Speaking generally, all these towers were of four stories, with an underground basement each containing a number of dens and dungeons of the most gloomy and horrible character. The stone walls were constantly dripping water upon the slimy floor which swarmed with vermin, rats, toads and newts. Scanty light entered through narrow slits in the wall on the side of the ditch, and a small allowance of air, always foul with unwholesome exhalations. Iron bedsteads with a thin layer of dirty straw were the sole resting places of the miserable inmates. The fourth or topmost floors were even more dark than the basement. These, the Calottes, or “skull caps,” (familiar to us as the head-dress of the tonsured priests) were cagelike in form with low, vaulted roofs, so that no one might stand upright within save in the very centre of the room. They were barely lighted by narrow windows that gave no prospect, from the thickness of the walls and the plentiful provision of iron gratings having bars as thick as a man’s arms.
The fortress stood isolated in the centre of its own deep ditch, which was encircled by a narrow gallery serving as a chemin-des-rondes, the sentinel’s and watchman’s beat. This was reached by narrow staircases from the lower level of the interior and there were sentry boxes at intervals for the guards. North of the Bastile, beyond the main prison structure, but included in the general line of fortifications, was the Bastion, used as a terrace and exercising ground for privileged prisoners. In later years permission was accorded to the governors to grow vegetables upon this open space and fruit gardens were in full bearing upon the final demolition of the Bastile. The privilege conceded to the governor in this garden became a grievance of the prisoners, for it was let to a contractor who claimed that when the prisoners frequented it for exercise damage was done to the growing produce, and by a royal decree all prisoners were forbidden henceforth to enter this space.
The Bastile was for the first two centuries of its history essentially a military stronghold serving, principally, as a defensive work, and of great value to its possessors for the time being. Whoever held the Bastile over-awed Paris and was in a sense the master of France. In the unceasing strife of parties it passed perpetually from hand to hand and it would be wearisome to follow the many changes in its ownership. In the long wars between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, the latter seized Paris in the reign of the half-witted Charles V, but the Armagnacs held the Bastile and the person of the king’s eldest son, whose life was eventually saved by this seclusion. This dauphin came afterwards to the throne through the help of the English king, Henry V, who married his daughter Catherine and was appointed Regent of France. Under this régime Paris was occupied for a time by an English garrison. When at length the rival factions in France made common cause against the intrusive strangers the French re-entered Paris and the English were forced to retire into the Bastile, where they were so closely besieged that they presently offered to capitulate. The fortress was greatly over-crowded, supplies ran short and there was no hope of relief. The Constable of France, Richemont, was master of the situation outside, and at first refused terms, hoping to extort a large ransom, but the people of Paris, eager to be rid of the foreigners, advised him to accept their surrender and to allow the English garrison to march out with colors flying. It was feared that the people of Paris would massacre them as they passed through the streets and they were led by a circuitous route to the river where, amidst the hoots and hisses of a large crowd, they embarked in boats and dropped down the river to Rouen.
It is interesting to note here that one of the English governors of the Bastile was a certain Sir John Falstaff, not Shakespeare’s Sir John but a very different person, a stalwart knight of unblemished character, great judgment and approved prowess. He was a soldier utterly unlike the drunken, and disreputable “Jack Falstaff,” with his unconquerable weakness for sack, who only fought men in buckram. The real Sir John Falstaff was careful to maintain his charge safely, strengthening the fortress at all points, arming and victualling it and handing it over in good order to his successor, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby. History has to record other good things of Sir John Falstaff, who is remembered as a patron of letters, who paid a price for the translation of Cicero’s “De Senectute,” who endowed Magdalen College, Oxford, with much valuable property and whose name is still commemorated among the founders of the College in the anniversary speech. He was a Knight of the Garter, held many superior commands and died full of honors at the advanced age of eighty. Lord Willoughby was governor at the time of the surrender. He withdrew in safety and evidently in good heart for he won a victory over the French at Amiens after his retreat.
After the exodus of the English and with the accession of Louis XI, the two State prisons of Paris were very fully and constantly occupied. The chief episodes in the checkered history of France, conspiracies, revolts and disturbances, were written in the prison registers and their records are a running commentary upon the principal events of French history. The personal qualities of the rulers, their quarrels with their great subjects, the vindictive policies they followed, their oppression of, and cruelty to the people, may be read in the annals of Vincennes and the Bastile. By taking the reigns seriatim and examining the character of the sovereigns, we shall best realise passing events and those who acted in them.
Let us take up the story with Louis XI to whom some reference has already been made. Some of his victims, the prisoners of Loches and the Comte de Saint Pol have figured on an earlier page. To these we may add the story of the two Armagnacs, Jacques and Charles. Charles, although wholly innocent, was arrested and imprisoned because his brother Jacques had revolted against the king. Charles d’Armagnac was first tortured horribly, then thrown into one of the cages of the Bastile, which he inhabited for fourteen years and when released was found to be bereft of reason. Jacques, better known as the Duc de Nemours, had been the boy friend and companion of Louis, who lavished many favors on him which he repaid by conspiring against the royal authority. When orders were issued for his arrest he withdrew to his own castle, Carlet, hitherto deemed impregnable. It succumbed, however, when besieged in due form, and the Duke was taken prisoner. He had given himself up on a promise that his life would be spared, but he received no mercy from his offended king. His first prison was Pierre-Encise, in which his hair turned grey in a few nights. Thence he was transferred to a cage in the Bastile. The minute instructions were issued by the King as to this prisoner’s treatment, and in a letter it was directed that he should never be permitted to leave his cage or to have his fetters removed or to go to mass. He was only to be taken out to be tortured, in the cruel desire to extort an avowal that he had intended to kill the King and set up the Dauphin in his place. The Duke made a piteous appeal, signing himself “Pauvre Jacques,” but he was sent for trial before the Parliament in a packed court from which the peers were absent. He was condemned to death and executed, according to Voltaire, under the most revolting circumstances. It is fair to add that no other historian reports these atrocities. It is said that the scaffold on which he suffered was so constructed that his children, the youngest of whom was only five, were placed beneath clad in white and were splashed with the blood from his severed head that dropped through the openings of the planks. After this fearful tragedy these infants were carried back to the Bastile and imprisoned there in a narrow cell for five years. Other records, possibly also apocryphal, are preserved of additional torments inflicted on the Armagnac princes. It is asserted that they were taken out of their cells twice weekly to be flogged in the presence of the governor and to have a tooth extracted every three months.
The character of Louis XI shows black and forbidding in history. His tireless duplicity was matched by his distrustfulness and insatiable curiosity. He braved all dangers to penetrate the secrets of others, risked his own life, spent gold, wasted strength, used the matchless cunning of a red Indian, betrayed confidences and lied to all the world. Yet he was gifted with keen insight into human nature. No one knew better than he the strength and weakness of his fellow creatures. Withal, France has had worse rulers. He may be credited with a desire to raise and help the common people. He saw that in their industry and contentment the wealth of the kingdom chiefly lay and looked forward to the day when settled government would be assured. “If I live a little longer,” he told Comines the historian, “there shall be only one weight, one measure, one law for the kingdom. We will have no more lawyers cheating and pilfering, lawsuits shall be shortened, and there shall be good police in the country.” These dreams were never realised; but at least, Louis was not a libertine and the slave of selfish indulgence, the most vicious in a vicious court, ever showing an evil example and encouraging dissolute manners and shameless immorality, as were many of those who came after him.
Although the Salic law shut the female sex out of the succession to the throne, supreme power was frequently wielded by women in France. One of the earliest instances of this was in the steps taken by Louis XI to provide for the government during the minority of his son, who succeeded as Charles IX. The King’s daughter, Anne de Beaujeu, was named regent by her father, who had a high opinion of her abilities and considered her “the least foolish of her sex he had met; not the wisest, for there are no sensible women.” She was in truth possessed of remarkable talents and great strength of character, having much of her father’s shrewdness and being even less unscrupulous. But she ruled with a high hand and her young brother submitted himself entirely to her influence. She felt it her duty to make an example of the evil counsellors upon whom Louis had so much relied. Oliver le Daim, the ex-barber who had been created Comte de Meulan, was hanged, and his estates confiscated; Doyat, chief spy and informer, was flogged and his tongue pierced with a hot iron; Coictier, the King’s doctor, who had wielded too much authority, was fined heavily and sent into exile. Anne’s brother-in-law, the Duc d’Orleans, afterwards King Louis XII, had expected the regency and rebelled, but she put him down with a strong hand, destroyed the insurgent forces that he gathered around him, and made him a close prisoner in the great tower of Bourges, where he endured the usual penalties,—confinement in a narrow, low-roofed cell by day and removal to the conventional iron cage at night. Better fortune came to him in a few short years, for by the death of the Dauphin, only son of Charles VIII, Louis became next heir to the throne, and ascended it on the sudden death of the King from an accident in striking his head against the low archway of a dark corridor. He succeeded also to the King’s bed, for in due course he married his widow, Anne of Brittany, another woman of forcible character, on whom he often relied, sometimes too greatly.
The reign of Charles VIII and Louis brought military glory and a great increase of territory to France. The records of generally successful external war rather than internal dissensions fill the history of the time and we look in vain for lengthy accounts of prisoners relegated to the State prisons. With the accession of Francis I another epoch of conflict arrived and was general throughout Europe, involving all the great nations. It was the age of chivalry, when knights carried fortunes on their backs and the most lavish outlay added to the “pomp and circumstance” of war. “The Field of the Cloth of Gold” remains as a landmark in history, when kings vied with each other in extravagant ostentation and proposed to settle their differences by personal combat. The reign was brilliant with achievement abroad, but at home the people suffered much misery and Francis kept his prisons filled. Some great personages fell under his displeasure and were committed to the Bastile; notably, Montmorency, Constable of France, and Chabot, Admiral of France. These two, once school companions of the King, became bitter rivals and the Constable persuaded the King to try the Admiral on a charge of embezzlement. Francis, jealous of Chabot, readily accepted the accusation, and sent him to the Bastile, where the most flagrant violations of justice were used to secure conviction. He escaped with fines and banishment; and the next year the fickle monarch forgave him and released him from durance. He had been so sorely tried by his imprisonment that no doctor could restore him to health. The Chancellor, Poyet, who had framed the indictment, next found himself in the Bastile, suspected of being in the possession of important State secrets. The King himself appeared as the witness against him and although the charges were vague, he was sentenced to fine and confiscation of property.
