LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Model of the Bastille | [Frontispiece] |
| Facsimile of Du Junca’s note regarding the entry of the Iron Mask | Facing page [115] |
| Facsimile of Du Junca’s note regarding the death of the Iron Mask | " [116] |
| Facsimile of the Iron Mask’s burial certificate " | " [142] |
| Facsimile of the cover of Latude’s explosive box | " [173] |
| Facsimile of Latude’s writing with blood on linen | " [188] |
| Portrait of Latude | " [229] |
| The Capture of the Bastille | " [257] |
INTRODUCTION
AT the great Exhibition of 1889 I visited, in company with some friends, the reproduction of the Bastille, calculated to give all who saw it—and the whole world must have seen it—an entirely false impression.
You had barely cleared the doorway when you saw, in the gloom, an old man enveloped in a long white beard, lying on the “sodden straw” of tradition, rattling his chains and uttering doleful cries. And the guide said to you, not without emotion, “You see here the unfortunate Latude, who remained in this position, with both arms thus chained behind his back, for thirty-five years!”
This information I completed by adding in the same tone: “And it was in this attitude that he so cleverly constructed the ladder, a hundred and eighty feet long, which enabled him to escape.”
The company looked at me with surprise, the guide with a scowl, and I slipped away.
The same considerations that prompted my intervention have suggested to M. Funck-Brentano this work on the Bastille, in which he has set the facts in their true light, and confronted the legends which everyone knows with the truth of which many are in ignorance.
For in spite of all that has been written on the subject by Ravaisson, in the introduction to his Archives of the Bastille, by Victor Fournel, in his Men of the Fourteenth of July, and by other writers, the popular idea of the internal administration of the Bastille in 1789 holds by the description of Louis Blanc: “Iron cages, recalling Plessis-les-Tours[1] and the tortures of Cardinal La Balue![2]—underground dungeons, the loathsome haunts of toads, lizards, enormous rats, spiders—the whole furniture consisting of one huge stone covered with a little straw, where the prisoner breathed poison in the very air.... Enveloped in the shades of mystery, kept in absolute ignorance of the crime with which he was charged, and the kind of punishment awaiting him, he ceased to belong to the earth!”