Fortunately, the custody of the captured fortress was entrusted on July 15 to the company of arquebusiers, which received orders to prevent the removal of any more papers. On July 16 one of the members present at a sitting of the Electoral Assembly, sprang forward to the table and cried, “Ah, gentlemen, let us save the papers! It is said that the papers of the Bastille are being plundered; let us hasten to collect the remnants of these old title-deeds of an intolerable despotism, so that we may inspire our latest posterity with their horror!” There was rapturous applause. A committee was nominated, consisting of Dusaulx, De Chamseru, Gorneau, and Cailleau. Let us follow the style of the period: “Before the Bastille the commissioners received a triumphant reception. Amid the cheers of the people, who had been informed of their mission, ten distinguished men of letters besought them to lead the commissioners into the heart of that famous fortress, so long detested.” When they got into the Bastille, the commissioners were not long in perceiving that they were a little behind the fair: “Many boxes were empty, and there was an immense heap of papers in complete disorder.”
The question of the papers of the Bastille grew day by day extraordinarily popular. The Electoral Assembly had just appointed commissioners to collect them; La Fayette, commander of the National Guards, imposed a similar duty on the St. Elizabeth district; Bailly, the mayor of Paris, delegated Dusaulx to the same office. In the Constituent Assembly, the Comte de Châtenay-Lanty proposed that the municipality of Paris should be instructed to get together the papers found at the Bastille, so that they might be arranged, and that extracts from them might be printed and published, “in order to keep for ever alive in the hearts of Frenchmen, by means of this reading, the detestation of arbitrary orders and the love of liberty”! This book was to be the preface to the constitution. Finally, the district of St. Roch took the initiative in calling upon the electors to restore to the nation the papers carried off from the Bastille by Beaumarchais.
In the sitting of July 24, the Electoral Assembly passed a resolution enjoining such citizens as were in possession of papers from the Bastille to bring them back to the Hôtel de Ville. The appeal was responded to, and the restitutions were numerous.
When the pillage and destruction had been stopped and possession had been regained of a part of the stolen documents, the papers were consigned to three different depositories; but it was not long before they were deposited all together in the convent of St. Louis la Culture. At length, on November 2, 1791, the Commune of Paris resolved to have the precious documents placed in the city library. The decision was so much the more happy in that the transfer, while placing the papers under the guardianship of trained men and genuine librarians, did not necessitate removal, since the city library at that date occupied the same quarters as the archives of the Bastille, namely, the convent of St. Louis la Culture.
To the revolutionary period succeeded times of greater calm. The archives of the Bastille, after being the object of so much discussion, and having occupied the Constituent Assembly, the Electoral Assembly, the Paris Commune, the press, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, all Paris, the whole of France, fell into absolute oblivion. They were lost from sight; the very recollection of them was effaced. In 1840, a young librarian named François Ravaisson discovered them in the Arsenal library at the bottom of a veritable dungeon. How had they got stranded there?
Ameilhon, the city librarian, had been elected on April 22, 1797, keeper of the Arsenal library. Anxious to enrich the new depository of which he had become the head, he obtained a decree handing over the papers of the Bastille to the Arsenal library. The librarians recoiled in dismay before this invasion of documents, more than 600,000 in number and in the most admired disorder. Then, having put their heads together, they had the papers crammed into a dusty back-room, putting off the sorting of them from day to day. Forty years slipped away. And if it happened that some old antiquary, curious and importunate, asked to be allowed to consult the documents he had heard spoken of in his youth, he was answered—no doubt in perfect good faith—that they did not know what he was talking about.
In 1840 François Ravaisson had to get some repairs done in his kitchen at the Arsenal library. The slabs of the flooring were raised, when there came to view, in the yawning hole, a mass of old papers. It happened by the merest chance that, as he drew a leaf out of the heap, Ravaisson laid his hand on a lettre de cachet. He understood at once that he had just discovered the lost treasure. Fifty years of laborious effort have now restored the order which the victors of the 14th of July and successive removals had destroyed. The archives of the Bastille still constitute, at the present day, an imposing collection, in spite of the gaps made by fire and pillage in 1789, for ever to be regretted. The administration of the Arsenal library has acquired copies of the documents coming from the Bastille which are preserved at St. Petersburg. The archives of the Bastille are now open to inspection by any visitor to the Arsenal library, in rooms specially fitted up for them. Several registers had holes burnt in them on the day of the capture of the Bastille, their binding is scorched black, their leaves are yellow. In the boxes the documents are now numbered, and they are daily consulted by men of letters. The catalogue has been compiled and published recently, through the assiduity of the minister of public instruction.
It is by the light of these documents, of undeniable genuineness and authority, that the black shade which so long brooded over the Bastille has at length been dispelled. The legends have melted away in the clear light of history, as the thick cloak of mist with which night covers the earth is dissipated by the morning sun; and enigmas which mankind, wearied of fruitless investigations, had resigned itself to declare insoluble, have now at last been solved.
CHAPTER II.
HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE.
JULIUS CÆSAR describes a structure three stories high which his legionaries used rapidly to erect in front of towns they were besieging. Such was the remote origin of the “bastides” or “bastilles,” as these movable fortresses were called in the Middle Ages. Froissart, speaking of a place that was being invested, says that “bastides were stationed on the roads and in the open country” in such a manner that the town could get no food supplies. It was not long before the designation was applied to the fixed towers erected on the ramparts for the defence of the towns, and more particularly to those which were constructed at the entrance gates.