In 1356, the chroniclers mention some important works that had been done on the circumvallations of Paris. These were constructions interrupting the wall at intervals, and so placed as to protect either an entrance gate or the wall itself. The special designations of eschiffles, guérites, or barbacanes were applied to such of these buildings as rose between two gates of the city, while the bastilles or bastides were those which defended the gates. The first stone of the edifice which for more than four centuries was to remain famous under the name of the Bastille was laid on April 22, 1370, by the mayor of Paris in person, Hugh Aubriot, the object being to strengthen the defences of the city against the English. To reproach the king, Charles V., with the construction of a cruel prison would be almost as reasonable as to reproach Louis-Philippe with the construction of the fortress of Mont Valérien. We borrow these details from M. Fernand Bournon’s excellent work on the Bastille in the Histoire générale de Paris.
“The Bastille,” writes M. Bournon, “at the time of its capture on July 14, 1789, was still identical, except in some trifling particulars, with the work of the architects of the fourteenth century.” The Place de la Bastille of the present day does not correspond exactly to the site of the fortress. Mentally to restore that site it is necessary to take away the last houses of the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV.; the ground they occupy was then covered with the château and its glacis. The round towers, however, must have extended considerably in advance of the line of the houses and have encroached upon the pavement. The plan reproducing the site exactly is to-day marked by lines of white stones, by means of which all Parisians may get some notion of it if they go to the Place de la Bastille.
M. Augé de Lassus, who drew so largely upon the works of M. Bournon and ourselves for his lecture on the Bastille,[21] will permit us in our turn to borrow from him the description he gave of the Bastille, so far as its construction is concerned. Prints of the commonest kind which have circulated in thousands, the more recent reconstruction which in 1889 gave Paris so much entertainment, have familiarized us with the aspect of the Bastille, whose eight circular towers, connected by curtains of equal height, give us the impression of a box all of a piece, or, if you prefer it, an enormous sarcophagus. The eight towers all had their names. There were the Corner, the Chapel, and the Well towers, names readily accounted for by their position or by details of their construction. Then came the Bertaudière and Bazinière towers, baptized by the names of two former prisoners. The Treasure tower was so called because it had received on many occasions, notably under Henri IV., the custody of the public money. The excellent poet Mathurin Regnier alludes to this fact in these oft-quoted lines:—
“Now mark these parsons, sons of ill-got gain,
Whose grasping sires for years have stolen amain,
Whose family coffers vaster wealth conceal,
Than fills that royal store-house, the Bastille.”
The seventh tower was known as the County tower, owing its name, as M. Bournon conjectures, to the feudal dignity called the County of Paris. “The hypothesis,” he adds, “derives the greater weight from the fact that the mayors of Paris were called, up to the end of the ancien régime, mayors of the town and viscounty of Paris.” The eighth tower bore a name which, for the tower of a prison, is very remarkable. It was called the Tower of Liberty. This odd appellation had come to it from the circumstance that it had been the part of the Bastille where prisoners were lodged who enjoyed exceptionally favourable treatment, those who had the “liberty” of walking during the day in the courtyards of the château. These prisoners were said to be “in the liberty of the court”; the officers of the château called them the “prisoners of the liberty” in contradistinction to the prisoners “in durance”; and that one of the eight towers in which they were lodged was thus, quite naturally, called “the Tower of Liberty.”
The towers of the Chapel and the Treasure, which were the oldest, had flanked the original gateway, but this was soon walled up, leaving however in the masonry the outline of its arch, and even the statues of saints and crowned princes that had been the only ornaments of its bare walls. “In accordance with custom,” says M. Augé de Lassus, “the entrance to the Bastille was single and double at the same time; the gate for vehicles, defended by its drawbridge, was flanked by a smaller gate reserved for foot passengers, and this, too, was only accessible when a small drawbridge was lowered.”
In the first of the two courtyards of the Bastille, D’Argenson had placed a monumental clock held up by large sculptured figures representing prisoners in chains. The heavy chains fell in graceful curves around the clock-face, as a kind of ornamentation. D’Argenson and his artists had a ferocious taste.
On the morrow of the defeat at St. Quentin,[22] the fear of invasion decided Henri II., under the advice of Coligny, to strengthen the Bastille. It was then, accordingly, that there was constructed, in front of the Saint-Antoine gate, the bastion which was at a later date to be adorned with a garden for the prisoners to walk in.
Around the massive and forbidding prison, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, quite a little town sprang up and flourished, as in the Middle Ages happened around lofty and impressive cathedrals. Barbers, cobblers, drink-sellers, poulterers, cheesemongers, and general dealers had their shops there. These new buildings encroached on the Rue Saint-Antoine, and extended as far as the convent of the Visitation, the chapel of which, converted into a Protestant place of worship, still exists.
“In its latter days,” writes M. de Lassus, “the Bastille with its appendages presented an appearance somewhat as follows:—On the Rue Saint-Antoine, a gateway of considerable size, and, with its trophies of arms, making some pretensions to a triumphal arch, gave access to a first court skirted with shops, and open, at least during the day, to all comers. People might pass through it freely, but were not allowed to loiter there. Then appeared a second entrance, a double one for horse and foot traffic, each gate defended by its drawbridge. Admittance through this was more difficult, and the sentry’s instructions more rigorous; this was the outer guard. As soon as this entrance was passed, one came to the court of the governor, who received the more or less voluntary visitor. On the right stretched the quarters of the governor and his staff, contiguous to the armoury. Then there were the moats, originally supplied by the waters of the Seine—at that time people frequently fell in and were drowned, the moats not being protected by any railing—in later times they were for the most part dry. Then rose the lofty towers of the citadel, encircled, nearly a hundred feet up, by their crown of battlements; and then one found the last drawbridge, most often raised, at any rate before the carriage gate, the door for foot passengers alone remaining accessible, under still more rigorous conditions.”