Legends of the Bastille

by Frantz Funck-Brentano

On March 23, 1725, at Montagnac in Languedoc, a poor girl named Jeanneton Aubrespy gave birth to a male child who was baptized three days later under the name of Jean Henri, given him by his god-parents, Jean Bouhour and Jeanne Boudet. Surname the poor little creature had none, for he was the illegitimate child of a father unknown. Jeanneton, who had just passed her thirtieth year, was of respectable middle-class family, and lived near the Lom gate in a little house which seems to have been her own. Several cousins of hers held commissions in the army. But from the day when she became a mother, her family had no more to do with her, and she fell into want. Happily she was a woman of stout heart, and by her spinning and sewing she supported her boy, who shot up into a lad of keen intelligence and considerable ambition. She succeeded in getting him some sort of education, and we find Jean Henri at the age of seventeen acting as assistant surgeon in the army of Languedoc. Surgeons, it is true, made no great figure in the eighteenth century; they combined the duties of barber and dentist as well as leech. But the situation was good enough. “Assistant surgeons in the army,” wrote Saint-Marc the detective, “who really worked at their trade, made a good deal of money.” At this time, being reluctant to bear his mother’s name, the young man ingeniously transformed his double forename into Jean Danry, under which he is designated in a passport for Alsace, given him on March 25, 1743, by the general commanding the royal forces in Languedoc. In the same year 1743, Danry accompanied the army of Marshal de Noailles in its operations on the Maine and the Rhine, receiving from the Marshal, towards the end of the season, a certificate testifying to his good and faithful service throughout the campaign.

Four years later we find Danry at Brussels, employed in the field-hospital of the army in Flanders, at a salary of 500 livres a month. He was present at the famous siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, the impregnable fortress which the French so valiantly stormed under the command of the Comte de Lowendal. But peace being concluded at Aix-la-Chapelle, the armies were disbanded, and Danry went to Paris. He had in his pocket a letter of recommendation to Descluzeaux, the surgeon of Marshal de Noailles, and a certificate signed by Guignard de La Garde, chief of the commissariat, testifying to the ability and good conduct of “the aforesaid Jean Danry, assistant surgeon.” These two certificates formed the most substantial part of his fortune.

Danry arrived in Paris about the end of the year 1748. On any afternoon he might have been seen strolling about the Tuileries in a grey frock and red waistcoat, carrying his twenty-three years with a good grace. Of middle height and somewhat spare figure, wearing his brown hair in a silk net, having keen eyes and an expression of much intelligence, he would probably have been thought a handsome fellow but for the marks which smallpox had indelibly stamped on his face. His accent had a decided Gascon tang, and it is obvious, from the spelling of his letters, not only that he could not boast of a literary education, but that his speech was that of a man of the people. Yet, what with his brisk temperament, his professional skill, and his favour with his superiors, he was in a fair way to attain an honourable position, which would have enabled him at length to support his mother, then living in solitary friendlessness at Montagnac, centring on him, in her forlorn condition, all her affection and her dearest hopes.

Paris, with its gaiety and stir, dazzled the young man. Its brilliant and luxurious life, its rustling silks and laces, set him dreaming. He found the girls of Paris charming creatures, and opened his heart to them without stint, and his purse too; and his heart was more opulent than his purse. Ere long he had spent his modest savings and sunk into want. He fell into bad company. His best friend, an apothecary’s assistant named Binguet, shared with him a mean garret in the Cul-de-sac du Coq, in the house of one Charmeleux, who let furnished lodgings. Than these two no greater rakes, wastrels, or thorough-paced rascals could have been found in all Paris. Danry in particular very soon got a name all over his neighbourhood for his riotous, threatening, and choleric temper. Dying of hunger, threatened with being ejected neck-and-crop from his lodging for nonpayment of rent, he was reduced at last to write for money to his mother, who, poor thing, had barely enough for her own modest wants.

As yet we are a long way from the “handsome officer of engineers” who lives in our remembrance: we see little likeness to the brilliant picture which Danry drew later of those youthful years during which he received, “by the care of his father the Marquis de La Tude, the education of a gentleman destined to serve his country and his king.”

Having come now absolutely to the end of his resources, Danry took it into his head that, at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, he had been stripped by some soldiers of all his clothes but his shirt, and robbed of 678 livres into the bargain. This story he worked up in a letter addressed to Moreau de Séchelles, commissary of the army in Flanders, hoping to get it corroborated by Guignard de La Garde, the commissary under whom he had himself served. In this letter he demanded compensation for the losses he had suffered while devoting himself under fire to the care of the wounded. But we read, in the Memoirs he wrote later, that so far from having been stripped and robbed, he had actually purchased at Bergen-op-Zoom a considerable quantity of goods of all kinds when they were sold off cheap after the sack of the town. However that may be, his experiment was a failure. But Danry was a man of resource, and not many days had passed before he had hit on another means of raising the wind.

At this time everybody was talking about the struggle between the king’s ministers and the Marquise de Pompadour, which had just ended in a triumph for the lady. Maurepas was going into exile, but it was generally believed that he was a man who would wreak vengeance on his enemy, and the favourite herself openly declared that she went in fear of poison. A light dawned on the young surgeon’s mind as he heard such gossip as this; he caught a sudden glimpse of himself—even he, the ragged outcast—arrayed in cloth of gold and rolling in his carriage along the Versailles road.

This was his plan. On April 27, 1749, in a shop under the arcade of the Palais-Royal, hard by the grand staircase, he bought of a small tradesman six of those little bottle-shaped toys, once called Prince Rupert’s Drops, out of which children used to get so much harmless amusement. They were globules of molten glass, which, on being thrown into cold water, had taken the shape of pears, and which, if the tapering end was suddenly snapped, crumbled with a loud report into dust. Four of these crackers Danry placed in a cardboard box, binding the thin ends together with a thread which he fixed in the lid. Over these he sprinkled some toilet powder, and this he covered with a layer of powdered vitriol and alum. The whole packet he then enclosed in a double wrapper, writing on the inner one, “I beg you, madam, to open the packet in private,” and on the outer one, “To Madame the Marquise de Pompadour, at court.”