The truth, in history, sometimes suggests to our mind’s eye those white or yellow flowers which float on the water among broad flat leaves; a breeze springs up, a wave rises and submerges them, they disappear; but only for a moment: then they come to the surface again.
CHAPTER V.
MEN OF LETTERS IN THE BASTILLE.
SPEAKING of men of letters in France under the ancien régime, Michelet calls them “the martyrs of thought”; he adds: “The world thinks, France speaks. And that is precisely why the Bastille of France, the Bastille of Paris—I would rather say, the prison-house of thought—was, among all bastilles, execrable, infamous, and accursed.” In the course of the article devoted to the Bastille in the Grande Encyclopédie, M. Fernand Bournon writes: “After Louis XIV. and throughout the eighteenth century, the Bastille was especially employed to repress, though it could not stifle, that generous and majestic movement (the glory of the human spirit) towards ideas of emancipation and enfranchisement; it was the epoch when philosophers, publicists, pamphleteers, the very booksellers, were imprisoned there in large numbers.” And to substantiate this eloquent apostrophe, M. Bournon cites the names of Voltaire, La Beaumelle, the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, and Linguet, imprisoned in the Bastille; and of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau placed in the château of Vincennes.
Let us recall the story of these poor victims in turn, and trace the history of their martyrdom.
Voltaire.
The most illustrious and the earliest in date of the writers mentioned by M. Bournon is Voltaire. He was sent to the Bastille on two different occasions. His first imprisonment began on May 17, 1717. At that date the poet was only twenty-two years of age and of no reputation; he did not even bear the name of Voltaire, which he only took after his discharge from the Bastille on April 14, 1718. The cause of his detention was not “the generous and majestic movement towards ideas of enfranchisement which is the glory of the human spirit,” but some scurrilities which, to speak plainly, brought him what he deserved: coarse verses against the Regent and his daughter, and public utterances coarser still. Many authors state that Voltaire was imprisoned for writing the J’ai vu, a satire against the government of Louis XIV., each stanza of which ended with the line:—
J’ai vu ces maux, et je n’ai pas vingt ans.[42]
This is a mistake. Voltaire was imprisoned for having written the Puero regnante, some verses on the Regent and his daughter, the Duchess of Berry, which it would be impossible to translate. To these he added observations whose reproduction would be equally impossible. At the Bastille Voltaire underwent examinations in the usual way, in the course of which he lied with impudence; after that he was allowed considerable liberty. “It was at the Bastille,” wrote Condorcet, “that the young poet made the first draft of his poem La Ligue, corrected his tragedy of Œdipe, and composed some very lively lines on the ill-luck of being there.”
The following are the most respectable lines of this production:—
So one fine faultless morning in the spring,
When Whitsun splendour brighten’d everything,
A strange commotion startled me from sleep.
. . . . . . . . . .
At last I reach’d my chamber in the keep.
A clownish turnkey, with an unctuous smile,
Of my new lodging ‘gan to praise the style:
“What ease, what charms, what comforts here are yours!
For never Phœbus in his daily course
Will blind you here with his too brilliant rays;
Within these ten-foot walls you’ll spend your days
In cool sequester’d blithefulness always.”
Then bidding me admire my cloistral cell—
The triple doors, the triple locks as well,
The bolts, the bars, the gratings all around—
“’Tis but,” says he, “to keep you safe and sound!”
. . . . . . . . . .
Behold me, then, lodged in this woful place,
Cribb’d, cabin’d, and confined in narrow space;
Sleepless by night, and starving half the day;
No joys, no friend, no mistress—wellaway![43]