Lenglet rendered one important service to the State, the discovery of the Cellamare-Alberoni conspiracy, but he would not proceed in the affair until he had been assured that no lives should be sacrificed. He was a painstaking writer, and kept one manuscript by him for fifty-five years; it was, however, a work on visions and apparitions, and he was a little afraid of publishing it to the world. His end came by a strange accident. He fell into the fire as he slept over a “modern book” and was burned to death. He was then eighty years of age.
Among the smaller people, scribblers and second rate litterateurs, who were consigned to the Bastile, was Roy, an impudent rascal, who lampooned royalty and royal things, and impertinently attacked the Spanish ambassador. All Paris was moved by his arrest, his papers were sealed and he was treated as of more importance than he deserved. After four months’ detention he was released, and banished from Paris to a distance of ninety leagues. He soon returned and published a defamatory ode on the French generals. General de Moncrieff met Roy in the streets, boxed his ears and kicked him, but although the poet wore his sword he did not defend himself. Roy raged furiously against the Academy which would not elect him a member and wrote a stinging epigram when the Comte de Clermont of the blood royal was chosen. The Comte paid a ruffian to give him a thrashing, which was so severe that the poet, now eighty years of age, succumbed to the punishment.
Another literary prisoner of more pretensions was the Abbé Prevost, author of the well known Manon Lescaut, the only work which has survived out of the 170 books he wrote in all. He was a Jesuit, who joined the order of the Benedictines, but fled from their house in St.-Germain-des-Prés, and went about Paris freely. He was arrested by the police and sent back to his monastery. For seven years he remained quiet, but when at length he proposed to publish new works in order “to impose silence upon the malignity of his enemies,” a lettre de cachet was issued to commit him to the Bastile. The Prince de Conti came to his help, and gave him money with which he escaped to Brussels.
Voltaire’s first connection with the Bastile was in 1717, when he was only twenty-two years of age, a law student in Paris. He had already attracted attention by his insolent lampoons on the Regent and the government, and had been banished from Paris for writing an epigram styled the Bourbier, “the mud heap.” This new offence was a scandalous Latin inscription and some scathing verses which, according to a French writer, would have been punished under Louis XIV with imprisonment for life. He took his arrest very lightly. The officer who escorted him to the Bastile reports: “Arouet (Voltaire) joked a good deal on the road, saying he did not think any business was done on feast days, that he did not mind going to the Bastile but hoped he would be allowed to continue taking his milk, and that if offered immediate release he would beg to remain a fortnight longer.” His detention ran on from week to week into eleven months, which he employed in writing two of his masterpieces, La Henriade and Œdipe, the latter his first play to have a real success when put upon the stage.
Voltaire, when released, was ordered to reside at Chatenay with his father, who had a country house there, and offered to be responsible for him. The charge was onerous, and the young man was sent to Holland to be attached to the French ambassador, but he soon drifted back to Paris, where he remained in obscurity for seven years. Now he came to the front as the victim of a personal attack by bravos in the pay of the Chevalier de Rohan, by whom he was severely caned. The poet had offended the nobility by his insolent airs. Voltaire appealed for protection, and orders were issued to arrest De Rohan’s hirelings if they could be found. The poet sought satisfaction against the moving spirit, and having gone for a time into the country to practise fencing, returned to Paris and challenged the Chevalier, when he met him in the dressing-room of the famous actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur. The duel was arranged, but the De Rohan family interposed and secured Voltaire’s committal to the Bastile, when he wrote to the Minister Herault:
“In the deplorable condition in which I find myself I implore your kindness. I have been sent to the Bastile for having pursued with too much haste and ardor the established laws of honor. I was set upon publicly by six persons, and I am punished for the crime of another because I did not wish to hand him over to justice. I beg you to use your credit to obtain leave for me to go to England.”
Leave was granted, accompanied with release, and in due course Voltaire arrived in London, where he remained three years. This period tended greatly to develop his mental qualities. “He went a discontented poet, he left England a philosopher, the friend of humanity,” says Victor Cousin. He became a leader among the men who, as Macaulay puts it, “with all their faults, moral and intellectual, sincerely and earnestly desired the improvement of the condition of the human race, whose blood boiled at the sight of cruelty and injustice, who made manful war with every faculty they possessed on what they considered as abuses, and who on many signal occasions placed themselves gallantly between the powerful and the oppressed.”
Voltaire was presently permitted to return to Paris. Minister Maurepas wrote him: “You may go to Paris when you like and even reside there.... I am persuaded you will keep a watch upon yourself at Paris, and do nothing calculated to get you into trouble.” The warning was futile. Within four years he was once more arrested and lodged in the castle prison of Auxonne, with strict orders that he was never to leave the interior of the castle. His offences were blasphemy and a bitter attack upon the Stuarts. He had, moreover, published his “Lettres Philosophiques,” and a new lettre de cachet was to be issued, but he was given time and opportunity to make his escape into Germany. The work was, however, burned by the public executioner, and the wretched publisher sent to the Bastile, after the confiscation of all his stock, which meant total ruin. Prison history is not further concerned with Voltaire. His friendship with Frederick the Great, his long retreat in Switzerland and the fierce criticisms and manifestoes he fulminated from Ferney must be sought elsewhere.
Reference has been made in a previous page to the Cellamare-Alberoni conspiracy first detected by Abbé Lenglet, which had for object the removal of the Duc d’Orleans from the Regency and the convocation of the States General, the first organised effort towards more popular government in France. A secondary aim was a coalition of the powers to re-establish the Stuart dynasty in England. Nothing came of the conspiracy, but the arrest of those implicated. Among them were the Duc and Duchesse de Maine. A certain Mdlle. de Launay, who was a waiting woman of the Duchess, staunchly refused to betray her mistress and was imprisoned in the Bastile. Out of this grew a rather romantic love story. The King’s lieutenant of the Bastile, a certain M. de Maison Rougé, an old cavalry officer, was greatly attracted by Mdlle. de Launay. “He conceived the greatest attachment that any one ever had for me,” she writes in her amusing memoirs. “He was the only man by whom I think I was ever really loved.” His devotion led him to grant many privileges to his prisoner, above all in allowing her to open a correspondence with another inmate of the Bastile, the Chevalier de Ménil,—also concerned in the Cellamare conspiracy,—with whom she had a slight acquaintance. M. de Maison Rougé went so far as to allow them to meet on several occasions, and, much to his chagrin, the pair fell desperately in love with each other. Mdlle. de Launay expected to marry the Chevalier after their release, but on getting out of the Bastile she found herself forgotten. Some fifteen years later she became the wife of Baron de Staal, an ex-officer of the Swiss Guards under the Duc de Maine. She must not be confused, of course, with the Madame de Staël of Napoleon’s time.
While some prisoners like Masers Latude—of whom more directly—followed their natural bent in making the most daring and desperate attempts to escape from the Bastile, there were one or two cases in which men showed a strong reluctance to leave it. One of the victims of the Cellamare conspiracy was an ex-cavalry officer, the Marquis de Bonrepas, who had been shut up for four or five years. He found friends abroad who sought to obtain his release. But he received the offer of liberty with a very bad grace, declaring his preference for the prison. He was a veteran soldier, old, poor and without friends, and he was only persuaded to leave the Bastile on the promise of a home at the Invalides with a pension. A doctor of the University, François du Boulay, was sent to the Bastile in 1727 and remained there forty-seven years. Then, when Louis XVI ascended the throne, search was made through the registers for meet subjects for the King’s pardon, and Du Boulay was one of those recommended for discharge. He went out and deeply regretted it. He was quite friendless and could find no trace of any member of his family. His house had been pulled down and a public edifice built upon the site. He had been quite happy in the Bastile, and begged that he might return there. His prayer was refused, however, and he withdrew altogether from the world and passed the rest of his days in complete solitude.