denotes a small antique castle, fortified with turrets: Such was the Bastile of Paris, which seems to have been the last castle that 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 was for the custody of state prisoners; or, more properly speaking, for the clandestine purpose of unfeeling despotism.

The lieutenant-general of the police of Paris was the sub-delegate of the ministry for the department of the Bastile. He had under him a titular commissary, who was called the commissary of the Bastile. He had a fixed salary for drawing up what were called instructions, but he did not do this exclusively. He had no inspection or function but in cases where he received orders: the reason of which was that all that was done in this castle was arbitrary.

Each prisoner on coming to the Bastile had an inventory made of every thing about him. His trunks, clothes, linens, and pockets were searched, to discover whether there were any papers in them relative to the matter for which he was apprehended. It was not usual to search persons of a certain rank; but they were asked for their knives, razors, scissors, watches, canes, jewels, and money. After this examination, the prisoner was conducted into an apartment, where he was locked up within three doors. They who had no servants made their own bed and fire. The hour of dining was eleven, and of supping fix.

At the beginning of their confinement they had neither books, ink, or paper; they went neither to mas, nor on the walks; they were not allowed to write to any one, not even to the lieutenant of the police, on whom all depended, and of whom permission must first have been asked by means of the major, who seldom refused. At first they went to mas only every other Sunday. When a person had obtained leave to write to the lieutenant of the police, he might have asked his permission to write to his family, and to receive their answers; to have with him his servant or attendant, tendant, &c. which requests were either granted or refused according to circumstances. Nothing could be obtained but through this channel.

The officers of the staff took the charge of conveying the letters of the prisoners to the police. They were sent regularly at noon and at night; but if they defied it, their letters were sent at any hour by express, who were paid out of the money of those who were confined. The answers were always addressed to the major, who communicated them to the prisoner. If no notice was taken of any request contained in the letter of the prisoner, it was a refusal. The attendants whom they appointed for those who were not allowed their own servants, or who had none of their own, were commonly invalid soldiers.

Sometimes a prisoner obtained permission of having books, his watch, knife, and razors, and even paper and ink. He might have asked to see the lieutenant of the police when he came to the Bastile. This officer commonly caused prisoners to be brought down some days after their arrival. Sometimes he went to visit them in their chambers.

When the lieutenant of the police saw a prisoner, the conversation turned upon the cause of his confinement. He sometimes asked for written and signed declarations. In general, as much circumspection was necessary in these conferences as in the examination itself, since nothing that a person might have said or written was forgotten.

When a prisoner wanted to transmit any thing to the lieutenant of the police, it was always by means of the major. Notes might have been sent to this officer by the turnkeys. A person was never anticipated in any thing—he must have asked for every thing; even for permission to be shaved. This office was performed by the surgeon; who also furnished sick or indisposed prisoners with sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, confections, and the necessary remedies.

The time of walking was an hour a-day; sometimes an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, in the great court.

A prisoner might have been interrogated a few days after his entrance into the Bastile, but frequently this was not done till after some weeks. Sometimes he was previously informed of the day when this was to be done; often he was only acquainted with it the moment he was brought down to the council-chamber. This commission of interrogatory was executed by the lieutenant of the police, a counsellor of state, a matter of requests, a counsellor or a commissioner of the Chatelet. When the lieutenant of the police did not himself interrogate, he usually came at the end of the examination.

The commissioners were purely passive beings. Frequently they attempted to frighten a prisoner; they laid snares for him, and employed the meanest artifices to get a confession from him. They pretended proofs, exhibited papers, without suffering him to read them: asserting that they were instruments of unavoidable conviction. Their interrogatories were always vague. They turned 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 was wished to bring into question.

The examiners told a prisoner that his life was at stake; that his fate depended on himself; that if he would make a fair declaration, they were authorized to promise him a speedy release; but if he refused to confess, he would be given up to a special commission: that they were in possession of decisive documents, of authentic proofs, more than sufficient to ruin him; that his accomplices had discovered all; that the government had unknown resources, of which he could have no suspicion. They fatigued prisoners by varied and infinitely multiplied interrogatories. According to the persons, they employed promises, caresses, and menaces. Sometimes they used insults, and treated the unhappy sufferers with an insolence that filled up the measure of that tyranny of which they were the base instruments.

If the prisoner made the required confession, the commissioners then told him, that they had no precise authority for his enlargement, but that they had every reason to expect it; that they were going to solicit it, &c. The prisoner's confessions, far from bettering his condition, gave occasion to new interrogatories, often lengthened his confinement, drew in the persons with whom he had connexions, and exposed himself to new vexations.

Although there were rules for all occasions, yet everything was subject to exceptions arising from influence, recommendations, protection, intrigue, &c. because the first principle in this place was arbitrary will. Very frequently, persons confined on the same account were treated very differently, according as their recommendations were more or less considerable.

There was a library, founded by a foreign prisoner who died in the Bastile in the beginning of the last century. Some prisoners obtained leave to go to it; others, to have the books carried to their chambers.

The falsest things were 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 were the etiquette of the place.

It would have been in vain for a prisoner to ask leave to write to the king—he could never obtain it.

The perpetual and most infupportable torment of this cruel and odious inquisition, were 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 were 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 were frequently published. The true causes of imprisonment, and real obstacles to release, were concealed. These resources, which were infinitely varied, were inexhaustible.

When a prisoner who was known and protected had entirely lost his health, and his life was thought in danger, he was always sent out. The ministry did not choose that persons well known should die in the Bastile. If a prisoner did die there, he was interred in the parish of St Paul, under the name of a domestic; tic; and this falsity was written in the register of deaths, in order to deceive posterity. There was another register in which the true names of the deceased were entered; but it was not without great difficulty that extracts could be procured from it. The commissary of the Bastile must first have been informed of the use the family intended to make of the extract.

In 1674 the baggage of Louis chevalier de Rohan, grand huntman 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 Bastile. The Sieur de la Tuanderie, his agent, concealed himself. The proof was not sufficient. A commission was named to proceed against the accused for treason. La Tuanderie was discovered at Rouen: an attempt was made to arrest him; but he fired on the assailants, and obliged them to kill him on the spot. Persons attached to the chevalier de Rohan went every evening round the Bastile, crying through a speaking trumpet, "La Tuanderie is dead, and has said nothing;" but the chevalier did not hear them. The commissioners, not being able to get any thing from him, told him, "that the king knew all, that they had proofs, but only wished for his own confession, and that they were authorized 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 very 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 armoury 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 Clararomontanum Societatis Iesu); 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:

Abfusit hinc Iesum, poftuitque insignia regis Impia gens: alium non colti illa Deum.

The Jesuits did not fail to cry out sacrilege: the young author was discovered, taken up, and put into the Bastile. 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 St Marguerite. Several years after, he was brought back to the Bastile. In 1705 he had been a prisoner 31 years. Having become heir to all his family, who possessed great property, the Jesuit Riquelet, then confessor of the Bastile, remonstrated to his brethren on the necessity of restoring the prisoner to liberty. The golden shower which forced the tower of Danaë had the same effect on the castle of the Bastile. 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 then in office, moved by humanity, began their administration with an act of clemency and justice; they inspected the registers of the Bastile, 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. Hardened 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 Bastile 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 domestie, now a superannuated porter, who, confined to his lodge for 15 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 30 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 to 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 domestie 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 chagrin 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.

Such was the nature of this celebrated fortress. Many of our readers will probably recollect that it was attacked and taken by the Parisian mob on the 14th July 1789. At that time only seven prisoners were found in it, and it did not appear that any of them were the victims of tyranny or wanton oppression.