The conquerors were somewhat surprised at the small number of victims, more surprised still to find them comfortably installed in rooms, some of which were furnished with arm-chairs in Utrecht velvet! The author of The Bastille Unmasked exclaims: “What! No corpses! No skeletons! No men in chains!” “The taking of the Bastille,” said “Cousin Jacques,”[18] “has opened the eyes of the public on the kind of captivity experienced there.”
But in this he was greatly mistaken. Legends die hard! A Bastille without cells, dungeons, cages of iron! Public opinion did not admit that it could have been deceived on that point.
“Several prisoners,” says the History of Remarkable Events, “were set at liberty; but some, and perhaps the greater number, had already died of hunger, because men could not find their way about this monstrous prison. Some of these prisoners confined within four walls received food only through holes cut in the wall. A party of prisoners was found starved to death, because their cells were not discovered till several days had elapsed!”
Another pamphlet on the underground cells discovered in the Bastille, resuscitating an old fable which had already done duty for the Cardinal de Richelieu, shows us a prisoner taken from his cell and led by the governor into “a room which had nothing sinister in its appearance. It was lit by more than fifty candles. Sweet-scented flowers filled it with a delicious perfume. The tyrant chatted amicably with his prisoner.... Then he gave the horrible signal: a bascule let into the floor opened, and the wretched man disappeared, falling upon a wheel stuck with razors and set in motion by invisible hands.” And the author winds up with this magnificent reflection:—“Such a punishment, so basely contrived, is not even credible—and yet it was at Paris, in that beautiful and flourishing city, that this took place!”
Dorat-Cubières, who was one of the literary disgraces of the eighteenth century, goes further! He saw, with his own eyes, one of those dens where the captive, shut up with enough bread to last him a week, had thereafter nothing else to subsist on but his own flesh. “In this den,” he says, “we came upon a horrible skeleton, the sight of which made me shrink back with horror!”
And the popular picture-mongers did not fail to propagate these insanities. I have an engraving of the time nicely calculated to stir sensitive hearts. Upon the steps of a gloomy cellar the conquerors are dragging along a man whom his uniform shows to be one of the defenders of the Bastille, and are pointing out to him an old man being carried away, another being cut down from the ceiling where he is hanging by the arms; yet others lying on a wheel furnished with iron teeth, chained to it, twisted into horrible contortions by abominable machines; and in a recess behind a grating appears the skeleton—which Dorat-Cubières never saw!
The non-existence of these dungeons and holes with skeletons was too great a shock to settled beliefs. This Bastille must contain concealed below ground some unknown cells where its victims were moaning! And naturally enough, when one bent down the ear, one heard their despairing appeals! But after having pierced through vaults, sunk pits, dug, sounded everywhere, there was no help for it but to give up these fancies, though—an agreeable thing to have to say!—with regret.
They fell back then on instruments of torture. For though the rack had been abolished for a hundred years, how was it possible to conceive of the Bastille without some slight instruments of torture?
They had no difficulty in finding them—“chains,” says Louis Blanc, “which the hands of many innocent men had perhaps worn, machines of which no one could guess the use: an old iron corslet which seemed to have been invented to reduce man to everlasting immobility!”
As a matter of fact, these chains belonged to two statuettes of prisoners which stood on either side of the great clock in the courtyard. The machines, the use of which no one could guess, were the fragments of a clandestine printing-press that had been pulled to pieces. And the iron corslet was a piece of fifteenth-century armour!