In exitu Israel

by S. Baring-Gould

Gabrielle, without another word, made ready. She took her basket with the cat in it, which Madeleine had amused herself with re-dying saffron, so that the cat was now brilliantly yellow, and taking the corporal's arm, issued with him into the street.

Madame Deschwanden was in raptures at the idea of hearing from the girl, on her return, an account of her visit. Her husband, on leaving the door, beat his forehead with his palm, and said:

'I was a fool to mention the turquoise ring to her. I have not heard the last of it yet. Whenever she has her tantrums, that ring will be brought up. Alas! would that I had more discretion, I should not have mentioned the ring. I was not in conscience bound to do so.'

Deschwanden led Gabrielle out of the street into the court before the entrance to the prison, occupied by the soldiers. She presented her order, which had been countersigned by a magistrate, and parted with the Swiss corporal at the second gate. She was told to cross a second court, on one side of which stood the governor's house, to the iron grating which closed the huge gate of the Bastille itself. At this entrance she was taken in charge by a turnkey, who conducted her through the long dark vault piercing the block of buildings to the great quadrangle in the centre of the fortress. This court was formerly much larger, but it had been cut in two by Sartines, lieutenant of police in the reign of Louis XV, and a range of offices and prisons, in a style destitute of architectural pretensions, was drawn across the court from the Tour de la Chapelle to the Tour de la Liberté. The front of this new building was decorated with a clock-face, fringed with sculptured chains, and supported by two figures chained together by the neck, the feet, and the waist. These two figures at the extremities of these ingenious garlands, after having moved round the dial, met in front of it, and formed a knot with their chains and limbs, and their parting, recommenced their automatonic movements. The artist, guided by the genius of the spot, had made one of these figures resemble a man in the bloom of his youth, and the other an aged, decrepit man, with blanched hair and bent back.

Around this large court rose six towers, each five storeys high. In the well-court were two more, the tops of which appeared above the roof of the new buildings. Between the towers of Liberty and la Bertaudière was the new chapel, and between the latter and the Tour de la Basinière was the gallery of archives. The ancient gate into the town, now walled up, stood on the opposite side of the quadrangle, between the Tour de la Chapelle, where was the oratory, used by the prisoners till the new chapel was built, and the Tour du Trésor. The guard-house adjoined the Tour de la Comté.

When the famous provost, Stephen Marcel, in 1377, fortified the old enclosure of Paris with new walls and double fosses, to protect it from the Free Companions, who were devastating France, he built a gate at the east side of the town, which was called the Bastillon Saint-Antoine. Under Charles VI, towers were added to this gate, and a fortress was erected on the spot, and called the Royal Castle of the Bastille. It played a great part in the intestine wars of the Bourguignons and Armagnacs, each party attaching equal importance to the possession of the fortress, as it was the key of the city.

The Bastille was not, like the Louvre, and most castles of the Middle Ages, a square, or a parallelogram of crenelated ramparts, with towers at intervals, capped with conical roofs and steeples, gay with blazoned weathercocks, and crested with elegant metal work, but it was an oblong irregular mass of thick double walls, containing rooms, halls, passages throughout their length, flanked by eight towers scarcely detaching themselves from the surface of the curtain, projecting slightly only from the bed of masonry connecting them, and not surpassing the walls in height,—a monument black and sinister, whose appearance and history were alike gloomy.

Under Louis XIV, the Bastille attained its exclusive destination as a State prison. Cardinal Richelieu did not suffer the rust to gather on the hinges of its gates; but it was not till the second period of the reign of the Great Monarch, that this royal château became an awful gulf swallowing up, year after year, multitudes of unfortunates, of every rank and station, persecuted and oppressed at the caprice of the monarch, his ministers, his confessors, and his favourites.

In feudal times, only prisoners of a high rank had been consigned to the Bastille; but, under the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV and Louis XVI, no citizen, however obscure he might be, could consider himself safe from these oubliettes incessantly gaping for victims. The action of the regular tribunals and of the municipal authorities was null in the presence of the Bastille, which was filled and emptied by order of the king, without trial. Lettres de cachet given, not only by his majesty and the ministers, but also by the lieutenant-general of police, consigned often innocent persons to an unlimited imprisonment, without a form of trial; so that often a prisoner was ignorant of the reason of his incarceration.

On the death of Louis XIV, thirty thousand unfortunates were found in the State prisons; their only crime in the majority of cases was a suspicion of heresy.