This is the last straw. Patience is exhausted, and he is clapped into Bicêtre[13] as a dangerous lunatic. Imagine his fury and disgust!
Let us be just. Suppose, in our own days, a swindler, sentenced to a few months’ imprisonment, insulting the police, the magistrates, the court, the president; sentenced on this account to a longer term, escaping once, twice, a third time; always caught, put in jail again, sentenced to still longer terms: then when at last released, after having done his time, scattering broadcast insulting libels against the chief of police, the ministers, the parliament, and insisting on the President of the Republic paying him damages to the tune of 150,000 francs; to crown it all, getting money out of some good woman by working on her fears! You will agree with me that such a swaggering blade would not have much difficulty in putting together thirty-five years in jail!
But these sentences would of course be public, and provide no soil for the growth of those legends to which closed doors always give rise. Yet in all that relates to the causes and the duration of the man’s imprisonment, his case would be precisely that of Latude—except that for him there would be no furs, no promenading in the gardens, no stuffed fowls for his lunch!
Besides some fifty autograph letters from Latude, addressed from Bicêtre to his good angel, Madame Legros, in which he shows himself in his true character, an intriguing, vain, insolent, bragging, insupportable humbug, I have one, written to M. de Sartine, which Latude published as a pendant to the pamphlet with which he hoped to move Madame de Pompadour to pity, and in which every phrase is an insult. This letter was put up at public auction, and these first lines of it were reproduced in the catalogue:—
“I am supporting with patience the loss of my best years and of my fortune. I am enduring my rheumatism, the weakness of my arm, and a ring of iron around my body for the rest of my life!”
A journalist, one of those who learn their history from Louis Blanc, had a vision of Latude for ever riveted by a ring of iron to a pillar in some underground dungeon, and exclaimed with indignation: “A ring of iron! How horrible!”
And it was only a linen band!
That fabulous iron collar is a type of the whole legend of the unfortunate Latude!
Everything connected with the Bastille has assumed a fabulous character.
What glorious days were those of the 13th and 14th of July, as the popular imagination conjures them up in reliance on Michelet, who, in a vivid, impassioned, picturesque, dramatic, admirable style, has written, not the history, but the romance of the French Revolution!