the rest—were in his charge; he interrogated them at will, and might add to their number by arresting dangerous or suspected persons, in pursuit of whom he could enter and search private houses or take any steps, however arbitrary. For all these purposes he had a large armed force at his disposal, cavalry and infantry, nearly a thousand men in all, and besides there was the city watch, the chevaliers de guet, or “archers,” who were seventy-one in number.
La Reynie.
The first lieutenant-general of police in Paris was Gabriel Nicolas (who assumed the name of la Reynie, from his estate), a young lawyer who had been the protégé of the Governor of Burgundy, and afterwards was taken up by Colbert, Louis XIV.’s Minister. La Reynie is described by his contemporaries as a man of great force of character, grave and silent and self-reliant, who wielded his new authority with great judgment and determination, and soon won the entire confidence of the autocratic king. He lost no time in putting matters right. To clear out the Cour des Miracles and expel all rogues was one of his first measures; his second was to enforce the regulation forbidding servants to go armed. Exemplary punishment overtook two footmen of a great house who had beaten and wounded a student upon the Pont Neuf. They were apprehended, convicted, and hanged, in spite of the strong protests of their masters. La Reynie went farther, and revived the ancient regulation by which servants could not come and go as they pleased, and none could be engaged who did not possess papers en règle. The servants did not submit kindly, and for some time evaded the new rule by carrying huge sticks or canes, of which also they were eventually deprived.
The lieutenant-general of police was the censor of the Press, which was more free-spoken than was pleasing to a despotic government, and often published matter that was deemed libellous. The French were not yet entirely cowed, and sometimes they dared to cry out against unjust judges and thieving financiers; there were fierce factions in the Church; Jesuit and Jansenist carried on a bitter polemical war; the Protestants, unceasingly persecuted, made open complaint which brought down on some of their exemplary clergy the penalty of the galleys. The police had complete authority over printers and publishers, and could deal sharply with all books, pamphlets, or papers containing libellous statements or improper opinions. The most stringent steps were taken to prevent the distribution of prohibited books. Philosophical works were most disliked. Books when seized were dealt with as criminals and were at once consigned to the Bastille. Twenty copies were set aside by the governor, other twelve or fifteen were at the disposal of the higher officials, the rest were handed over to the paper-makers to be torn up and sold as waste paper or destroyed by fire in the presence of the keeper of archives. Many of the books preserved in the Bastille and found at the Revolution were proved to be insignificant and inoffensive, and to have been condemned on the general charge of being libels either on the queen and royal family or on the Ministers of State. Prohibited books were not imprisoned until they had been tried and condemned; their sentence was written on a ticket affixed to the sack containing them. Condemned engravings were scratched and defaced in the presence of the keeper of archives and the staff of the Bastille; and so wholesale was the destruction of books that one paper-maker alone carried off 3,015 pounds weight of fragments. Seizures were often accompanied by the arrest of printers and publishers, and an order to destroy the press and distribute the bookseller’s whole stock.
Although la Reynie used every effort to check improper publications, he was known as the patron and supporter of legitimate printing. Under his auspices several notable editions issued from the press, and their printers received handsome pensions from the State. He was a collector, a bibliophile who gathered together many original texts; and he will always deserve credit for having caused the chief manuscripts of the great dramatist Molière to be carefully preserved.
Society was very corrupt in those days, honeycombed with vices, especially gambling, which claimed the constant attention of a paternal police. La Reynie was most active in his pursuit of gamblers. The rapid fortunes made by dishonest means led to much reckless living, and especially to an extraordinary development of play. Everyone gambled, everywhere, in and out of doors, even in their carriages while travelling to and fro. Louis XIV., as he got on in life, and more youthful pleasures palled, played tremendously. His courtiers naturally followed the example. It was not all fair play either; the temptation of winning largely attracted numbers of “Greeks” to the gaming tables, and cheating of all kinds was very common. The king gave frequent and positive orders to check it. A special functionary who had jurisdiction in the Court, the grand provost, was instructed to find some means of preventing this constant cheating at play. At the same time la Reynie sent Colbert a statement of the various kinds of fraud practised with cards, dice, or hoca, a game played with thirty points and thirty balls. The police lieutenant made various suggestions for checking these malpractices; the card-makers were to be subjected to stringent surveillance; it was useless to control the makers of dice, but they were instructed to denounce all who ordered loaded dice. As to hoca, it was, he said, far the most difficult and the most dangerous. The Italians, who had originated the game, so despaired of checking cheating in it that they had forbidden it in their own country. La Reynie’s anxiety was such that he begged the Minister to prohibit its introduction at the Court, as the fashion would soon be followed in the city. However, this application failed; the Court would not sacrifice its amusements, and was soon devoted to hoca, with lansquenet, postique, trou-madame, and other games of hazard.
The extent to which gambling was carried will be seen in the amounts lost and won; it was easy, in lansquenet or hoca, to win fifty or sixty times in a quarter of an hour. Madame de Montespan, the king’s favourite, frequently lost a hundred thousand crowns at a sitting. One Christmas Day she lost seven hundred thousand crowns. On another occasion she laid a hundred and fifty thousand pistoles (£300,000) upon three cards, and won. Another night, it is said, she won back five millions which she had lost. Monsieur, the king’s brother, also gambled wildly. When campaigning he lost a hundred thousand francs to other officers; once he was obliged to pledge the whole of his jewels to liquidate his debts of honour.
Nevertheless the games of chance, if permitted at Court, were prohibited elsewhere. The police continually harried the keepers of gambling hells; those who offended were forced to shut up their establishments and expelled from Paris. The king was disgusted at times, and reproved his courtiers. He took one M. de Ventadour sharply to task for starting hoca in his house, and warned him that “this kind of thing must be entirely ended.” The exact opposite was the result: that and other games gained steadily in popularity, and the number of players increased and multiplied. The king promised la Reynie to put gambling down with a strong hand, and called for a list of all hells and of those who kept them. But the simple measure of beginning with the Court was not tried. Had play been suppressed among the highest it would soon have gone out of fashion; as it was, it flourished unchecked till the collapse of the ancien régime.