Legends of the Bastille

by Frantz Funck-Brentano

Linguet, advocate and journalist, was arrested for a breach of the press laws and for slander. He was a man of considerable ability, but little character. Attorney-general Cruppi has devoted to the story of Linguet a work as extensive as it is eloquent. He has a wealth of indulgence for his hero; yet, despite the goodwill he shows for him and endeavours to impart to the reader, his book reveals between the lines that Linguet was worthy of little esteem, and that his professional brethren were justified in removing his name from the roll of the advocates of Paris.

Linguet’s captivity lasted for two years. He has left a description of it in his Memoirs on the Bastille, which made a great noise, and of which the success has endured down to our own day. His book, like everything which came from his pen, is written in a fluent style, with spirit and brilliance; the facts cited are for the most part correct, but the author, aiming at making a sensation, has cleverly presented them in a light which distorts their real character. “There are means,” says Madame de Staal, “of so distributing light and shade on the facts one is exhibiting, as to alter their appearance without altering the groundwork.” Take, for instance, the description that Linguet gives of his belongings while in the Bastille: “Two worm-eaten mattresses, a cane chair the seat of which was only held to it by strings, a folding table, a jug for water, two earthenware pots, one of them for drinking, and two stone slabs to make a fire on.” A contemporary could say of Linguet’s Memoirs, “It is the longest lie that ever was printed.” And yet, if we take the facts themselves which are related by the clever journalist, and disengage them from the deceitful mirage in which he has enwrapped them, we do not see that his life in the Bastille was so wretched as he endeavours to make us believe. He is forced to acknowledge that his food was always most abundant, adding, it is true, that that was because they wished to poison him! He owed his life, he is convinced, “only to the obstinate tenacity of his constitution.” He marked, nevertheless, on the menu for the day, which was sent up every morning by the Bastille cook, the dishes he fancied; and later on he had his room furnished after his own heart. He still enjoyed, moreover, enough liberty to write during his imprisonment a work entitled, The Trials of Three Kings, Louis XVI., Charles III., and George III., which appeared in London in 1781. Let us recall once more the famous saying of Linguet to the wig-maker of the Bastille on the first day that he presented himself to trim the prisoner’s beard: “To whom have I the honour of speaking?” “I am, sir, the barber to the Bastille.” “Gad, then, why don’t you raze it?”

In June, 1792, some years after his liberation, Linguet was prosecuted a second time for breach of the press laws. The revolutionary tribunal condemned him to death. As he mounted the steps of the scaffold, the ardent pamphleteer thought, mayhap, with bitterly ironical regret, of that Bastille whose destruction he had so clamorously demanded.

Diderot.

We have still to speak of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who were not incarcerated at the Bastille, but at Vincennes, not in the castle keep, but in the château itself, which constituted a separate place of imprisonment. They placed in the château only prisoners guilty of minor offences, who were sentenced to a temporary detention, and to whom they wished to show some consideration. This was, as we have just said, the abode of Diderot and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot was arrested on July 24, 1749. His last book, Letters on the Blind for the Use of those Who Can See, contained theories which appeared to have but little title to the description of “moral.” But in the course of his examination he stoutly denied that he was its author, as also he denied the authorship of the Thoughts of a Philosopher he had published some years before. The lieutenant of police gave instructions to the governor of Vincennes that, short of being set at liberty, Diderot was to be granted all possible comforts—allowed to walk in the garden and park; “that the king’s desire was, in consideration of the literary work on which he was engaged (the Encyclopædia), to permit him to communicate freely with persons from without who might come for that purpose or on family business.” And so Diderot received a visit from his wife and walked with her in the wood; Rousseau and D’Alembert spent their afternoons with him, and, as in the “good old days” of Plato and Socrates, our philosophers chatted of metaphysics and love, seated on the green grass under the shade of mighty oaks. The booksellers and printers who had undertaken the publication of the Encyclopædia were, as we have seen, in constant communication with Diderot at Vincennes; he corrected in prison the proofs of the publication, which the court looked on with no favourable eye. And we know, too, that at night, with the secret complicity of the governor, our philosopher cleared the park walls to hurry to a fair lady at Paris, one Madame de Puysieux, whom he loved with a passion by no means platonic; ere the sun was up, the jailers found him safely back under lock and key. This irksome captivity lasted little more than three months.

The Marquis de Mirabeau.

The imprisonment of Mirabeau lasted only ten days. The lettre de cachet had been obtained by the clique of financiers, who took fright at the audacious conceptions of the Theory of Taxation. “I fancy I deserved my punishment,” wrote the Marquis, “like the ass in the fable, for a clumsy and misplaced zeal.” In regard to the arrest, Madame d’Epinay sent word to Voltaire: “Never before was a man arrested as this one was. The officer said to him, ‘Sir, my orders do not state I am to hurry you: to-morrow will do, if you haven’t time to-day.’ ‘No, sir, one cannot be too prompt in obeying the king’s orders, I am quite ready.’ And off he went with a bag crammed with books and papers.” At Vincennes the Marquis had a servant with him. His wife came to see him. The king spent for his support fifteen livres a day, more than twenty-five shillings of our money. He was liberated on December 24, 1760. His brother, Bailie Mirabeau, speaking of this detention, wrote to him of “a week’s imprisonment in which you were shown every possible consideration.”

We have exhausted M. Bournon’s list of the writers who were victims of arbitrary authority. Such are the “martyrs” for whom that excellent historian, and Michelet and others, have shown the most affecting compassion. The foregoing facts do not call for comment. Men of letters were the spoilt children of the eighteenth century much more than of our own, and never has an absolute government shown a toleration equal to that of the monarchy under the ancien régime towards writers whose doctrines, as events have proved, tended directly to its destruction.

CHAPTER VI.
LATUDE.

FEW historical figures have taken a higher place in the popular imagination than Masers de Latude. That celebrated prisoner seems to have accumulated in his life of suffering all the wrongs that spring from an arbitrary government. The novelists and playwrights of the nineteenth century have made him a hero; the poets have draped his woes in fine mourning robes, our greatest historians have burnt for him the midnight oil; numerous editions of his Memoirs have appeared in quick succession down to our own days. Even by his contemporaries he was regarded as a martyr, and posterity has not plucked the shining crown of martyrdom from his head, hoary with the snows of long captivity. His legend is the creature of his own unaided brain. When in 1790 he dictated the story of his life, he made greater calls on his glowing southern imagination than on his memory; but the documents relating to his case in the archives of the Bastille have been preserved. At the present time they are to be found dispersed among various libraries, at the Arsenal, at Carnavalet, at St. Petersburg. Thanks to them it is easy to establish the truth.