I thought of the Countess d'Amboise, and the Marquis de Gordon; but I had no means of communicating with either of them, and thus they would remain probably in ignorance of my situation. Who was my enemy—who were my accusers? I started up and traversed my room to and fro, with impatient strides, until I grew weary, and again seated myself on the bed to watch the embers on the hearth as they flickered, reddened, and died in the uncertain currents of air that came down the huge chimney, the aperture of which was secured by an iron grating; and so the long, long night wore away and the lingering dawn began to brighten over sleeping Paris and the distant country.
I opened the stained-glass casement and looked out. Far down below, beyond the outer rampart of the Bastille, I saw all the chimneys of Paris vomiting smoke; the arsenal of Henry IV., a spacious pile, having three great courts and a portal, the pillars of which were cannon set on end. Beyond lay the Seine and the Isles of St. Louis and the Cité—the Paris of the kings of the first race and of Philip Augustus—rising like a mass of rugged castles, moated round by the river, which was bridged across by the quaint piles of the Pont de Notre Dame and the Pont de la Cité. Nearer still, waved the green trees which covered all the Isle Louviers. A yellow flush spread across the eastern quarter of the sky; above it rolled clouds of murky amber, rendered darker by the morning smoke; and as the sun ascended behind the horizontal stripes of cloud, which his rays turned to bars of seeming gold and fire; he tipped with a rosy gleam the countless quaint façades and features of the city, which spread around me, with all its churches, spires, and glittering vanes; and chief of all, the huge dark double towers of Notre Dame, whose foundations were laid by Charles the Great. The queen of French cathedrals, she rose from a sea of ancient roofs, steep, sharp, and conical; and there, too, yawned the Parvis, a handsome old square, overhung by quaint houses, full of bustling shops, hurrying passengers, and a hundred varying noises. Then, as morning advanced, I heard the bells ringing in all the convents, monasteries, and steeples—St. Landry, St. Pierre aux Boeuf, St. Denis du Pas, St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and all the old churches of Paris as the city awoke, and roused itself to life and business, prayer and sin.
The live-long day, from my lofty perch, I watched far down below the sights and sounds of Paris passing and buzzing round me, until the rattle of fiacres and the clatter of hoofs died away, and the arteries of life that intersected the town became dark and still as night drew on again, and, with a sigh of weariness, I threw myself on my bed, to sigh and pray, and to utter futile imprecations and maledictions on the hour I came to France. My gaoler was a kind but taciturn fellow. He had served a long apprenticeship to chains and groans, and to sighs of unavailing anguish; thus he seldom spoke; yet, when he did, it was only to drop casual hints of the horrors by which I was surrounded, but quite in a common-place way, for the man had scarcely an idea of anything beyond the precincts of the Bastille; and from him I learned that in this living tomb were state prisoners who had been committed to it on no better warrant than a lettre-de-cachet, of which letters any French noble might get a dozen from the premier any forenoon; prisoners who had not seen the blessed light of day for more than forty years; poor creatures whose crimes, if any, had long since been forgotten, even as their names were forgotten by their keepers, and as their existence was forgotten by the world; like the dead of forty years ago; and the whole record of whose mysterious disappearance from life and upper air, if record of it existed at all, might be found in some mouldy portfolio of Richelieu or his predecessors.
Such were the inmates of the Bastille!
One day I beheld a long train of personages on foot pass through the gate of St. Antoine. There were gentlemen guards, grooms, pages, and lacqueys. Six of the former bore a blue-silk canopy over the head of a tall and stately lady, who was also on foot, and carried in her right hand a lighted taper. As she passed along, cries of 'Vive la Reine' reached me.
'What is all this?' I inquired of my keeper, who chanced to be in my apartment.
'It is her Majesty, Madame Anne of Austria, proceeding on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Fiacre, to pray for the health of the King, who is ill, and to return thanks for her own cure.'
'Cure from what?'
'A dangerous issue of blood, which M. Richelieu affirmed to be the malice of sorcerers, and which had baffled her physicians with all their skill.'
'You believe in all this?'