denotes a small antique castle, fortified with turrets. Such is the bastile of Paris, which seems the only castle that has retained the name: it was begun to be built in 1369 by order of Charles V. and was finished in 1383 under the reign of his successor.—Its chief use is for the custody of state-prisoners; or, more properly speaking, for the clandestine purposes of unfeeling despotism.
The lieutenant-general of the police of Paris is the sub-delegate of the ministry for the department of the Bastile. He has under him a titular commissary, who is called the commissary of the Bastile. He has a fixed salary for drawing up what are called instructions, but he does not this exclusively. He has no inspection nor function but in cases where he receives orders; the reason of which is, that all that is done in this castle is arbitrary.
Every prisoner on coming to the Bastile has an inventory made of every thing about him. His trunks, cloaths, linen, and pockets are searched, to discover whether there be any papers in them relative to the matter for which he is apprehended. It is not usual to search persons of a certain rank; but they are asked for their knives, razors, scissors, watches, canes, jewels, and money. After this examination, the prisoner is conducted into an apartment, where he is locked up within three doors. They who have no servants make their own bed and fire. The hour of dining is eleven, and of supping six.
At the beginning of their confinement, they have neither books, ink or paper; they go neither to mas, nor on the walks; they are not allowed to write to any one, not even to the lieutenant of the police, on whom all depends, and of whom permission must first be asked by means of the major, who seldom refuses. At first they go to mas only every other Sunday. When a person has obtained leave to write to the lieutenant of the police, he may ask his permission to write to his family, and to receive their answers; to have with him his servant or an attendant, &c. which requests are either granted or refused according to circumstances. Nothing can be obtained but through this channel.
The officers of the staff take the charge of conveying the letters of the prisoners to the police. They are sent regularly at noon and at night; but if they desire it, their letters are sent at any hour by express, who are paid out of the money of those who are confined. The answers are always addressed to the major, who communicates them to the prisoner. If no notice is taken of any request contained in the letter of the prisoner, it is a refusal. The attendants whom they appoint for those who are not allowed their own servants, or who have none of their own, are commonly invalid soldiers. These people lie near the prisoners, and wait upon them. A person ought always to be upon his guard with these men, as well as with the turnkeys; for all his words are noticed, and carried to the officers, who report them to the police: it is thus they study the characters of the prisoners. In this castle, all is mystery, trick, artifice, snare, and treachery. The officers, attendants, turnkeys, and valets, often attempt to draw a man on to speak against the government, and then inform of all.
Sometimes a prisoner obtains permission of having books, his watch, knife, and razors, and even paper and ink. He may ask to see the lieutenant of the police when he comes to the Bastille. This officer commonly causes prisoners to be brought down some days after their arrival. Sometimes he goes to visit them in their chambers; especially the ladies.
When the lieutenant of the police sees a prisoner, the conversation turns upon the cause of his confinement. He sometimes asks for written and signed declarations. In general, as much circumspection should be used in these conferences as in the examination itself, since nothing that a person may have said or written is forgotten.
When a prisoner wants to transmit anything to the lieutenant of the police, it is always by means of the major. Notes may be sent to this officer by the turnkeys. A person is never anticipated in anything—he must ask for everything; even for permission to be shaved. This office is performed by the surgeon; who also furnishes sick or indisposed prisoners with sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, confections, and the necessary remedies.
The time for walking is an hour a day; sometimes an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, in the great court.
A prisoner may be interrogated a few days after his entrance into the Bastille, but frequently this is not done till after some weeks. Sometimes he is previously informed of the day when this is to be done; often he is only acquainted with it the moment he is brought down to the council-chamber. This commission of interrogatory is executed by the lieutenant of the police, a counsellor of state, a matter of requests, a councillor or a commissioner of the Chatelet. When the lieutenant of the police does not himself interrogate, he usually comes at the end of the examination.
These commissioners are purely passive beings. Frequently they attempt to frighten a prisoner; they lay snares for him, and employ the meanest artifices to get a confession from him. They pretend proofs, exhibit papers without suffering him to read them; asserting that they are instruments of unavoidable conviction. Their interrogatories are always vague. They turn not only on the prisoner's words and actions, but on his most secret thoughts, and on the discourse and conduct of persons of his acquaintance, whom it is wished to bring into question.
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The examiners tell a prisoner that his life is at stake; that this day his fate depends upon himself; that if he will make a fair declaration, they are authorized to promise him a speedy release; but if he refuses to confess, he will be given up to a special commission: that they are in possession of decisive documents, of authentic proofs, more than sufficient to ruin him; that his accomplices have discovered all; that the government has unknown resources, of which he can have no suspicion. They fatigue prisoners by varied and infinitely multiplied interrogatories. According to the persons, they employ promises, caresses, and menaces. Sometimes they use insults, and treat the unhappy sufferers with an insolence that fills up the measure of that tyranny of which they are the base instruments.
If the prisoner makes the required confession, the commissioners then tell him that they have no precise authority for his enlargement, but that they have every reason to expect it; that they are going to solicit it, &c. The prisoner's confessions, far from bettering his condition, give occasion to new interrogatories, often lengthen his confinement, draw in the persons with whom he has had connections, and expose himself to new vexations.
Although there are rules for all occasions, yet everything is subject to exceptions arising from influence, recommendations, protection, intrigue, &c. because the first principle in this place is arbitrary will. Very frequently, persons confined on the same account are treated very differently, according as their recommendations are more or less considerable.
There is a library, founded by a foreign prisoner who died in the Bastille in the beginning of the present century. Some prisoners obtain leave to go to it; others, to have the books carried to their chambers.
The falsest things are told the prisoners with an air of sincerity and concern. "It is very unfortunate that the king has been prejudiced against you. His majesty cannot hear your name mentioned without being irritated. The affair for which you have lost your liberty is only a pretext—they had designs against you before—you have powerful enemies." These discourses are the etiquette of the place.
It would be in vain for a prisoner to ask leave to write to the king—he can never obtain it.
The perpetual and most insupportable torment of this cruel and odious inquisition, are vague, indeterminate, false, or equivocal promises, inexhaustible and constantly deceitful hopes of a speedy release, exhortations to patience, and blind conjectures, of which the lieutenant of the police and officers are very lavish.
To cover the odium of the barbarities exercised here, and slacken the zeal of relations or patrons, the most absurd and contradictory flanders against a prisoner are frequently published. The true causes of imprisonment, and real obstacles to release, are concealed. These resources, which are infinitely varied, are inexhaustible.
When a prisoner who is known and protected has entirely lost his health, and his life is thought in danger, he is always sent out. The ministry do not choose that persons well known should die in the Bastille. If a prisoner does die there, he is interred in the parish of St Paul, under the name of a domestic; and this falsity is written in the register of deaths, in order to deceive posterity. There is another register in which the true names of the deceased are entered; but it is not without great difficulty that extracts can be procured from it. The commissary of the Bastille must first be informed of the use the family intends to make of the extract.
In 1674 the baggage of Louis chevalier de Rohan, grand huntsman of France, having been taken and rummaged in a skirmish, some letters were found which caused a suspicion that he had treated with the English for the surrender of Havre de Grace. He was arrested and put into the Bastille. The Sieur de la Tuanterie, his agent, concealed himself. The proof was not sufficient. A commission was named to proceed against the accused for treason. La Tuanterie was discovered at Rouen: an attempt was made to arrest him; but he fired on the afflators, and obliged them to kill him on the spot. Persons attached to the chevalier de Rohan went every evening round the Bastille, crying through a speaking trumpet, "La Tuanterie is dead, and has said nothing;" but the chevalier did not hear them. The commissioners, not being able to get anything from him, told him, "that the king knew all, that they had proofs, but only wished for his own confession, and that they were authorised to promise him pardon if he would declare the truth." The chevalier, too credulous, confessed the whole. Then the perfidious commissioners changed their language. They said, "that with respect to the pardon, they could not answer for it; but that they had hopes of obtaining it, and would go and solicit it." This they troubled themselves little about, and condemned the criminal to lose his head. He was conducted on a platform to the scaffold, by means of a gallery raised to the height of the window of the armory in the arsenal, which looks towards the little square at the end of the Rue des Tournelles. He was beheaded on November 27, 1674.
The Jesuits of the college of Clermont, in the Rue St Jacques Paris, having this same year (1674) invited the king (Louis XIV.) to honour with his presence a tragedy to be performed by their scholars, that prince accepted the invitation. These able courtiers took care to insert in the piece several strokes of flattery, with which the monarch, greedy of such incense, was greatly pleased. When the rector of the college was conducting the king home, a nobleman in the train applauded the success of the tragedy. Louis said, "Do you wonder at it? this is my college." The Jesuits did not lose a word of this. The very same night they got engraved in large golden letters on black marble, Collegium Ludovicii Magni, instead of the former inscription which was placed beneath the name of Jesus on the principal gate of the college (Collegium Claramontanum Societatis Jesu); and in the morning the new inscription was put up in place of the old one. A young scholar of quality, aged 13, who was witness to the zeal of the reverend fathers, made the two following verses, which he posted up at night on the college gate:
Abfulit hinc Jesum, postuitque insignia regis Impia gens: altum non colit illa Deum.
The Jesuits did not fail to cry out sacrilege: the
young author was discovered, taken up, and put into the Bastille. The implacable society caused him, as a matter of favour, to be condemned to perpetual imprisonment; and he was transferred to the citadel of the ile Sainte Marguerite. Several years after, he was brought back to the Bastille. In 1705 he had been a prisoner 31 years. Having become heir to all his family, who possessed great property, the Jesuit Riquellet, then confessor of the Bastille, renounced to his brethren on the necessity of restoring the prisoner to liberty. The golden shower which forced the tower of Danae had the same effect on the castle of the Bastille. The Jesuits made a merit with the prisoner of the protection they granted him; and this man of rank, whose family would have become extinct without the aid of the society, did not fail to give them extensive proofs of his gratitude.
Nowhere else on earth, perhaps, has human misery, by human means, been rendered so lasting, so complete, or so remediless. This the following case may suffice to evince; the particulars of which are translated from that elegant and energetic writer M. Mercier. The heinous offence which merited an imprisonment surpassing torture and rendering death a blessing, though for obvious reasons not specified by our author, is known from other sources to have consisted in some unguarded expressions implying disrespect concerning the late Gallic monarch Louis XV.
Upon the accession of Louis XVI. to the throne, the ministers now in office, and moved by humanity, begun their administration with an act of clemency and justice; they inspected the registers of the Bastille, and set many prisoners at liberty. Among those there was an old man who had groaned in confinement for 47 years between four thick and cold stone-walls. Harassed by adversity, which strengthens both the mind and the constitution, when they are not overpowered by it, he had resisted the horrors of his long imprisonment with an invincible and manly spirit. His locks white, thin, and scattered, had almost acquired the rigidity of iron; whilst his body, environed for so long a time by a coffin of stone, had borrowed from it a firm and compact habit. The narrow door of his tomb, turning upon its grating hinges, opened not as usual by halves; and an unknown voice announced his liberty, and bade him depart. Believing this to be a dream, he hesitated; but at length rose up and walked forth with trembling steps, amazed at the space he traversed: The stairs of the prison, the halls, the court, seemed to him vast, immense, and almost without bounds. He stopped from time to time, and gazed around like a bewildered traveller: His vision was with difficulty reconciled to the clear light of day: He contemplated the heavens as a new object: His eyes remained fixed, and he could not even weep. Stupified with the newly acquired power of changing his position, his limbs, like his tongue, refused, in spite of his efforts, to perform their office; at length he got through the formidable gate.
When he felt the motion of the carriage prepared to transport him to his former habitation, he screamed out, and uttered some inarticulate sounds; and as he could not bear this new movement, he was obliged to descend. Supported by a benevolent arm, he fought out the street where he had formerly resided: he found it, but no trace of his house remained; one of the public edifices occupied the spot where it had stood. He now saw nothing that brought to his recollection, either that particular quarter, the city itself, or the objects with which he had formerly been acquainted. The houses of his nearest neighbours, which were fresh in his memory, had assumed a new appearance. In vain were his looks directed to all the objects around him; he could discover nothing of which he had the smallest remembrance. Terrified, he stopped and fetched a deep sigh. To him, what did it import that the city was peopled with living creatures? None of them were alive to him; he was unknown to all the world, and he knew nobody: And whilst he wept, he regretted his dungeon.
At the name of the Bastile, which he often pronounced and even claimed as an asylum, and the sight of his clothes that marked a former age, the crowd gathered round him: curiosity, blended with pity, excited their attention. The most aged asked him many questions, but had no remembrance of the circumstances he recapitulated. At length accident brought in his way an ancient domestic, now a superannuated porter, who, confined to his lodge for fifteen years, had barely sufficient strength to open the gate:—Even he did not know the master he had served; but informed him that grief and misfortune had brought his wife to the grave thirty years before, that his children were gone abroad to distant climes, and that of all his relations and friends none now remained. This recital was made with the indifference which people discover for events long passed, and almost forgot. The miserable man groaned, and groaned alone. The crowd around, offering only unknown features to his view, made him feel the excess of his calamities even more than he would have done in the dreadful solitude that he had left.
Overcome with sorrow, he presented himself before the minister to whose humanity he owed that liberty which was now a burden to him. Bowing down, he said, "Restore me again to that prison from which you have taken me: I cannot survive the loss of my nearest relations; of my friends; and, in one word, of a whole generation: Is it possible in the same moment to be informed of this universal destruction, and not wish for death? This general mortality, which to the rest of mankind comes slowly and by degrees, has to me been instantaneous, the operation of a moment. Whilst secluded from society, I lived with myself only; but here I neither can live with myself nor with this new race, to whom my anguish and despair appear only as a dream. There is nothing terrible in dying; but it is dreadful indeed to be the last." The minister was melted; he caused the old domestic to attend this unfortunate person, as only he could talk to him of his family. This discourse was the single consolation that he received: for he shunned all intercourse with a new race, born since he had been exiled from the world; and he passed his time in the midst of Paris in the same solitude as he had done whilst confined in a dungeon for almost half a century. But the charity and mortification of meeting no person who could say to him, We were formerly known to one another, soon put an end to his existence.