The report that the Prince de Léon, being a prince of the blood, a son of the Duc de Rohan, was about to marry a ballet dancer, Mademoiselle Florence, entailed committal to the Bastile, not on the Prince but on the girl. “Florence was arrested this morning while the Prince was at Versailles,” writes the chief of the police. “Her papers were seized.... She told the officer who arrested her she was not married, that she long foresaw what would happen, that she would be only too happy to retire into a convent and that she had a hundred times implored the Prince to give his consent. I have informed the Prince’s father, the Duc de Rohan, of this.” The Prince was furious upon hearing of the arrest and refused to forgive his relations. The Duc de Rohan was willing to supply Mademoiselle Florence with all necessaries to make captivity more tolerable, but great difficulty was found in getting him to pay the bill. The Duc de Rohan was so great a miser that he allowed his wife and children to die of hunger. The Bastile bill included charges for doctor and nurse as Mademoiselle de Florence was brought to bed of a child in prison. What with the expenses of capture and gaol fees it amounted to 5,000 francs. The end of this incident was that the Prince de Léon, while his lady love was in the Bastile, eloped with a supposed heiress, Mademoiselle de Roquelaure, who was ugly, hunch-backed and no longer young. The Prince ran off with her from a convent, moved to do so by his father’s promise of an allowance, which the miserly duke never paid. The bride was recaptured and sent back to the cloister in which her mother had placed her to avoid the necessity of giving her any dowry. The married couple, when at last they came together, had a bad time of it, as neither of the parents would help them with funds and they lived in great poverty.
A strange episode, forcibly illustrating the arbitrary character of Louis XIV and his fine contempt for international rights, was the case of the Armenian Patriarch, Avedik, who was an inmate of the Bastile and also of Mont St. Michel. The Armenian Catholics, and especially the Jesuits, had reason to complain of Avedik’s high handed treatment, and the French ambassador interfered by paying a large price for the Patriarch’s removal from his sacred office. Certain schismatics of the French party secured his reinstatement by raising the bid; and now the French ambassador seized the person of Avedik, who was put on board a French ship and conveyed to Messina, then Spanish territory, where he was cast into the prison of the Inquisition. This abduction evoked loud protest in Constantinople, but the French disavowed it, although it had certainly met with the approval of Louis XIV. Avedik would have languished and died forgotten in Messina, but without waiting instructions, the French consul had extracted him from the prison of the Inquisition and passed him on to Marseilles.
Great precautions were taken to keep his arrival secret. If the poor, kidnapped foreigner, who spoke no language but Turkish and Armenian, should chance to be recognised, the report of his sudden death was to be announced and no doubt it would soon be justified in fact. Otherwise he was to be taken quietly across France from Marseilles, on the Mediterranean, to Mont St. Michel on the Normandy coast, where his kidnappers were willing to treat him well. The King expressly ordered that he should have “a room with a fire place, linen and so forth, as his Majesty had no desire that the prisoner should suffer, provided economy is observed.... He is not to be subjected to perpetual abstinence and may have meat when he asks for it.” Of course an attempt was made to convert the Patriarch, already a member of the Greek Church, to Catholicism as preached in France, although the interchange of ideas was not easy, and the monk sent to confess him could not do so for want of a common language. Eventually Avedik was brought to Paris and lodged in the Bastile, where an interpreter was found for him in the person of the Abbé Renaudot, a learned Oriental scholar.
Meanwhile a hue and cry was raised for the missing Patriarch. One of his servants was traced to Marseilles and was promptly arrested and hidden away in the hospital of the galley slaves. Louis and his ministers stoutly denied that Avedik was in France, and he was very strictly guarded lest the fact of his kidnapping should leak out. No one saw him but the person who took him his food, and they understood each other only by signs. Avedik was worked up to make a written statement that he owed his arrest to English intrigues, and this was to be held as an explanation should the Porte become too pressing in its inquiries. It is clear that the French Government would gladly have seen the last of Avedik and hesitated what course to adopt with him: whether to keep him by force, win him over, transfer him to the hands of the Pope, send him to Persia or let him go straight home. These questions were in a measure answered by a marginal note endorsed on the paper submitting them. “Would it be a blessing or would it be a misfortune if he were to die?” asks the Minister Pontchartrain; and the rather suspicious answer was presently given by his death. But an official report was drawn up, declaring that he had long enjoyed full liberty, that he received every attention during his illness, that his death was perfectly natural and that he died a zealous Catholic. Pontchartrain went further and, after reiterating that death was neither violent nor premature, added that it was entirely due to the immoderate use of brandy and baleful drugs. Avedik had grown very corpulent during his imprisonment, but there was no proof of the charge of intemperance.
The most heinous crimes disgraced the epoch of Louis XIV, and in all, the Bastile played a prominent part. There was first the gigantic frauds and peculations of Fouquet as already described; then came the conspiracy of the Chevalier de Rohan, who was willing to sell French fortresses to foreign enemies; and on this followed the horrible affair of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, the secret poisoner of her own people. The use of poison was for a time a wholesale practice, and although the special court established for the trial of those suspected held its sessions in private, the widespread diffusion of the crime was presently revealed beyond all question. There were reasons of State why silence should be preserved; the high rank of many of the criminals and their enormous number threatened, if too openly divulged, to shake society to its base. Some two hundred and thirty of the accused were afterwards convicted and sent to prison and thirty-four more were condemned to death.
Conspiracies against the life of the King had been frequent. We may mention among them that of the Marquis de Bonnesson, of the Protestant Roux de Marcilly, who would have killed Louis to avenge the wrongs of his co-religionists, and another Protestant, Comte de Sardan, who sought to stir up disaffection in four great provinces,—which were to renounce allegiance to France and pass under the dominion of the Prince of Orange and the King of Spain. The most dangerous and extensive plot was that of Louis de Rohan, a dissolute young nobleman, who had been a playmate of the King and the favorite of ladies of the highest rank, but who had been ruined by gambling and a loose life until his fortunes had sunk to the lowest ebb. He found an evil counsellor in a certain retired military officer, the Sieur de Latréaumont, no less a pauper than De Rohan, and hungry for money to retrieve his position. Together they made overtures to the Dutch and Spaniards to open the way for a descent upon the Normandy coast. Their price was a million livres. Several disaffected Normandy nobles joined the plot, and as it was unsafe to trust to the post, an emissary, Van den Ende, an ancient Dutch professor, was sent in person to the Low Countries to deal with the Spanish general. He obtained liberal promises of cash and pension, and returned to Paris, where he was promptly arrested at the barrier. The police had discovered the conspiracy and De Rohan was already in custody. De Latréaumont was surprised in bed, had resisted capture, had been mortally wounded and had died, leaving highly compromising papers.
Louis XIV, bitterly incensed against the Chevalier, whom he had so intimately known, determined to make an example of him and his confederates. A special tribunal was appointed for their trial, some sixty persons in all. Abundant evidence was forthcoming, for half Normandy was eager to confess and escape the traitor’s fate. Some very great names were mentioned as implicated, the son of the Prince de Condé among the rest. The King now wisely resolved to limit the proceedings, lest too much importance should be given to a rather contemptible plot. De Rohan’s guilt was fully proved. He was reported to have said: “If I can only draw my sword against the King in a serious rebellion I shall die happy.” When he saw there was no hope for him, the Chevalier tried to soften the King by full confession. It did not serve him, and he was sentenced to be beheaded and his creature, Van den Ende, to be hanged in front of the Bastile. De Rohan was spared torture before execution, but Van den Ende and another suffered the “boot.” The King was vainly solicited to grant pardon to De Rohan, but was inflexible, declaring it was in the best interests of France that traffic with a foreign enemy should be punished with the extreme rigor of the law. It cannot be stated positively that there were no other conspiracies against Louis XIV, but none were made public.