THE TEMPLE.
When they came to Paris in the twelfth century, the Templars obtained
leave to settle in the Marshes, whose baleful exhalations cost the town
a plague or two every year. In no long time they had completely
transformed that dismal and pestilential swamp. Herculean labours
witnessed as their outcome oaks, elms, and beeches growing where the
rotten ooze had bred but reeds and osiers. Vast buildings, too, arose as
if by magic, with towers and turrets protecting them, drawbridges,
battlemented walls, and trenches. The principal tower of the pile
enclosed the treasure and arsenal of the Order, and four smaller towers
or turrets served as a prison for those who had transgressed the stark
monastic rules. On the broad terrace of the Temple three hundred men had
space for exercise at cross-bow and halberd.
Philip III. bestowed a royal recompense on the laborious monks who had
reclaimed those miasmatic marshes and given new means of defence to the
capital; and towards the close of the thirteenth century the Templars
had become an extraordinary power in France. In Paris they exercised
large justiciary rights, and had their gallows standing without the
Temple walls. They were concerned in all enterprises, civil, political,
and military; their sovereignty was such that princes had to reckon with
them, on pain of contact with the monkish steel. They had great
monopolies of grain, and owned some of the richest lands in the kingdom;
they touched the revenues of from eight to ten thousand manors. The
Templars guarded at need the towns, treasures, and archives of royalty;
and kings, popes, and nobles were their visitors and guests.
The fortress dwelling of the Temple which had sprung fairy-like from the
foul marshes of Paris shone with a splendour above that of the royal
residence. Twenty-four columns of silver, carved and chased, sustained
the audience-chamber of the grand master; and the chapter-hall, paved in
mosaic, and enriched with woodwork in cedar of Lebanon, contained sixty
huge vases of solid gold and a veritable armoury of Arabian, Moorish,
and Turkish weapons, chiselled, damascened, and crusted with precious
stones. The private chamber of every knight of the Order was
distinguished by some particular object of beauty; whilst the chambers
of the officers and commanders were stored with riches "so that they
were a wonder to behold."
How great a gulf separated the wealthy and powerful Templars of Paris
from those "poor brothers of the Temple who rode two on one horse, lived
frugally, without wives or children, had no goods of their own, and who,
when they were not taking the field against the infidels, were employed
in mending their weapons and the harness of their horses, or in pious
exercises prescribed for them by their chief."
The first institution of the Order of the Temple dates from the year
1118, when "certain brave and devout gentlemen" obtained from King
Baudouin III. "the noble favour of guarding the approaches to
Jerusalem." The Council of Troyes, in 1128, confirmed the religious and
military Order of the Templars. The knights clothed themselves in long
white robes adorned with a red cross; and the standard of the Order,
called the _Beaucèant_, was white and black, for an emblem of life and
death,—death for the infidels and life for the Christians of the Holy
Land. Bravery in battle was almost an article of their faith; no Templar
would fly from three opponents.
In the day of their military and political power, the Templars of France
acknowledged none but the authority of the grand master of the Order,
and treated with royalty as between power and power. Up to the reign of
Philippe le Bel, the Kings of France were little more than courtiers of
the Temple, Royalty knocked humbly at those august, defiant portals, for
leave to deposit within them its treasures and its charters, or to
solicit a loan from the golden coffers of the knights. Not so, however,
Philippe le Bel.
This was the sovereign who, in 1307, broke the power of the Knights
Templars of France. The act of accusation which he flung at the Order
proscribed its members as "ravening wolves," "a perfidious and
idolatrous society, whose works, nay, whose very words soil the earth
and infect the air." The last grand master, Jacques de Molay, seized by
the King's Inquisitor, passed through the torments of the torture
chamber, and thence to the torments of the stake. The Knights of the
Temple in their turn, loaded with chains, were led before the
Inquisitor, Guillaume de Paris, to answer his charges of heresy and
idolatry. The Templars were pursued through all the States of Europe,
the Pope encouraging the hue and cry. Jacques de Molay, and his
companion in misfortunes, Gui, Dauphin of Auvergne, were burned alive in
Paris; and the persecution of the Templars lasted for six years. Their
Order was abolished, and most of their wealth was bestowed by Philippe
upon the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.
The prison of the Temple became a prison of the State; and the Temple
and the Louvre were the forerunners of the Bastille. The Dukes of
Aquitaine and Brabant were confined in the Temple under Philippe V. and
Philippe de Valois, the Counts of Dammartin and Flanders under King
John. Four sovereigns, indeed, Charles VII., Louis XI., Charles VIII.,
and Louis XII., seemed to have forgotten the dungeon which the Templars
had bequeathed them (they might well have done so, since Mediæval Paris
had its prisons at every turn); and the cells and chambers in the great
tower of the Temple remained closed,—to be opened no more until after
the 10th of August, 1792.
But there were social passages of interest in the history of this famous
fastness, and it was not unfitting that Francis I., the magnificent
monarch of the Renaissance, should repair the palace of the Templars,
restore those historic ruins, re-establish the spreading gardens, gild
afresh those illustrious halls,—re-create, in a word, the once brilliant
dwelling of the Chevaliers of the Cross: in 1540, the Temple became the
sumptuous abode of the Grand Priors of France.
In the last years of the seventeenth century, Philippe de Vendôme,
prince of the blood and knight of Malta, was named Grand Prior of the
Temple. He would have his priory worthy of the gallant and graceful
Court of the Palais-Royal; and the handsomest and most amiable of
ladies, and the finest and gayest of wits were bidden to his historic
suppers. The oaks that had shadowed the cross of Jacques de Molay lent
their shelter now to "all the gods of Olympus," summoned within the
green enclosure of the Temple by the lively invocations of La Fare and
de Chaulieu.
In the eighteenth century, this same enclosure had a population of four
thousand souls, divided into three distinct classes. There was first the
house of the Grand Prior, the dignitaries of the Order, and certain
nobles; then, a numerous body of workers of all grades; and lastly, a
rather heterogeneous collection of debtors who were able to elude their
creditors within these precincts, in virtue of a Mediæval
prescript—which justice ceased to respect in 1779.
At this epoch, the Government of Louis XVI.—as if with a presentiment of
what the Temple was shortly to become for the King of France—ordered the
demolition of the old fortress of the Templars. But the destroyers of
1779 overthrew only a portion of the tower; the dungeon itself remained,
to be witness of a royal agony.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE PRISON.]
See, then, at length, after the revolution of the 10th of August, Louis
XVI. and Marie Antoinette prisoners in the prison of the Temple! Marie
Antoinette, most imprudent and most amiable, most unfortunate and most
calumniated of women; Louis XVI., poor honest gentleman, whose passive
intelligence drew from Turgot this prophetic word: "Sire, a weak prince
can make choice only between the musket of Charles IX. and the scaffold
of Charles I." The King was without force and without prestige; the
Queen was incapable either of giving or of receiving a lesson in
royalty.
Taciturn, and subject to sudden fits of temper; as much embarrassed by
his wife as by his crown, Louis divided his time between hunting and
those little harmless hobbies which showed that, had the fates desired,
he might have made an excellent artisan. As for Marie Antoinette, what
rôle was there for her, the victim of perpetual suspicion, in the midst
of a tremendous political reaction? It was reproached against her, not
without reason, that she could never fashion for herself the conscience
of a queen. She felt herself a woman, young and beautiful; she forgot
that she was also the partner of a throne. Full of personal charm,
liking to toy with elegant pleasures, wedded to a man so little made for
her, surrounded by gallant courtiers whom her beauty and graces
intoxicated, Marie Antoinette had her share of ardent emotions, and more
than once she was at last forgetful of her pride, _cette pudeur des
reines_; but her position at the Court of France was so false and so
complicated that, let her have done what she would, she might not have
escaped the abyss towards which her own feet impelled her.
To the Temple, then, they were hurried, Louis and his family, on the
14th of August, 1792. The tower of the fortress was allotted to them,
and a portion of the palace and all the adjacent buildings were
levelled, so that the dungeon proper was completely isolated. The space
of garden reserved for their daily exercise was enclosed between lofty
walls. Louis occupied the first floor of the prison and his family the
second. Every casement was protected by thick iron bars, and the outer
windows were masked in such a manner that the prisoners obtained
scarcely a glimpse of the world beyond their cage. Six wickets defended
the staircase which led to the King's apartment; so low and narrow that
it was necessary to squeeze through them in a stooping posture. Each
door was of iron, heavily barred, and was kept locked at all hours.
After Louis' imprisonment, a seventh wicket with a door of iron was
constructed at the top of the stairs, which no one could open
unassisted. The first door of Louis' chamber was also of iron; so here
were eight solid barriers betwixt the King and his friends in
freedom,—not counting the dungeon walls. A guard of some three hundred
men watched night and day around the Temple.
These costly preparations on his Majesty's account (great sums, it is
said, were spent on them) were not completed in a day, and in the
meantime the Royal family inhabited that portion of the palace of the
Temple which had been left standing. In his daily walks in the garden,
King Louis looked on at the building of his last earthly mansion, and
must have noticed the desperate haste with which the builders worked! In
the middle of September, he passed into the shades of the dungeon.
Once locked in there, he was forbidden the use of pens, ink, and paper;
no writing materials were allowed him until the national convention had
commanded his appearance at the bar.
The large chamber assigned to the King was partitioned into four
compartments; the first served as a dining-room, the second was Louis'
bed-chamber, and his valet slept in the third; the fourth was a little
cabinet contrived in a turret, to which the royal prisoner was fond of
retiring. His bed-chamber was hung in yellow and decently furnished. A
little clock on the chimney-piece bore on its pedestal the words
"Lepante, Clockmaker for the King." When the convention had decreed
France a republic, Louis' gaolers scratched out the last three words of
the inscription. They hung in his dining-room the declaration of the
rights of the Constitution of 1792, at the foot of which ran the legend:
"First year of the Republic." This was their announcement to Louis that
he had fallen from his king's estate.
Like a murderer of these days in the condemned hold, Louis had two
guards with him night and day. They passed the day in his bed-chamber,
following him to the dining-room when he took his meals; and in the
dining-room they slept at night, after locking the doors of the
apartments.
Their captivity was full of indignity for the illustrious unfortunates,
whose guards were incessantly suspicious. If Louis addressed a question
during the night to the valet who slept close to him, the answer must be
spoken loudly. The members of the family were not allowed to whisper in
their conversations, and if at dinner Louis, or his wife, or his sister
chanced to speak low in asking anything of the servant who waited on
them, one of the guards at the door cried, "_Parlez plus haut!_"
Apart from suspense as to the future, a terrible dreariness must have
marked those days in the Temple. The early morning was given by the King
to his private devotions, after which he read the office which the
Chevaliers of the Order of the Saint-Esprit were accustomed to recite
daily. His piety was not without its inconveniences to himself. The
table was furnished with meat on Fridays, but Louis dipped a slice of
bread in his wine glass with the remark: "_voilà mon diner!_" To the
gentle suggestion that such extreme abstinence might be dispensed with,
he replied: "I do not trouble your conscience; why trouble mine? You
have your practices, and I have my own; let each hold to those which he
believes the best."
His devotions engaged the King until nine o'clock, at which hour his
family joined him in the dining-room,—that is to say, during the period
in which it was still permitted him to communicate with them. He sat
with them at breakfast, eating nothing himself; he had made it a rule in
prison to fast until the dinner-hour. After breakfast the King took his
son for lessons in Latin and geography, and whilst Marie Antoinette
taught their daughter, sister Elizabeth plied her needle. The children
had an hour's play at mid-day, and at one o'clock the family assembled
for dinner. The table was always well supplied, but Louis ate little and
drank less, and the Queen took nothing but water with her food.
After dinner the parents amused their children again as best they could,
round games at the table being the favourite recreation. To these poor
little pleasures succeeded reading and conversation, and at nine the
prisoners supped. After supper, Louis took the boy to his bed-chamber,
where a little bed was placed for him beside his own. He heard him
recite his prayers, and saw him to bed. Then he returned to reading, and
fell to his own prayers at eleven. When the doomed King, husband, and
father was denied the solace of his family, the time that he had devoted
to them was given almost wholly to his books. The Latins were his
favourite authors, and a day seldom passed on which he had not conned
afresh some pages of Tacitus, Livy, Seneca, Horace, Virgil, or Terence.
In French he was especially fond of books of travel. He read the news of
the day as long as he was supplied with it, but his not unnatural
interest in the affairs of revolutionary France seemed to trouble his
gaolers, and the newspapers were withdrawn from him. Thrown back upon
his books, he studied more than ever, and on the eve of his death he
summed up the volumes he had read through during the five months and
seven days of his captivity in the Temple: the number was two hundred
and fifty-seven.
Towards the end he suffered some brusque interruptions of his
ignominious solitude. Three times he awoke to find a new valet in his
bedroom. Chamilly's place in this capacity was taken by Hue, and Hue was
succeeded by Cléry, who was all but a stranger to the King. Chamilly and
Hue barely came off with their lives in the prisons to which they were
removed from the Temple. The abandoned King took shock upon shock with
not a little fortitude. He was skimming his Tacitus one day when the
cannibals of September stopped under his window to brandish on a pike
the bleeding and disfigured head of the Princess Lamballe.
Severely as they had guarded him, his gaolers began to double their
precautions. The concierge of the dungeon, the chief warder,—all, in a
word, who were specially charged with the keeping of the King, were
themselves constituted prisoners of the Temple. Did you wait on Louis,
or were you suffered to approach him, your person was searched minutely
at the governor's discretion. Not the commonest instrument of steel or
iron was allowed to be carried by anyone who went near the King: Cléry
was deprived of his penknife. Every article of food passed into the
prison for Louis' table was rigorously examined; and the prison cook had
to taste every dish, under the eyes of the guard, before it was
permitted to leave the kitchen. Never was suicide more strenuously
denied to a man who had no thought of it.
The prisoners themselves were not spared the indignity of the search.
Louis, his wife, and his sister had their cupboards, drawers, and
closets ransacked; they were spoiled of knives, scissors, and
curling-irons. Louis' pains were prolonged to the end. The courage he
had mustered for death, and it was a very commendable portion, failed
him a moment at the last. In his confessor's hands, on the morning of
his death, whilst the carriage was waiting for him in the courtyard, he
halted in his prayers. He had, as he thought, caught a note of tears on
the other side of the partition, and he dreaded a second last embrace.
His ear strained at the wall, whilst the priest's hand was on his head.
But there was no weeping there, for Marie Antoinette was on her knees
under her crucifix; and Louis went down to his carriage. There is no
need to tell again the last scene of all....
Marie Antoinette was removed to the Conciergerie, which she quitted only
for the scaffold. After the parents had passed under the knife, the
young dauphin and his sister Marie Thérèse continued in the prison of
the Temple "the sorrowful Odyssey of the Royalty of France." The
daughter of Marie Antoinette must quit the Temple to go into exile, the
son of Louis XVI. must die wretchedly in the prison of his father. The
"education" of the poor little dauphin was entrusted to Simon the
shoemaker, whose wife, it is said, used to teach him ribald songs. He
had a charming face and a crooked back, "as if life were already too
heavy for him." In the hands of those singular preceptors he came to
lose nearly all his moral faculties, and the sole sentiment which he
cherished was that of gratitude, "not so much for the good that was done
him—which was small—as for the ills that were spared him. Without
uttering a word, he would precipitate himself before his guards, press
their hands, and kiss the hems of their coats."[13] After the retreat of
Simon, who had not used his gentle captive over-tenderly, the dauphin's
imprisonment was somewhat kinder, though he continued to be watched as
closely as before. His gaoler one day asked him: "What would you do to
Simon, little master, if you were to become king?" "I would have him
punished as an example," answered the young Capet. He had had no news of
Simon for two years, and did not know that the ungentle shoemaker had
perished on the scaffold.[14]
Footnote 13:
Nougaret.
Footnote 14:
Idem.
The little dauphin's own untimely death, while still a prisoner in the
Temple, induced more than one audacious adventurer to seek to assume the
mask of Louis XVI's son. Hervagaut, Mathurin Bruneau, and more recently
the Duc de Normandie essayed in turn the rôle of pretender, "draped in
the shroud of Louis XVII." The first-named, condemned in 1802 to four
years' imprisonment, died ten years later in Bicêtre. The second, tried
at Rouen in 1818, received a sentence of seven years; and the Duc de
Normandie ended his days in Holland.
The Convention seems to have given no political prisoners to the tower
of the Temple, which was again a prison of State under the Directory,
the Consulate, and the Empire.
It was the Directory which consigned to the Temple the celebrated
English Admiral, Sir Sidney Smith, M.P. for Rochester, who had defended
Acre against Napoleon, and who was arrested at Havre "on the point of
setting fire to the port." He was transferred to the Temple from the
Abbey, the order of transfer bearing the signature of Barras.
On the 10th of May, 1798, certain friends of the Admiral, disguised in
French uniform, presented to the concierge of the Temple a document
purporting to be an order of the Minister of War for the removal of Sir
Sidney to another prison. The concierge fell into the trap, and bade
adieu to his prisoner, who, a few days later, found himself safe in
London.
The mysterious conspiracy of the Camp de Grenelle furnished the Temple
with a batch of one hundred and thirty-five prisoners; and the _coup
d'État_ which swept them in proscribed also the editors of twenty-two
French journals. During the next eight years the most distinguished of
the "enemies of the Republic" whose names were entered on the Temple
register were Lavalette; Caraccioli, the Ambassador of the King of
Naples to the Court of Louis XVI.; Hottinguer, the banker of the Rue de
Provence; Hyde de Neuville; the journalist Bertin; Toussaint-Louverture,
the hero of Saint-Domingue, who had written to Buonaparte: "_Le premier
homme des noirs au premier homme des blancs_"; the two Polignacs, the
Duc de Rivière, George Cadoudal, Moreau, and Pichegru.
General Pichegru, arrested on the 28th of February, 1804, "for having
forgotten in the interests of the English and the Royalists what he owed
to the French Republic," was found dead in his cell on the 6th of April
following, having strangled himself with a black silk cravat. Moreau,
liberated by the First Consul, took service in the ranks of the enemy,
and was slain by a French bullet before Dresden, in 1813.
Toussaint-Louverture's detention in the Temple is an episode which
reflects little credit upon the military and political history of the
Consulate. Certainly the expedition of Saint-Domingue, under the command
of General Leclerc, Napoleon's brother-in-law, makes a poor page in the
annals of that period. After having received Toussaint-Louverture's
submission, Leclerc, afraid of the great negro's influence, made him a
prisoner by the merest trick, and despatched him to France. Confined at
first in the Temple, he was afterwards removed to the fort of Joux,
where he died in April, 1803.
Five years after this, in June, 1808, the prisoners of the Temple were
transferred by Fouché's order to the Dungeon of Vincennes. Amongst them
was General Malet, that bold conspirator who, in 1812, "_devait porter
la main sur la couronne de l'Empereur_."
The tower of the Temple was demolished in 1811, and, four years later,
Louis XVIII. instituted, on the ruins of the ancient dwelling of the
Templars and the prison of Louis XVI., a congregation of nuns, who had
for their Superior a daughter of Prince de Condé.
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