Produced by Chris Curnow, Chuck Greif and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
DOWNEY & CO.'S
_NEW PUBLICATIONS_.
=MEDICINE AND THE MIND.= Translated from the French of MAURICE DE
FLEURY by S. B. COLLINS, M.D. 16_s._
*** This work has been crowned by the French Academy.
=OLD LONDON TAVERNS.= By EDWARD CALLOW. Illustrated. 6_s._
=THE GOOD QUEEN CHARLOTTE.= By PERCY FITZGERALD. With a Photogravure
reproduction of Gainsborough's Portrait and other Illustrations.
Demy 8vo. 10_s._ 6_d._
=THE LIFE OF JOHN MYTTON.= By NIMROD. An entirely new edition printed
from new type. With 20 Coloured Plates reproduced from Alken's
Drawings. 42_s._ net.
=GOSSIP OF THE CENTURY.= By Mrs. PITT BYRNE. 4 vols. with numerous
Illustrations. 42_s._
=THE ACTOR AND HIS ART.= By STANLEY JONES. Crown 8vo. With Cover
designed by H. MITCHELL. 3_s._ 6_d._
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.