Amongst the prisoners of renown of the eighteenth century Latude must not pass unnoticed. His sojourn in and escape from the Bastille have been much more widely bruited than his captivity at Vincennes, where also he did things wonderful and suffered pains and indignities incredible. Needless to say that he gave his guards the slip, and equally needless to add that he was recovered and brought back. His second incarceration was in one of De Rougemont's cachots (De Rougemont always had a cachot available), from, which, on the surgeon's declaration that his life was in danger, he was removed to a more habitable chamber. On his way thither he found and secreted one of those handy tools which fortune seemed always to leave in the path of Latude, and used it to establish a most ingenious means of communication with his fellow-prisoners. No one ever yet performed such wonders in prison as Masers de Latude. No one accomplished such unheard-of escapes. No one, when retaken, paid with such cruel interest the penalty of his daring. Was the man only a splendid fable, as some latter-day sceptics have suggested? The question has been put, but no one will ever affirm it with authority, and the weight of the evidence seems to lie with Latude the man and not with Latude the legend.
No great distance separated the chamber of Latude from the cachot of the Prévôt de Beaumont. The Prévôt was a great criminal: he had had the courage to denounce and expose that gigantic State fraud, the pacte de famine, in which the De Sartines before named and other persons of consequence were involved. Those were not the days for Prévôts de Beaumont to meddle as critics with criminal ventures of this sort, and the Prévôt had his name written on the customary form. He spent twenty-two years in five of the State prisons of France, and fifteen of them in the dungeon of Vincennes.
"There is not in the Saints' Martyrology," he wrote (in the record which he gave to the people of the Revolution of his experiences in the dungeon of the Monarchy), "such a tale of tribulations and torments as were suffered by me on twelve separate occasions in the fifteen years of my captivity at Vincennes. On one occasion I was confined four months in the cachot, nine months on another occasion, eighteen months on a third; of my fifteen years in the dungeon, seven years and eight months were passed in the black hole. The cruel De Sartines never ceased to harry me; the monster De Rougemont surpassed the orders of De Sartines. Yes, I have lain almost naked and with fettered ankles for eighteen months together. For eighteen months at a time, I have lived on a daily allowance of two ounces of bread and a mug of water. I have more than once been deprived of both for three successive days and nights."[[10]]
[10]. I have summarised here the extracts in the original from the pamphlet of the Prévôt de Beaumont quoted at great length by the authors of the Histoire du Donjon de Vincennes. As a curiosity of prison literature, the Prévôt's pamphlet, if correctly cited, goes above the little eighteenth-century work on Newgate by "B. L. of Twickenham."
The dramatic interest of the Prévôt's imprisonment culminates in an assault upon him in his cell, renewed at four several ventures by the whole strength of the prison staff "and the biggest dog that I have ever seen." The Prévôt had devoted five years to the stealthy composition of an essay on the Art of True Government, which was actually a history of the pacte de famine. His attempts to get it printed were discovered by the police, and the attack on his cell was designed to wrest from him the manuscript. He sets out the affair in detail with the liveliest touches—"First Round," "Second Round," etc.—shews himself levelling De Rougemont with a brick in the stomach, the dog with a blow on the nose, and blinding a brace of warders with the contents of his slop-bucket. At last, faced by an order in the King's writing, he allowed himself to be transferred from Vincennes to Charenton, on the express understanding that his precious manuscript should be transferred with him. The Prévôt himself arrived duly at Charenton, but he never again set eyes on the essay on the Art of True Government. De Rougemont had arranged that it should be stolen on the journey, and the manuscript was last seen in the archives of the Bastille.
Mirabeau was not the only polemic of genius who helped to sharpen against the gratings of Vincennes the weapons of the dawning Revolution. Was not Diderot of the Encyclopedia there also? He paid by a month's rigorous imprisonment in the dungeon, and a longer period of mild captivity in the château, the publication of his Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who See. This, at least, was the ostensible reason of his detention; the true reason was never quite apparent. At the château he was allowed the visits of his wife and friends, and amongst the latter Jean Jacques Rousseau was frequently admitted. Literary legend is more responsible than history for the statement that the first idea of the Social Contract was the outcome of Rousseau's talks with Diderot and Grimm in the park of Vincennes.
Year after year, reign after reign, the picture rarely changes within the four walls of the dungeon. Vincennes was perhaps fuller under Louis XV. than in the reigns of preceding or succeeding sovereigns, but the difference could not have been great. During the twenty years of Cardinal Fleury's ministry under Louis XV., 40,000 lettres de cachet were issued by him, mostly against the Jansenists. Madame de Pompadour made a lavish use of the lettres in favour of Vincennes; Madame Dubarry bestowed her patronage chiefly on the Bastille. Richelieu at one epoch, Mazarin at another, found occupants in plenty for the cells of Vincennes. It was Richelieu who passed a dry word one day apropos of certain mysterious deaths in the dungeon.
"It must be grief," said one.