“Tamerlaine allowed himself to be disarmed by a basket of figs presented to him by the inhabitants of a town he was proceeding to besiege. The Marquise de Pompadour is a Christian lady; I beg you to allow me to send her also a pair: perhaps she will allow her heart to be touched by these two innocent pigeons. I append a copy of the letter which will accompany them:—
“‘Madam,—Two pigeons used to come every day to pick grains out of my straw; I kept them, and they gave me young ones. I venture to take the liberty of presenting you with this pair as a mark of my respect and affection. I beseech you in mercy to be good enough to accept them, with as much pleasure as I have in offering them to you. I have the honour to be, with the profoundest respect, Madam, your very humble and obedient servant,
“‘Danry, for eleven years at the Bastille.’”
Why did not Danry always make so charming a use of the permission accorded him to write to the minister, the lieutenant of police, Madame de Pompadour, Dr. Quesnay, and his mother? He wrote incessantly, and we have letters of his in hundreds, widely differing one from another. Some are suppliant and pathetic: “My body is wasting away every day in tears and blood, I am worn out.” He writes to Madame de Pompadour:—“Madam,—I have never wished you anything but well; be then sensible to the voice of tears, of my innocence, and of a poor despairing mother of sixty-six years. Madam, you are well aware of my martyrdom. I beg you in God’s name to grant me my precious liberty; I am spent, I am dying, my blood is all on fire by reason of my groaning; twenty times in the night I am obliged to moisten my mouth and nostrils to get my breath.” Everyone knows the famous letter beginning with the words, “I have been suffering now for 100,000 hours.” He writes to Quesnay: “I present myself to you with a live coal upon my head, indicating my pressing necessity.” The images he uses are not always so happy: “Listen,” he says to Berryer, “to the voice of the just bowels with which you are arrayed”!
In other letters the prisoner alters his tone; to plaints succeed cries of rage and fury, “he steeps his pen in the gall with which his soul is saturated.” He no longer supplicates, he threatens. There is nothing to praise in the style of these epistles: it is incorrect and vulgar, though at times vigorous and coloured with vivid imagery. To the lieutenant of police he writes: “When a man is to be punished in this accursed prison, the air is full of it, the punishments fall quicker than the thunderbolt; but when it is a case of succouring a man who is unfortunate, I see nothing but crabs;” and he addresses to him these lines of Voltaire:—
“Perish those villains born, whose hearts of steel
No touch of ruth for others’ woes can feel.”
He predicts terrible retribution for the ministers, the magistrates, and Madame de Pompadour. To her he writes: “You will see yourself one day like that owl in the park of Versailles; all the birds cast water upon him to choke him, to drown him; if the king chanced to die, before two hours were past someone would set five or six persons at your heels, and you would yourself pack to the Bastille.” The accused by degrees becomes transformed into the accuser; he writes to Sartine: “I am neither a dog nor a criminal, but a man like yourself.” And the lieutenant of police, taking pity on him, writes on one of these letters sent to the minister of Paris: “When Danry writes thus, it is not that he is mad, but frantic from long imprisonment.” The magistrate counsels the prisoner “to keep out of his letters all bitterness, which can only do him harm.” Bertin corrected with his own hand the petitions Danry sent to the Marquise de Pompadour; in the margin of one of them we read, “I should think I was prejudicing him and his interests if I sent on to Madame de Pompadour a letter in which he ventures to reproach her with having abused his good faith and confidence.” Having amended the letter, the lieutenant of police himself carried it to Versailles.
The years of captivity, far from humbling the prisoner and abasing his pride, only made him the more arrogant; his audacity grew from day to day, and he was not afraid of speaking to the lieutenants of police themselves, who knew his history, about his fortune which had been ruined, his brilliant career which had been cut short, his whole family plunged into despair. At first the magistrate would shrug his shoulders; insensibly he would be won over by these unwavering assertions, by this accent of conviction; and he ends actually by believing in this high birth, this fortune, this genius, in all which Danry had perhaps come to believe himself. Then Danry takes a still higher tone: he claims not only his freedom, but compensation, large sums of money, honours. But one must not think that this sprang from a sordid sentiment unworthy of him: “If I propose compensation, my lord, it is not for the sake of getting money, it is only so that I may smooth away all the obstacles which may delay the end of my long suffering.”
In return, he is very ready to give the lieutenant of police some good advice—to indicate the means of advancement in his career, to show him how to set about getting appointed secretary of state, to compose for him the speech he is to make to the king at his first audience. He adds: “This very time is extremely favourable to you; it is the auspicious hour: profit by it. Before they take horse on the day of rejoicing for the conclusion of peace, you ought to be a counsellor of state.”
He is very ready also to send to the king schemes conceived in his prison for the welfare of the realm. Now it is a suggestion to give sergeants and officers on the battlefield muskets instead of spontoons and pikes, by which the French arms would be strengthened by 25,000 good fusiliers. Now it is a suggestion for increasing postal facilities, which would augment the resources of the Treasury by several millions every year. He recommends the erection of public granaries in the principal towns, and draws up plans of battle for giving unheard-of strength to a column of men three deep. We might mention other and better suggestions. These notions were drowned in a flood of words, an unimaginable wealth of verbiage, with parallels drawn from the history of all periods and every country. His manuscripts were illustrated with pen and ink sketches. Danry copied and recopied them incessantly, sent them to all and sundry in all sorts of forms, persuaded the sentinels that these lofty conceptions intimately concerned the safety of the state and would win him an immense fortune. Thus he induced these good fellows to compromise their situation by carrying the papers secretly to ministers, members of the Parlement, marshals of France; he threw them from the windows of his room, and, wrapped in snowballs, from the top of the towers. These memoirs are the work of a man whose open and active mind, of incredible activity indeed, plans, constructs, invents without cessation or repose.