As many wilful errors as there are words!
The Comte de Solages was an execrable libertine, confined at the request of his family for “atrocious and notorious crimes.” His relatives nevertheless had the humanity to take him in after his deliverance, and it was with them that he died in 1825.
Whyte and Tavernier did not go mad in the Bastille. They were in the Bastille because they were mad; and the second was, further, implicated in an assassination. Finding shelter with a perruquier of the neighbourhood, he set about smashing all his host’s belongings, which necessitated his banishment to Charenton, where Whyte soon rejoined him. It was not worth the trouble of changing their quarters!
Four other prisoners who were set free, Corrège, Béchade, Pujade, and Laroche, were imprisoned for forgery. And so Louis Blanc is careful silently to pass them over!
Ten days before, another victim of tyranny had been groaning in irons—the Marquis de Sade, who, from the height of the platform, used to provoke the passers-by with the aid of a speaking trumpet. De Launey was compelled to transfer him to Vincennes, thus depriving the victors of the glory of liberating the future author of Justine. The Republic took its revenge in making him later secretary of the “Pike” ward,[16] an office for which he was marked out by his virtues!
But of all these prisoners the most celebrated, the most popular, the man whose misfortunes all Paris deplored, was the famous Comte de Lorges, who, according to the biographical sketch devoted to him by the unknown author of his deliverance, had been shut up for thirty-two years. The story must be read in the pamphlet of Citizen Rousselet, conqueror of the Bastille: “The tide of humanity penetrates into ways narrowed by mistrust. An iron door opens: what does one see? Is this a man? Good heavens! this old man loaded with irons! the splendour of his brow, the whiteness of his beard hanging over his breast! What majesty! the fire still flashing from his eyes seems to shed a gentle light in this lugubrious abode!”
Surprised at seeing so many armed men, he asks them if Louis XV. is still alive. They set him free, they lead him to the Hôtel de Ville.
For fifteen days all Paris went to visit the black dungeon in which this unhappy wretch had been shut up for so many years without other light than that which escaped “from his eyes”! A stone from that dungeon had a place in the Curtius Museum. His portrait was published. A print represents him at the moment when his chains were broken, seated on a chair in his cell, a pitcher of water by his side!
And this hapless greybeard—he was never seen! He never existed!
In reality there were in the Bastille, on the 14th of July, only seven prisoners—two madmen, a Sadique,[17] and four forgers. But about their number and their right to imprisonment Michelet remains dumb: to discuss that would spoil his epic! And he excels in making the most of everything that can support his case, and in ignoring everything that damages it. And so he contents himself with speaking of the two who had “gone mad”!—a prevarication worthy of Louis Blanc, nay, unworthy even of him!