LATUDE.
1750-1784.
Masers de Latude was born in 1725, at the castle of Craiseih, near Montagnac, in Languedoc. His father, the Marquis de Latude, was an officer in high rank, and the young Latude was destined for the military profession. While, however, he was studying at Paris, in 1749, he unfortunately conceived the idea of having recourse to subterfuge, in order to attract the notice of Madame de Pompadour, and to obtain her protection. He accordingly placed a small cardboard box in the post containing a harmless powder, and addressed to the marchioness, and then went straight to Versailles with the information that two individuals wished to poison the royal favourite, and that he had discovered their secret. The marchioness at first thanked him in the warmest terms; but he had scarcely left her presence when she began to suspect that she had been the victim of a shameful fraud. She obtained a few lines in his own handwriting from her pretended preserver; and comparing them with the address on the box, had her suspicions confirmed. Some few days after that, Latude found himself in the Bastille.
When he had remained there four months, he was taken to the castle of Vincennes, and he had every reason to fear that his imprisonment was to last for life, for the enraged woman proved inexorable to every appeal in his favour.
“I kept up my courage,” he says in his “Memoirs,” “with the hope that I should one day obtain my liberty, and that I should owe it to my own exertions alone, not to the favour of my gaolers. I was constantly forming plans. Among my fellow-prisoners I noticed an aged ecclesiastic, who appeared at a particular time every day in the garden of the chateau. He had been deprived of his liberty a long while on account of Jansenism. He was frequently visited by the abbé of St. Sauveur, and he devoted a great deal of his leisure to teaching the children of the officers to read and write. He was allowed to go almost wherever he pleased when in the company of his little pupils. He usually took his walk at about the time when I was led into a small garden adjoining the one I have spoken of—an indulgence granted me through the kindness of M. Berryer, the lieutenant of police. Two turnkeys used to accompany me on my leaving the cell, and on my return; but sometimes the elder of the two would wait for me in the garden, while the younger came up alone to let me out. I gradually accustomed the latter to see me run down the stairs in advance of him, and join his comrade in the garden, so that he always moved in the most leisurely manner when he came to fetch me.
“On a certain day I had resolved, at any price, to make an effort for liberty. As soon, therefore, as he came into my cell I ran downstairs with inconceivable swiftness, and hastily bolting the door on the outside, left him a prisoner within. There were then four sentinels to deal with. The first was on the other side of a door which led from the donjon, and which was always closed. I knocked; the door was opened. ‘Where is the abbé of St. Sauveur?’ I asked, hurriedly. ‘Our priest has been waiting for him in the garden over two hours, and I have been looking for him everywhere.’ I ran forward, as I spoke, till I came to a second sentinel, to whom I put the same question, and who allowed me to pass in the same way; and to a third, posted on the other side of the drawbridge, with whom I was equally fortunate. The fourth sentinel did not for a moment suspect I was a prisoner, seeing I had passed the others. I crossed the threshold of the outermost gate; I ran forward and was lost to view: I was free.
“I made my way across the fields, avoiding the high road as much as possible, and at length I came to Paris, where I took furnished lodgings, and tasted to the full the joys of liberty, with an appetite sharpened by fourteen months of captivity.”
Having had the imprudence to write to the king to excuse his fault, and to urge that he had already made sufficient expiation for it, Latude was again arrested and taken to the Bastille, where he was confined in a very strong cell. After remaining there eighteen months, however, he was removed, by M. Berryer’s orders, to a tolerably comfortable room, which he occupied jointly with a young man of his own age, named Alègre, whose crime was also that of having given offence to Madame de Pompadour.
“Under such circumstances, young men could come to but one resolution—to escape, or perish in the attempt. But every one able to form the slightest idea of the Bastille will conceive that this project had in it a touch of the wildness of delirium. In adopting it, however, I knew what I was about, and I hope I shall be credited with a soul a little above the common for having invented, formed, and carried it out.
“It was now no longer of any use to think of escaping from the Bastille by the gates. Every physical impossibility tended to render that idea impracticable. The ground being thus denied me, there was but one other way—to mount into the air. There was in our room a chimney running to the top of the tower; but, like every other in the place, it was so fortified with bars of iron as scarcely to leave a free passage to the smoke; and any one making his way to the top of the tower would find himself cut off from all communication with surrounding buildings, and with a ditch, commanded by a high wall some two hundred feet beneath him. Yet all these obstacles, all these dangers, could not daunt me. I communicated my ideas to my companion, but his timorous soul at first shrunk from the possible sufferings they involved. He chose to regard me as a madman, and for a time I thought and worked alone.
“There were many things to provide for, and to do: to climb to the top of the chimney, in spite of the iron bars; to make a ladder long enough to reach to the foot of the tower, and a second one (of wood) for mounting the ditch on the other side. In order to do all this I should have to procure tools and materials, and to use them in secret, yet, as it were, under the gaoler’s eyes.