A story told by Jesse in his “Memoirs of George Selwyn” may be related here to give a ray of relief to this sombre picture. The eccentric Englishman was much addicted to the practice of attending executions. He went over to Paris on purpose to see Damiens done to death, and on the day mixed with the crowd. He was dressed in a plain undress suit and a plain bob wig, and “a French nobleman observing the deep interest he took in the scene, and imagining from the plainness of his attire that he must be a person in the humbler walks of life, resolved that he must infallibly be a hangman. ‘Eh bien, monsieur,’ said he, ‘etes-vous arrive pour voir ce spectacle?’ ‘Oui, monsieur.’ ‘Vous etes bourreau?’ ‘Non, monsieur,’ replied Selwyn, ‘je n’ai pas cet honneur, je ne suis qu’un amateur.’”
Among the latest records affording a graphic impression of the interior of the Bastile is that of the French officer Dumouriez, who afterwards became one of the first, and for a time, most successful of the Revolutionary generals, who won the battles of Fleurus and Jernappes and repelled the German invasion of the Argonne in the west of France. Dumouriez fled to England to save his head, and was the ancestor of one also famous, but in the peaceful fields of literature and art. George Du Maurier, whose name is held in high esteem amongst all English speaking races, traced his family direct to the French emigré, who lived long and died in London. It is a little curious that the eminent caricaturist who long brightened the pages of “Punch” the author of “Trilby,” should be connected with the French monarchy and the ancient castle of evil memory.
The elder Dumouriez was imprisoned as the outcome of his connection with the devious diplomacy of his time. He had been despatched on a secret mission to Sweden on behalf of the King, but the French Minister of Foreign Affairs suspected foul play. The movements of Dumouriez were watched, and he was followed by spies as far as Hamburg, where he was arrested and brought back to France straight to the Bastile. He gives a minute account of his reception.
First he was deprived of all his possessions, his money, knife and shoe buckles, lest he should commit suicide by swallowing them. When he called for a chicken for his supper, he was told it was a fast day, Friday, but he indignantly replied that the major of the Bastile was not the keeper of his conscience if of his person, and the chicken was provided. Then he was ushered into his prison apartment, and found it barely furnished with a wooden table, a straw bottomed chair, a jar of water and a dirty bed. He slept well, but was aroused early to go before the Governor, the Comte de Jumilhac, who gave him a very courteous and cordial welcome, but, after denying him books and writing materials, ended by lending him several novels, which he begged him to hide. The Governor continued to treat him as a friend and companion rather than a prisoner. “He came and saw me every morning and gossiped over society’s doings. He went so far as to send me lemons and sugar to make lemonade, a small quantity of coffee, foreign wine and every day a dish from his own table, when he dined at home,” he writes. No fault could be found with the daily fare in the Bastile. The quality was usually good and the supply abundant. “There were always five dishes for dinner and three for supper without counting the dessert.” Besides, Dumouriez had his own servants, and one of them, the valet de chambre, was an excellent cook.
After a week of solitary confinement, which he had relieved by entering into communication with a neighbor, the captain of a Piedmontese regiment, who had been confined in the Bastile for twenty-two years for writing a song about Madame de Pompadour, which had been hawked all over Paris, Dumouriez was removed to another chamber which he describes as “a very fine apartment with a good fireplace.” Near the fireplace was an excellent bed, which had been slept in by many notable inmates of the prison. The major of the Bastile said it was the finest room in the castle, but it had not always brought good luck. Most of its previous inhabitants, the Comte de St. Pol, the Maréchal de Biron, the Chevalier de Rohan and the Count de Lally-Tollendal, ended their days upon the scaffold. Significant traces of them were to be found in the sad inscriptions upon the walls. Labourdonnais had inscribed some “touching reflections;” Lally had written some remarks in English; and La Chalotais some paraphrases of the Psalms. Dumouriez’s immediate predecessor had been a young priest, who had been forced into taking orders and tried to evade his vows, inherit an estate and marry the girl of his choice. He was committed to the Bastile, but was presently released on writing an impassioned appeal for liberty.
Dumouriez was detained only six months in the Bastile and was then transferred to Caen in Normandy, where he was handsomely lodged, and had a garden to walk in. The death of Louis XV and the complete change of government upon the accession of the ill-fated Louis XVI immediately released him. He came to Court and was told at a public reception that the new King profoundly regretted the harshness with which he had been treated, and that the State would make him amends by promotion and employment.
With Louis XVI began a milder and more humane régime, too late, however, to stave off the swiftly gathering storm that was soon to shake and shatter France. The King desired to retain no more State prisoners arbitrarily, and sent a minister to visit the prisons of the Bastile, Vincennes and Bicêtre to inquire personally into the cases of all, and to liberate any against whom there was no definite charge. He proposed that there should be no more lettres de cachet, and the Bastile became gradually less and less filled. The committals were chiefly of offenders against the common law, thieves and swindlers; but a large contingent of pamphleteers and their publishers were lodged within its walls, and one ancient prisoner still lingered to die there after a confinement of twenty-seven years. This was Bertin, Marquis de Frateau, guilty of writing lampoons on Madame de Pompadour, and originally confined at the request of his own family.
A man who made more mark was Linguet, whose “Memoirs,” containing a bitter indictment of the Bastile, from personal experience, were widely read both in England and France. They were actually written in London, to which he fled after imprisonment, and are now held to be mendacious and untrustworthy. Linguet had led a strangely varied life. He had tried many lines—had been in turn poet, historian, soldier, lawyer, journalist. He wrote parodies for the Opera Comique and pamphlets in favor of the Jesuits. Such a man was certain to find himself in the Bastile. He spent a couple of years there, and the book he subsequently wrote was full of the most extravagant and easily refuted lies. Yet there is reason to believe that his statements did much to inflame the popular mind and increase the fierce hatred of the old prison, which ere long was to lead to its demolition.
The Bastile also received that infamous creature, most justly imprisoned, the Marquis de Sade, whose name has been synonymous with the grossest immorality and is now best known to medical jurisprudence. Beyond doubt he was a lunatic, a man of diseased and deranged mind, who was more properly relegated to Charenton, where he died. He was at large during the Revolutionary period and survived it, but dared to offer some of his most loathsome books to Napoleon, who when First Consul wrote an order with his own hand for the return of the Marquis to Charenton as a dangerous and incurable madman.
One of the last celebrities confined in the Bastile was the Cardinal de Rohan, a grandee of the Church and the holder of many dignities, who was involved in that famous fraud, dear to dramatists and romance writers, the affair of the Diamond Necklace. His confederates, some of whom shared his captivity, were the well known Italian adventurer and arch impostor, who went by the name of Cagliostro, who played upon the credulity of the gullible public in many countries as a latter day magician, and the two women, Madame de La Motte-Valois, who devised the fraud of impersonating the Queen before de Rohan, and Mdlle. d’Oliva, who impersonated her.