Of the secondary punishments, those less than death, there was the amende honorable, a public reparation made by degrading exposure with a rope round the neck, sometimes by standing at the door of a church, sometimes by being led through the streets seated on a donkey with face towards the tail. The culprit was often stripped naked to the waist and flogged on the back as he stood or was borne away. Blasphemy, sacrilege and heresy were punished by the exaction of the amende honorable. An old King of France was subjected to it by his revolted sons. A reigning prince, the Count of Toulouse, who was implicated in the assassination of a papal legate concerned in judging the religieuses, was brought with every mark of ignominy before an assemblage at the door of a church. Three archers, who had violated a church sanctuary and dragged forth two fugitive thieves, were sentenced on the demand of the clergy to make the amende at the church door arrayed in petticoats and bearing candles in their hands.
Flagellation was a cruel and humiliating punishment, largely used under degrading conditions and with various kinds of instruments. Mutilation was employed in every variety; not a single part of the body has escaped some penalties. There were many forms of wounding the eyes and the mouth; tongue, ears, teeth, arms, hands and feet have been attacked with fire and weapons of every kind. To slice off the nose, crop the ears, amputate the wrist, draw the teeth, cut off the lower limbs, were acts constantly decreed. Branding with red hot irons on the brow, cheeks, lips and shoulders, kept the executioner busy with such offenses as blasphemy, petty thefts and even duelling. The effects served to inhibit like offenses, but the punishment was in no sense a preventive or corrective.
Prisoners were generally received at Vincennes in the dead of night, a natural sequel to secret unexplained arrests, too often the result of jealousy or caprice or savage ill-will. The ceremony on arrival was much the same as that which still obtains. A close search from head to foot, the deprivation of all papers, cash and valuables, executed under the eyes of the governor himself. The new arrival was then conducted to his lodging, generally a foul den barely furnished with bedstead, wooden table and a couple of rush-bottomed chairs. The first mandate issued was that strict silence was the invariable rule. Arbitrary and irksome rules governed the whole course of procedure and daily conduct. The smallest privileges depended entirely upon the order of superior authority. Books or writing materials were issued or forbidden as the gaoler, the king’s minister, or the king himself might decide. Dietary was fixed by regulation and each prisoner’s maintenance paid out of the king’s bounty on a regular scale according to the rank and quality of the captive. The allowance for princes of the blood was $10 per diem, for marshals of France $7.50, for judges, priests and captains in the army or officials of good standing about $2, and for lesser persons fifty cents. These amounts were ample, but pilfering and peculation were the general rule. The money was diverted from the use intended, articles were issued in kind and food and fuel were shamelessly stolen. Prisoners who were not allowed to supply themselves, were often half starved and half frozen in their cells. So inferior was the quality of the prison rations, that those who purloined food could not sell it in the neighborhood and the peasants said that all that came from the Donjon was rotten. In sharp contrast was the revelry and rioting in which prisoners of high station were permitted to indulge. These were attended by their own servants and constantly visited by their personal friends of both sexes. An amusing sidelight on the régime of Vincennes may be read in the account of the arrest of the great Prince de Condé, during the Fronde, and his two confederate princes, the Prince de Conti, his brother, and the Duc de Longueville, his brother-in-law. No preparations had been made for their reception, but Condé, a soldier and an old campaigner, supped on some new-laid eggs and slept on a bundle of straw. Next morning he played tennis and shuttle-cock with the turnkeys, sang songs and began seriously to learn music. A strip of garden ground, part of the great court, surrounding the prison, where the prisoners exercised, was given to Condé to cultivate and he raised pinks which were the admiration of all Paris. He poked fun at the Governor and when the latter threatened him for breach of rule, proposed to strangle him. This is clearly the same Condé who nicknamed Cardinal Mazarin, “Mars,” when his eminence aspired to lead an army, and when he wrote him a letter addressed it to “His Excellency, the Great Scoundrel.”
Prison discipline must have been slack in Vincennes, nor could innumerable locks and ponderous chains make up for the careless guard kept by its gaolers. Many escapes were effected from Vincennes, more creditable to the ingenuity and determination of the fugitives than to the vigilance and integrity of those charged with their safe custody.
Antiquarian researches connect the Bastile in its beginning with the fortifications hastily thrown up by the Parisians in the middle of the fourteenth century to defend the outskirts of the city upon the right bank of the river. The walls built by Philip Augustus one hundred and fifty years earlier were by this time in a ruinous condition. The English invasion had prospered, and after the battle of Poitiers the chief authority in the capital, Étienne Marcel, the provost of the merchants, felt bound to protect Paris. An important work was added at the eastern entrance of the city, and the gateway was flanked by a tower on either side. Marcel was in secret correspondence with the then King of Navarre, who aspired to the throne of France, and would have admitted him to Paris through this gateway, but was not permitted to open it. The infuriated populace attacked him as he stood with the keys in his hand, and although he sought asylum in one of the towers he was struck down with an axe and slain.
This first fortified gate was known as the Bastile of St. Antoine. The first use of the word “Bastile,” which is said to have been of Roman origin, was applied to the temporary forts raised to cover siege works and isolate and cut off a beleaguered city from relief or revictualment. The construction of a second and third fortress was undertaken some years later, in 1370, when the first stone of the real Bastile was laid. Another provost, Hugues Aubriot by name, had authority from Charles V to rebuild and strengthen the defences, and was supplied by the king with moneys for the purpose. Aubriot appears to have added two towers to the gateway, and this made the Bastile into a square fort with a tower at each angle. This provost was high-handed and ruled Paris with a rod of iron, making many enemies, who turned on him. He offended the ever turbulent students of the University and was heavily fined for interfering with their rights. To raise money for the king, he imposed fresh taxes, and was accused of unlawful commerce with the Jews, for which he was handed over to the ecclesiastical tribunal and condemned to be burnt to death. This sentence was, however, commuted to perpetual imprisonment, and tradition has it that he was confined in one of the towers he had himself erected. The historian compares his sad fate with that of other designers of punishment, such as the Greek who invented the brazen bull and was the first to be burnt inside it, or Enguerrand de Marigny, who was hung on his own gibbet of Montfauçon, and the Bishop Haraucourt of Verdun, who was confined in his own iron cage.
Hugues Aubriot was presently transferred from the Bastile to For-l’Évêque prison where he was languishing at the time of the insurrection of the Maillotins. These men rose against the imposition of fresh taxes and armed themselves with leaden mallets which they seized in the arsenal. A leader failing them, they forcibly released Hugues Aubriot and begged him to be their captain, escorting him in triumph to his house. But the ex-provost pined for peace and quiet and slipped away at the first chance. He was a native of Dijon in Burgundy and he escaped thither to die in obscurity the following year.
Charles VI enlarged and extended the Bastile by adding four more towers and giving it the plan of a parallelogram, and it remained with but few modifications practically the same when captured by the revolutionists in 1789. The fortress now consisted of eight towers, each a hundred feet high and with a wall connecting them, nine feet thick. Four of these towers looked inwards facing the city, four outwards over the suburb of St. Antoine. A great ditch, twenty-five feet deep and one hundred and twenty feet wide, was dug to surround it. The road which had hitherto passed through it was diverted, the gateway blocked up and a new passage constructed to the left of the fortress. The Bastile proper ceased to be one of the entrances of Paris and that of the Porte St. Antoine was substituted. Admission to the fortress was gained at the end opposite the rue St. Antoine between the two towers named the Bazinière and Comté overlooking the Seine. On the ground floor of the former was the reception ward, as we should call it, a detailed account of which is preserved in the old archives. The first room was the porter’s lodge with a guard bed and other pieces of furniture of significant purpose; two ponderous iron bars fixed in the wall, with iron chains affixed ending in fetters for hands and feet, and an iron collar for the neck; the avowed object of all being to put a man in “Gehenna,” the ancient prison euphemism for hell. A four-wheeled iron chariot is also mentioned, no doubt for the red hot coals to be used in inflicting torture, the other implements for which were kept in this chamber. The tower of the Comté was like the rest, of four stories, and became chiefly interesting for the escapes effected from it by Latude and D’Allègre in later years.
All the towers of the Bastile received distinctive names derived from the chance associations of some well-known personage or from the purpose to which they were applied. These names became the official designation of their occupants, who were entered in the books as “No. so and so” of “such and such a tower.” Personal identity was soon lost in the Bastile. If we made the circuit of the walls, starting from the Bazinière Tower first described, we should come to that of La Bertaudière in the façade above the rue St. Antoine and overlooking the city, the third floor of which was the last resting place of that mysterious prisoner, the Man with the Iron Mask. Next came the tower of Liberty, a name supposed by some to have originated in some saturnine jest, by others to have been the scene of successful escape, although attempts were usually made on the other side of the Bastile which overlooked the open country. The tower of the Well (Du Puits) had an obvious derivation.
At the north-east angle was the Corner Tower, so called, no doubt, because it was situated at the corner of the street and the Boulevard St. Antoine. Next came the Chapel Tower, from its neighborhood to the old Chapel of the Bastile. This at one time took rank as the noble quarter of the fortress and was called the “Donjon”—for in the time of the English domination the king’s chamber and that of the “captain” were situated in this tower. In later days the Chapel Tower had accommodation for only three occupants, two on the second and one on the third floor, the first floor being used as a store house. Next came the Treasure Tower, a title which referred back to a very early date, as witness receipts in existence for moneys paid over to the king’s controller-general of finances. In the reign of Henry IV, a prudent monarch with a thrifty minister, the ever faithful and famous Duke de Sully, large sums were deposited in this tower as a reserve for the enterprises he contemplated. The money was soon expended after Henry’s assassination, in wasteful extravagances and civil wars. It is of record that after payment of all current expenses of State, the surplus collected by Sully in the Bastile amounted to 41,345,000 livres or upwards of 120,000,000 francs, or $25,000,000. On reaching the eighth, or last tower, that of the Comté, we return to the northernmost side of the great gate already spoken of.