MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE.
Speaking of men of letters in France under the _ancien régime_, Michelet
calls them "the martyrs of thought"; he adds: "The world thinks, France
speaks. And that is precisely why the Bastille of France, the Bastille
of Paris--I would rather say, the prison-house of thought--was, among
all bastilles, execrable, infamous, and accursed." In the course of the
article devoted to the Bastille in the _Grande Encyclopédie_, M. Fernand
Bournon writes: "After Louis XIV. and throughout the eighteenth century,
the Bastille was especially employed to repress, though it could not
stifle, that generous and majestic movement (the glory of the human
spirit) towards ideas of emancipation and enfranchisement; it was the
epoch when philosophers, publicists, pamphleteers, the very booksellers,
were imprisoned there in large numbers." And to substantiate this
eloquent apostrophe, M. Bournon cites the names of Voltaire, La
Beaumelle, the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, and Linguet, imprisoned in the
Bastille; and of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau placed in the
château of Vincennes.
Let us recall the story of these poor victims in turn, and trace the
history of their martyrdom.
VOLTAIRE.
The most illustrious and the earliest in date of the writers mentioned
by M. Bournon is Voltaire. He was sent to the Bastille on two different
occasions. His first imprisonment began on May 17, 1717. At that date
the poet was only twenty-two years of age and of no reputation; he did
not even bear the name of Voltaire, which he only took after his
discharge from the Bastille on April 14, 1718. The cause of his
detention was not "the generous and majestic movement towards ideas of
enfranchisement which is the glory of the human spirit," but some
scurrilities which, to speak plainly, brought him what he deserved:
coarse verses against the Regent and his daughter, and public utterances
coarser still. Many authors state that Voltaire was imprisoned for
writing the _J'ai vu_, a satire against the government of Louis XIV.,
each stanza of which ended with the line:--
J'ai vu ces maux, et je n'ai pas vingt ans.[42]
This is a mistake. Voltaire was imprisoned for having written the _Puero
regnante_, some verses on the Regent and his daughter, the Duchess of
Berry, which it would be impossible to translate. To these he added
observations whose reproduction would be equally impossible. At the
Bastille Voltaire underwent examinations in the usual way, in the course
of which he lied with impudence; after that he was allowed considerable
liberty. "It was at the Bastille," wrote Condorcet, "that the young poet
made the first draft of his poem _La Ligue_, corrected his tragedy of
_OEdipe_, and composed some very lively lines on the ill-luck of being
there."
The following are the most respectable lines of this production:--
So one fine faultless morning in the spring,
When Whitsun splendour brighten'd everything,
A strange commotion startled me from sleep.
* * * * *
At last I reach'd my chamber in the keep.
A clownish turnkey, with an unctuous smile,
Of my new lodging 'gan to praise the style:
"What ease, what charms, what comforts here are yours!
For never Phoebus in his daily course
Will blind you here with his too brilliant rays;
Within these ten-foot walls you'll spend your days
In cool sequester'd blithefulness always."
Then bidding me admire my cloistral cell--
The triple doors, the triple locks as well,
The bolts, the bars, the gratings all around--
"'Tis but," says he, "to keep you safe and sound!"
* * * * *
Behold me, then, lodged in this woful place,
Cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined in narrow space;
Sleepless by night, and starving half the day;
No joys, no friend, no mistress--wellaway![43]
When Voltaire was set at liberty, the Regent, whom, as we have just
said, he had reviled, made him a very handsome offer of his protection.
The poet's reply is well known: "My lord, I thank your royal highness
for being so good as to continue to charge yourself with my board, but
I beseech you no longer to charge yourself with my lodging." The young
writer thus obtained from the Regent a pension of 400 crowns, which
later on the latter augmented to 2000 livres.
Voltaire was sent to the Bastille a second time in April, 1726. For this
new detention there was no justification whatever. He had had a violent
quarrel, one evening at the Opera, with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot.
On another occasion, at the Comédie Française, the poet and the nobleman
had a warm altercation in the box of Mdlle. Lecouvreur. Rohan raised his
stick, Voltaire put his hand on his sword, and the actress fainted. Some
days later "the gallant chevalier, assisted by half a dozen ruffians,
behind whom he courageously posted himself," gave our poet a thrashing
in broad daylight. When relating the adventure later, the Chevalier said
pleasantly: "I commanded the squad." From that moment Voltaire sought
his revenge. "The police reports reveal curious details of the loose,
erratic, and feverish life he lived between the insult and his arrest,"
writes the careful biographer of Voltaire, Desnoiresterres. From one of
these police reports we see that the young writer established relations
with soldiers of the guard: several notorious bullies were constantly
about him. A relative who attempted to calm him found him more irritated
and violent in his language than ever. It appears certain that he was
meditating some act of violence, which indeed would not have been
without justification. But the Cardinal de Rohan contrived that he
should be arrested on the night of April 17, 1726, and placed in the
Bastille.
Speaking of this new imprisonment Marshal de Villars writes: "The
public, disposed to find fault all round, came to the conclusion on this
occasion that everybody was in the wrong: Voltaire for having offended
the Chevalier de Rohan, the latter for having dared to commit a capital
offence in causing a citizen to be beaten, the government for not having
punished a notorious crime, and for having sent the injured party to the
Bastille to pacify the injurer." Nevertheless, we read in the report of
Hérault, the lieutenant of police: "The Sieur de Voltaire was found
armed with pocket pistols, and his family, when informed of the matter,
unanimously and universally applauded the wisdom of an order which saves
this young man the ill effects of some new piece of folly and the worthy
people who compose his family the vexation of sharing his shame."
Voltaire remained at the Bastille for _twelve days_: he was permitted to
have a servant of his own choice to wait on him, who was boarded at the
king's expense; as for himself, he took his meals whenever he pleased at
the governor's table, going out of the Bastille, as the governor's
residence stood outside the prison. Relatives and friends came to see
him; his friend Thiériot dined with him; he was given pens, paper,
books, whatever he desired in order to divert himself. "Using and
abusing these opportunities," writes Desnoiresterres, "Voltaire believed
that he could give audience to all Paris. He wrote to those of his
friends who had not yet shown a sense of their duty, exhorting them to
give him proof they were alive." "I have been accustomed to all
misfortunes," he wrote to Thiériot, "but not yet to that of being
utterly abandoned by you. Madame de Bernières, Madame du Deffand, the
Chevalier des Alleurs really ought to come and see me. They only have to
ask permission of M. Hérault or M. de Maurepas." At the time of the
poet's entrance to the Bastille, the lieutenant of police had written to
the governor: "The Sieur de Voltaire is of a _genius_ that requires
humouring. His Serene Highness has approved of my writing to tell you
that the king's intention is that you should secure for him mild
treatment and the internal liberty of the Bastille, so far as these do
not jeopardize the security of his detention." The warrant setting him
at liberty was signed on April 26.
LA BEAUMELLE.
In M. Bournon's list La Beaumelle comes second. The circumstances under
which he was put into the Bastille were as follows. After having fallen
out at Berlin with Voltaire, whom he had compared to a monkey, La
Beaumelle returned to Paris, whence he had been exiled. There he got
printed a new edition of Voltaire's _Age of Louis XIV._, unknown to the
author, and interpolated therein odes insulting to the house of Orleans.
"La Beaumelle," exclaimed Voltaire, "is the first who dared to print
another man's work in his lifetime. This miserable Erostrates of the
_Age of Louis XIV._ has discovered the secret of changing into an
infamous libel, for fifteen ducats, a work undertaken for the glory of
the nation."
La Beaumelle became an inmate of the Bastille in April, 1753, and
remained there for six months. Writing on May 18, 1753, to M. Roques,
Voltaire said that "there was scarcely any country where he would not
inevitably have been punished sooner or later, and I know from a certain
source that there are two courts where they would have inflicted a
chastisement more signal than that which he is undergoing here."
It was not long before La Beaumelle issued his edition of _Notes towards
the History of Madame de Maintenon and that of the past century_, with
nine volumes of correspondence. He had fabricated letters which he
attributed to Madame de Saint-Géran and Madame de Frontenac, and
published a correspondence of Madame de Maintenon which M. Geffroy, in a
work recognized as authoritative, regards as full of barefaced
falsehoods and foul and scurrilous inventions. He had inserted in his
work the following phrase: "The court of Vienna has been long accused of
having poisoners always in its pay."
It must be observed that La Beaumelle's publication owed its great vogue
to special circumstances. The author's reputation abroad, the very title
of the book, lent it great importance; and France, then engaged in the
Seven Years' War, found it necessary to keep in Austria's good graces.
La Beaumelle was conveyed to the Bastille a second time. The lieutenant
of police, Berryer, put him through the usual examination. La Beaumelle
was a man of the world, so witty that in the course of their quarrels he
drove Voltaire himself to despair. He showed himself such in his
examination. "La Beaumelle," said Berryer to him, "this is wit you are
giving me when what I ask of you is plain sense." On his expressing a
wish for a companion, he was placed with the Abbé d'Estrades. The
officers of the château had all his manuscripts brought from his house,
so that he might continue his literary work. He had at the Bastille a
library of 600 volumes, ranged on shelves which the governor ordered to
be made for him. He there finished a translation of the _Annals_ of
Tacitus and the _Odes_ of Horace. He had permission to write to his
relatives and friends, and to receive visits from them; he had the
liberty of walking in the castle garden, of breeding birds in his room,
and of having brought from outside all the luxuries to which he was
partial. The principal secretary of the lieutenant of police, Duval,
reports the following incident: "Danry (the famous Latude) and Allègre
(his companion in confinement and ere long in escape) found means to
open a correspondence with all the prisoners in the Bastille. They
lifted a stone in a closet of the chapel, and put their letters
underneath it. La Beaumelle pretended to be a woman in his letters to
Allègre, and as he was a man of parts and Allègre was of keen
sensibility and an excellent writer, the latter fell madly in love with
La Beaumelle, to such a degree that, though they mutually agreed to
burn their letters, Allègre preserved those of his fancied mistress,
which he had not the heart to give to the flames; with the result that,
the letters being discovered at an inspection of his room, he was put in
the cells for some time. The prisoner amused himself also by composing
verses which he recited at the top of his voice. This gave much concern
to the officers of the garrison, and Chevalier, the major, wrote to the
lieutenant of police on the matter: "The Sieur de la Beaumelle seems to
have gone clean out of his mind; he seems to be a maniac; he amuses
himself by declaiming verses in his room for a part of the day: for the
rest of the time he is quiet."
This second detention lasted from August, 1756, till August, 1757.
THE ABBÉ MORELLET.
We come to the Abbé Morellet, a man of fine and fascinating mind, one of
the best of the Encyclopædists, who died in 1819 a member of the
Institute and the object of general esteem. He was arrested on June 11,
1760, for having had printed and distributed, without privilege or
permission, a pamphlet entitled: _Preface to the Philosophers' Comedy;
or, the Vision of Charles Palissot_.[44] These are the terms in which,
later on, Morellet himself judged his pamphlet: "I must here make my
confession. In this work, I went far beyond the limits of a literary
pleasantry regarding the Sieur Palissot, and to-day I am not without
remorse for my fault." And further, as J. J. Rousseau, in whose favour
the pamphlet had been in part composed, had to acknowledge, the Abbé
"very impudently" insulted a young and pretty woman, Madame de Robecq,
who was dying of decline, spitting blood, and did actually die a few
days later.
The arrest of Morellet was demanded by Malesherbes, then censor of the
press, one of the most generous and liberal spirits of the time, the
inspirer of the famous remonstrances of the Court of Taxation against
_lettres de cachet_--the man who, as M. H. Monin testifies, "being
elected censor of the press, protected philosophers and men of letters,
and by his personal efforts facilitated the publication of the
_Encyclopædia_." Speaking of the _Preface to the Comedy_, Malesherbes
writes to Gabriel de Sartine, lieutenant-general of police: "It is an
outrageous pamphlet, not only against Palissot, but against respectable
persons whose very condition should shelter them against such insults. I
beg you, sir, to be good enough to put a stop to this scandal. I believe
it to be a matter of public importance that the punishment should be
very severe, and that this punishment should not stop at the Bastille or
the For-l'Evêque,[45] because a very wide distinction must be drawn
between the delinquencies of men of letters tearing each other to
pieces and the insolence of those who attack persons of the highest
consideration in the State. I do not think that Bicêtre would be too
severe for these last. If you have to ask M. de Saint-Florentin for the
royal authority for your proceedings, I hope you will be good enough to
inform him of the request I am making."
It will be observed that, on Malesherbes' showing, the Bastille would
not suffice to punish the _Preface to the Comedy_, nor even the
For-l'Evêque; he asks for the most stringent of the prisons, Bicêtre.
Before long, it is true, this excellent man returned to milder
sentiments. An imprisonment at Bicêtre, he wrote, would be infamous.
Saint-Florentin and Sartine were not hard to convince. Morellet was
taken to the Bastille. "The warrant for his arrest," wrote one of his
agents to Malesherbes, "was executed this morning by Inspector D'Hémery
with all the amenities possible in so unpleasant a business. D'Hémery
knows the Abbé Morellet, and has spoken of him to M. de Sartine in the
most favourable terms."
When he entered the Bastille the Abbé calculated that his imprisonment
would last six months, and after acknowledging that he at that time
viewed his detention without great distress, he adds: "I am bound to
say, to lower the too high opinion that may be formed of me and my
courage, that I was marvellously sustained by a thought which rendered
my little virtue more easy. I saw some literary glory illumining the
walls of my prison; persecuted, I must be better known. The men of
letters whom I had avenged, and the philosophy for which I was a
martyr, would lay the foundation of my reputation. The men of the world,
who love satire, would receive me better than ever. A career was opening
before me, and I should be able to pursue it at greater advantage. These
six months at the Bastille would be an excellent recommendation, and
would infallibly make my fortune."
The Abbé remained at the Bastille, not six months, but six weeks, "which
slipped away," he observes "--I chuckle still as I think of them--very
pleasantly for me." He spent his time in reading romances, and, with
admirable humour, in writing a _Treatise on the Liberty of the Press_.
Afterwards the good Abbé informs us that the hopes which he had indulged
were not deceived. On issuing from the Bastille he was a made man.
Little known two months before, he now met everywhere with the reception
he desired. The doors of the salons of Madame de Boufflers, Madame
Necker, the Baron d'Holbach, flew open before him; women pitied him and
admired him, and men followed their example. Why have we not to-day a
Bastille to facilitate the career of writers of talent!
MARMONTEL.
To Marmontel his stay at the royal prison appeared as pleasant as the
Abbé Morellet had found his. He had amused himself by reciting at Madame
Geoffrin's a mordant satire in which the Duke d'Aumont, first groom of
the stole to the king, was cruelly hit. The duke expostulated;
Marmontel wrote to him declaring that he was not the author of the
satire; but the nobleman stood his ground.
"I am helpless," said the Count de Saint-Florentin, who countersigned
the _lettre de cachet_, to Marmontel; "the Duke d'Aumont accuses you,
and is determined to have you punished. It is a satisfaction he demands
in recompense for his services and the services of his ancestors. The
king has been pleased to grant him his wish. So you will go and find M.
de Sartine; I am addressing to him the king's order; you will tell him
that it was from my hand you received it."
"I went to find M. de Sartine," writes Marmontel, "and I found with him
the police officer who was to accompany me. M. de Sartine was intending
that he should go to the Bastille in a separate carriage; but I myself
declined this obliging offer, and we arrived at the Bastille, my
introducer and myself, in the same hack.... The governor, M. d'Abadie,
asked me if I wished my servant to be left with me.... They made a
cursory inspection of my packets and books, and then sent me up to a
large room furnished with two beds, two tables, a low cupboard, and
three cane chairs. It was cold, but a jailer made us a good fire and
brought me wood in abundance. At the same time they gave me pens, ink,
and paper, on condition of my accounting for the use I made of them and
the number of sheets they allowed me.
"The jailer came back to ask if I was satisfied with my bed. After
examining it I replied that the mattresses were bad and the coverlets
dirty. In a minute all was changed. They sent to ask me what was my
dinner hour. I replied, 'The same as everybody's.' The Bastille had a
library: the governor sent me the catalogue, giving me free choice among
the books. I merely thanked him for myself, but my servant asked for the
romances of Prévost, and they were brought to him."
Let us go on with Marmontel's story. "For my part," he says, "I had the
means of escape from ennui. Having been for a long time impatient of the
contempt shown by men of letters for Lucan's poem, which they had not
read, and only knew in the barbarous fustian of Brébeuf's version, I had
resolved to translate it more becomingly and faithfully into prose; and
this work, which would occupy me without fatiguing my brain, was the
best possible employment for the solitary leisure of my prison. So I had
brought the _Pharsalia_ with me, and, to understand it the better, I had
been careful to bring with it the _Commentaries_ of Cæsar. Behold me
then at the corner of a good fire, pondering the quarrel of Cæsar and
Pompey, and forgetting my own with the Duke d'Aumont. And there was Bury
too (Marmontel's servant) as philosophical as myself, amusing himself by
making our beds placed at two opposite corners of my room, which was at
this moment lit up by the beams of a fine winter sun, in spite of the
bars of two strong iron gratings which permitted me a view of the Suburb
Saint-Antoine.
"Two hours later, the noise of the bolts of the two doors which shut me
in startled me from my profound musings, and the two jailers, loaded
with a dinner I believed to be mine, came in and served it in silence.
One put down in front of the fire three little dishes covered with
plates of common earthenware; the other laid on that one of the two
tables which was clear a tablecloth rather coarse, indeed, but white. I
saw him place on the table a very fair set of things, a pewter spoon and
fork, good household bread, and a bottle of wine. Their duty done, the
jailers retired, and the two doors were shut again with the same noise
of locks and bolts.
"Then Bury invited me to take my place, and served my soup. It was a
Friday. The soup, made without meat, was a _purée_ of white beans, with
the freshest butter, and a dish of the same beans was the first that
Bury served me with. I found all this excellent. The dish of cod he gave
me for second course was better still. It was served with a dash of
garlic, which gave it a delicacy of taste and odour which would have
flattered the taste of the daintiest Gascon. The wine was not
first-rate, but passable; no sweets: of course one must expect to be
deprived of something. On the whole, I thought that dinner in prison was
not half bad.
"As I was rising from table, and Bury was about to sit down--for there
was enough for his dinner in what was left--lo and behold! in came my
two jailers again, with pyramids of dishes in their hands. At this
display of fine linen, fine china-ware, spoon and fork of silver, we
recognized our mistake; but we made not the ghost of a sign, and when
our jailers, having laid down their burden, had retired, 'Sir,' said
Bury, 'you have just eaten my dinner, you will quite agree to my having
my turn and eating yours.' 'That's fair,' I replied, and the walls of my
room were astonished, I fancy, at the sound of laughter.
"This dinner was not vegetarian; here are the details: an excellent
soup, a juicy beef-steak, a boiled capon's leg streaming with gravy and
melting in one's mouth, a little dish of artichokes fried in pickle, a
dish of spinach, a very fine William pear, fresh-cut grapes, a bottle of
old burgundy, and best Mocha coffee; this was Bury's dinner, with the
exception of the coffee and the fruit, which he insisted on reserving
for me.
"After dinner the governor came to see me, and asked me if I found the
fare sufficient, assuring me that I should be served from his table,
that he would take care to cut my portions himself, and that no one
should touch my food but himself. He suggested a fowl for my supper; I
thanked him and told him that what was left of the fruit from my dinner
would suffice. The reader has just seen what my ordinary fare was at the
Bastille, and from this he may infer with what mildness, or rather
reluctance, they brought themselves to visit on me the wrath of the Duke
d'Aumont.
"Every day I had a visit from the governor. As he had some smack of
literature and even of Latin, he took some interest in following my
work, in fact, enjoyed it; but soon, tearing himself away from these
little dissipations, he said, 'Adieu, I am going to console men who are
more unfortunate than you.'"
Such was the imprisonment of Marmontel. It lasted for eleven days.
LINGUET.
Linguet, advocate and journalist, was arrested for a breach of the press
laws and for slander. He was a man of considerable ability, but little
character. Attorney-general Cruppi has devoted to the story of Linguet a
work as extensive as it is eloquent. He has a wealth of indulgence for
his hero; yet, despite the goodwill he shows for him and endeavours to
impart to the reader, his book reveals between the lines that Linguet
was worthy of little esteem, and that his professional brethren were
justified in removing his name from the roll of the advocates of Paris.
Linguet's captivity lasted for two years. He has left a description of
it in his _Memoirs on the Bastille_, which made a great noise, and of
which the success has endured down to our own day. His book, like
everything which came from his pen, is written in a fluent style, with
spirit and brilliance; the facts cited are for the most part correct,
but the author, aiming at making a sensation, has cleverly presented
them in a light which distorts their real character. "There are means,"
says Madame de Staal, "of so distributing light and shade on the facts
one is exhibiting, as to alter their appearance without altering the
groundwork." Take, for instance, the description that Linguet gives of
his belongings while in the Bastille: "Two worm-eaten mattresses, a cane
chair the seat of which was only held to it by strings, a folding table,
a jug for water, two earthenware pots, one of them for drinking, and two
stone slabs to make a fire on." A contemporary could say of Linguet's
_Memoirs_, "It is the longest lie that ever was printed." And yet, if we
take the facts themselves which are related by the clever journalist,
and disengage them from the deceitful mirage in which he has enwrapped
them, we do not see that his life in the Bastille was so wretched as he
endeavours to make us believe. He is forced to acknowledge that his food
was always most abundant, adding, it is true, that that was because they
wished to poison him! He owed his life, he is convinced, "only to the
obstinate tenacity of his constitution." He marked, nevertheless, on the
menu for the day, which was sent up every morning by the Bastille cook,
the dishes he fancied; and later on he had his room furnished after his
own heart. He still enjoyed, moreover, enough liberty to write during
his imprisonment a work entitled, _The Trials of Three Kings, Louis
XVI., Charles III., and George III._, which appeared in London in 1781.
Let us recall once more the famous saying of Linguet to the wig-maker of
the Bastille on the first day that he presented himself to trim the
prisoner's beard: "To whom have I the honour of speaking?" "I am, sir,
the barber to the Bastille." "Gad, then, why don't you raze it?"
In June, 1792, some years after his liberation, Linguet was prosecuted a
second time for breach of the press laws. The revolutionary tribunal
condemned him to death. As he mounted the steps of the scaffold, the
ardent pamphleteer thought, mayhap, with bitterly ironical regret, of
that Bastille whose destruction he had so clamorously demanded.
DIDEROT.
We have still to speak of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who were
not incarcerated at the Bastille, but at Vincennes, not in the castle
keep, but in the château itself, which constituted a separate place of
imprisonment. They placed in the château only prisoners guilty of minor
offences, who were sentenced to a temporary detention, and to whom they
wished to show some consideration. This was, as we have just said, the
abode of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot was arrested on
July 24, 1749. His last book, _Letters on the Blind for the Use of those
Who Can See_, contained theories which appeared to have but little title
to the description of "moral." But in the course of his examination he
stoutly denied that he was its author, as also he denied the authorship
of the _Thoughts of a Philosopher_ he had published some years before.
The lieutenant of police gave instructions to the governor of Vincennes
that, short of being set at liberty, Diderot was to be granted all
possible comforts--allowed to walk in the garden and park; "that the
king's desire was, in consideration of the literary work on which he was
engaged (the _Encyclopædia_), to permit him to communicate freely with
persons from without who might come for that purpose or on family
business." And so Diderot received a visit from his wife and walked with
her in the wood; Rousseau and D'Alembert spent their afternoons with
him, and, as in the "good old days" of Plato and Socrates, our
philosophers chatted of metaphysics and love, seated on the green grass
under the shade of mighty oaks. The booksellers and printers who had
undertaken the publication of the _Encyclopædia_ were, as we have seen,
in constant communication with Diderot at Vincennes; he corrected in
prison the proofs of the publication, which the court looked on with no
favourable eye. And we know, too, that at night, with the secret
complicity of the governor, our philosopher cleared the park walls to
hurry to a fair lady at Paris, one Madame de Puysieux, whom he loved
with a passion by no means platonic; ere the sun was up, the jailers
found him safely back under lock and key. This irksome captivity lasted
little more than three months.
THE MARQUIS DE MIRABEAU.
The imprisonment of Mirabeau lasted only ten days. The _lettre de
cachet_ had been obtained by the clique of financiers, who took fright
at the audacious conceptions of the _Theory of Taxation_. "I fancy I
deserved my punishment," wrote the Marquis, "like the ass in the fable,
for a clumsy and misplaced zeal." In regard to the arrest, Madame
d'Epinay sent word to Voltaire: "Never before was a man arrested as this
one was. The officer said to him, 'Sir, my orders do not state I am to
hurry you: to-morrow will do, if you haven't time to-day.' 'No, sir, one
cannot be too prompt in obeying the king's orders, I am quite ready.'
And off he went with a bag crammed with books and papers." At Vincennes
the Marquis had a servant with him. His wife came to see him. The king
spent for his support fifteen livres a day, more than twenty-five
shillings of our money. He was liberated on December 24, 1760. His
brother, Bailie Mirabeau, speaking of this detention, wrote to him of "a
week's imprisonment in which you were shown every possible
consideration."
* * * * *
We have exhausted M. Bournon's list of the writers who were victims of
arbitrary authority. Such are the "martyrs" for whom that excellent
historian, and Michelet and others, have shown the most affecting
compassion. The foregoing facts do not call for comment. Men of letters
were the spoilt children of the eighteenth century much more than of our
own, and never has an absolute government shown a toleration equal to
that of the monarchy under the _ancien régime_ towards writers whose
doctrines, as events have proved, tended directly to its destruction.