In the reign of Louis XVI all the rigors of prisons were softened, with the exception of the Bastille, the discipline of which was harsher than ever. In former reigns they had barred the windows; but now they also stopped the promenades in the gardens.
It is true that Louis XVI did not actually do this himself but he suffered it to be done, which is all the same.
Louis XVI did not himself shut up the garden. No; it was De Launay, who was as unpopular as he well could be.
At the Bastille all bought the places that they occupied, from the Governor down to the gaolers. Every situation was worth having, except that of the prisoners.
The Governor had sixty thousand livres salary. He made a hundred and twenty thousand by his plunders.
We have already spoken of the garden of the Bastille open to the prisoners. It was but a little plot of ground, planted, as it were, upon a bastion.
A gardener offered a hundred francs a year for it; and this scoundrel, who was wringing from the pitiful allowances of the prisoners the sum of a hundred and twenty thousand francs per annum, actually, for the sake of this paltry sum, deprived the poor wretches under his rule of the breath of air that made life supportable, of the sole gleam of life that intervened ’twixt them and the tomb.
He well knew that he would never survive the capture of the Bastille—this man of iron, who had a Bastille in place of a heart.
The Governor’s hundred and thirty-five barrels of powder were placed in a vault, situated in the centre of the fortress. The Bastille blown into the air would astound Paris in its ascent, and utterly destroy it in its stupendous fall. This he knew. When the prison was entered by the people, he clapped a torch to the touch-string. An Invalide seized his arms; two sous-officers crossed bayonets across his breast. He snatched a knife from his belt; they took it out of his hands.
Then he demanded to be allowed to march out with the honors of war.