THE BASTILLE.
When I alighted, the musketeers closed round me. We were under the
shadow of an immense dark building, the massive outline of which was
broken at intervals by eight round towers. A jagged gateway frowned
above the carriage; there was a clanking of iron bars; a horrible
jarring of bolts upon the pavement as an iron gate was opened and
shut; a swinging of chains and exchange of papers as De Brissac gave
my sword to the governor with a malicious and undisguised smile of
triumph; and then I found myself in the custody of the
Bastille--fairly enclosed within its walls.
The Bastille!
How much of terror had not that name conjured up within me; and now
visions of dungeons and of sufferings inconceivable came vaguely
before me, as I was requested, with cold politeness, to 'step _this
way_,' and mechanically I followed, my heart sinking lower at every
step, along passages, vaulted, dark, and strong, on the slimy or cold
and whitewashed walls of which the torches of the gaolors flared and
gleamed; and a horror came over me, that if I did not reach a
pestilential vault at the end of these devious corridors, some secret
plank or paving-stone might suddenly sink beneath my feet, and
precipitate me, crushed and mangled, into some hideous oubliette or
subterranean tributary of the Seine, where, among the festering bones
of former victims, mine would rot, unburied and forgotten. I had
often heard of such things; and was there aught too horrible to be
associated with that edifice?
Bastille meant simply an ancient castle; but that of Paris alone
retained the name; though we in some manner adopted it in Scotland by
designating our fortified mansions _Bastel-houses_.
The terrible Bastille of Paris, begun by order of Charles V. in 1383
for the defence of the city, was completed by his successor, Charles
the Well-beloved; and since then it had been the infernal abode of
misery and of tears, dedicated solely to the secret purposes of
despotism and tyranny.
As we advanced into the interior of its vast and gloomy keep, I was
deeply impressed by the number and complication of low-browed
doorways, steep staircases, and narrow corridors by which its
enormous walls were perforated; and by the number of huge iron locks,
bolts, bars, and chains by which all the entrances were secured. At
last we crossed a high and spacious hall, having a roof and floor of
stone. In the centre stood a square mass of stone-work, having one
little orifice or window, but all cramped and bound together by bars
of iron run into the stone with lead. It was one of those terrible
cages made by the decrepit tyrant, Louis XI., for the confinement of
great state-prisoners--a notable invention of the Cardinal de Baluc,
who was the first to experience the comforts of them. The Most
Christian King was charmed by the invention, however, and had several
made; thus they were styled by the lively French, 'the King's little
daughters.' Each had a door of stone--a slab like the lid of a
coffin; and none on whom that dreadful door was closed ever came out
again--alive, at least. In this vast sepulchral-looking hall the
torches flared and gleamed with a red and smoking light.
Rage and hatred began to mingle with my alarm as we passed from
thence along a corridor beyond the hall, and I was ushered through a
Gothic doorway into an apartment. Then the Captain of the Bastille
turned to me, and said--
'M. Blane, this is your chamber and sleeping-place.'
I glanced round me. The room was circular, as it was in one of the
towers attached to the keep. Its walls were covered by pale leather
stamped over with gilded flowers. It had one long and narrow window,
having a pointed arch, well barred without and glazed with stained
glass charged with the arms of France, and latticed with brass wire
within. The furniture was very plain, but a comfortable fire of wood
was blazing on the stone hearth.
'Monsieur's apartment is quite historical,' said the Captain of the
Bastille, with a well-bred smile, which to me seemed then a hideous
leer; 'it was in this place that the Scottish archer, a Huguenot who
was accused of a design to fire the city of Paris, was tortured to
death; and here the Comte d'Auvergne, son of Charles IX., was
confined until 1616.'
'Confined--how long?'
'About _fifty_ years, I think, monsieur.'
I made no reply, for my tongue seemed cleaving unto the roof of my
parched mouth. He bowed and left me; and the clatter of bolts and
locks as the door was secured, together with the sound of retiring
footsteps, as the Captain and his people withdrew, sank like iron
into my soul.
My bed, which was destitute of curtains, stood close by me, and I
flung myself upon it, exclaiming with bitterness--
'And this is the reward of my service to a faithless King! Send a
fool to France and he will still be a fool--'tis our old Scottish
proverb, and truly it applies to me.'
It seemed almost incredible that the events of the last hour, or of
the past day, were reality; that within so short a period, I had been
graciously received by the King at Versailles, and had delivered
those triumphant despatches which filled all Paris with joy; that
within an hour, I had been in the gay and brilliant salon of the
beautiful Marion de l'Orme, surrounded by the chief wits of Paris;
and now, that I was a lonely state prisoner, without an accuser and
without a crime; a prisoner, perhaps to remain so in secret during
the caprice of the King; to be handed over, as others have been, from
gaoler to gaoler, from chatelain to chatelain; for my name a number
substituted, until my hair became white, and even my oldest friends
had forgotten that I had once lived and mysteriously disappeared from
among them!
These thoughts were bitter agony!
I thought of the Countess d'Amboise, and the Marquis de Gordon; but I
had no means of communicating with either of them, and thus they
would remain probably in ignorance of my situation. Who was my
enemy--who were my accusers? I started up and traversed my room to
and fro, with impatient strides, until I grew weary, and again seated
myself on the bed to watch the embers on the hearth as they
flickered, reddened, and died in the uncertain currents of air that
came down the huge chimney, the aperture of which was secured by an
iron grating; and so the long, long night wore away and the lingering
dawn began to brighten over sleeping Paris and the distant country.
I opened the stained-glass casement and looked out. Far down below,
beyond the outer rampart of the Bastille, I saw all the chimneys of
Paris vomiting smoke; the arsenal of Henry IV., a spacious pile,
having three great courts and a portal, the pillars of which were
cannon set on end. Beyond lay the Seine and the Isles of St. Louis
and the Cité--the Paris of the kings of the first race and of Philip
Augustus--rising like a mass of rugged castles, moated round by the
river, which was bridged across by the quaint piles of the Pont de
Notre Dame and the Pont de la Cité. Nearer still, waved the green
trees which covered all the Isle Louviers. A yellow flush spread
across the eastern quarter of the sky; above it rolled clouds of
murky amber, rendered darker by the morning smoke; and as the sun
ascended behind the horizontal stripes of cloud, which his rays
turned to bars of seeming gold and fire; he tipped with a rosy gleam
the countless quaint façades and features of the city, which spread
around me, with all its churches, spires, and glittering vanes; and
chief of all, the huge dark double towers of Notre Dame, whose
foundations were laid by Charles the Great. The queen of French
cathedrals, she rose from a sea of ancient roofs, steep, sharp, and
conical; and there, too, yawned the Parvis, a handsome old square,
overhung by quaint houses, full of bustling shops, hurrying
passengers, and a hundred varying noises. Then, as morning advanced,
I heard the bells ringing in all the convents, monasteries, and
steeples--St. Landry, St. Pierre aux Boeuf, St. Denis du Pas, St.
Germain l'Auxerrois, and all the old churches of Paris as the city
awoke, and roused itself to life and business, prayer and sin.
The live-long day, from my lofty perch, I watched far down below the
sights and sounds of Paris passing and buzzing round me, until the
rattle of fiacres and the clatter of hoofs died away, and the
arteries of life that intersected the town became dark and still as
night drew on again, and, with a sigh of weariness, I threw myself on
my bed, to sigh and pray, and to utter futile imprecations and
maledictions on the hour I came to France. My gaoler was a kind but
taciturn fellow. He had served a long apprenticeship to chains and
groans, and to sighs of unavailing anguish; thus he seldom spoke;
yet, when he did, it was only to drop casual hints of the horrors by
which I was surrounded, but quite in a common-place way, for the man
had scarcely an idea of anything beyond the precincts of the
Bastille; and from him I learned that in this living tomb were state
prisoners who had been committed to it on no better warrant than a
lettre-de-cachet, of which letters any French noble might get a dozen
from the premier any forenoon; prisoners who had not seen the blessed
light of day for more than forty years; poor creatures whose crimes,
if any, had long since been forgotten, even as their names were
forgotten by their keepers, and as their existence was forgotten by
the world; like the dead of forty years ago; and the whole record of
whose mysterious disappearance from life and upper air, if record of
it existed at all, might be found in some mouldy portfolio of
Richelieu or his predecessors.
Such were the inmates of the Bastille!
One day I beheld a long train of personages on foot pass through the
gate of St. Antoine. There were gentlemen guards, grooms, pages, and
lacqueys. Six of the former bore a blue-silk canopy over the head of
a tall and stately lady, who was also on foot, and carried in her
right hand a lighted taper. As she passed along, cries of 'Vive la
Reine' reached me.
'What is all this?' I inquired of my keeper, who chanced to be in my
apartment.
'It is her Majesty, Madame Anne of Austria, proceeding on a
pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Fiacre, to pray for the health of the
King, who is ill, and to return thanks for her own cure.'
'Cure from what?'
'A dangerous issue of blood, which M. Richelieu affirmed to be the
malice of sorcerers, and which had baffled her physicians with all
their skill.'
'You believe in all this?'
'Parbleu, yes! If M. Seguier, Bishop of Meaux in 1649, and Jean,
Comte de Blois, bore testimony to the wonderful cures wrought upon
them by praying to St. Fiacre, why should not a poor unlettered
fellow such as I?'
'True; this is unanswerable.'
'And we all know, monsieur, that M. Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, began a
_novena_ of prayers to implore the divine intercession for the Queen,
who was thereafter safely delivered of a boy, who may be Louis XIV.
if he lives, yet is as unlike his father as I am.'
'Perhaps you resemble the Cardinal,' said I.
'If court scandal is dangerous in the open air, monsieur, it is much
more dangerous in the Bastille,' replied the man, with a hasty glance
around him, as he withdrew.
'It is strange,' said I to him on the sixth or seventh day of my
captivity, 'that your face seems familiar to me.'
'Perhaps, monsieur,' said he, smiling, 'those who see our faces here,
remember them for ever.'
'What is your name?' I asked.
'Martin Omelette.'
'How? any relation to my maitre d'hôtel, Pierre Omelette?'
'Who keeps the Fleur-de-lis, in the Rue d'Ecosse?'
'Yes.'
'I am his brother, M. Blane, and have had the pleasure of seeing you,
and M. le Vicomte Dundrennan, and other gentlemen of the Garde du
Corps Ecossais, there often.'
'Alas! times are changed with me now, my friend Martin; I am alike
poor and unfortunate.'
'Take courage, monsieur; you have been here only seven days.'
'D--n, only seven!'
'We have had prisoners here for seven-and-forty, and yet they have
been released at last--released when their minds had sunk to such
apathy, however, that they would as readily have remained.'
'Martin, you torture me!'
'We had one for forty-six years in this very room; see, he has
scribbled the walls all over with invocations of St. Fiacre, his
patron, and the dates will show you an ordinary lifetime spent within
this little place.'
'Martin,' said I, in a voice like a sob, 'I should die of this place
in one month.'
'So at first they all say who come here; yet they get used to
it--even those who are secret prisoners, and who, without date or
name, are handed over per list from chatelain to chatelain. Ma foi!
we have one in the lowest vaults who is so old that he has worn out a
set of fetters, and is supposed to have been put in when M. de
Salvaison was captain of the Bastille.'
'In what time did this worthy flourish?'
'In the days of Henry II.--about 1560.'
'Impossible!'
'Seventy-five years ago, monsieur.'
'It is alike horrible and incredible!'
Martin smiled faintly, and whispered,--
'He is supposed to be a kinsman of Anne du Bourg, whom the Cardinal
de Lorraine, a fierce and passionate man, hanged and burned in the
Place de la Grève; but only supposed, monsieur, since he never speaks
now, and we know not his name.'
As if he had said too much, Martin Omelette hastily withdrew, leaving
me to torture myself with dark anticipations of the future, and to
spell over the prayers with which my hapless predecessor had
supplicated the intercession of St. Fiacre. But my mind would recur
again and again with stinging poignancy to my present predicament. I
thought now of all my futile aspirations after fame; of all I had
done at Bitche, at Ingweiler, and La Mothe, in the service of this
ungrateful Louis of France, whose wanton war against Duke Charles of
Lorraine I saw in all its wickedness. Then I thought of my distant
home and the scenes I never more might see; of the green pastoral
hills and the woods of Blanerne, that cast their shadows on the Dee,
whose waters rush to meet the Solway; of the birchen glen, on the
brow of which the towers of old Tungland Abbey raised their gray-worn
pinnacles above the waving coppice; of the breezy upland slopes,
where the yellow corn ripened on the long golden rigs, where the
bonneted ploughboy whistled, nor dreamed there was such a thing as
tyranny in the world; where the black crow and the eagle that had
their eyry in St. Mark's lovely isle were wheeling aloft, and I
panted for freedom and for _home_!
Home! Alas! I had more friends in the grave than in the world; yet
their graves were in Scottish earth, and that was all the world to me.
I thought of my unavenged quarrel with the house of Nithsdale; of my
slaughtered father, as he lay all 'boltered' in his blood by Lochar
Moss; of our ravaged lands and ruined homes, all sunk in smoke and
flame, as I had last seen the tower of Blanerne when I, a fugitive,
looked back from the green hills of Galloway, and saw the weapons of
the Maxwell troopers glitter on my track, as I forded the foaming
waters of Urr. Then I thought of the horrors of the Bastille, and
dashed my head upon my bed, as I longed--madly longed for liberty!
Louis XIII. I abhorred, but could not petition either him or the
Countess d'Amboise, for paper and ink were denied me. How had our
petty intrigue--if intrigue it could be called--been discovered?
I remembered the loss of the miniature at Versailles, and the
malevolent smile of the jealous De Brissac, and planned a hundred
impossible schemes of escape and revenge; and so, amid all these
bitter, burning, and impatient thoughts, the second weary week of my
captivity wore slowly and monotonously away.