"Yes, sire."
"And you will be tender of them, gossip. You are not to kill them on the way. When we have them here—we shall see. Start early to-morrow, Tristan. As for friend Oliver here, he shall be my governor of the dungeon of Vincennes, and devote himself to my prisoners. If a man of them escapes, my Oliver, Tristan will hang you; because you are not a nobleman, you know."
"Sire," murmured the barber, "you overwhelm me."
"Your Majesty owed that place to me, I think," said Tristan.
"Are you not my matchless hangman, gossip? No, no! Besides, I'm keeping you to hang Oliver. Go to Montlhéry."
Thus was Vincennes advanced to be a State prison, in 1473, when Louis XI. held the destinies of France. From that date to the beginning of the century we live in, those black jaws had neither sleep nor rest. As fast as they closed on one victim, they opened to receive another. At a certain stage of all despotic governments, the small few in power live mainly for two reasons—to amuse themselves and to revenge themselves. One amuses oneself at Court, and a State prison-controlled from the Court—is an ideal means of revenging oneself. The tedious machinery of the law is dispensed with. There is no trouble of prosecuting, beating up witnesses, or waiting in suspense for a verdict which may be given for the other side. The lettre de cachet, which a Court historian described as an ideal means of government, and which Mirabeau (in an essay penned in Vincennes itself) tore once for all into shreds, saved a world of tiresome procedure to the King, the King's favourites, and the King's ministers. For generations and for centuries, absolutism, persecution, party spirit, public and private hate used the lettre de cachet to fill and keep full the cells and dungeons of the Bastille and Vincennes. It was, to be sure, a two-edged weapon, cutting either way. He who used it one day might find it turned against him on another day. But, by whomsoever employed, it was the great weapon of its time; the most effective weapon ever forged by irresponsible authority, and the most unscrupulously availed of. It was this instrument which, during hundreds of years, consigned to captivity without a limit, in the oubliettes of all the State prisons of France, that "immense et déplorable contingent de prisonniers célèbres, de misères illustres."
Vincennes and the Bastille have been contrasted. They were worthy the one of the other; and at several points their histories touch. In both prisons the discipline (which was much an affair of the governor's whim) followed pretty nearly the same lines, and owed nothing in either place to any central, preconceived and ordered scheme of management. Prisoners might be transferred from Vincennes to the Bastille, and from the Bastille again to Vincennes. For the governor, Vincennes was generally the stepping-stone to the Bastille. At Vincennes he served his apprenticeship in the three branches of his calling—turnkey, torturer, and hangman. Like the callow barber-surgeon of the age, he bled at random, and used the knife at will; and his savage novitiate counted as so much zealous service to the State.
But Vincennes wears a greater colour than the Bastille. It stood to the larger and more famous fortress as the noblesse to the bourgeoisie. Vincennes was the great prison, and the prison of the great. Talent or genius might lodge itself in the Bastille, and often so did, very easily; nobility, with courage enough to face its sovereign on a grievance, or with power enough to be reckoned a thought too near the throne, tasted the honours of Vincennes. To be a wit, and polish an epigram against a minister or a madam of the Court; to be a rhymester, and turn a couplet against the Government; to be a philosopher, and hazard a new social theory, was to knock for admission at the wicket of the Bastille. But to be a stalwart noble, and look royalty in the eye, sword in hand; to be brother to the King, and chafe under the royal behest; to be a cardinal of the Church, and dare to jingle your breviary in the ranks of the Fronde; to be leader of a sect or party, or the head of some school of enterprise, this was to give with your own hand the signal to lower the drawbridge of Vincennes.
At seasons prisoners of all degrees jostled one another in both prisons; but in general the unwritten rule obtained that philosophy and unguarded wit went to the Bastille; whilst for strength of will that might prove troublesome to the Crown ... voilà le donjon de Vincennes!
Yes, Vincennes was the State prison, the prison for audacity in high places, for genius that could lead the general mind into paths of danger to the throne. The fetters fashioned there were for a Prince de Condé to wear, a Henri de Navarre, a Maréchal de Montmorency, a Bassompierre or a Cardinal de Retz, a Duc de Longueville or a Prince Charles Edward, a La Môle and a Coconas, a Rantzau or a Prince Casimir, a Fouquet or a Duc de Lauzun, a Louis-Joseph de Vendôme, a Diderot or a Mirabeau, a d'Enghien.