Legends of the Bastille

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 and the tortures of Cardinal La Balue!—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.