And as for the Bastile, the terror is in the word. Make the most of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word for a tower, and a tower is but another word for a house you can't get out of. Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a year; but with nine livres a day, and pen, and ink, and paper, and patience, albeit a man can't get out, he may do very well within, at least for a month or six weeks; at the end of which, if he is a harmless fellow, his innocence appears, and he comes out a better and wiser man than he went in.
I had some occasion—I forget what—to step into the courtyard as I settled this account; and remember I walked down-stairs in no small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning. Beshrew the somber pencil, said I vauntingly, for I envy not its powers, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a coloring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself and blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks them. "'Tis true," said I, correcting the proposition, "the Bastile is not an evil to be despised; but strip it of its towers, fill up the fosse, unbarricade the doors, call it simply a confinement, and suppose 'tis some tyrant of a distemper and not of a man which holds you in it, the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint." I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy with a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained "it could not get out." I looked up and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman nor child, I went out without further attention.
In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage; "I can't get out, I can't get out," said the starling. I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came through the passage, it ran fluttering to the side toward which they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity: "I can't get out," said the starling. "God help thee!" said I, "but I'll let thee out, cost what it will"; so I turned about the cage to get the door. It was twisted and double-twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces. I took both hands to it. The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, prest his breast against it as if impatient. "I fear, poor creature," said I, "I can not set thee at liberty." "No," said the starling, "I can't get out; I can't get out," said the starling. I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; or do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile; and I heavily walked up-stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them.
"Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery," said I, "still thou art a bitter draft; and tho thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account. 'Tis thou, thrice sweet and gracious goddess," addressing myself to liberty, "whom all in public or in private worship, whose taste is grateful, and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change; no tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle, or chemic power turn thy scepter into iron; with thee to smile upon him as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch, from whose court thou art exiled. Gracious Heaven!" cried I, kneeling down upon the last step but one in my ascent, "grant me but health, thou great bestower of it, and give me but this fair goddess as my companion, and shower down thy miters, if it seem good unto thy divine providence, upon those heads which are aching for them."
The bird in his cage pursued me into my room. I sat down close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I began to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I was in a right frame for it, and so I gave full scope to my imagination. I was going to begin with the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could not bring it near me, and that the multitude of sad groups in it did but distract me, I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then looked through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture. I beheld his body half-wasted away with long expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of the heart it was which arises from hope deferred. Upon looking nearer I saw him pale and feverish; in thirty years the western breeze had not once fanned his blood; he had seen no sun, no moon, in all that time, nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice; his children—but here my heart began to bleed, and I was forced to go on with another part of the portrait. He was sitting upon the ground upon a little straw, in the furthest corner of his dungeon, which was alternately his chair and bed; a little calendar of small sticks lay at the head, notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed there; he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and with a rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the heap. As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless eye toward the door, then cast it down, shook his head, and went on with his work of affliction. I heard his chains upon his legs, as he turned his body to lay his little stick upon the bundle. He gave a deep sigh: I saw the iron enter into his soul. I burst into tears: I could not sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn.
II
TO MOULINES WITH MARIA[34]
When Maria had come a little to herself, I asked her if she remembered a pale thin person of a man who had sat down betwixt her and her goat about two years before? She said she was unsettled much at that time, but remembered it upon two accounts; that, ill as she was, she saw the person pitied her: and next, that her goat had stolen his handkerchief, and that she had beat him for the theft. "She had washed it," she said, "in the brook, and kept it ever since in her pocket to restore it to him in case she should ever see him again, which," she added, "he had half promised her."