The Dungeons of Old Paris / Being the Story and Romance of the Most Celebrated Prisons of the Monarchy and the Revolution

by Tighe Hopkins

At no point in the existence of an ordinary captive of the Bastille is there any occasion to exaggerate his pains. Such as they were, they were very real; and scant reason is there to wonder at the bitterness, the vehemence, and even the violence of tone which characterises the memoirs or narratives of those who had endured them. The apologists of the Bastille will beg us to believe that the histories of Linguet and certain others are mendacious, have been refuted, and so forth. The gifted, caustic Linguet, who is one of their particular bugbears, was not the most upright man, nor the most scrupulous writer, in the France of his day; but the essential parts of his narrative are confirmed by the statements of a host of others. It is not because Linguet has said that the Bastille walls, which were from seven to twelve feet thick, were from thirty to forty feet thick (which he might quite possibly have supposed) that we are to discredit his account, highly wrought as it is, of the general conditions of life within the prison. It is not more highly wrought than the accounts of other prisoners of the Bastille, the accuracy of which has not been questioned. These other histories are plentiful, and we are under no necessity of resting upon the better-known narratives which, for their qualities of style or their greater picturesqueness, have been so often reproduced. Far on into the eighteenth century—indeed until within a few years of our own—there lay in the Bastille victims of public or private injustice, whose complainings, stifled in its vaulted ceilings, have sent us down a faint but faithful echo. What of Bertin de Frateaux, who was walled in there from 1752 until his death in 1782? What of Tavernier, who, imprisoned in 1759 (after a previous ten years' sojourn in another gaol), was liberated only by the wreckers of the Bastille, on the 14th of July, 1789? Here, too, in 1784, lies the Genoese, Pellissery, imprisoned, in 1777, for publishing a pamphlet on the finances of Necker. Dishonourable terms of release are offered him which he will not accept, although "rheumatic in every joint, scorbutic, and spitting blood for fifteen months, owing to the atrocious treatment I have had here during seven years." Here, two years later, is Brun de la Condamine, the inventor of an explosive bomb, which he has importuned the ministry to make test of. After a captivity of four years and a half, enraged at the indignities he receives, he makes a wild attempt to escape. Here, at the same period, is Guillaume Debure, the oldest and most respected bookseller in France, lodged in the Bastille for refusing to stamp the pirated copies of works issued by his brethren in the trade; treated apparently like a common malefactor, and released only on the indignant representations of the whole bookselling fraternity of Paris. Thus lightly was the liberty of the subject held, even while the Revolution was fermenting.

The prisoner who was released never knew until then the full bitterness of the treatment he had endured. It was perhaps the acutest part of his sufferings, that the letters he had written to family and friends, the entreaties he had addressed to ministers, magistrates, and chiefs of police, brought him never a word in answer. It was thus that was produced in so many cases that sense of utter desolation and abandonment by the whole world which resulted in the madness of very many prisoners. Those who were restored to liberty with their reason unimpaired learned that their letters and petitions had never been received. They had never, in fact, passed out of the Bastille. It was well to have the truth of this at any time; but we are to remember the prisoners who died in the belief that their dearest ones had denied them one kind or sympathetic word. When the Bastille was sacked, piles of letters were found which had never passed beyond the governor's hands. Amongst them was one which (considering the circumstances of the writer, and the fact that no line was ever vouchsafed him in response) may be regarded as perhaps the very saddest ever penned: "If for my consolation," wrote the prisoner to the lieutenant of police, "Monseigneur would have the goodness, in the name of the God above us both, to give me but one word of my dear wife, her name only on a card, that I might know she still lives, I would pray for Monseigneur to the last day of my life." This letter was signed "Queret Démery," a name known to nobody, but which will be remembered while the Bastille is remembered. One does not choose to ask, were there even a chance of an answer, how many other letters not less piteous than this were read and drily docketed by governors of the Bastille.

This inveterate and almost inviolable secrecy in which the government of the Bastille enwrapped the majority of its prisoners seems on the whole to have been the most cruel feature of its policy. After reading some fifty volumes of cells with rats in them, and dungeons frozen or fiery, and torture rooms, and filthy beds, and food not enough to keep life on, one is shocked to find that the due and natural poignancy of sympathy with human suffering begins insensibly to weaken. But this refinement of pain, inflicted as a part of the routine, upon the common prisoners of the Bastille, revives the sense of pity. It was the habit to pretend that prisoners who were dungeoned there were not in there at all. Asked as to the fate of this prisoner or the other, ministers would respond with a blank look, assure the questioner that they had never heard the prisoner's name, and that, wherever he might be, he was certainly not in the Bastille. The governor and chief officers of the prison, who saw the prisoner every day, would say that he was not in their keeping, and that no such person was known to them. The common practice of imprisoning men in the Bastille under names other than their own made these denials easy. At other times, when it was desired to prejudice his friends or society against a prisoner, the answer would be, that the less said about him the better. The nominal cause of his imprisonment, his friends were told, was not the real one; the Government had their information, and if it could possibly be published the prisoner would be known in his true character. The prisoner himself was often told that his friends had ceased to believe in his innocence, or that they thought him dead, or that they had given up all hope of procuring his release. The Bastille and the Inquisition were singularly alike in their methods.

Dreary beyond expression must have been the daily round for all but the privileged few. "Every hour was struck on a bell which was heard all through the Faubourg St. Antoine." The sentries on the rampart challenged one another ceaselessly throughout the night. There were prisoners in solitary confinement to whom no other sounds than these ever penetrated, except the grating of the key in the lock which announced the daily visits of the gaoler. This was the life of such prisoners as the Iron Mask, and of Tavernier, who told his liberators that, during the thirty years of his captivity, he had passed nineteen consecutive ones without crossing the threshold of his cell. Exercise in the yard, for those who enjoyed this favour, was limited to an hour a day, and this period might be reduced to a few minutes if there were many prisoners to be exercised in turn,—for, in general, the utmost care was taken to prevent them from meeting one another. If a stranger were shewn into the yard, the prisoner who was taking his mouthful of air had to retreat to a cabinet in the wall. These walks were solitary, except for the presence of a dumb sentinel; and, unless the prisoner were now and then permitted or compelled to share his chamber with a fellow-captive, not less solitary was his whole existence. The most stringent rules were in force respecting the admission of friends or relatives. "Strangers cannot enter the Bastille," ran the official injunction, "without very precise orders from the governor"; and such rare interviews as were permitted took place in the council-chamber, in the presence of this officer or his deputy. The length of the interview was always fixed in the letter which the visitor bore from the lieutenant of police, and nothing might be said relative to the cause of the prisoner's detention.

A certain Mme. de Montazau, visiting her husband in the Bastille, took with her a little dog, and, while pretending to caress it in her own Portuguese tongue, was trying to tell Montazau what efforts she was making for his release. "Madame," interrupted De Launay, his gaoler's instinct aroused, "if your dog does not understand French you cannot bring him here." Even such poor barren visits as these were of the rarest possible occurrence.

But, M. Ravaisson will tell us, prisoners were frequently visited by the lieutenant of the King or some other high personage. It would be more to the point to say that such visits were occasionally inflicted, for the comfort that prisoners derived from them was slender. Abbé Duvernet receives the visit of the minister Amelot, who tells him that he can have nothing to complain of, since he has had access to the prison library. The Bastille library, by the way, seems to have been founded not by the Government, but by a prisoner who was confined there early in the eighteenth century. Abbé Duvernet had made a catalogue of the collection. "I have catalogued your library," he replied to the minister, "and there are not ten volumes in it which a man of ordinary education would trouble himself to read. Library, indeed! Listen, monsieur: when a man has had the hardihood to expose one of the blunders of you ministers, you will spend any quantity of money to be avenged on him. You will hunt him to Holland, England, or the heart of Germany, if it costs the State two thousand pounds. But to afford a little solace to the poor devils in your Bastille, by buying a few books for them to read—no! I dare be sworn that Government has not spent ten pounds on books for this place since the Bastille was built!"

"Well, monsieur l'Abbé," said Amelot, "may I ask why you are here?"

"Why am I here! Because you yourself gave some one a lettre de cachet, which had your own name and the King's attached to it. I am very sure that his Majesty knows nothing of my detention, or the motive of it; but you can scarcely pretend to the same ignorance. Or, will you have me believe that you set your signature to these lettres without knowing what it is that you are signing?" Then, turning to Lenoir, the Lieutenant of Police, the Abbé asked: "Do you, sir, demand lettres de cachet of M. Amelot without giving him a reason? Come, as you are both here together, perhaps one of you will be good enough to tell me what is the excuse for my imprisonment." I have condensed this interview from Les Prisons de Paris. It is not likely that ministers and chiefs of police were often faced in this style by prisoners of the Bastille, but it is probable enough that most interviews of the kind ended with the same fruitless inquiry on the part of the prisoner.

It may be inferred from this how much protection was afforded to prisoners by the daily reports of the governor or the major to the minister, who was nominally responsible for the Bastille. These reports, in fact, seem to have been merely a part of the system of espionage which was regularly practised there. The governor writes:

"I have the honour to inform you that the sieur Billard was engaged with the sieur Perrin yesterday, from six to nine in the evening.