third time, telling him that I would sooner die than write again to
+that implacable shrew.
+
+"Six or eight days after, my two young ladies came and kissed their
+hands to me, at the same time displaying a roll of paper on which were
+written in large characters the words: 'Madame de Pompadour is dead!'
+The Marquise de Pompadour died on April 19, 1764, and two months
+afterwards, on June 19, M. de Sartine came to the Bastille and gave me
+an audience; the first thing he said was that we would say no more about
+the past, but that at the earliest moment he would go to Versailles and
+demand of the minister the justice which was my due." And we find, in
+truth, among the papers of the lieutenant of police, the following note,
+dated June 18, 1764: "M. Duval (one of the lieutenant's secretaries)--to
+propose at the first inspection that Danry be liberated and exiled to
+his own part of the country."
+
+Returning to his room, Danry reflected on these developments; for the
+lieutenant of police to show so much anxiety for his liberation was
+evidently a sign that he was afraid of him, and that his memorials had
+reached their destination and achieved their end. But he would be a
+great ass to be satisfied with a mere liberation: "100,000 livres" would
+scarcely suffice to throw oblivion over the injustices with which he had
+been overwhelmed.
+
+He revolved these thoughts in his head for several days. To accept
+freedom at the hands of his persecutors would be to pardon the past, a
+mistake he would never fall into. The door opened, the major entered,
+bearing in his hand a note written by de Sartine: "You will tell County
+Number 4 that I am working for his effectual liberation." The officer
+went out; Danry immediately sat down at his table and wrote to the
+lieutenant of police a letter replete with threats, insults, and
+obscenity. The original is lost, but we have an abstract made by Danry
+himself. He concluded with leaving to Sartine a choice: "he was either a
+mere lunatic, or else had allowed himself to be corrupted like a villain
+by the gold of the Marquis de Marigny, the Marquise de Pompadour's
+brother."
+
+"When Sartine received my letter, he wrote an answer which the major
+brought and read to me, in which these were his very words: that I was
+wrong to impute to him the length of my imprisonment, that if he had had
+his way I should long ago have been set free; and he ended by telling me
+that there was Bedlam for the mad. On which I said to the major: 'We
+shall see in a few days whether he will have the power to put me in
+Bedlam.' He did not deprive me of my walk on the towers; nine days
+after, he put me in the cells on bread and water." But Danry was not
+easily put out. No doubt they were only meaning to put his assurance to
+the test. He went down to his cell singing, and for several days
+continued to manifest the most confident gaiety.
+
+From that moment the prisoner made himself insufferable to his
+guardians. It was yells and violence from morning to night. He filled
+the whole Bastille with bursts of his "voice of thunder." Major
+Chevalier wrote to Sartine: "This prisoner would wear out the patience
+of the saintliest monk"; again: "He is full of gall and bitterness, he
+is poison pure and simple"; once more: "This prisoner is raving mad."
+
+The lieutenant of police suggested to Saint-Florentin, the minister, to
+transfer Danry to the keep of Vincennes. He was conducted there on the
+night of September 15, 1764. We are now entering on a new phase of his
+life. We shall find him still more wretched than in the past, but
+constantly swelling his demands and pretensions, and with reason, for he
+is now, mark you, a nobleman! He had learnt from a sentinel of the
+Bastille of the death of Henri Vissec de la Tude, lieutenant-colonel of
+a dragoon regiment, who had died at Sedan on January 31, 1761. From that
+day he determined that he was the son of that officer. And what were his
+reasons? Vissec de la Tude was from his own part of the country, he was
+a nobleman and rich, and he was dead. These arguments Danry considered
+excellent. He was, however, in complete ignorance of all that concerned
+his father and his new family; he did not know even the name "Vissec de
+la Tude," of which he made "Masers de la Tude"; Masers was the name of
+an estate belonging to Baron de Fontes, a relation of Henri de Vissec.
+The latter was not a marquis, as Danry believed, but simply a chevalier;
+he died leaving six sons, whilst Danry represents him as dying without
+issue. It goes without saying that all that our hero relates about his
+father in his _Memoirs_ is pure invention. The Chevalier de la Tude
+never knew of the existence of the son of Jeanneton Aubrespy, and when
+in later years Danry asked the children to recognize him as their
+natural brother, his pretensions were rejected. Nevertheless our
+gentleman will henceforth sign his letters and memoirs "Danry, or rather
+Henri Masers d'Aubrespy," then "de Masers d'Aubrespy," then "de Masers
+de la Tude." When Danry had once got an idea in his head, he never let
+it go. He repeated it unceasingly until he had forced it upon the
+conviction of all about him--pertinacity which cannot fail to excite our
+admiration. In the patent of Danry's pension of 400 livres granted by
+Louis XVI. in 1784, the king calls the son of poor Jeanneton "Vicomte
+Masers de la Tude."
+
+As may well be imagined, the Vicomte de la Tude could not accept his
+liberty on the same terms as Danry. The latter would have been satisfied
+with 60,000 livres: the viscount demands 150,000 and the cross of St.
+Louis to boot. So he writes to the lieutenant of police. Sartine was too
+sensible a man to be long obdurate to the prisoner on account of these
+extravagances. "I was transferred to the keep of Vincennes on the night
+of September 15, 1764. About nine hours after, the late M. de Guyonnet,
+king's lieutenant, came and saw me in the presence of the major and the
+three warders, and said: 'M. de Sartine has instructed me to inform you,
+on his behalf, that provided you behave yourself quietly for a short
+time, he will set you free. You have written him a very violent letter,
+and you must apologize for it.'" Danry adds: "When all is said and done,
+M. de Sartine did treat me well." He granted him for two hours every day
+"the extraordinary promenade of the moats." "When a lieutenant of
+police," says Danry, "granted this privilege to a prisoner, it was with
+the object of promptly setting him free." On November 23, 1765, Danry
+was walking thus, in company with a sentinel, outside the keep. The fog
+was dense. Turning suddenly towards his keeper, Danry said, "What do you
+think of this weather?" "It's very bad." "Well, it's just the weather to
+escape in." He took five paces and was out of sight. "I escaped from
+Vincennes," writes Danry, "without trickery; an ox would have managed it
+as well." But in the speech he delivered later in the National Assembly,
+the matter took a new complexion. "Think," he cried, "of the unfortunate
+Latude, in his third escape, pursued by twenty soldiers, and yet
+stopping and disarming under their very eyes the sentinel who had taken
+aim at him!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Latude was at large, he found himself without resources, as at his
+first escape. "I escaped with my feet in slippers and not a sou in my
+pocket; I hadn't a thing to bless myself with." He took refuge with his
+young friends, the Misses Lebrun.
+
+In their keeping he found a part of his papers, plans and projects,
+memorials and dissertations. He sent "a basketful" of these to Marshal
+de Noailles, begging him to continue to honour him with his protection,
+and imparting to him "four great discoveries he had just made; first,
+the true cause of the tides; secondly, the true cause of mountains, but
+for which the globe would be brought to a standstill and become
+speedily vitrified; thirdly, the cause of the ceaseless turning of the
+globe; fourthly, the cause of the saltness of sea-water." He wrote also
+to the Duke de Choiseul, minister of war, in order to obtain a reward
+for his military scheme; he wrote making overtures of peace to Sartine:
+in return for an advance of 10,000 crowns of the 150,000 livres due to
+him, he would overlook the past: "I was resolved," he says, "to stake
+all on one cast." In reply, he received a letter naming a house where he
+would find 1200 livres obtained for him by Dr. Quesnay. He proceeded to
+the address indicated--and was there captured.
+
+He was at once taken back to Vincennes. He declares that he was about to
+be set at liberty at the moment of his escape: and now a new detention
+was commencing. We shall not relate in detail the life he was now to
+lead. Materially he continued to be well treated, but his mind became
+affected, his rages became more and more violent, reaching at last
+paroxysms of fury. Here are some extracts from letters and memorials
+sent to Sartine: "By all the devils, this is coming it too strong. It is
+true, sir, that I'd defy the blackest devils in all hell to teach you
+anything in the way of cruelty; and that's but poor praise for you." He
+writes on another occasion: "The crime of every one of us is to have
+seen through your villainies: we are to perish, are we? how delighted
+you would be if some one told you that we had all strangled ourselves in
+our cells!" Danry reminds the lieutenant of police of the tortures of
+Enguerrand de Marigni, adding: "Remember that more than a thousand
+wretches have been broken in the Place de Greve who had not committed
+the hundredth part of your crimes."... "Not a single person would be
+astonished to see you flayed alive, your skin tanned, and your carcase
+thrown into the gutters for the dogs to eat."... "But Monsieur laughs
+at everything, Monsieur fears neither God, nor king, nor devil, Monsieur
+swills down his crimes like buttermilk!"
+
+In prison Latude wrote memoirs which he filled with calumnies on the
+ministers and the court. These memoirs are composed in the most dramatic
+style, with an inimitable accent of sincerity. It was known that the
+prisoner found a thousand means of sending them outside the walls, and
+it was feared that they might be circulated among the populace, whose
+minds--the year is 1775--were beginning to ferment. Latude had just been
+flung into a cell in consequence of a fresh outbreak against his
+jailers. "On March 19, 1775, the king's lieutenant entered, accompanied
+by the major and three warders, and said to me: 'I have obtained leave
+to let you out of the cell, but on one condition: that you hand over
+your papers.'
+
+"'Hand over my papers! I tell you, sir, I'd rather be done to death in
+this cell than show the white feather so!'
+
+"'Your trunk is upstairs in your room: I've only to say the word and the
+seals would be broken and your papers taken out.'
+
+"I replied: 'Sir, justice has formalities to which you are bound to
+conform, and you are not allowed to commit such outrages.'
+
+"He took five or six steps out of the cell, and as I did not call him
+back, he came back himself and said: 'Just hand them to me for ten days
+to examine them, and I give you my word of honour that at the end of
+that time I will have them returned to your room.'
+
+"I replied: 'I will not let you have them for two hours even.'
+
+"'All right,' he said; 'as you won't entrust them to me, you have only
+to stay where you are.'"
+
+Latude relates in his _Memoirs_ with great indignation the story of a
+flute he had made, on which he used to play, his sole diversion during
+the long hours of solitude; his jailers had the barbarity to take it
+from him. The governor of the fortress, out of compassion, offered to
+restore it. "But it will only be on condition that you play by day only,
+and not at night." At this stipulation, writes Latude in his _Reveries_,
+"I could not refrain from bantering him, saying, 'Why, don't you know,
+sir, that forbidding a thing is just the way to make me eager for it?'"
+
+And so at Vincennes as at Paris they came to consider Danry as a madman.
+Among the books given him for his amusement there were some dealing with
+sorcery. These he read and re-read, and from that time onward he saw in
+all the incidents of his life nothing but the perpetual intervention of
+devils evoked by the witch Madame de Pompadour and her brother the
+magician, the Marquis de Marigny.
+
+Sartine came again to see the prisoner on November 8, 1772. Danry begged
+him to send a police officer to make a copy of a memorial he had drawn
+up for his own justification; to send also an advocate to assist him
+with his advice, and a doctor, to examine the state of his health. The
+police officer arrived on the 24th. On the 29th, he wrote to the
+lieutenant of police: "I have the honour to report that in pursuance of
+your orders I proceeded to the chateau of Vincennes on the 24th curt.,
+to hear from Danry something which, he asserts, concerns the minister:
+it is impossible to hear anything which concerns him less. He began by
+saying that to write all he had to tell me I should have to remain for
+three weeks with him. He was bound to tell me the story of 180
+sorceries, and I was to copy the story, according to him, from a heap of
+papers he drew from a bag, the writing of which is undecipherable."
+
+We know from Danry himself what passed at the visit of the advocate. He
+entered the prisoner's room about noon. Danry handed him two memorials
+he had drawn up and explained their purport. "Instantly he cut me short,
+saying, 'Sir, I have no belief whatever in witchcraft.' I did not give
+in, but said, 'Sir, I cannot show you the devil in bodily shape, but I
+am very certain I can convince you, by the contents of this memorial,
+that the late Marquise de Pompadour was a witch, and that the Marquis de
+Marigny, her brother, is at this very time still having dealings with
+the devil.'
+
+"The advocate had read but a few pages when he stopped dead, put the
+manuscript on the table, and said, as though he had been wakened out of
+a deep sleep, 'Would you not like to get out of prison?' I replied:
+'There's no doubt of that.' 'And do you intend to remain in Paris, or to
+go to your home?' 'When I am free, I shall go home.' 'But have you any
+means?' Upon this I took his hand and said: 'My dear sir, I beg you not
+to take offence at what I am going to say.' 'Speak on,' he said, 'say
+whatever you like, I shall not be offended.' 'Well then, I see very
+clearly that the devil has already got hold of you.'"
+
+In the same year, Malesherbes made his celebrated inspection of the
+prisons. "This virtuous minister came to see me at the beginning of
+August, 1775, and listened to me with the most lively interest." The
+historian who has the completest knowledge of everything relating to the
+Bastille, Francois Ravaisson, believed that Malesherbes left the
+wretched man in prison out of regard for his colleague Maurepas. "One
+would have thought that Maurepas' first act on resuming office would
+have been to release his old accomplice." This conjecture is destroyed
+by a letter from Malesherbes to the governor of Vincennes: "I am busy,
+sir, with the examination of the papers relating to your various
+prisoners. Danry, Thorin, and Marechal are quite mad, according to the
+particulars furnished to me, and the two first gave indubitable marks
+of madness in my presence."
+
+In consequence, Danry was transferred to Charenton on September 27,
+1775, "on account of mental derangement, in virtue of a royal order of
+the 23rd of the said month, countersigned by Lamoignon. The king will
+pay for his keep." On entering his new abode, Latude took the precaution
+to change his name a third time, and signed the register "Danger."
+
+In passing from the fortress of Vincennes to the hospital of Charenton,
+Danry thought it was as well to rise still higher in dignity. So we see
+him henceforth styling himself "engineer, geographer, and royal
+pensioner at Charenton."
+
+His situation was sensibly changed for the better. He speaks of the
+kindnesses shown him by the Fathers of La Charite.[48] He had companions
+whose society pleased him. Halls were set apart for billiards,
+backgammon, and cards. He had company at his meals and in his walks. He
+met Allegre, his old fellow-prisoner, whom he came upon among the
+dangerous lunatics in the dungeons; Allegre had been removed in 1763
+from the Bastille, where he was shattering and destroying everything.
+His latest fancy was that he was God. As to Danry, he had taken so
+kindly to his role as nobleman that to see his aristocratic and
+well-to-do air, to hear his conversation, full of reminiscences of his
+family and his early life, no one could have doubted that he actually
+was the brilliant engineer officer he set up for, who had fallen in the
+prime of life a victim to the intrigues of the favourite. He hobnobbed
+with the aristocratic section of society at Charenton and struck up an
+intimacy with one of his associates, the Chevalier de Moyria, son of a
+lieutenant-colonel, and a knight of Saint-Louis.
+
+Meanwhile the Parlement, which sent a commission every year to inspect
+the Charenton asylum--a commission before which Danry appeared on two
+separate occasions--did not decide that he ought to be set at liberty.
+But one fine day in September, 1776, the prior of the Fathers, who took
+a quite exceptional interest in the lot of his pensioner, meeting him in
+the garden, said to him abruptly: "We are expecting a visit from the
+lieutenant of police; get ready a short and taking address to say to
+him." The lieutenant of police, Lenoir, saw Danry, and listened to him
+attentively, and as the prior's account of him was entirely favourable,
+the magistrate promised him his liberty. "Then Father Prudentius, my
+confessor, who was behind me, drew me by the arm to get me away, fearing
+lest, by some imprudent word, I might undo the good that had been
+decided on"--a charming incident, much to the honour of Father
+Prudentius.
+
+But on consideration it appeared dangerous to fling so suddenly upon
+society a man who would be at a loss how to live, having neither
+relatives nor fortune, having no longer the means of gaining a
+livelihood, and a man, moreover, whom there was only too much reason to
+mistrust. Lenoir asked the prisoner if, once set at liberty, he would
+find the wherewithal to assure his existence; if he had any property; if
+he could give the names of any persons willing to go bail for him.
+
+What did this mean--_if_ he had any property, _if_ he could find
+sureties? He, Masers de Latude! Why, his whole family, when the Marquise
+de Pompadour had him put in the Bastille, was occupying a brilliant
+position! Why, his mother, of whose death he had had the agony to hear,
+had left a house and considerable estates! Latude took his pen, and
+without hesitation wrote to M. Caillet, royal notary at Montagnac: "My
+dear friend, I would bet ten to one you believe me dead; see how
+mistaken you are!... You have but to say the word and before the
+carnival is over we shall eat a capital leveret together." And he speaks
+to his friend the notary of the fortune left by his mother, and of his
+family, who all of them cannot fail to be interested in him. Latude
+himself was not greatly astonished at receiving no reply to this
+epistle: but it must have passed under the eyes of the lieutenant of
+police, and what more did he want?
+
+Latude's new friend, the Chevalier de Moyria, had already been for some
+time at liberty. The prisoner hastened to send him a copy of his letter
+to the notary. "The reply is a long time coming, M. Caillet is dead,
+doubtless." What is to become of him? These twenty-eight years of
+captivity have endangered his fortune, have made him lose his friends;
+how is he to find the remnant of his scattered family? Happily there
+remains to him a friendship, a friendship still recent, but already
+strong, in which he places his whole confidence. "Chevalier, it would
+only need your intervention to deliver me, by inducing your good mother
+to write to M. Lenoir." The Chevalier de Moyria sent an amiable reply.
+Danry wrote another and more urgent letter, with such success that not
+only the Chevalier's mother, but also an old friend of the Moyria
+family, Mercier de Saint-Vigor, a colonel, and controller-general of the
+queen's household, intervened, and made applications at Versailles. "On
+June 5, 1777, King Louis XVI. restored to me my freedom; I have in my
+pocket the warrant under his own hand!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On leaving Charenton, Danry signed an undertaking to depart immediately
+for Languedoc, an undertaking which he did not trouble to fulfil. Paris
+was the only city in France where a man of his stamp could thrive. He
+was now fifty-two years old, but was still youthful in appearance, full
+of go and vigour; his hair, as abundant as it had been in youth, had not
+become white. He soon found means of borrowing some money, and then we
+see him opening a campaign, exerting himself to get in touch with the
+ministers, gaining the protection of the Prince de Beauvau, distributing
+memorials in which he claimed a reward for great services rendered, and
+launched out into invectives against his oppressors, Sartine in
+particular. Minister Amelot sent for him, and in tones of severity
+notified him that he was to leave the city at once. Latude did not wait
+for the command to be repeated. He had reached Saint-Bris, about a
+hundred miles from the capital, when he was suddenly arrested by the
+police officer Marais. Brought back to Paris, he was locked up in the
+Chatelet on July 16, 1777, and on August 1 conducted to Bicetre. The
+first use he had made of his liberty was to introduce himself to a lady
+of quality and extort money from her by menaces. The officer found a
+considerable sum in his possession.
+
+Bicetre was not a state prison like the Bastille and Vincennes, or an
+asylum like Charenton; it was the thieves' prison. On entering, Danry
+took the precaution of changing his name a fourth time, calling himself
+Jedor. He is, moreover, careful in his _Memoirs_ to give us the reason
+of this fresh metamorphosis: "I would not sully my father's name by
+inscribing it on the register of this infamous place." From this day
+there begins for him a truly wretched existence; huddled with criminals,
+put on bread and water, his lodging is a cell. But his long martyrdom is
+nearing its end: the hour of his apotheosis is at hand!
+
+Louis XVI. had now been on the throne for several years, and France had
+become the most impressionable country in the world. Tears flowed at the
+slightest provocation. Was it the sentimental literature, which Rousseau
+made fashionable, that produced this moving result, or contrariwise, was
+the literature successful because it hit the taste of the day? At all
+events, the time was ripe for Latude. His recent unlucky experience was
+not to dishearten him. On the contrary, it is with a greater energy, a
+more poignant emotion, and cries still more heartrending, that he
+resumes the story of his interminable sufferings. The victim of cruel
+oppressors, of cowardly foes who have their own reasons for smothering
+his voice, he will not bend his head under his abominable treatment; he
+will remain proud, self-assured, erect before those who load him with
+irons!
+
+On the birth of the Dauphin, Louis XVI. resolved to admit his wretched
+prisoners to a share of his joy and to pronounce a great number of
+pardons. A special commission, composed of eight counsellors of the
+Chatelet and presided over by Cardinal de Rohan, sat at Bicetre. Danry
+appeared before it on May 17, 1782. His new judges, as he testifies,
+heard his story with interest. But the decision of the commission was
+not favourable to him. He was not so much surprised at this as might be
+supposed: "The impure breath of vice," he wrote to the Marquis de
+Conflans, "has never tainted my heart, but there are magistrates who
+would let off guilty men with free pardons rather than expose themselves
+to the merited reproach of having committed injustice of the most
+revolting kind in keeping innocence for thirty-three years in irons."
+
+Giving rein to the marvellous activity of his brain, he composed at
+Bicetre new schemes, memorials, and accounts of his misfortunes. To the
+Marquis de Conflans he sends a scheme for a hydraulic press, "the
+homage of an unfortunate nobleman who has grown old in irons"; he
+induces the turnkeys to carry memorials to all who may possibly interest
+themselves in him. The first to take compassion on him was a priest, the
+Abbe Legal, of the parish of St. Roch, and curate of Bicetre. He visited
+him, consoled him, gave him money, showed him attentions. Cardinal de
+Rohan also took much interest in him, and sent him some assistance
+through his secretary. We are coming at last to Madame Legros. This
+wonderful story is so well known that we shall tell it briefly. A
+drunken turnkey chanced to lose one of Latude's memorials at a corner of
+the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois: it was picked up and
+opened by a woman, a haberdasher in a small way. Her heart burned within
+her as she read of these horrible sufferings, depicted in strokes of
+fire. She inspired her husband with her own emotion; henceforth it was
+to be the aim in life of these worthy people to effect the unhappy man's
+deliverance, and Madame Legros devoted herself to the self-imposed task
+with indefatigable ardour, courage, and devotion. "A grand sight," cries
+Michelet, "to see this poor, ill-clad woman going from door to door,
+paying court to footmen to win entrance into mansions, to plead her
+cause before the great, to implore their support!" In many houses she
+was well received. President de Gourgues, President de Lamoignon,
+Cardinal de Rohan, aided her with their influence. Sartine himself took
+steps on behalf of the unhappy man. Two advocates of the Parlement of
+Paris, Lacroix and Comeyras, devoted themselves to his cause. Copies
+were made of the prisoner's memorials and distributed in every
+drawing-room; they penetrated even into the boudoir of the queen. All
+hearts were stirred by the accents of this harrowing voice.
+
+The Marquis de Villette, who had become celebrated through the
+hospitality he showed to Voltaire when dying, conceived a passionate
+enthusiasm for Danry. He sent his steward to Bicetre to offer him a
+pension of 600 livres on the sole condition of the prisoner's leaving
+his case entirely in the Marquis's hands. Latude received this singular
+proposal with becoming dignity. "For two years a poor woman has been
+devoting herself to my cause. I should be an ungrateful wretch if I did
+not leave my fate in her hands." He knew that this pension would not
+escape him, and it was not for 600 livres that he would have consented
+to rob his story of the touching and romantic features it was
+increasingly assuming.
+
+Further, the French Academy actually intervenes! D'Alembert is all fire
+and flame. From this time a stream of visitors of the highest
+distinction flows through the squalid prison. At length the king himself
+is led to look into the affair. He has the documentary evidence brought
+to him and examines it carefully. With what anxiety everyone awaits his
+decision! But Louis XVI., now acquainted with the case, replies that
+Latude will be released--_never_! At this decree, to all appearance
+irrevocable, all the prisoner's friends lose heart, except Madame
+Legros. The queen and Madame Necker are on her side. In 1783, Breteuil,
+the queen's man, comes into power; on March 24, 1784, the release is
+signed! The Vicomte de Latude receives a pension of 400 livres, but is
+exiled to his own part of the country. New importunities, new
+applications; at last they succeed: Latude is free to live in Paris!
+
+This is the grandest period in the life of a great man! Latude is soon
+in occupation of a modest but decent and well-ordered suite of rooms on
+the fourth floor. He lives with his two benefactors, M. and Madame
+Legros, petted, spoilt in a thousand ways. The Duchess of Beauvau has
+obtained for Madame Legros from Calonne, out of funds intended for the
+support of distressed gentlefolk, a pension of 600 livres: the Duchess
+of Kingston[49] grants a pension of the same amount. In addition to the
+royal pension, Latude receives 500 livres a year from President Dupaty
+and 300 from the Duke d'Ayen. Moreover, a public subscription is opened,
+and the list is filled with the greatest names in France. An agreeable
+competency is assured to the Legros couple and their adopted son. At its
+sitting on March 24, the French Academy solemnly awarded the Montyon
+prize to the valiant little haberdasher. "The Dame Legros came to
+receive the medal amid the acclamations of the whole assembly."
+
+The name of Latude is on everyone's lips; he wins admiration and pity on
+all sides. Ladies of the highest society are not above mounting to the
+fourth story, accompanied by their daughters, to bring the poor man "aid
+in money, with their tears." The hero has left a complacent description
+of the throng: duchesses, marchionesses, grandees of Spain, wearers of
+the cross of St. Louis, presidents of the Parlement, all these met at
+his house. Sometimes there were six or eight persons in his room.
+Everyone listened to his story and lavished on him marks of the most
+affectionate compassion, and no one failed before going away "to leave a
+mark of his sensibility." The wives of Marshals de Luxembourg and de
+Beauvau, the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, the Countess de Guimont, were
+among the most zealous. "Indeed," says our hero, "it would be extremely
+difficult for me to tell which of these countesses, marchionesses,
+duchesses, and princesses had the most humane, the most compassionate
+heart."
+
+Thus Latude became one of the lions of Paris: strangers flocked to his
+lodging, hostesses ran off with him. At table, when he spoke, all voices
+were hushed with an air of deference and respect; in the drawing-room
+you would find him seated in a gilt chair near the fireplace where great
+logs were blazing, and surrounded by a thick cluster of bright, silky,
+rustling robes. The Chevalier de Pougens, son of the Prince de Conti,
+pressed him to come and stay at his house; Latude graciously consented.
+The American ambassador, the illustrious Jefferson, invited him to
+dinner.
+
+Latude has himself described this enchanted life: "Since I left prison,
+the greatest lords of France have done me the honour of inviting me to
+eat with them, but I have not found a single house--except that of the
+Comte d'Angevillier, where you could meet men of wit and learning in
+scores, and receive all sorts of civilities on the part of the countess;
+and that of M. Guillemot, keeper of the royal palaces, one of the most
+charming families to be found in Paris--where you are more at your ease
+than with the Marquis de Villette.
+
+"When a man has felt, as I have felt, the rage of hunger, he always
+begins by speaking of his food. The Marquis de Villette possesses a cook
+who is a match for the most skilful in his art: in a word, his table is
+first-rate. At the tables of the dukes and peers and marshals of France
+there is eternal ceremony, and everyone speaks like a book, whereas at
+that of the Marquis de Villette, men of wit and learning always form the
+majority of the company. All the first-class musicians have a cover set
+at his table, and on at least three days of the week he gives a little
+concert."
+
+On August 26, 1788, died one of the benefactresses of Latude, the
+Duchess of Kingston, who did not fail to mention her protege in her
+will. We see him dutifully assisting at the sale of the lady's furniture
+and effects. He even bought a few things, giving a _louis d' or_ in
+payment. Next day, the sale being continued, the auctioneer handed the
+coin back to Latude: it was bad. Bad! What! did they take the Vicomte de
+Latude for a sharper? The coin bad! Who, he would like to know, had the
+insolence to make "an accusation so derogatory to his honour and his
+reputation?" Latude raised his voice, and the auctioneer threatened to
+bundle him out of the room. The insolent dog! "Bundle out rogues, not
+gentlemen!" But the auctioneer sent for the police, who put "the Sieur
+de Latude ignominiously outside." He went off calmly, and the same day
+summoned the auctioneer before the Chatelet tribunal, "in order to get a
+reparation as authoritative as the defamation had been public."
+
+In the following year (1789) Latude made a journey into England. He had
+taken steps to sue Sartine, Lenoir, and the heirs of Madame de Pompadour
+in the courts in order to obtain the damages due to him. In England, he
+drew up a memorandum for Sartine, in which he informed the late
+lieutenant of police of the conditions on which he would withdraw his
+actions. "M. de Sartine, you will give me, as compensation for all the
+harm and damage you have made me suffer unjustly, the sum of 900,000
+livres; M. Lenoir, 600,000 livres; the heirs of the late Marquise de
+Pompadour and Marquis de Menars, 100,000 crowns; in all, 1,800,000
+livres;" that is to say, about L160,000 in English money of to-day.
+
+[Illustration: LATUDE.
+
+_From the Painting by Vestier (Hotel Carnavalet)._]
+
+The Revolution broke out. If the epoch of Louis XVI., with its mildness
+and fellow-feeling, had been favourable to our hero, the Revolution
+seems to have been ordained on purpose for him. The people rose against
+the tyranny of kings: the towers of the Bastille were overthrown.
+Latude, the victim of kings, the victim of the Bastille and arbitrary
+warrants, was about to appear in all his glory.
+
+He hastened to throw into the gutter his powdered peruque and viscount's
+frock; listen to the revolutionist, fierce, inflexible, indomitable,
+_uncompromising_: "Frenchmen, I have won the right to tell you the
+truth, and if you are free, you cannot but love to hear it.
+
+"For thirty-five years I meditated in dungeons on the audacity and
+insolence of despots; with loud cries I was calling down vengeance, when
+France in indignation rose up as one man in one sublime movement and
+levelled despotism with the dust. The will to be free is what makes a
+nation free; and you have proved it. But to preserve freedom a nation
+must make itself worthy of it, and that is what remains for you to do!"
+
+In the Salon of 1789 there were two portraits of Latude with the famous
+ropeladder. Below one of these portraits, by Vestier, a member of the
+Royal Academy, these lines were engraved:--
+
+    Instruit par ses malheurs et sa captivite
+    A vaincre des tyrans les efforts et la rage,
+    Il apprit aux Francais comment le vrai courage
+            Peut conquerir la liberte.[50]
+
+In 1787 the Marquis de Beaupoil-Saint-Aulaire had written, inspired by
+Latude himself, the story of the martyr's captivity. Of this book two
+editions appeared in the same year. In 1789 Latude published the
+narrative of his escape from the Bastille, as well as his _Grand
+Memoire_ to the Marquise de Pompadour; finally, in 1790 appeared
+_Despotism Unmasked, or the Memoirs of Henri Masers de Latude_, edited
+by the advocate Thiery. The book was dedicated to La Fayette. On the
+first page we see a portrait of the hero, his face proud and energetic,
+one hand on the ropeladder, the other extended towards the Bastille
+which workmen are in the act of demolishing. "I swear," says the author
+at the commencement, "that I will not relate one fact which is not
+true." The work is a tissue of calumnies and lies; and what makes a most
+painful impression on the reader is to see this man disowning his
+mother, forgetting the privations she endured out of love for her son,
+and ascribing the credit of what little the poor thing could do for her
+child to a Marquis de la Tude, knight of St. Louis, and
+lieutenant-colonel of the Orleans Dragoons!
+
+But the book vibrates with an incomparable accent of sincerity and of
+that profound emotion which Latude knew so well how to infuse into all
+those with whom he had to do. In 1793, twenty editions had been
+exhausted, the work had been translated into several languages; the
+journals had no praise strong enough for the boldness and genius of the
+author; the _Mercure de France_ proclaimed that henceforth it was a
+parent's duty to teach his children to read in this sublime work; a copy
+was sent to all the departments, accompanied by a model of the Bastille
+by the architect Palloy. With good reason could Latude exclaim in the
+National Assembly: "I have not a little contributed to the Revolution
+and to its consolidation."
+
+Latude was not the man to neglect opportunities so favourable. To begin
+with, he sought to get his pension augmented, and presented to the
+Constituent Assembly a petition backed by representative Bouche. But
+Camus, "rugged Camus," president of the committee appointed to
+investigate the matter, decided on rejection; and at the sitting of
+March 13, 1791, deputy Voidel delivered a very spirited speech; his view
+was that the nation had unhappy folk to succour more worthy of their
+concern than a man whose life had begun with roguery and villainy. The
+Assembly sided with him; not only was Latude's pension not increased,
+but on consideration, the pension granted by Louis XVI. was altogether
+withdrawn.
+
+Horror and infamy! "What madness has seized on the minds of the
+representatives of the most generous nation in the world!... To slay a
+hapless wretch the mere sight of whom awakens pity and warms into life
+the most sluggish sensibility ... for death is not so terrible as the
+loss of honour!" The valiant Latude will not abide the stroke of such an
+insult. Ere long he has brought Voidel to retract; in the heart of the
+Assembly he gains an influential supporter in the Marshal de Broglie.
+The Constituent Assembly is replaced by the Legislative, and Latude
+returns to the charge. He is admitted to the bar of the House on January
+26, 1792; the matter is re-committed and gone into a second time on
+February 25. We should like to be able to quote at length the speech
+which Latude himself composed for his advocate; here is a portion of the
+peroration:--
+
+"That a man, without any outside assistance, should have been able to
+escape three times, once from the Bastille and twice from Vincennes,
+yes, gentlemen, I venture to say he could not have succeeded except by a
+miracle, or else that Latude has more than extraordinary genius. Cast
+your eyes on this ladder of rope and wood, and on all the other
+instruments which Latude constructed with a mere knife, which you see
+here in the centre of this chamber. I resolved to bring before your own
+eyes this interesting object, which will for ever win admiration from
+men of intelligence. Not a single stranger comes to Paris without going
+to see this masterpiece of intelligence and genius, as well as his
+generous deliverer, Madame Legros. We have resolved to give you,
+gentlemen, the pleasure of seeing this celebrated woman, who
+unremittingly for forty months set despotism at defiance, and vanquished
+it by dint of virtue. Behold her there at the bar with M. de Latude,
+behold that incomparable woman, for ever to be the glory and the
+ornament of her sex!"
+
+It is not surprising that the Legislative Assembly was deeply moved by
+this eloquent harangue and this exhibition of the lady, as touching as
+unexpected. It unanimously voted Latude a pension of 2000 livres,
+without prejudice to the pension of 400 livres previously awarded.
+Henceforth Latude will be able to say: "The whole nation adopted me!"
+
+However, the little mishap in the Constituent Assembly was to be the
+only check that Latude suffered in the course of his glorious martyr's
+career. Presented to the Society of "Friends of the Constitution," he
+was elected a member by acclamation, and the Society sent a deputation
+of twelve members to carry the civic crown to Madame Legros. The leader
+of the deputation said, in a voice broken by emotion, "This day is the
+grandest day of my life." A deputation from the principal theatres of
+Paris offered Latude free admission to all performances, "so that he
+might go often and forget the days of his mourning." He was surrounded
+by the highest marks of consideration; pleaders begged him to support
+their cases before the tribunals with the moral authority bestowed on
+him by his virtue. He took advantage of this to bring definitively
+before the courts his claims against the heirs of the Marquise de
+Pompadour. Citizen Mony argued the case for the first time before the
+court of the sixth arrondissement on July 16, 1793; on September 11 the
+case came again before the magistrates: Citizens Chaumette, Laurent, and
+Legrand had been designated by the Commune of Paris as counsel for the
+defence, and the whole Commune was present at the hearing. Latude
+obtained 60,000 livres, 10,000 of which were paid him in cash.
+
+And now his life became more tranquil. Madame Legros continued to lavish
+her care on him. The 50,000 livres remaining due to him from the heirs
+of the Marquise were paid in good farm lands situated in La Beauce, the
+profits of which he regularly drew.
+
+Let us hasten to add that France did not find in Latude an ungrateful
+child. The critical situation in which the nation was then struggling
+pained him deeply. He sought the means of providing a remedy, and in
+1799 brought out a "Scheme for the valuation of the eighty departments
+of France to save the Republic in less than three months," and a "Memoir
+on the means of re-establishing the public credit and order in the
+finances of France."
+
+When the estates of Madame de Pompadour were sequestrated, the farms
+Latude had received were taken from him; but he induced the Directory to
+restore them. He was less fortunate in his requisition for a licence for
+a theatre and a gaming-house. But he found consolation. The subsidies he
+went on extorting from right and left, the proceeds of his farms, the
+sale of his books, and the money brought in by the exhibition of his
+ropeladder, which was exhibited by a showman in the different towns of
+France and England, provided him with a very comfortable income.
+
+The Revolution became a thing of the past. Latude hailed the dawning
+glory of Bonaparte, and when Bonaparte became Napoleon, Latude made his
+bow to the emperor. We have a very curious letter in which he marks out
+for Napoleon I. the line of conduct he should pursue to secure his own
+welfare and the good of France. It begins as follows:--
+
+"SIRE,--I have been five times buried alive, and am well acquainted with
+misfortune. To have a heart more sympathetic than the common run of men
+it is necessary to have suffered great ills.... At the time of the
+Terror I had the delightful satisfaction of saving the lives of
+twenty-two poor wretches.... To petition Fouquet d'Etinville on behalf
+of the royalists was to persuade him that I was one myself. When I
+braved death in order to save the lives of twenty-two citizens, judge,
+great Emperor, if my heart can do ought but take great interest in you,
+the saviour of my beloved country."
+
+We are given some details of the last years of Latude's life in the
+_Memoirs_ of his friend, the Chevalier de Pougens, and in the _Memoirs_
+of the Duchess d'Abrantes. The Chevalier tells us that at the age of
+seventy-five years he still enjoyed good health; he was "active and gay,
+and appeared to enjoy to the full the delights of existence. Every day
+he took long walks in Paris without experiencing the least fatigue.
+People were amazed to find _no trace_ of the cruel sufferings he had
+undergone in the cells during a captivity of thirty-five years." His
+popularity suffered no diminution under the Empire. Junot awarded him a
+pension from funds at his disposal. One day the general presented him
+to his wife, along with Madame Legros, whose side Latude never left.
+"When he arrived," says the Duchess d'Abrantes, "I went to greet him
+with a respect and an emotion that must have been truly edifying. I took
+him by the hand, conducted him to a chair, and put a cushion under his
+feet; in fact, he might have been my grandfather, whom I could not have
+treated better. At table I placed him on my right. But," adds the
+Duchess, "my enchantment was of short duration. He talked of nothing but
+his own adventures with appalling loquacity."
+
+At the age of eighty, a few months before his death, Latude wrote in the
+most familiar terms to his protector, the Chevalier de Pougens, a member
+of the Institute: "Now I assure you in the clearest possible words, that
+if within ten days of the present time, the 11th Messidor, you have not
+turned up in Paris (the Chevalier was staying at his country estate), I
+shall start the next day and come to you with the hunger of a giant and
+the thirst of a cabby, and when I have emptied your cellar and eaten you
+out of house and home you will see me play the second act of the comedy
+of _Jocrisse_[51]; you will see me run off with your plates, and dishes,
+and tankards, and bottles--empty, you may be sure--and fling all your
+furniture out of the window!"
+
+On July 20, 1804, Latude compiled one more circular, addressed to the
+sovereigns of Europe: the kings of Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, the
+Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor; and to the President of the
+United States. To each of them he sent a copy of his _Memoirs_,
+accompanied by the famous scheme for replacing with muskets the pikes
+with which the sergeants were armed. He explained to each of the
+sovereigns that as the country he ruled was profiting by this child of
+his genius, it was only just that he should reap some benefit.
+
+Jean Henri, surnamed Danry, alias Danger, alias Jedor, alias Masers
+d'Aubrespy, alias De Masers de Latude, died of pneumonia at Paris, on
+January 1, 1805, aged eighty years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY.
+
+
+In the remarkable book entitled _Paris during the Revolution_, M.
+Adolphe Schmidt writes: "All the purely revolutionary events, the events
+of the Fourteenth of July, of October 5 and 6, 1789, were the work of an
+obscure minority of reckless and violent revolutionists. If they
+succeeded, it was only because the great majority of the citizens
+avoided the scene of operations or were mere passive spectators there,
+attracted by curiosity, and giving in appearance an enhanced importance
+to the movement." Further on he says: "After the fall of the
+Gironde,[52] Dutard expressed himself in these terms: 'If, out of 50,000
+Moderates, you succeed in collecting a compact body of no more than
+3000, I shall be much astonished; and if out of these 3000 there are to
+be found only 500 who are agreed, and courageous enough to express their
+opinion, I shall be still more astonished. And these, in truth, must
+expect to be Septembrised.'[53] 'Twelve maniacs, with their blood well
+up, at the head of the Sansculotte section,' writes Dutard in another
+report, 'would put to flight the other forty-seven sections of Paris.'
+Mercier, after the fall of the Gironde, thus expresses himself in regard
+to the reign of Terror: 'Sixty brigands deluged France with blood:
+500,000 men within our walls were witnesses of their atrocities, and
+were not brave enough to oppose them.'"
+
+To enable the reader to understand the extraordinary and improbable
+event which is the subject of this chapter, it would be necessary to
+begin by explaining the circumstances and describing the material and
+moral state of things in which it happened; and that, unhappily, would
+occupy much space. Let us take the two principal facts, see what they
+led to, and then come to the events of the Fourteenth of July.
+
+For its task of governing France, the royal power had in its hands no
+administrative instrument, or, at any rate, administrative instruments
+of a very rudimentary character. It ruled through tradition and
+sentiment. The royal power had been created by the affection and
+devotion of the nation, and in this devotion and affection lay its whole
+strength.
+
+What, actually and practically, were the means of government in the
+hands of the king? "Get rid of _lettres de cachet_," observed
+Malesherbes, "and you deprive the king of all his authority, for the
+_lettre de cachet_ is the only means he possesses of enforcing his will
+in the kingdom." Now, for several years past, the royal power had
+practically renounced _lettres de cachet_. On the other hand, during the
+course of the eighteenth century, the sentiments of affection and
+devotion of which we have spoken had become enfeebled, or at least had
+changed their character. So it was that on the eve of the Revolution the
+royal power, which stood in France for the entire administration, had,
+if the expression may be allowed, melted into thin air.
+
+Below the royal power, the lords in the country, the upper ten in the
+towns, constituted the second degree in the government. The same remarks
+apply here also. And unhappily it is certain that, over the greater part
+of France, the territorial lords had forgotten the duties which their
+privileges and their station imposed. The old attachment of the
+labouring classes to them had almost everywhere disappeared, and in many
+particulars had given place to feelings of hostility.
+
+Thus on the eve of '89 the whole fabric of the state had no longer any
+real existence: at the first shock it was bound to crumble into dust.
+And as, behind the fragile outer wall, there was no solid structure--no
+administrative machine, with its numerous, diverse, and nicely-balanced
+parts, like that which in our time acts as a buffer against the shocks
+of political crises,--the first blow aimed at the royal power was bound
+to plunge the whole country into a state of disorganization and
+disorder from which the tyranny of the Terror, brutal, blood-stained,
+overwhelming as it was, alone could rescue it.
+
+Such is the first of the two facts we desire to make clear. We come now
+to the second. Ever since the year 1780, France had been almost
+continually in a state of famine. The rapidity and the abundance of the
+international exchanges which in our days supply us constantly from the
+remotest corners of the world with the necessaries of life, prevent our
+knowing anything of those terrible crises which in former days swept
+over the nations. "The dearth," writes Taine, "permanent, prolonged,
+having already lasted ten years, and aggravated by the very outbreaks
+which it provoked, went on adding fuel to all the passions of men till
+they reached a blaze of madness." "The nearer we come to the Fourteenth
+of July," says an eye witness, "the greater the famine becomes." "In
+consequence of the bad harvest," writes Schmidt, "the price of bread had
+been steadily rising from the opening of the year 1789. This state of
+things was utilized by the agitators who aimed at driving the people
+into excesses: these excesses in turn paralyzed trade. Business ceased,
+and numbers of workers found themselves without bread."
+
+A few words should properly be said in regard to brigandage under the
+_ancien regime_. The progress of manners and especially the development
+of executive government have caused it utterly to disappear. The
+reader's imagination will supply all we have not space to say. He will
+recollect the lengths of daring to which a man like Cartouche[54] could
+go, and recall what the forest of Bondy[55] was at the gates of Paris.
+
+So grew up towards the end of the _ancien regime_ what Taine has so
+happily called a spontaneous anarchy. In the four months preceding the
+capture of the Bastille, one can count more than three hundred riots in
+France. At Nantes, on January 9, 1789, the town hall was invaded, and
+the bakers' shops pillaged. All this took place to the cries of "Vive le
+roi!" At Bray-sur-Seine, on May 1, peasants armed with knives and clubs
+forced the farmers to lower the price of corn. At Rouen, on May 28, the
+corn in the market place was plundered. In Picardy, a discharged
+carabineer put himself at the head of an armed band which attacked the
+villages and carried off the corn. On all sides houses were looted from
+roof to cellar. At Aupt, M. de Montferrat, defending himself, was "cut
+into little pieces." At La Seyne, the mob brought a coffin in front of
+the house of one of the principal burgesses; he was told to prepare for
+death, and they would do him the honour to bury him. He escaped, and his
+house was sacked. We cull these facts haphazard from among hundreds of
+others.
+
+The immediate neighbourhood of Paris was plunged in terror. The batches
+of letters, still unpublished, preserved in the National Archives throw
+the most vivid light on this point. Bands of armed vagabonds scoured the
+country districts, pillaging the villages and plundering the crops.
+These were the "Brigands," a term which constantly recurs in the
+documents, and more and more frequently as we approach the 14th of July.
+These armed bands numbered three, four, five hundred men. At Cosne, at
+Orleans, at Rambouillet, it was the same story of raids on the corn. In
+different localities of the environs of Paris, the people organized
+themselves on a military basis. Armed burghers patrolled the streets
+against the "brigands." From all sides the people rained on the king
+demands for troops to protect them. Towns like Versailles, in dread of
+an invasion by these ruffians, implored the king for protection: the
+letters of the municipal council preserved in the National Archives are
+in the highest degree instructive.
+
+At this moment there had collected in the outskirts of Paris those
+troops whose presence was in the sequel so skilfully turned to account
+by the orators of the Palais-Royal. True, the presence of the troops
+made them uneasy. So far were the soldiers from having designs against
+the Parisians that in the secret correspondence of Villedeuil we find
+the court constantly urging that they should be reserved for the
+safeguarding of the adjoining districts, which were every day exposed to
+attack, and for the safe conduct of the convoys of corn coming up to
+Versailles and Paris. Bands mustered around the capital. In the first
+weeks of May, near Villejuif, a troop of from five to six hundred
+ruffians met intending to storm Bicetre and march on Saint-Cloud. They
+came from distances of thirty, forty, and fifty leagues, and the whole
+mass surged around Paris and was swallowed up there as into a sewer.
+During the last days of April the shopmen saw streaming through the
+barriers "a terrific number of men, ill clad and of sinister aspect." By
+the first days of May, it was noticed that the appearance of the mob had
+altogether changed. There was now mingled with it "a number of strangers
+from all the country parts, most of them in rags, and armed with huge
+clubs, the mere aspect of them showing what was to be feared." In the
+words of a contemporary, "one met such physiognomies as one never
+remembered having seen in the light of day." To provide occupation for a
+part of these ill-favoured unemployed, whose presence everybody felt to
+be disquieting, workshops were constructed at Montmartre, where from
+seventeen to eighteen thousand men were employed on improvised tasks at
+twenty sous a day.
+
+Meanwhile the electors chosen to nominate deputies to the National
+Assembly had been collecting. On April 22, 1789, Thiroux de Crosne, the
+lieutenant of police, speaking of the tranquillity with which the
+elections were being carried on, added: "But I constantly have my eye on
+the bakers."
+
+On April 23, de Crosne referred to the irritation which was showing
+itself among certain groups of workmen in the Suburb Saint-Antoine
+against two manufacturers, Dominique Henriot, the saltpetre-maker, and
+Reveillon, the manufacturer of wall-papers. Henriot was known, not only
+for his intelligence, but for his kindliness; in years of distress he
+had sacrificed a portion of his fortune for the support of the workmen;
+as to Reveillon, he was at this date one of the most remarkable
+representatives of Parisian industry. A simple workman to begin with, he
+was in 1789 paying 200,000 livres a year in salaries to 300 workers;
+shortly before, he had carried off the prize founded by Necker for the
+encouragement of useful arts. Henriot and Reveillon were said to have
+made offensive remarks against the workmen in the course of the recent
+electoral assemblies. They both denied, however, having uttered the
+remarks attributed to them, and there is every reason to believe that
+their denials were genuine.
+
+During the night of April 27 and the next day, howling mobs attacked the
+establishments of Henriot and Reveillon, which were thoroughly
+plundered. Commissary Gueullette, in his report of May 3, notes that a
+wild and systematic devastation was perpetrated. Only the walls were
+left standing. What was not stolen was smashed into atoms. The
+"brigands"--the expression used by the Commissary--threw a part of the
+plant out of the windows into the street, where the mob made bonfires of
+it. Part of the crowd were drunk; nevertheless they flung themselves
+into the cellars, and the casks were stove in. When casks and bottles
+were empty, the rioters attacked the flasks containing colouring
+matter; this they absorbed in vast quantities, and reeled about with
+fearful contortions, poisoned. When these cellars were entered next day,
+they presented a horrible spectacle, for the wretches had come to
+quarrelling and cutting each other's throats. "The people got on to the
+roofs," writes Thiroux de Crosne, "whence they rained down upon the
+troops a perfect hailstorm of tiles, stones, &c.; they even set rolling
+down fragments of chimneys and bits of timber; and although they were
+fired upon several times and some persons were killed, it was quite
+impossible to master them."
+
+The riot was not quelled by the troops until 10 o'clock that night; more
+than a hundred persons were left dead in the street. M. Alexandre Tuetey
+has devoted some remarkable pages to Reveillon's affair; he has
+carefully studied the interrogatories of rioters who were arrested. The
+majority, he says, had been drunk all day. Reveillon, as is well known,
+only found safety by taking refuge in the Bastille. He was the only
+prisoner whom the Bastille received throughout the year 1789.
+
+In the night following these bacchanalian orgies, the agents of the
+Marquis du Chatelet, colonel of the Gardes Francaises, having crept
+along one of the moats, "saw a crowd of brigands" collected on the
+further side of the Trone gate. Their leader was mounted on a table,
+haranguing them.
+
+We come upon them again in the report of Commissary Vauglenne, quoted by
+M. Alexandre Tuetey. "On April 29, Vauglenne took the depositions of
+bakers, confectioners, and pork butchers of the Marais, who had been
+robbed by veritable bands of highwaymen, who proceed by burglary and
+violence; they may possibly be starving men, but they look and act
+uncommonly like gentlemen of the road."
+
+Meanwhile, in the garden of the Palais-Royal, Camille Desmoulins was
+haranguing groups of the unemployed and ravenous outcasts, who were
+pressing round him with wide glaring eyes. Desmoulins vociferates: "The
+beast is in the trap; now to finish him!... Never a richer prey has ever
+been offered to conquerors! Forty thousand palaces, mansions, chateaux,
+two-fifths of the wealth of France will be the prize of valour. Those
+who have set up as our masters will be mastered in their turn, the
+nation will be purged!" It is easy to understand that in Paris the alarm
+had become as acute as in the country; everyone was in terror of the
+"brigands." On June 25 it was decided to form a citizen militia for the
+protection of property. "The notoriety of these disorders," we read in
+the minutes of the electors, "and the excesses committed by several mobs
+have decided the general assembly to re-establish without delay the
+militia of Paris." But a certain time was necessary for the organization
+of this civil guard. On June 30, the doors of the Abbaye, where some
+Gardes Francaises had been locked up, some for desertion, others for
+theft, were broken in by blows from hatchets and hammers. The prisoners
+were led in triumph to the Palais-Royal, where they were feted in the
+garden. The extent of the disorders was already so great that the
+government, powerless to repress them, had perforce to grant a general
+pardon. From that day there was no longer any need to capture the
+Bastille, the _ancien regime_ was lost.
+
+The disturbances at the Palais-Royal, the rendezvous of idlers, light
+women, and hot-headed fools, were becoming ever more violent. They began
+to talk of setting fire to the place. If some honest citizen plucked up
+courage to protest he was publicly whipped, thrown into the ponds, and
+rolled in the mud.
+
+On July 11, Necker was dismissed from the ministry and replaced by
+Breteuil. At this time Necker was very popular; Breteuil was not, though
+he ought to have been, particularly in the eyes of supporters of a
+revolutionary movement. Of all the ministers of the _ancien regime_, and
+of all the men of his time, Breteuil was the one who had done most for
+the suppression of _lettres de cachet_ and of state prisons. It was he
+who had closed Vincennes and the Chatimoine tower of Caen, who had got
+the demolition of the Bastille decided on, who had set Latude at
+liberty, and how many other prisoners! who had drawn up and made
+respected, even in the remotest parts of the kingdom, those admirable
+circulars which will immortalize his name, by which he ordered the
+immediate liberation of all prisoners whose detention was not absolutely
+justified, and laid down such rigorous formalities for the future, that
+the arbitrary character of _lettres de cachet_ may be said to have been
+destroyed by them. Nevertheless the orators of the Palais-Royal
+succeeded in persuading many people that the advent of Breteuil to the
+ministry presaged a "St. Bartholomew of patriots." The agitation became
+so vehement, the calumnies against the court and the government were
+repeated with so much violence, that the court, in order to avoid the
+slightest risk of the outbreak of a "St. Bartholomew," ordered all the
+troops to be withdrawn and Paris to be left to itself.
+
+Meanwhile, Camille Desmoulins was continuing to thunder forth: "I have
+just sounded the people. My rage against the despots was turned to
+despair. I did not see the crowds, although keenly moved and dismayed,
+strongly enough disposed to insurrection.... I was rather lifted on to
+the table than mounted there myself. Scarcely was I there than I saw
+myself surrounded by an immense throng. Here is my short address, which
+I shall never forget: 'Citizens! there is not a moment to lose. I come
+from Versailles; M. Necker is dismissed; this dismissal is the alarm
+bell of a St. Bartholomew of patriots; this evening all the Swiss and
+German battalions will march from the Champ de Mars to cut our throats.
+Only one resource remains to us: we must fly to arms!'"
+
+The Parisians were in an abject state of fright, but it was not the
+Swiss and German battalions which terrified them. The author of the
+_Memorable Fortnight_, devoted heart and soul as he was to the
+revolutionary movement, acknowledges that during the days from the 12th
+to the 14th of July, all respectable people shut themselves up in their
+houses. And while the troops and decent people were retiring, the dregs
+were coming to the surface. During the night of July 12, the majority of
+the toll gates, where the town dues were collected, were broken open,
+plundered, and set on fire. "Brigands," armed with pikes and clubs,
+scoured the streets, threatening the houses in which the trembling and
+agitated citizens had shut themselves. Next day, July 13, the shops of
+the bakers and wine merchants were rifled. "Girls snatched the earrings
+from women who went by; if the ring resisted, the ear was torn in two."
+"The house of the lieutenant of police was ransacked, and Thiroux de
+Crosne had the utmost difficulty in escaping from the bands armed with
+clubs and torches. Another troop, with murderous cries, arrived at the
+Force, where prisoners for debt were confined: the prisoners were set
+free. The Garde-Meuble was ransacked. One gang broke in with their axes
+the door of the Lazarists, smashed the library, the cupboards, the
+pictures, the windows, the physical laboratory, dived into the cellar,
+stove in the wine-casks and got gloriously drunk. Twenty-four hours
+afterwards some thirty dead and dying were found there, men and women,
+one of the latter on the point of childbirth. In front of the house the
+street was full of debris and of brigands, who held in their hands, some
+eatables, others a pitcher, forcing wayfarers to drink and filling for
+all and sundry. Wine flowed in torrents." Some had possessed themselves
+of ecclesiastical robes, which they put on, and in this attire yelled
+and gesticulated down the street. In the minute books of the electors we
+read at this date: "On information given to the committee that the
+brigands who had been dispersed showed some disposition to reassemble
+for the purpose of attacking and pillaging the Royal Treasury and the
+Bank, the committee ordered these two establishments to be guarded." On
+the same day, they luckily succeeded in disarming more than a hundred
+and fifty of these roisterers, who, drunk with wine and brandy, had
+fallen asleep inside the Hotel de Ville. Meanwhile the outskirts of
+Paris were no safer than the city itself, and from the top of the towers
+of the Bastille they could see the conflagrations which were started in
+various quarters.
+
+The organization of the citizen militia against these disorders was
+becoming urgent. When evening came, the majority of the districts set
+actively to work. Twelve hundred good citizens mustered in the Petit
+Saint-Antoine district. It was a motley crew: tradesmen and artisans,
+magistrates and doctors, writers and scholars, cheek by jowl with
+navvies and carpenters. The future minister of Louis XVI., Champion de
+Villeneuve, filled the post of secretary. The twelve hundred citizens,
+as we read in the minutes, "compelled to unite by the too well founded
+alarm inspired in all the citizens by the danger which seems to threaten
+them each individually, and by the imminent necessity of taking prompt
+measures to avert its effects, considering that a number of
+individuals, terrified perhaps by the rumours which doubtless
+evil-disposed persons have disseminated, are traversing, armed and in
+disorder, all the streets of the capital, and that the ordinary town
+guard either mingles with them or remains a passive spectator of the
+disorder it cannot arrest; considering also that the prison of the Force
+has been burst into and opened for the prisoners, and that it is
+threatened to force open in the same way the prisons which confine
+vagabonds, vagrants, and convicts ... in consequence, the assembled
+citizens decide to organize themselves into a citizen militia. Every man
+will carry while on duty whatever arms he can procure, save and except
+pistols, which are forbidden as dangerous weapons.... There will always
+be two patrols on duty at a time, and two others will remain at the
+place fixed for headquarters." Most of the other districts imitated the
+proceedings of the Petit-Saint-Antoine. They sent delegates to the Hotel
+des Invalides to ask for arms. The delegates were received by Besenval,
+who would have been glad to grant them what they requested; but he must
+have proper instructions. He writes in his _Memoirs_ that the delegates
+were in a great state of fright, saying that the "brigands" were
+threatening to burn and pillage their houses. The author of the
+_Memorable Fortnight_ dwells on the point that the militia of Paris was
+formed in self-defence against the excesses of the brigands. Speaking of
+the minute book of the Petit-Saint-Antoine district, an excellent
+authority, M. Charavay, writes: "The burgesses of Paris, less alarmed
+at the plans of the court than at the men to whom the name of _brigands_
+had already been given, organized themselves into a militia to resist
+them: that was their only aim. The movement which on the next day swept
+away the Bastille might perhaps have been repressed by the National
+Guard if its organization had had greater stability." The fact could not
+have been better put.
+
+The Hotel de Ville was attacked, and one of the electors, Legrand, only
+cleared it of the hordes who were filling it with their infernal uproar
+by ordering six barrels of powder to be brought up, and threatening to
+blow the place up if they did not retire.
+
+During the night of July 13, the shops of the bakers and wine-sellers
+were pillaged. The excellent Abbe Morellet, one of the Encyclopaedists,
+who, as we have seen, was locked up in the Bastille under Louis XV.,
+writes: "I spent a great part of the night of the 13th at my windows,
+watching the scum of the population armed with muskets, pikes, and
+skewers, as they forced open the doors of the houses and got themselves
+food and drink, money and arms." Mathieu Dumas also describes in his
+_Souvenirs_ these ragged vagabonds, several almost naked, and with
+horrible faces. During these two days and nights, writes Bailly, Paris
+ran great risk of pillage, and was only saved by the National Guard.
+
+The proceedings of these bandits and the work of the National Guard are
+described in a curious letter from an English doctor, named Rigby, to
+his wife. "It was necessary not only to give arms to those one could
+rely on, but to disarm those of whom little protection could be expected
+and who might become a cause of disorder and harm. This required a good
+deal of skill. Early in the afternoon we began to catch a glimpse here
+and there among the swarms of people, where we saw signs of an
+irritation which might soon develop into excesses, of a man of decent
+appearance, carrying a musket with a soldierly air. These slowly but
+surely increased in number; their intention was evidently to pacify and
+at the same time to disarm the irregular bands. They had for the most
+part accomplished their task before nightfall. Then the citizens who had
+been officially armed occupied the streets almost exclusively: they were
+divided into several sections, some mounting guard at certain points,
+others patrolling the streets, all under the leadership of captains.
+When night came, only very few of those who had armed themselves the
+evening before could be seen. Some, however, had refused to give up
+their arms, and during the night it was seen how well founded had been
+the fears they had inspired, for they started to pillage. But it was too
+late to do so with impunity. The looters were discovered and seized, and
+we learnt next morning that several of these wretches, taken redhanded,
+had been executed." Indeed, the repressive measures of the citizens were
+not wanting in energy. Here and there brigands were strung up to the
+lamp-posts, and then despatched, as they hung there, with musket shots.
+
+The author of the _Authentic History_, who left the best of the
+contemporary accounts of the taking of the Bastille which we possess,
+says rightly enough: "The riot began on the evening of July 12." There
+was thus a combination of disorders and "brigandage" in which the
+capture of the Bastille, though it stands out more prominently than the
+other events, was only a part, and cannot be considered by itself.
+
+The morning of the Fourteenth dawned bright and sunny. A great part of
+the population had remained up all night, and daylight found them still
+harassed with anxiety and alarm. To have arms was the desire of all; the
+citizens and supporters of order, so as to protect themselves; the
+brigands, a part of whom had been disarmed, in order to procure or
+recover the means of assault and pillage. There was a rush to the
+Invalides, where the magazines of effective arms were. This was the
+first violent action of the day. The mob carried off 28,000 muskets and
+twenty-four cannon. And as it was known that other munitions of war were
+deposited in the Bastille, the cry of "To the Invalides!" was succeeded
+by the cry "To the Bastille!"
+
+We must carefully distinguish between the two elements of which the
+throng flocking to the Bastille was composed. On the one hand, a horde
+of nameless vagabonds, those whom the contemporary documents invariably
+style the "brigands"; and, on the other hand, the respectable
+citizens--these certainly formed the minority--who desired arms for the
+equipment of the civil guard. The sole motive impelling this band to
+the Bastille was the wish to procure arms. On this point all documents
+of any value and all the historians who have studied the matter closely
+are in agreement. There was no question of liberty or of tyranny, of
+setting free the prisoners or of protesting against the royal authority.
+The capture of the Bastille was effected amid cries of "Vive le roi!"
+just as, for several months past in the provinces, the granaries had
+been plundered.
+
+About 8 o'clock in the morning, the electors at the Hotel de Ville
+received some inhabitants of the Suburb Saint-Antoine who came to
+complain that the district was threatened by the cannon trained on it
+from the towers of the Bastille. These cannon were used for firing
+salutes on occasions of public rejoicing, and were so placed that they
+could do no harm whatever to the adjacent districts. But the electors
+sent some of their number to the Bastille, where the governor, de
+Launey, received the deputation with the greatest affability, kept them
+to lunch, and at their request withdrew the cannon from the embrasures.
+To this deputation there succeeded another, which, however, was quite
+unofficial, consisting of three persons, with the advocate Thuriot de la
+Rosiere at the head. They were admitted as their predecessors had been.
+Thuriot was the eloquent spokesman, "in the name of the nation and the
+fatherland." He delivered an ultimatum to the governor and harangued the
+garrison, consisting of 95 Invalides and 30 Swiss soldiers. Some
+thousand men were thronging round the Bastille, vociferating wildly. The
+garrison swore not to fire unless they were attacked. De Launey said
+that without orders he could do no more than withdraw the cannon from
+the embrasures, but he went so far as to block up these embrasures with
+planks. Then Thuriot took his leave and returned to the Hotel de Ville,
+the crowd meanwhile becoming more and more threatening.
+
+[Illustration: THE CAPTURE OF THE BASTILLE.
+
+_From an anonymous contemporary painting now in the Hotel Carnavalet._]
+
+"The entrance to the first courtyard, that of the barracks, was open,"
+says M. Fernand Bournon in his admirable account of the events of this
+day; "but de Launey had ordered the garrison to retire within the
+enclosure, and to raise the outer drawbridge by which the court of the
+governor was reached, and which in the ordinary way used to be lowered
+during the day. Two daring fellows dashed forward and scaled the roof of
+the guard-house, one of them a soldier named Louis Tournay: the name of
+the other is unknown. They shattered the chains of the drawbridge with
+their axes, and it fell."
+
+It has been said in a recent work, in which defects of judgment and
+criticism are scarcely masked by a cumbrous parade of erudition, that
+Tournay and his companion performed their feat under the fire of the
+garrison. At this moment the garrison did not fire a single shot,
+contenting themselves with urging the besiegers to retire. "While M. de
+Launey and his officers contented themselves with threats, these two
+vigorous champions succeeded in breaking in the doors and in lowering
+the outer drawbridge; then the horde of brigands advanced in a body and
+dashed towards the second bridge, which they wished to capture, firing
+at the troops as they ran. It was then for the first time that M. de
+Launey, perceiving his error in allowing the operations at the first
+bridge to be managed so quietly, ordered the soldiers to fire, which
+caused a disorderly stampede on the part of the rabble, which was more
+brutal than brave; and it is at this point that the calumnies against
+the governor begin. Transposing the order of events, it has been
+asserted that he had sent out a message of peace, that the people had
+advanced in reliance on his word, and that many citizens were
+massacred." This alleged treachery of de Launey, immediately hawked
+about Paris, was one of the events of the day. It is contradicted not
+only by all the accounts of the besieged, but by the besiegers
+themselves, and is now rejected by all historians.
+
+A wine-seller named Cholat, aided by one Baron, nicknamed La Giroflee,
+had brought into position a piece of ordnance in the long walk of the
+arsenal. They fired, but the gun's recoil somewhat seriously wounded the
+two artillerymen, and they were its only victims. As these means were
+insufficient to overturn the Bastille, the besiegers set about devising
+others. A pretty young girl named Mdlle. de Monsigny, daughter of the
+captain of the company of Invalides at the Bastille, had been
+encountered in the barrack yard. Some madmen imagined that she was
+Mdlle. de Launey. They dragged her to the edge of the moat, and gave the
+garrison to understand by their gestures that they were going to burn
+her alive if the place was not surrendered. They had thrown the unhappy
+child, who had fainted, upon a mattress, to which they had already set
+light. M. de Monsigny saw the hideous spectacle from a window of the
+towers, and, desperately rushing down to save his child, he was killed
+by two shots. These were tricks in the siege of strongholds of which
+Duguesclin would never have dreamed. A soldier named Aubin Bonnemere
+courageously interposed and succeeded in saving the girl.
+
+A detachment of Gardes Francaises, coming up with two pieces of
+artillery which the Hotel de Ville had allowed to be removed, gave a
+more serious aspect to the siege. But the name of Gardes Francaises must
+not give rise to misapprehension: the soldiers of the regular army under
+the _ancien regime_ must not be compared with those of the present day.
+The regiment of Gardes Francaises in particular had fallen into a
+profound state of disorganization and degradation. The privates were
+permitted to follow a trade in the city, by this means augmenting their
+pay. It is certain that in the majority of cases the trade they followed
+was that of the bully. "Almost all the soldiers in the Guards belong to
+this class," we read in the _Encyclopedie methodique_, "and many men
+indeed only enlist in the corps in order to live on the earnings of
+these unfortunates." The numerous documents relating to the Gardes
+Francaises preserved in the archives of the Bastille give the most
+precise confirmation to this statement. We see, for example, that the
+relatives of the engraver Nicolas de Larmessin requested a _lettre de
+cachet_ ordering their son to be locked up in jail, where they would pay
+for his keep, "because he had threatened to enlist in the Gardes
+Francaises."
+
+From the fifteen cannon placed on the towers, not a single shot was
+fired during the siege. Within the chateau, three guns loaded with grape
+defended the inner drawbridge; the governor had only one of them fired,
+and that only once. Not wishing to massacre the mob, de Launey
+determined to blow up the Bastille and find his grave among the ruins.
+The Invalides Ferrand and Bequart flung themselves upon him to prevent
+him from carrying out his intention. "The Bastille was not captured by
+main force," says Elie, whose testimony cannot be suspected of
+partiality in favour of the defenders; "it surrendered before it was
+attacked, on my giving my word of honour as a French officer that all
+should escape unscathed if they submitted."
+
+We know how this promise was kept, in spite of the heroic efforts of
+Elie and Hulin, to whom posterity owes enthusiastic homage. Is the mob
+to be reproached for these atrocious crimes? It was a savage horde, the
+scum of the population. De Launey, whose confidence and kindness had
+never faltered, was massacred with every circumstance of horror. "The
+Abbe Lefevre," says Dusaulx, "was an involuntary witness of his last
+moments: 'I saw him fall,' he told me, 'without being able to help him;
+he defended himself like a lion, and if only ten men had behaved as he
+did at the Bastille, it would not have been taken.'" His murderers
+slowly severed his head from his trunk with a penknife. The operation
+was performed by a cook's apprentice named Desnot, "who knew, as he
+afterwards proudly said, how to manage a joint." The deposition of this
+brute should be read. It has been published by M. Guiffrey in the _Revue
+historique_. To give himself courage, Desnot had gulped down brandy
+mixed with gunpowder, and he added that what he had done was done in the
+hope of obtaining a medal.
+
+"We learnt by-and-by," continues Dusaulx, "of the death of M. de
+Losme-Salbray, which all good men deplored." De Losme had been the good
+angel of the prisoners during his term of office as major of the
+Bastille: there are touching details showing to what lengths he carried
+his kindliness and delicacy of feeling. At the moment when the mob was
+hacking at him, there happened to pass the Marquis de Pelleport, who had
+been imprisoned in the Bastille for several years; he sprang forward to
+save him: "Stop!" he cried, "you are killing the best of men." But he
+fell badly wounded, as also did the Chevalier de Jean, who had joined
+him in the attempt to rescue the unfortunate man from the hands of the
+mob. The adjutant Miray, Person the lieutenant of the Invalides, and
+Dumont, one of the Invalides, were massacred. Miray was led to the
+Greve, where the mob had resolved to execute him. Struck with fists and
+clubs, stabbed with knives, he crawled along in his death agony. He
+expired, "done to death with pin-pricks," before arriving at the place
+of execution. The Invalides Asselin and Bequart were hanged. It was
+Bequart who had prevented de Launey from blowing up the Bastille. "He
+was gashed with two sword-strokes," we read in the _Moniteur_, "and a
+sabre cut had lopped off his wrist. They carried the hand in triumph
+through the streets of the city--the very hand to which so many citizens
+owed their safety." "After I had passed the arcade of the Hotel de
+Ville," says Restif de la Bretonne, who has left so curious a page about
+the 14th of July, "I came upon some cannibals: one--I saw him with my
+own eyes--brought home to me the meaning of a horrible word heard so
+often since: he was carrying at the end of a _taille-cime_[56] the
+bleeding entrails of a victim of the mob's fury, and this horrible
+top-knot caused no one to turn a hair. Farther on I met the captured
+Invalides and Swiss: from young and pretty lips--I shudder at it
+still--came screams of 'Hang them! Hang them!'"
+
+Further, they massacred Flesselles, the provost of the guilds, accused
+of a treacherous action as imaginary as that of de Launey. They cut the
+throat of Foulon, an old man of seventy-four years, who, as Taine tells
+us, had spent during the preceding winter 60,000 francs in order to
+provide the poor with work. They assassinated Berthier, one of the
+distinguished men of the time. Foulon's head was cut off; they tore
+Berthier's heart from his body to carry it in procession through
+Paris--charming touch!--in a bouquet of white carnations. For the fun
+was growing fast and furious. De Launey's head was borne on a pike to
+the Palais Royal, then to the new bridge, where it was made to do
+obeisance three times to the statue of Henri IV., with the words,
+"Salute thy master!" At the Palais Royal, two of the conquerors had
+merrily set themselves down at a dining-table in an entresol. As we
+garnish our tables with flowers, so these men had placed on the table a
+trunkless head and gory entrails; but as the crowd below cried out for
+them, they shot them gaily out of the window.
+
+Those who had remained in front of the Bastille had dashed on in quest
+of booty. As at the pillage of the warehouses of Reveillon and Henriot,
+and of the convent of the Lazarists, the first impulse of the conquerors
+was to bound forward to the cellar. "This rabble," writes the author of
+the _Authentic History_, "were so blind drunk that they made in one body
+for the quarters of the staff, breaking the furniture, doors, and
+windows. All this time their comrades, taking the pillagers for some of
+the garrison, were firing on them."
+
+No one gave a thought to the prisoners, but the keys were secured and
+carried in triumph through Paris. The doors of the rooms in which the
+prisoners were kept had to be broken in. The wretched men, terrified by
+the uproar, were more dead than alive. These victims of arbitrary power
+were exactly seven in number. Four were forgers, Bechade, Laroche, La
+Correge, and Pujade; these individuals had forged bills of exchange, to
+the loss of two Parisian bankers: while their case was being dealt with
+in regular course at the Chatelet, they were lodged in the Bastille,
+where they consulted every day with their counsel. Then there was the
+young Comte de Solages, who was guilty of monstrous crimes meriting
+death; he was kept in the Bastille out of regard for his family, who
+defrayed his expenses. Finally there were two lunatics, Tavernier and de
+Whyte. We know what immense progress has been made during the past
+century in the methods of treating lunatics. In those days they locked
+them up. Tavernier and de Whyte were before long transferred to
+Charenton, where assuredly they were not so well treated as they had
+been at the Bastille.
+
+Such were the seven martyrs who were led in triumphant procession
+through the streets, amid the shouts of a deeply moved people.
+
+Of the besiegers, ninety-eight dead were counted, some of whom had met
+their death through the assailants' firing on one another. Several had
+been killed by falling into the moat. Of this total, only nineteen were
+married, and only five had children. These are details of some interest.
+
+There was no thought of burying either the conquerors or the conquered.
+At midnight on Wednesday the 15th, the presence of the corpses of the
+officers of the Bastille, still lying in the Place de Greve, was
+notified to the commissaries of the Chatelet. In his admirable work M.
+Furnand Bournon has published the ghastly report that was drawn up on
+that night. It is a fitting crown to the work of the great day: "We, the
+undersigned commissaries, duly noted down the declaration of the said
+Sieur Houdan, and having then gone down into the courtyard of the
+Chatelet (whither the corpses had just been carried), we found there
+seven corpses of the male sex, the first without a head, clothed in a
+coat, vest, breeches, and black silk stockings, with a fine shirt, but
+no shoes; the second also without a head, clothed in a vest of red
+stuff, breeches of nankeen with regimental buttons, blue silk stockings
+with a small black pattern worked in; the third also headless, clothed
+in a shirt, breeches, and white cotton stockings; the fourth also
+headless, clothed in a blood-stained shirt, breeches, and black
+stockings; the fifth clad in a shirt, blue breeches, and white gaiters,
+with brown hair, apparently about forty years old, and having part of
+his forearm cut off and severe bruises on his throat; the sixth clothed
+in breeches and white gaiters, with severe bruises on his throat; and
+the seventh, clothed in a shirt, breeches, and black silk stockings,
+disfigured beyond recognition."
+
+Meanwhile the majority of the victors, the first moments of intoxication
+having passed, were hiding themselves like men who had committed a
+crime. The disorder in the city was extreme. "The commissioners of the
+districts," writes the Sicilian ambassador, "seeing the peril in which
+the inhabitants were placed before this enormous number of armed men,
+including brigands and men let out of prison on the previous days,
+formed patrols of the National Guard. They proclaimed martial law, or
+rather, they issued one solitary law declaring that whoever robbed or
+set fire to a house would be hanged. Indeed, not a day passed without
+five and even as many as ten persons suffering this penalty. To this
+salutary expedient we owe our lives and the safety of our houses."
+
+More than one conqueror of the Bastille was hanged in this way, which
+was a great pity, for two days later his glorious brow might have been
+crowned with laurels and flowers!
+
+It has been said that the Bastille was captured by the people of Paris.
+But the number of the besiegers amounted to no more than a thousand,
+among whom, as Marat has already brought to our notice, there were many
+provincials and foreigners. As to the Parisians, they had come in great
+numbers, as they always do, to see what was going on. We have this too
+on the testimony of Marat. "I was present at the taking of the
+Bastille," writes the Chancellor de Pasquier also: "what has been called
+the 'fight' was not serious, and of resistance there was absolutely
+none. A few musket shots were fired to which there was no reply, and
+four or five cannon shots. We know the results of this boasted victory,
+which has brought a shower of compliments upon the heads of the
+so-called conquerors: the truth is that this great fight did not give a
+moment's uneasiness to the numerous spectators who had hurried up to see
+the result. Among them there was many a pretty woman; they had left
+their carriages at a distance in order to approach more easily. I was
+leaning on the end of the barrier which closed in the garden skirting
+Beaumarchais' garden in the direction of the Place de la Bastille. By my
+side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Comedie Francaise: we stayed to the end,
+and I gave her my arm to her carriage. As pretty as any woman could be,
+Mdlle. Contat added to the graces of her person an intelligence of the
+most brilliant order."
+
+By next day there was quite another story. The Bastille had been
+"stormed" in a formidable and heroic assault lasting a quarter of an
+hour. The guns of the assailants had made a breach in its walls. These,
+it is true, were still standing intact; but that did not signify, the
+guns had made a breach, unquestionably! The seven prisoners who had been
+set free had been a disappointment, for the best will in the world could
+not make them anything but scoundrels and lunatics; some one invented an
+eighth, the celebrated Comte de Lorges, the white-headed hero and
+martyr. This Comte de Lorges had no existence; but that fact also is
+nothing to the purpose: he makes an admirable and touching story. There
+was talk of instruments of torture that had been discovered: "an iron
+corslet, invented to hold a man fast by all his joints, and fix him in
+eternal immobility:" it was really a piece of knightly armour dating
+from the middle ages, taken from the magazine of obsolete arms which was
+kept at the Bastille. Some one discovered also a machine "not less
+destructive, which was brought to the light of day, but no one could
+guess its name or its special use"; it was a secret printing-press
+seized in the house of one Francois Lenormand in 1786. Finally, while
+digging in the bastion, some one came upon the bones of Protestants who
+had once been buried there, the prejudices of the time not allowing
+their remains to be laid in the consecrated ground of the cemetery: the
+vision of secret executions in the deepest dungeons of the Bastille was
+conjured up in the mind of the discoverers, and Mirabeau sent these
+terrible words echoing through France: "The ministers were lacking in
+foresight, they forgot to eat the bones!"
+
+The compilation of the roll of the conquerors of the Bastille was a
+laborious work. A great number of those who had been in the thick of the
+fray did not care to make themselves known: they did not know but that
+their laurel-crowned heads might be stuck aloft! It is true that these
+bashful heroes were speedily replaced by a host of fine fellows
+who--from the moment when it was admitted that the conquerors were
+heroes, deserving of honours, pensions, and medals--were fully persuaded
+that they had sprung to the assault, and in the very first rank. The
+final list contained 863 names.
+
+Victor Fournel in a charming book has sung the epic, at once ludicrous
+and lachrymose, of the men of the 14th of July. The book, which ought to
+be read, gives a host of delightful episodes it is impossible to
+abridge. In the sequel these founders of liberty did not shine either
+through the services they rendered to the Republic, or through their
+fidelity to the immortal principles. The Hulins--Hulin, however, had
+done nobly in trying to save de Launey--the Palloys, the Fourniers, the
+Latudes, and how many others! were the most servile lackeys of the
+Empire, and those of them who survived were the most assiduous servants
+of the Restoration. Under the Empire, the conquerors of the Bastille
+tried to secure the Legion of Honour for the whole crew. They went about
+soliciting pensions even up to 1830, and at that date, after forty-three
+years, there were still 401 conquerors living. In 1848 the conquerors
+made another appearance. There was still mention of pensions for the
+conquerors of the Bastille in the budget of 1874--let us save the
+ladder, the ladder of Latude!
+
+This is the amusing side of their story. But there is a painful side
+too: their rivalries with the Gardes Francaises, who charged them with
+filching the glory from them, and with the "volunteers of the Bastille."
+The heroes were acquainted with calumny and opprobrium. There were, too,
+deadly dissensions among their own body. There were the true conquerors,
+and others who, while they were true conquerors, were nevertheless not
+true: there were always "traitors" among the conquerors, as well as
+"patriots." On July 1, 1790, two of the conquerors were found beaten to
+death near Beaumarchais' garden, in front of the theatre of their
+exploits. Next day there was a violent quarrel between four conquerors
+and some soldiers. In December two others were assassinated near the
+Champs de Mars. Early in 1791 two were wounded, and a third was
+discovered with his neck in a noose, in a ditch near the military
+school. Such were the nocturnal doings on the barriers.
+
+It remains to explain this amazing veering round of opinion, this
+legend, of all things the least likely, which transformed into great men
+the "brigands" of April, June, and July, 1789.
+
+The first reason is explained in the following excellent passage from
+_Rabagas_[57]:--
+
+     _Carle._--But how then do you distinguish a riot from a revolution?
+
+     _Boubard._--A riot is when the mob is defeated ... they are all
+     curs. A revolution is when the mob is the stronger: they are all
+     heroes!
+
+During the night of July 14, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld woke Louis
+XVI. to announce to him the capture of the Bastille. "It's a revolt
+then," said the king. "Sire," replied the duke, "it is a revolution."
+
+The day on which the royal power, in its feebleness and irresolution,
+abandoned Paris to the mob, was the day of its abdication. The Parisians
+attempted to organize themselves into a citizen militia in order to
+shoot down the brigands. The movement on the Bastille was a stroke of
+genius on the part of the latter--instinctive, no doubt, but for all
+that a stroke of genius. The people now recognized its masters, and with
+its usual facility it hailed the new regime with adulation. "From that
+moment," said a deputy, "there was an end of liberty, even in the
+Assembly; France was dumb before thirty factionaries."
+
+What rendered the national enthusiasm for the conquerors more easy was
+precisely all those legends to which credence was given, in all
+sincerity, by the most intelligent people in France--the legends on the
+horrors of the Bastille and the cruelties of arbitrary power. For fifty
+years they had been disseminated throughout the kingdom, and had taken
+firm root. The pamphlets of Linguet and Mirabeau, the recent stupendous
+success of the _Memoirs of Latude_, had given these stories renewed
+strength and vigour. Compelled to bow before the triumphant mob, people
+preferred to regard themselves--so they silenced their conscience--as
+hailing a deliverer. There was some sincerity in this movement of
+opinion, too. The same districts which on July 13 took arms against the
+brigands could exclaim, after the crisis had passed: "The districts
+applaud the capture of a fortress which, regarded hitherto as the seat
+of despotism, dishonoured the French name under a popular king."
+
+In his edition of the _Memoirs of Barras_, M. George Duruy has well
+explained the transformation of opinion. "In the _Memoirs_, the capture
+of the Bastille is merely the object of a brief and casual mention.
+Barras only retained and transmits to us one single detail. He saw
+leaving the dungeons the 'victims of arbitrary power, saved at last from
+rack and torture and from living tombs.' Such a dearth of information is
+the more likely to surprise us in that Barras was not only a spectator
+of the event, but composed, in that same year 1789, an account of it
+which has now been discovered. Now his narrative of 1789 is as
+interesting as the passage in the _Memoirs_ is insignificant. The
+impression left by these pages, written while the events were vividly
+pictured in his mind, is, we are bound to say, that the famous capture
+of the Bastille was after all only a horrible and sanguinary saturnalia.
+There is no word of heroism in this first narrative: nothing about
+'victims of arbitrary power' snatched from 'torture and living tombs';
+but on the other hand, veritable deeds of cannibalism perpetrated by the
+victors. That is what Barras saw, and what he recorded on those pages
+where, at that period of his life, he noted down day by day the events
+of which he was a witness. Thirty years slip by. Barras has sat on the
+benches of the 'Montagne.'[58] He has remained an inflexible
+revolutionist. He gathers his notes together in view of _Memoirs_ he
+intends to publish. At this time, the revolutionist version of the
+capture of the Bastille is officially established. It is henceforth
+accepted that the Bastille fell before an impulse of heroism on the part
+of the people of Paris, and that its fall brought to light horrible
+mysteries of iniquity. This legend, which has so profoundly distorted
+the event, was contemporary with the event itself, a spontaneous fruit
+of the popular imagination. And Barras, having to speak of the capture
+in his _Memoirs_, discovers his old narrative among his papers, and
+reads it, I imagine, with a sort of stupefaction. What! the capture of
+the Bastille was no more than that!--and he resolutely casts it aside."
+
+In the provinces, the outbreak had a violent counterpart. "There
+instantly arose," writes Victor Fournel, "a strange, extraordinary,
+grotesque panic, which swept through the greater part of France like a
+hurricane of madness, and which many of us have heard our grand-fathers
+tell stories about under the name of the 'day of the brigands' or 'the
+day of the fear.' It broke out everywhere in the second fortnight of
+July, 1789. Suddenly, one knew not whence, an awful rumour burst upon
+the town or village: the brigands are here, at our very gates: they are
+advancing in troops of fifteen or twenty thousand, burning the standing
+crops, ravaging everything! Dust-stained couriers appear, spreading the
+terrible news. An unknown horseman goes through at the gallop, with
+haggard cheeks and dishevelled hair: 'Up, to arms, they are here!' Some
+natives rush up: it is only too true: they have seen them, the bandits
+are no more than a league or two away! The alarm bell booms out, the
+people fly to arms, line up in battle order, start off to reconnoitre.
+In the end, nothing happens, but their terrors revive. The brigands have
+only turned aside: every man must remain under arms." In the frontier
+provinces, there were rumours of foreign enemies. The Bretons and
+Normans shook in fear of an English descent: in Champagne and Lorraine
+a German invasion was feared.
+
+Along with these scenes of panic must be placed the deeds of violence,
+the assassinations, plunderings, burnings, which suddenly desolated the
+whole of France. In a book which sheds a flood of light on these facts,
+Gustave Bord gives a thrilling picture of them. The chateaux were
+invaded, and the owner, if they could lay hands on him, was roasted on
+the soles of his feet. At Versailles the mob threw themselves on the
+hangman as he was about to execute a parricide, and the criminal was set
+free: the state of terror in which the town was plunged is depicted in
+the journals of the municipal assembly. On July 23, the governor of
+Champagne sends word that the rising is general in his district. At
+Rennes, at Nantes, at Saint-Malo, at Angers, at Caen, at Bordeaux, at
+Strasburg, at Metz, the mob engaged in miniature captures of the
+Bastille more or less accompanied with pillage and assassination. Armed
+bands went about cutting down the woods, breaking down the dikes,
+fishing in the ponds.[59] The disorganization was complete.
+
+Nothing could more clearly show the character of the government under
+the _ancien regime:_ it was wholly dependent on traditions. Nowhere was
+there a concrete organization to secure the maintenance of order and
+the enforcement of the king's decrees. France was a federation of
+innumerable republics, held together by a single bond, the sentiment of
+loyalty every citizen felt towards the crown. One puff of wind sent the
+crown flying, and then disorder and panic bewilderment dominated the
+whole nation. The door was open to all excesses, and the means of
+checking them miserably failed. Under the _ancien regime_, devotion to
+the king was the whole government, the whole administration, the whole
+life of the state. And thus arose the necessity for the domination of
+the Terror, and the legislative work of Napoleon.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Allegre, Latude's fellow prisoner, 154, 185-192, 217.
+
+Ameilhon, city librarian, 55.
+
+Argenson, D', 60, 72, 95, 175, 182.
+
+Arsenal library, 55, 56.
+
+Atrocities of the mob, 258-266.
+
+Avedick, Armenian patriarch, 133.
+
+
+Barras, 272.
+
+Bastille, its situation, 47;
+  appearance, 48;
+  repute, 49, 50;
+  archives, 50-56;
+  origin, 57;
+  site, 58;
+  construction, 59, 60;
+  additions to, 61;
+  appearance in later days, 61, 62;
+  early uses, 63;
+  becomes state prison, 63, 64;
+  prisoners, 65;
+  its administration, 66;
+  gradual transformation, 67;
+  character of prisoners, 68, 69;
+  secretary, 70;
+  office of lieutenant of police, 71;
+  his duties, 71, 72;
+  becomes like modern prisons, 77, 78;
+  abolition of torture, 78;
+  duration of prisoners' detention, 80;
+  expenses, 81;
+  plans for altering, 81-83;
+  a _prison de luxe_, 85;
+  treatment of prisoners, 86;
+  the rooms, 87;
+  manner of prisoners' entrance, 88, 89;
+  cells, 92, 93;
+  tower rooms, 93, 94;
+  furniture, 95, 96;
+  examination of prisoners, 96, 97;
+  indemnified if innocent, 98, 99;
+  allowed companions, 100, 101;
+  prison fare, 102-107;
+  clothes, 107, 108;
+  books, 108, 109;
+  exercise, 109;
+  diversions, 109, 110;
+  funerals, 110, 111;
+  liberation, 111, 112;
+  the Iron Mask, 114-146;
+  men of letters, 147-165;
+  capture, 238-272.
+
+Berryer, 175, 176, 178, 184, 188, 189, 193.
+
+Besmaus, de, 70.
+
+Binguet, 171, 179.
+
+Bread riots, 242, 243.
+
+Breteuil, 78, 248.
+
+Brigands, 241, 245, 250.
+
+Burgaud, 135.
+
+
+Campan, Madame de, 144, 145.
+
+Carutti's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+Cellamare conspiracy, 72, 73.
+
+Character of French government and society, 239-241.
+
+Chevalier, major, 49, 51, 120, 121, 187, 189, 194.
+
+Citizen militia, 251-253.
+
+Clothes of prisoners, 107, 108.
+
+Crosne, de, lieutenant of police, 244-246.
+
+
+D'Aubrespy, Jeanneton, 169, 201.
+
+Dauger suggested as Iron Mask, 135.
+
+Desmoulins, 247, 249.
+
+Diderot, 165.
+
+Diversions of prisoners, 109, 110.
+
+Du Junca's journal, 69, 89, 90, 114-116, 122.
+
+Dusaulx, 51.
+
+
+Encyclopaedia, 80.
+
+Estrades, Abbe d', 138-142.
+
+
+Food of prisoners, 102-107.
+
+Funerals, 110.
+
+
+Games of prisoners, 101, 102.
+
+Gleichen, baron, 130.
+
+Griffet, Father, 120.
+
+
+Heiss, Baron, first to suggest true solution of Iron Mask, 136.
+
+Henriot, 245.
+
+Houdon, sculptor, 82.
+
+
+July 14th, 255-276.
+
+Jung's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+
+Kingston, Duchess of, 225, 227.
+
+
+La Beaumelle, 152-155.
+
+Lagrange-Chancel, 132.
+
+La Reynie, 71.
+
+Latude, 168-237.
+
+Launay, Mdlle. de, _see_ Staal, Madame de.
+
+Launey, de, governor, 256, 258, 260.
+
+Lauzun, 91.
+
+Legros, Madame de, 223-226, 232, 233.
+
+Lenoir, lieutenant of police, 186.
+
+_Lettres de cachet_, 240.
+
+Lieutenancy of police created, 97.
+
+Linguet, 163-165.
+
+Loiseleur's theory of Iron Mask, 134.
+
+Loquin's theory of Iron Mask, 133.
+
+Losme, de, 261.
+
+Louis XIV. and Iron Mask, 137-140.
+
+Louis XV. and Iron Mask, 144.
+
+Louis XVI. and Iron Mask, 144.
+
+Louvois, 70, 141.
+
+
+Maisonrouge, king's lieutenant, 73-76.
+
+Malesherbes, 78, 156, 216.
+
+Man in the Iron Mask, documents, 114-125;
+  legends, 125-136;
+  true solution, 136-146.
+
+Marmontel, 158-163.
+
+Mattioli, the Iron Mask, 136-146.
+
+Maurepas, 144, 173-175.
+
+Mirabeau, 166, 167.
+
+Morellet, 155-158, 253.
+
+Moyria, de, 218-220.
+
+
+Necker, 248.
+
+
+Palatine, Madame, 125.
+
+Palteau, M. de, 118, 119.
+
+Papon's theory of Iron Mask, 127.
+
+Parlement, 76, 77.
+
+Pensions to prisoners, 98, 99.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, 173, 206.
+
+Pontchartrain, 69.
+
+Puget, king's lieutenant, 83.
+
+
+Quesnay, Dr., 175, 177, 178.
+
+
+Ravaisson, librarian, 54, 55, 134.
+
+Register of St. Paul's church, 117, 142, 143.
+
+Regnier's lines, 59.
+
+Renneville's meals, 103, 104.
+
+Reveillon, 245, 246.
+
+Ricarville, companion of the Iron Mask, 123, 124.
+
+Richelieu, Cardinal, 63-66.
+
+Richelieu, Duke de, 76, 129, 130.
+
+Rigby, Dr., 253, 254.
+
+Risings in the provinces, 273.
+
+Rochebrune, commissary, 195.
+
+Rohan, Cardinal de, 222.
+
+
+Sade, Marquis de, 95.
+
+Saint-Mars, governor, 87, 115-119, 127, 142.
+
+Saint-Marc, detective, 169, 176, 180, 183, 192.
+
+Sartine, de, 49, 202, 203, 207, 210, 215.
+
+Sauve, Madame de, her dress, 108.
+
+Solages, de, 84.
+
+Staal, Madame de, 73-76, 94, 95, 102.
+
+
+Taules, de, 132.
+
+Tavernier, 106.
+
+Theories on Iron Mask, 125-136.
+
+Thuriot de la Rosiere, 256.
+
+Tirmont, companion of Iron Mask, 123, 124.
+
+
+Vieux-Maisons, Madame de, 128.
+
+Villette, Marquis de, 224.
+
+Vinache's library, 109.
+
+Vincennes, 165-167, 180.
+
+Voltaire, 99, 126, 128, 129, 148-152.
+
+LONDON:
+
+GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LD.
+
+ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, CLERKENWELL, E.C.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The castle of Tours, 147 miles south-west of Paris, which Louis XI.
+made his favourite residence. See Scott's _Quentin Durward_.--T.
+
+[2] Jean Balue (1471-1491), chaplain to Louis XI. For traitorously
+divulging the king's schemes to his enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, he was
+for eleven years shut up in the castle of Loches, in an iron-bound
+wooden cage.--T.
+
+[3] A French author (1624-1693) who was involved in the fall of Louis
+XIV.'s dishonest finance minister, Fouquet, in 1661, and was imprisoned
+for five years in the Bastille, amusing himself with reading the Fathers
+of the Church and taming a spider. See Kitchin's _History of France_,
+iii. 155-157.--T.
+
+[4] Antoine de Caumont, duc de Lauzun (1633-1723), a courtier of Louis
+XIV., whose favours to the Duke made Louvois, the minister, his bitter
+enemy. He was twice imprisoned in the Bastille, the second time at the
+instance of Madame de Montespan. He commanded the French auxiliaries of
+James II. in Ireland. See Macaulay's _History_, Chaps. IX., XII.,
+XV.--T.
+
+[5] A game played with a sort of box, in the top of which are cut holes
+of equal size, and with metal discs or balls, the object being to pitch
+the balls into the holes from a distance. A similar game may be seen at
+any English country fair.--T.
+
+[6] The famous president of the Cour des Aides and Minister of the
+Interior, renowned for his consistent support of the people against
+oppression. He was banished in 1771 for remonstrating against the abuses
+of law; but returning to Paris to oppose the execution of Louis XVI., he
+was guillotined in 1794.--T.
+
+[7] Antonio del Giudice, prince de Cellamare (1657-1733), the Spanish
+ambassador, was the instigator of a plot against the Regent in 1718. See
+Kitchin, _ib._ iii. 474.--T.
+
+[8] The Hotel des Invalides, residence of pensioned soldiers, &c. still
+a well-known building of Paris.--T.
+
+[9] A chateau, four miles east of Paris, notable as the place where St.
+Louis, the royal lawgiver of France, dispensed justice. The _donjon_
+still exists, serving now as a soldier's barracks.--T.
+
+[10] One of the first prisons on the system of solitary confinement in
+cells erected in Paris. It dates from 1850.--T.
+
+[11] The Abbe de Buquoy (1653-1740) owed his imprisonment originally to
+having been found in company with dealers in contraband salt when the
+_gabelle_, or salt-tax, compelled the French people to buy salt, whether
+they wanted it or not, at a price _two thousand times_ its true value.
+He was a man of very eccentric views, one of which was that woman was
+man's chief evil, and that was why, when the patriarch Job was stripped
+of children, flocks, herds, &c., his wife was left to him!--T.
+
+[12] The madhouse, eight miles east of Paris.--T.
+
+[13] A chateau originally outside Paris, now included in the city
+itself, once used as a hospital and jail, now a hospital for aged and
+indigent poor and for lunatics. The first experiments with the
+guillotine were tried there.--T.
+
+[14] See _infra_, p. 83.
+
+[15] The title role in a comedy by Henri Mounier, entitled _Grandeur et
+decadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme_ (1852). He is a writing-master, very
+vain, given (like Mr. Micawber) to tall talk and long-winded periods. He
+has become typical of "much cry and little wool." As an officer of the
+National Guard he says, "This sabre constitutes the finest day in my
+life! I accept it, and if ever I find myself at the head of your
+phalanxes, I shall know how to use it in defence of our
+institutions--and, if need arise, to fight for them!"--T.
+
+[16] In the early days of the Revolution, Paris was divided into
+sections or wards, and as the _pike_ had played a great part in the
+recent disturbances, one of the wards was known as the "Pike"
+section.--T.
+
+[17] A disciple of the Marquis de Sade (see p. 35), a notorious
+debauchee, whose book _Justine_ was a disgusting mixture of brutality
+and obscenity.--T.
+
+[18] The pseudonym of Beffroy de Reigny (1757-1811), author of farces,
+and of a _Precis historique de la prise de la Bastille_.--T.
+
+[19] The name given to the constitutional struggles of the nobles and
+the Parlement of Paris against Mazarin and the royal power (1648-1654).
+The name is derived from _fronde_, a sling. A wit of the Parlement, one
+Bachaumont, "told the lawyers of that august body that they were like
+schoolboys playing in the town ditches with their slings, who run away
+directly the watchman appears, and begin again when his back is turned."
+See Kitchin, iii. pp. 102-128.--T.
+
+[20] See _Monte-Cristo_.--T.
+
+[21] Delivered to the French Association for the Advancement of Science
+in 1893.
+
+[22] The battle fought on August 10, 1557, in which Egmont with a
+combined force of Spaniards, Flemish, and English (sent by Queen Mary)
+routed Constable Montmorency and the finest chivalry of France. It was
+in commemoration of this victory that Philip II. built the palace of the
+Escurial, shaped like a gridiron because the battle was fought on St.
+Lawrence's day.--T.
+
+[23] The following unpublished letter from Pontchartrain to Bernaville,
+intimating his probable nomination as governor of the Bastille, shows
+exactly what Louis XIV.'s government demanded of the head of the great
+state prison:-
+
+"Versailles, September 28, 1707.
+
+     "I have received your letter of yesterday. I can only repeat what I
+     have already written: to pay constant attention to what goes on in
+     the Bastille; to neglect none of the duties of a good governor; to
+     maintain order and discipline among the soldiers of the garrison,
+     seeing that they keep watch with all the necessary exactitude, and
+     that their wages are regularly paid; to take care that the
+     prisoners are well fed and treated with kindness, preventing them,
+     however, from having any communication with people outside and from
+     writing letters; finally, to be yourself especially prompt in
+     informing me of anything particular that may happen at the
+     Bastille. You will understand that in following such a line of
+     action you cannot but please the king, and perhaps induce him to
+     grant you the post of governor; on my part, you may count on my
+     neglecting no means of representing your services to His Majesty in
+     the proper light.
+
+"I am, &c.,
+
+"PONTCHARTRAIN."
+
+
+
+
+
+[24] The appellation of the eldest brother of the reigning king.--T.
+
+[25] Under the _ancien regime_, there being no Minister of the Interior
+(Home Secretary), each of the ministers (the War Minister, Minister for
+Foreign Affairs, &c.) had a part of France under his charge. The
+Minister of Paris was usually what we should call the Lord
+Chamberlain.--T.
+
+[26] The court which up to the time of the Revolution was the seat of
+justice, presided over by the Provost of Paris. It held its sittings in
+the castle known as the Chatelet.--T.
+
+[27] A judicial, not a legislative body. It was constantly in antagonism
+to the king.--T.
+
+[28] The famous Encyclopaedia edited by D'Alembert and Diderot. It
+occupied twenty years of the life of the latter, and went through many
+vicissitudes; its free criticism of existing institutions provoking the
+enmity of the government. Voltaire was one of its largest
+contributors.--T.
+
+[29] This raised Linguet's indignation. "The consideration of this
+enormous expense has given to some ministers, among others to M. Necker,
+a notion of reform; if this should come to anything, it would be very
+disgraceful to spring from no other cause. 'Suppress the Bastille out of
+economy!' said on this subject, a few days ago, one of the youngest and
+most eloquent orators of England."
+
+[30] The Hotel Carnavalet, museum in Paris, where a large number of
+documents and books are preserved relating to the history of the
+city.--T.
+
+[31] It may be noted that the different escapes contributed to the
+gradual tightening of the rules of the Bastille. After the escape of the
+Comte de Bucquoy, such ornaments as the prisoners could attach cords to
+were at once removed, and knives were taken from them; after the escape
+of Allegre and Latude, bars of iron were placed in the chimneys, and so
+forth.
+
+[32] The second of the four principal officers of the Bastille. The
+officers were: (1) the governor; (2) the king's lieutenant; (3) the
+major; (4) the adjutant. There was also a doctor, a surgeon, a
+confessor, &c. The garrison consisted of Invalides.--T.
+
+[33] The most surprising instance is that of an Englishman, who returned
+spontaneously from England to become a prisoner in the Bastille. "On
+Thursday, May 22, 1693, at nightfall, M. de Jones, an Englishman,
+returned from England, having come back to prison for reasons concerning
+the king's service. He was located outside the chateau, in a little room
+where M. de Besmaus keeps his library, above his office, and he is not
+to appear for some days for his examination, and is to be taken great
+care of."--Du Junca's Journal.
+
+[34] This was not the Lauzun already mentioned, but his nephew, Armand
+Louis de Gontaut, duke de Biron (1747-1793), who was notorious
+throughout Europe for his gallantries.--T.
+
+[35] An official of the royal council, whose function originally was to
+examine and report on petitions to the king. He became a sort of
+superior magistrate's clerk.--T.
+
+[36] "1751, March 2. I have received a letter from Dr. Duval (secretary
+to the lieutenant of police), in which he tells me that M. Berryer
+(lieutenant of police) is struck with the cost of the clothes supplied
+to the prisoners for some time past; but, as you know, I only supply
+things when ordered by M. Berryer, and I try to supply good clothes, so
+that they may last and give the prisoners satisfaction."--Letter from
+Rochebrune, commissary to the Bastille, to Major Chevalier.
+
+[37] These extracts are translated literally, in order to preserve the
+clumsy constructions of the unlettered official.--T.
+
+[38] Step-sister of Louis XIV. The following extracts from her
+correspondence show how, even in circles that might have been expected
+to be well informed, the legend had already seized on people's
+imaginations:--
+
+"Marly, October 10, 1711. A man remained long years in the Bastille, and
+has died there, masked. At his side he had two musketeers ready to kill
+him if he took off his mask. He ate and slept masked. No doubt there was
+some reason for this, for otherwise he was well treated and lodged, and
+given everything he wished for. He went to communion masked; he was very
+devout and read continually. No one has ever been able to learn who he
+was."
+
+"Versailles, October 22, 1711. I have just learnt who the masked man
+was, who died in the Bastille. His wearing a mask was not due to
+cruelty. He was an English lord who had been mixed up in the affair of
+the Duke of Berwick (natural son of James II.) against King William. He
+died there so that the king might never know what became of him."
+
+[39] The insurgents who rose for the king against the Revolutionists in
+Brittany: see Balzac's famous novel. The movement smouldered for a great
+many years.--T.
+
+[40] The Gregorian calendar was abolished by the National Convention in
+1793, who decreed that September 22, 1792, should be regarded as the
+first day of a new era. The year was divided into twelve months, with
+names derived from natural phenomena. Nivose (snowy) was the fourth of
+these months. Thus, the period mentioned in the text includes from
+December 21, 1800, to January 19, 1801.--T.
+
+[41] Since M. Funck-Brentano's book was published, his conclusions have
+been corroborated by Vicomte Maurice Boutry in a study published in the
+_Revue des Etudes historiques_ (1899, p. 172). The Vicomte furnishes an
+additional proof. He says that the Duchess de Crequy, in the third book
+of her _Souvenirs_, gives a _resume_ of a conversation on the Iron Mask
+between Marshal de Noailles, the Duchess de Luynes, and others, and
+adds: "The most considerable and best informed persons of my time always
+thought that the famous story had no other foundation than the capture
+and captivity of the Piedmontese Mattioli."--T.
+
+[42] "I have seen these ills, and I am not twenty yet."
+
+[43] These verses were, of course, in Latin.--T.
+
+[44] Palissot was a dramatist and critic who in his comedy _Les
+Philosophes_ had bitterly attacked Rousseau, Diderot, and the
+Encyclopaedists generally.--T.
+
+[45] The old prison of Paris. It was the debtors' prison, famous also
+for the number of actors who were imprisoned there under the _ancien
+regime_. It was demolished in 1780.--T.
+
+[46] "Not unto us, O Lord, but unto Thy name give glory!
+
+"Know our heart and search out our ways."
+
+[47] "The victory is won!"--T.
+
+[48] Charenton was under the direction of a religious order known as the
+_Freres de la Charite_, who undertook the care of sick and weak-minded
+poor.--T.
+
+[49] This was Elizabeth Chudleigh (1720-1788), the notorious beauty who
+privately married the Hon. Augustus Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol,
+separated from him after three years, and became the mistress of the
+second Duke of Kingston, whom she bigamously married. After his death
+she was tried by the House of Lords for bigamy, and fled to France to
+escape punishment. Her gallantries and eccentricities were the talk of
+Europe.--T.
+
+[50] Instructed by his misfortunes and his captivity how to vanquish the
+efforts and the rage of tyrants, he taught the French how true courage
+can win liberty.
+
+[51] Jocrisse is the stock French type of the booby, and as such is a
+character in many comedies. He breaks a plate, for instance; his master
+asks him how he managed to be so clumsy, and he instantly smashes
+another, saying, "_Just like that!_" His master asks him to be sure and
+wake him early in the morning; Jocrisse answers: "Right, sir, depend on
+me; _but of course you'll ring_!"--T.
+
+[52] The Girondists (so called from Gironde, a district of Bordeaux)
+were the more sober republican party in the Assembly, who were forced by
+circumstances to join the Jacobins against Louis XVI. With their fall
+from power in the early summer of 1792 the last hope of the monarchy
+disappeared.--T.
+
+[53] Referring to the horrible massacres of September, 1792, when about
+1400 victims perished.--T.
+
+[54] The French Dick Turpin. Of good education, he formed when quite a
+youth a band of robbers, and became the terror of France. Like Turpin,
+he is the subject of dramas and stories.--T.
+
+[55] A forest near Paris, on the line to Avricourt. It was a famous
+haunt of brigands. There is a well-known story of a dog which attacked
+and killed the murderer of its master there.--T.
+
+[56] Literally "cut-top": we have no equivalent in English.--T.
+
+[57] A five-act comedy by Victorien Sardou.
+
+[58] The nickname given to the Jacobins, the extreme revolutionists, who
+sat on the highest seats on the left in the National Assembly.--T.
+
+[59] Which were the strict preserves of the aristocrats: to fish in them
+was as great a crime as to shoot a landlord's rabbit was, a few years
+ago, in England.--T.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Legends of the Bastille, by Frantz Funck-Brentano
+
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