The BastileThe first stone of this historic fortress was laid in 1370. For the first two centuries it was a military stronghold, and whoever held the Bastile overawed Paris. The terrors of the Bastile as a state prison were greatest during the ministry of Richelieu. From the beginning of the revolution this prison was a special object of attack by the populace. On July 14, 1789, it was stormed by the people and forced to surrender.
The BastileThe first stone of this historic fortress was laid in 1370. For the first two centuries it was a military stronghold, and whoever held the Bastile overawed Paris. The terrors of the Bastile as a state prison were greatest during the ministry of Richelieu. From the beginning of the revolution this prison was a special object of attack by the populace. On July 14, 1789, it was stormed by the people and forced to surrender.
The Bastile
The first stone of this historic fortress was laid in 1370. For the first two centuries it was a military stronghold, and whoever held the Bastile overawed Paris. The terrors of the Bastile as a state prison were greatest during the ministry of Richelieu. From the beginning of the revolution this prison was a special object of attack by the populace. On July 14, 1789, it was stormed by the people and forced to surrender.
Later in the reign, the rage for play grew into a perfect madness.Hoca, just mentioned, although it had been indicted by two popes in Rome, and although, in Paris, the Parliament, the magistrates and the six guilds of merchants had petitioned for its suppression, held the lead. Other games of chance little less popular werelansquenet,hazard,portiqueandtrou-madame. Colossal sums were lost and won. A hundred thousand crowns changed hands at a sitting. Madame de Montespan, the notorious favorite, lost, one Christmas Day, 700,000 crowns and got back 300,000 by a stake upon only three cards. It was possible athocato lose or win fifty or sixty times a stake in one quarter of an hour. During a campaign, officers played incessantly and leading generals of the army were among the favorite players with the King, wheninvited to the palace. The police fulminated vainly against the vice, and would have prohibited play among the people, but did not dare to suggest that the court should set the example.
Extravagance and ostentation being the aim and fashion of all, every means was tried to fill the purse. The Crown was assailed on all sides by the needy, seeking places at court. Fathers sent their sons to Paris from the provinces to ingratiate themselves with great people and to pay court in particular to rich widows and dissolute old dowagers eager to marry again. Heiresses were frequently waylaid and carried off by force. Abduction was then as much the rule as aremariages de convenancein Paris nowadays. Friends and relations aided and abetted the abductor, if the lady’s servants made resistance.
The state of Paris was shocking. Disturbances in the street were chronic, murders were frequent and robbery was usually accompanied with violence, especially in the long winter nights. The chief offenders were soldiers of the garrison and the pages and lackeys of the great houses, who still carried arms. A police ordinance finally forbade them to wear swords and it was enforced by exemplary punishment. A duke’s footman and a duchess’s page, who attacked and wounded a student on the Pont Neuf, were arrested, tried and forthwith hanged despite the protests and petitions of their employers. Further ordinances regulated thedemeanor of servants who could not be employed without producing their papers, and now in addition to their swords being taken away, they were deprived of their canes and sticks on account of their brutal treatment of inoffensive people. They were forbidden to gather in crowds and they might not enter the gardens of the Tuileries or Luxembourg.
It was not enough to repress the insolent valets and check the midnight excesses of the worst characters. The importunity of the sturdy vagabond, who lived by begging, called for stern repression. These ruffians had long been tolerated. They enjoyed certain privileges and immunities, they were organised in dangerous bands strong enough to make terms with the police and they possessed a sanctuary in the heart of Paris, where they defied authority. This “Court of Miracles,” as it was called, had three times withstood a siege by commissaries and detachments of troops, who were repulsed with showers of stones. Then the head of the police went at the head of a strong force and cleared the place out, allowing all to escape; and when it had been thus emptied, their last receptacle was swept entirely away. Other similar refuges were suppressed,—the enclosures of the Temple and the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Près, and the Hotel Soissons, property of the royal family of Savoy, which had long claimed the right to give shelter to malefactors.
The prisons of Paris were in a deplorable and disgraceful state at this period, as appears from a picture drawn by a magistrate about the middle of the seventeenth century. They were without light or air, horribly overcrowded by the dregs of humanity and a prey to foul diseases which prisoners freely communicated to one another. For-l’Évêque was worse then than it had ever been; the whole building was in ruins and must soon fall to the ground. The Greater and Lesser Châtelets were equally unhealthy and of dimensions too limited for their population, the walls too high, the dungeons too deep down in the bowels of the earth. The only prison not absolutely lethal was the Conciergerie, yet some of its cells and chambers possessed no sort of drainage. The hopelessness of the future was the greatest infliction; once committed, no one could count on release: to be thrown into prison was to be abandoned and forgotten.
The records kept at the Bastile were in irremediable disorder. Even the names of the inmates were in most cases unknown, from the custom of giving new arrivals a false name. By the King’s order, his Minister once applied to M. de Besmaus, the governor, for information as to the cause of detention of two prisoners, a priest called Gerard, who had been confined for eight years, and a certain Pierre Rolland, detained for three years. The inquiry elicited a report that no such person as Rolland appeared upon the monthly pay lists for rations. Gerard, the priest, was recognised by his numerous petitions for release. The Minister called for a full nominal list of all prisoners and the reasons for their confinement, but the particulars were not forthcoming. This was on the conclusion of the Peace of Ryswick, when the King desired to mark the general rejoicings by a great gaol delivery.
Many causes contributed to fill the Bastile and other State prisons in the reign of Louis XIV. Let us take these more in detail. The frauds committed by dishonest agents dealing with public money, the small fry, as guilty as Fouquet, but on a lesser scale, consigned many to prison. Severe penalties were imposed upon defamatory writers and the whole of the literary crew concerned in the publication of libellous attacks upon the King,—printers, binders, distributors of this dangerous literature,—found their way to the Bastile, to the galleys, even to the scaffold. Presently when Louis, always a bigoted Catholic, became more and more intolerant under the influence of the priests, the revived persecution of the Protestants filled the gaols and galleys with the sufferers for their faith. Colbert had long protected them, but at the death of this talented minister who, as he wrote Madame de Maintenon, “thought more of finance than religion,” Le Tellier and Louvois, who succeeded him, raged furiously against the Protestants and many cruel edicts were published. A fierce fanatical desire to proselytise, to procure an abjuration of creedby every violent and oppressive means possessed all classes, high and low. The doors of sick people were forced to admit the priests who came to administer the sacraments, without being summoned.
On one occasion the pot-boy of a wine shop who, with his master, professed the new faith, was mortally wounded in a street fight. A priest visited him as he lay dying and besought him to make confession. A low crowd forthwith collected before the house, to the number of seven or eight hundred, and rose in stormy riot, attacked the door with sticks and stones, broke it down, smashed all the windows and forced their way in, crying, “Give us up the Huguenots or we will set fire to the house.” The police then came upon the scene and restored quiet, but the man died, to the last refusing to confess. Outrages of this kind were frequent. Again, the son of a new convert removed his hat when the procession of the Host passed by, but remained standing instead of falling on his knees. He was violently attacked and fled to his home, pursued by the angry crowd who would have burned the house to the ground. The public feeling was so strong that many called for the quartering of troops in Paris to assist in the good work of conversion, a suggestion which bore fruit presently in the infamousdragonnades, when the soldiers pillaged and laid waste the provinces.
The passion for proselytising was carried to the extent of bribing the poverty stricken to changetheir religion. Great pressure was brought to bear upon Huguenot prisoners who were in the Bastile. A number of priests came in to use their persuasive eloquence upon the recusants, and many reports are preserved in the correspondence of M. de Besmaus, the governor, of their energetic efforts. “I am doing my best,” says one priest, “and have great hopes of success.” “I think,” writes another, “I have touched Mademoiselle de Lamon and the Mademoiselles de la Fontaine. If I may have access to them I shall be able to satisfy you.” The governor was the most zealous of all in seeking to secure the abjuration of the new religion.
It may be noted here that this constant persecution, emphasised by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had conceded full liberty of conscience), had the most disastrous consequences upon French industry. The richest manufacturers and the most skillful and industrious artisans were to be found among the French Protestants and there was soon a steady drain outwards of these sources of commercial prosperity. In this continuous exodus of capital and intelligent labor began the material decadence of France and transferred the enterprise of these people elsewhere, notably to England. A contemporary pamphlet paints the situation in sombre colors;—“Nothing is to be seen but deserted farms, impecunious landed proprietors, bankrupt traders, creditors in despair, peasants dying of starvation, their dwellings in ruins.” On every sideand in every commodity there was a terrible depreciation of values,—land nearly worthless, revenues diminished, and besides a new and protracted war had now to be faced.
Some idea of the condition of the interior of the Bastile in those days may be best realised by a few extracts from the original archives preserved from the sack of the hated castle when Paris rose in revolution. Some documents are extant, written by a certain Comte de Pagan, who was thrown into the State prison charged with sorcery. He had boasted that he could, when he chose, destroy Louis XIV by magic. His arrest was immediate and his detention indefinitely prolonged. His letters contain the most piteous appeals for money.
“Monseigneur and most reverent patron,” he writes to Colbert from the Bastile under date of the 8th of November, 1661, “I supplicate you most humbly to accord this poor, unfortunate being his liberty. Your lordship will most undoubtedly be rewarded for so merciful a deed as the release of a wretched creature who has languished here for nine years devoid of hope.” In a second petition, reiterating his prayer for clemency, he adds, “It is now impossible for me to leave the room in which I am lodged as I am almost naked. Do send me a little money so that I may procure a coat and a few shirts.” Again, “May I beseech you to remember that I have been incarcerated for eleven years and eight months and have endured the worst hardshipsever inflicted on a man for the want of covering against the bitter cold.... Monseigneur, I am seventy-eight years of age, a prey to all manner of bodily infirmities; I do not possess a single friend in the world, and worse still, I am not worth one sou and am sunk in an abyss of wretchedness. I swear to you, Monseigneur, that I am compelled to go to bed in the dark because I cannot buy a farthing candle; I have worn the same shirt without removing or changing it for seven whole months.”
This appeal is endorsed with a brief minute signed by Colbert. “Let him have clothes.” The year following a new petition is rendered. “Your Excellency will forgive me if I entreat him to remember that thirteen months ago he granted me 400 francs to relieve my miseries. But I am once more in the same or even worse condition and I again beg humbly for help. I have been quite unable to pay the hire of the furniture in my chamber and the upholsterer threatens to remove the goods and I shall soon be compelled to lie on the bare floor. I have neither light nor fuel and am almost without clothes. You, Monseigneur, are my only refuge and I beseech your charitable help or I shall be found dead of cold in my cell. For the love of God, entreat the King to give me my liberty after the thirteen years spent here.”
This last appeal is dated November 28th, 1665, but there is no record of his ultimate disposal. It is stated in an earlier document that Cardinal Mazarin had been willing to grant a pardon to this prisoner if he would agree to be conveyed to the frontier under escort and sent across it as a common criminal, but the Count had refused to accept this dishonoring condition which he pleaded would cast a stigma upon his family name. He offered, however, to leave France directly he was released and seek any domicile suggested to him where he might be safe from further oppression. Cardinal Mazarin seems to have been mercifully inclined, but died before he could extend clemency to this unhappy victim of arbitrary power.
The Bastile was used sometimes as a sanctuary to withdraw an offender who had outraged the law and could not otherwise be saved from reprisal. A notable case was that of René de l’Hopital, Marquis de Choisy, who lived on his estates like a savage tyrant. In 1659 he was denounced by a curé to the ecclesiastical authorities for his crimes. The marquis with a couple of attendants waylaid the priest on the high road and attacked the curé whom he grievously wounded. The priest commended himself to God and was presently stunned by a murderous blow on the jaw from the butt end of a musket. Then the Marquis, to make sure his victim was really dead, rode his horse over the recumbent body and then stabbed it several times with his sword. But help came and the curé was rescued still alive, and strange to say, recovered, although it was said he had received a hundred and twenty wounds.
The entire religious hierarchy in France espoused the priest’s cause. The Marquis was haled before several provincial courts of justice. He would undoubtedly have been convicted of murder and sentenced to death, for Louis XIV would seldom spare the murderer of a priest, but the l’Hopital family had great influence at Court and won a pardon for the criminal. The Parliament of Paris or High Court of Justice boldly resisted the royal decree and the marquis would still have been executed had he not been consigned for safety to the “King’s Castle,” the Bastile. He passed subsequently to the prison of For-l’Évêque, from which he was released with others on the entry of the King to Paris, at his marriage. Still the vindictive Parliament pursued him and he would hardly have escaped the scaffold had he not fled the country.
In an age when so much respect was exacted for religious forms and ceremonies, imprisonment in the Bastile was promptly inflicted upon all guilty of blasphemous conduct or who openly ridiculed sacred things. The records are full of cases in which prisoners have been committed to gaol for impiety, profane swearing at their ill luck with the dice or athoca. A number of the Prince de Condé’s officers were sent to the Bastile for acting a disgraceful parody of the procession of the Host, in which a besom was made to represent a cross, a bucket was filled at a neighboring pump and called holy water, and the sham priests chanted theDe Profundisasthey went through the streets to administer the last sacrament to a pretended moribund.
A very small offense gained the pain of imprisonment. One foolish person was committed because he was dissatisfied with his name Cardon (thistle), and changed it toCardone, prefixing the particle “de” which signifies nobility, claiming that he was a member of the illustrious family of De Cardone. It appears from the record, however, that he also spoke evil of M. de Maurepas, a minister of State.
Still another class found themselves committed to the Bastile. The parental Louis, as he grew more sober and staid, insisted more and more on external decorum and dealt sharply with immoral conduct among his courtiers. The Bastile was used very much as a police station or a reformatory. Young noblemen were sent there for riotous conduct in the streets, for an affray with the watch and the maltreatment of peaceful citizens. The Duc d’Estrées and the Duc de Mortemart were imprisoned as wastrels who bet and gambled with sharpers. “The police officers cannot help complaining that the education of these young dukes had been sadly neglected,” reads the report. So the Royal Castle was turned for the nonce into a school, and a master of mathematics, a drawing master and a Jesuit professor of history were admitted to instruct the neglected youths. The same Duc d’Estrées paid a second visit for quarrelling with the Comte d’Harcourtand protesting against the interference of the marshals to prevent a duel.
The King nowadays set his face against all loose living. The Comte de Montgomery, for leading a debauched and scandalous life on his estates, was committed to the Bastile, where he presently died. He was a Protestant and the question of his burial came up before the Ministry, who wrote the governor that, “His Majesty is very indifferent whether he (Montgomery) be buried in one place rather than another and still more in what manner the ceremony is performed.”
The report that the Prince de Léon, being a prince of the blood, a son of the Duc de Rohan, was about to marry a ballet dancer, Mademoiselle Florence, entailed committal to the Bastile, not on the Prince but on the girl. “Florence was arrested this morning while the Prince was at Versailles,” writes the chief of the police. “Her papers were seized.... She told the officer who arrested her she was not married, that she long foresaw what would happen, that she would be only too happy to retire into a convent and that she had a hundred times implored the Prince to give his consent. I have informed the Prince’s father, the Duc de Rohan, of this.” The Prince was furious upon hearing of the arrest and refused to forgive his relations. The Duc de Rohan was willing to supply Mademoiselle Florence with all necessaries to make captivity more tolerable, but great difficulty was found in getting him to pay thebill. The Duc de Rohan was so great a miser that he allowed his wife and children to die of hunger. The Bastile bill included charges for doctor and nurse as Mademoiselle de Florence was brought to bed of a child in prison. What with the expenses of capture and gaol fees it amounted to 5,000 francs. The end of this incident was that the Prince de Léon, while his lady love was in the Bastile, eloped with a supposed heiress, Mademoiselle de Roquelaure, who was ugly, hunch-backed and no longer young. The Prince ran off with her from a convent, moved to do so by his father’s promise of an allowance, which the miserly duke never paid. The bride was recaptured and sent back to the cloister in which her mother had placed her to avoid the necessity of giving her any dowry. The married couple, when at last they came together, had a bad time of it, as neither of the parents would help them with funds and they lived in great poverty.
A strange episode, forcibly illustrating the arbitrary character of Louis XIV and his fine contempt for international rights, was the case of the Armenian Patriarch, Avedik, who was an inmate of the Bastile and also of Mont St. Michel. The Armenian Catholics, and especially the Jesuits, had reason to complain of Avedik’s high handed treatment, and the French ambassador interfered by paying a large price for the Patriarch’s removal from his sacred office. Certain schismatics of the French party secured his reinstatement by raising the bid; and nowthe French ambassador seized the person of Avedik, who was put on board a French ship and conveyed to Messina, then Spanish territory, where he was cast into the prison of the Inquisition. This abduction evoked loud protest in Constantinople, but the French disavowed it, although it had certainly met with the approval of Louis XIV. Avedik would have languished and died forgotten in Messina, but without waiting instructions, the French consul had extracted him from the prison of the Inquisition and passed him on to Marseilles.
Great precautions were taken to keep his arrival secret. If the poor, kidnapped foreigner, who spoke no language but Turkish and Armenian, should chance to be recognised, the report of his sudden death was to be announced and no doubt it would soon be justified in fact. Otherwise he was to be taken quietly across France from Marseilles, on the Mediterranean, to Mont St. Michel on the Normandy coast, where his kidnappers were willing to treat him well. The King expressly ordered that he should have “a room with a fire place, linen and so forth, as his Majesty had no desire that the prisoner should suffer, provided economy is observed.... He is not to be subjected to perpetual abstinence and may have meat when he asks for it.” Of course an attempt was made to convert the Patriarch, already a member of the Greek Church, to Catholicism as preached in France, although the interchange of ideas was not easy, and the monk sent to confesshim could not do so for want of a common language. Eventually Avedik was brought to Paris and lodged in the Bastile, where an interpreter was found for him in the person of the Abbé Renaudot, a learned Oriental scholar.
Meanwhile a hue and cry was raised for the missing Patriarch. One of his servants was traced to Marseilles and was promptly arrested and hidden away in the hospital of the galley slaves. Louis and his ministers stoutly denied that Avedik was in France, and he was very strictly guarded lest the fact of his kidnapping should leak out. No one saw him but the person who took him his food, and they understood each other only by signs. Avedik was worked up to make a written statement that he owed his arrest to English intrigues, and this was to be held as an explanation should the Porte become too pressing in its inquiries. It is clear that the French Government would gladly have seen the last of Avedik and hesitated what course to adopt with him: whether to keep him by force, win him over, transfer him to the hands of the Pope, send him to Persia or let him go straight home. These questions were in a measure answered by a marginal note endorsed on the paper submitting them. “Would it be a blessing or would it be a misfortune if he were to die?” asks the Minister Pontchartrain; and the rather suspicious answer was presently given by his death. But an official report was drawn up, declaring that he had long enjoyed full liberty, thathe received every attention during his illness, that his death was perfectly natural and that he died a zealous Catholic. Pontchartrain went further and, after reiterating that death was neither violent nor premature, added that it was entirely due to the immoderate use of brandy and baleful drugs. Avedik had grown very corpulent during his imprisonment, but there was no proof of the charge of intemperance.
The most heinous crimes disgraced the epoch of Louis XIV, and in all, the Bastile played a prominent part. There was first the gigantic frauds and peculations of Fouquet as already described; then came the conspiracy of the Chevalier de Rohan, who was willing to sell French fortresses to foreign enemies; and on this followed the horrible affair of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, the secret poisoner of her own people. The use of poison was for a time a wholesale practice, and although the special court established for the trial of those suspected held its sessions in private, the widespread diffusion of the crime was presently revealed beyond all question. There were reasons of State why silence should be preserved; the high rank of many of the criminals and their enormous number threatened, if too openly divulged, to shake society to its base. Some two hundred and thirty of the accused were afterwards convicted and sent to prison and thirty-four more were condemned to death.
Conspiracies against the life of the King had beenfrequent. We may mention among them that of the Marquis de Bonnesson, of the Protestant Roux de Marcilly, who would have killed Louis to avenge the wrongs of his co-religionists, and another Protestant, Comte de Sardan, who sought to stir up disaffection in four great provinces,—which were to renounce allegiance to France and pass under the dominion of the Prince of Orange and the King of Spain. The most dangerous and extensive plot was that of Louis de Rohan, a dissolute young nobleman, who had been a playmate of the King and the favorite of ladies of the highest rank, but who had been ruined by gambling and a loose life until his fortunes had sunk to the lowest ebb. He found an evil counsellor in a certain retired military officer, the Sieur de Latréaumont, no less a pauper than De Rohan, and hungry for money to retrieve his position. Together they made overtures to the Dutch and Spaniards to open the way for a descent upon the Normandy coast. Their price was a million livres. Several disaffected Normandy nobles joined the plot, and as it was unsafe to trust to the post, an emissary, Van den Ende, an ancient Dutch professor, was sent in person to the Low Countries to deal with the Spanish general. He obtained liberal promises of cash and pension, and returned to Paris, where he was promptly arrested at the barrier. The police had discovered the conspiracy and De Rohan was already in custody. De Latréaumont was surprised in bed, had resistedcapture, had been mortally wounded and had died, leaving highly compromising papers.
Louis XIV, bitterly incensed against the Chevalier, whom he had so intimately known, determined to make an example of him and his confederates. A special tribunal was appointed for their trial, some sixty persons in all. Abundant evidence was forthcoming, for half Normandy was eager to confess and escape the traitor’s fate. Some very great names were mentioned as implicated, the son of the Prince de Condé among the rest. The King now wisely resolved to limit the proceedings, lest too much importance should be given to a rather contemptible plot. De Rohan’s guilt was fully proved. He was reported to have said: “If I can only draw my sword against the King in a serious rebellion I shall die happy.” When he saw there was no hope for him, the Chevalier tried to soften the King by full confession. It did not serve him, and he was sentenced to be beheaded and his creature, Van den Ende, to be hanged in front of the Bastile. De Rohan was spared torture before execution, but Van den Ende and another suffered the “boot.” The King was vainly solicited to grant pardon to De Rohan, but was inflexible, declaring it was in the best interests of France that traffic with a foreign enemy should be punished with the extreme rigor of the law. It cannot be stated positively that there were no other conspiracies against Louis XIV, but none were made public.
The Marquise de Brinvilliers—Homicidal mania—Mysterious death of her father, M. D’Aubray—Death of her eldest brother and her second brother—Sainte Croix’s sudden death—Fatal secret betrayed—Marchioness flies to England—Brought to Paris—Her trial—Torture and cruel sentence—Others suspected—Pennautier—Trade in poisoning—TheChambre Ardente—La Voisin—Great people implicated—Wholesale sentences—The galleys, or forced labor at the oar a common punishment—War galleys—Manned with difficulty—Illegal detention—Horrors of the galleys.
Paris was convulsed and shaken to its roots in 1674, when the abominable crimes of the Marchioness of Brinvilliers were laid bare. They have continued to horrify the whole world. Here was a beautiful woman of good family, of quiet demeanor, seemingly soft-hearted and sweet tempered, who nevertheless murdered her nearest relations,—father, brother, sisters, her husband and her own children by secret and detestable practices. It could have been nothing less than homicidal mania in its worst development. The rage to kill, or, more exactly, to test the value of the lethal weapons she recklessly wielded, seized her under theguise of a high, religious duty to visit the hospitals to try the effects of her poisons on the sick poor. There were those at the time who saw in the discovery of her murderous processes the direct interposition of Providence. First, there was the sudden death of her principal accomplice, and the sure indications found among the papers he left; next, the confirmatory proofs afforded by a servant who had borne the “question” without opening his lips, and only confessed at the scaffold; last of all, the guilty woman’s arrest in Liége on the last day that the French king’s authority was paramount in that city; and more, there was the fact that when taken, she was in possession of papers indispensable to secure her own conviction.
Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray was beautiful, the daughter of the d’Aubray who filled the high legal office of Lieutenant-Criminel, and she married the Marquis de Brinvilliers at the age of twenty-one. She was possessed of great personal attraction: a small woman of slight, exquisite figure, her face round and regular, her complexion extraordinarily fair, her hair abundant and of a dark chestnut color. Everything promised a happy life for the young people. They were drawn together by strong liking, they were fairly rich and held their heads high in the best circle of the court. They lived together happily for some years, and five children were born to them, but presently they fell into extravagant ways and wasted their substance. TheMarquis became a roué and a gambler, and left his wife very much alone and exposed to temptation, and especially to the marked attentions of a certain Godin de St. Croix, a young, handsome and seductive gallant, whom the Marquis had himself introduced and welcomed to his house. At the trial it was urged that this St. Croix had been the real criminal; he is described as a demon of violent and unbridled passion, who had led the Marchioness astray, a statement never proved.
The liaison soon became public property, but the husband was altogether indifferent to his wife’s misconduct, having a disreputable character of his own. The father and brothers strongly disapproved and reproached the Marchioness fiercely. The elder d’Aubray, quite unable to check the scandal, at last obtained alettre de cachet, an order of summary imprisonment, against St. Croix, and the lover was arrested in the Marchioness’ carriage, seated by her side. He was committed at once to the Bastile, where he became the cellmate of an Italian generally called Exili; although his real name is said to have been Egidi, while his occult profession, according to contemporary writers, was that of an artist in poisons. From this chance prison acquaintance flowed the whole of the subsequent crimes. When St. Croix was released from the Bastile, he obtained the release also of Exili and, taking him into his service, the two applied themselves to the extensive manufacture of poisons, assisted by an apothecarynamed Glaser. St. Croix was supposed to have reformed. When once more free, he married, became reserved and grew devout. Secretly he renewed his intimacy with the Marchioness and persuaded her to get rid of her near relatives in order to acquire the whole of the d’Aubray property; and he provided her with the poisons for the purpose.
M. d’Aubray had forgiven his daughter, and had taken her with him to his country estate at Offémont in the autumn of 1666. The Marchioness treated him with the utmost affection and seemed to have quite abandoned her loose ways. Suddenly, soon after their arrival, M. d’Aubray was seized with some mysterious malady, accompanied by constant vomitings and intolerable sufferings. Removed to Paris next day, he was attended by a strange doctor, who had not seen the beginning of the attack, and speedily died in convulsions. It was suggested as the cause of his death, that he had been suffering from gout driven into the stomach.
The inheritance was small, and there were four children to share it. The Marchioness had two brothers and two sisters. One sister was married and the mother of two children, the other was a Carmelite nun. The eldest brother, Antoine d’Aubray, succeeded to his father’s office as Lieutenant-Criminel, and within four years he also died under suspicious circumstances. He lived in Paris, and upon entering his house one day called for a drink. A new valet, named La Chaussée, brought him aglass of wine and water. It was horribly bitter to the taste, and d’Aubray threw the greater part away, expressing his belief that the rascal, La Chaussée, wanted to poison him. It was like liquid fire, and others, who tasted it, declared that it contained vitriol. La Chaussée, apologising, recovered the glass, threw the rest of the liquid into the fire and excused himself by saying that a fellow servant had just used the tumbler as a medicine glass. This incident was presently forgotten, but next spring, at a dinner given by M. d’Aubray, guests and host were seized with a strange illness after eating a tart orvol au vent, and M. d’Aubray never recovered his health. He “pined visibly” after his return to Paris, losing appetite and flesh, and presently died, apparently of extreme weakness, on the 17th of June, 1670. A post mortem was held, but disclosed nothing, and the death was attributed to “malignant humours,” a ridiculously vague expression showing the medical ignorance of the times.
The second brother did not survive. He too was attacked with illness, and died of the same loss of power and vitality. An autopsy resulted in a certain suspicion of foul play. The doctors reported that the lungs of the deceased were ulcerated, the liver and heart burned up and destroyed. Undoubtedly there had been noxious action, but it could not be definitely referred to poison. No steps, however, were taken by the police to inquire into the circumstances of this sudden death.
Meanwhile the Marchioness had been deserted by her husband, and she gave herself up to reckless dissipation. When St. Croix abandoned her also, she resolved to commit suicide. “I shall put an end to my life,” she wrote him in a letter afterwards found among his papers, “by using what you gave me, the preparation of Glaser.” Courage failed her, and now chance or strange fortune intervened with terrible revelations. St. Croix’s sudden death betrayed the secret of the crime.
He was in the habit of working at a private laboratory in the Place Maubert, where he distilled his lethal drugs. One day as he bent over the furnace, his face protected by a glass mask, the glass burst unexpectedly, and he inhaled a breath of the poisonous fumes, which stretched him dead upon the spot. Naturally there could be no destruction of compromising papers, and these at once fell into the hands of the police. Before they could be examined, the Marchioness, terrified at the prospect of impending detection, committed herself hopelessly by her imprudence. She went at once to the person to whom the papers had been confided and begged for a casket in which were a number of her letters. She was imprudent enough to offer a bribe of fifty louis, and was so eager in her appeal, that suspicion arose and her request was refused. Ruin stared her in the face, she went home, got what money she could and fled from Paris.
The casket was now opened, and fully explainedher apprehensions. On top was a paper written by St. Croix which ran: “I humbly entreat the person into whose hands this casket may come to convey it to the Marchioness Brinvilliers, rue Neuve St. Paul; its contents belong to her and solely concern her and no one else in the world. Should she die before me I beg that everything within the box may be burned without examination.” In addition to the letters from the Marchioness, the casket contained a number of small parcels and phials full of drugs, such as antimony, corrosive sublimate, vitriol in various forms. These were analysed, and some portion of them administered to animals, which immediately died.
The law now took action. The first arrest was that of La Chaussée, whose complicity with St. Croix was undoubted. The man had been in St. Croix’s service, he had lived with Antoine d’Aubray, and at the seizure of St. Croix’s effects, he had rashly protested against the opening of the casket. He was committed to the Châtelet and put on his trial with the usual preliminary torture of the “boot.” He stoutly refused to make confession at first, but spoke out when released from the rack. His conviction followed, on a charge of having murdered the two Lieutenants-Criminel, the d’Aubrays, father and son. His sentence was, to be broken alive on the wheel, and he was duly executed.
This was the first act in the criminal drama. The Marchioness was still at large. She had soughtan asylum in England, and was known to be in London. Colbert, the French minister, applied in his king’s name for her arrest and removal to France. But no treaty of extradition existed in those days, and the laws of England were tenacious. Even Charles II, the paid pensioner of Louis and his very submissive ally, could not impose his authority upon a free people; and the English, then by no means friendly with France, would have resented the arbitrary arrest of even the most dastard criminal for an offence committed beyond the kingdom. History does not say exactly how it was compassed, but the Marchioness did leave England, and crossed to the Low Countries, where she took refuge in a convent in the city of Liége.
Four years passed, but her retreat became known to the police of Paris. Desgrez, a skilful officer, famous for his successes as a detective, was forthwith despatched to inveigle her away. He assumed the disguise of an abbé, and called at the convent. Being a good looking young man of engaging manners, he was well received by the fugitive French woman, sick and weary of conventual restriction. The Marchioness, suspecting nothing, gladly accepted the offer of a drive in the country with the astute Desgrez, who promptly brought her under escort to the French frontier as a prisoner. A note of her reception at the Conciergerie is among the records, to the effect, that, “La Brinvilliers, who had been arrested by the King’s order in the cityof Liége, was brought to the prison under a warrant of the Court.”
On the journey from Liége she had tried to seduce one of her escort into passing letters to a friend, whom she earnestly entreated to recover certain papers she had left at the convent. These, however, one of them of immense importance, her full confession, had already been secured by Desgrez, showing that the Abbess had been cognisant of the intended arrest. The Marchioness yielded to despair when she heard of the seizure of her papers and would have killed herself, first by swallowing a long pin and next by eating glass. This confession is still extant and will be read with horror—the long list of her crimes and debaucheries set forth with cold-blooded, plain speaking. It was not produced at her trial, which was mainly a prolonged series of detailed interrogatories to which she made persistent denials. As the proceedings drew slowly on, all Paris watched with shuddering anxiety, and the King himself, who was absent on a campaign, sent peremptory orders to Colbert that no pains should be spared to bring all proof against the guilty woman. Conviction was never in doubt. One witness declared that she had made many attempts to get the casket from St. Croix; another, that she exulted in her power to rid herself of her enemies, declaring it was easy to give them “a pistol shot in their soup;” a third, that she had exhibited a small box, saying, “it is very small but there is enoughinside to secure many successions (inheritances).” Hence the euphemismpoudre de succession, so often employed at that time to signify “deadly poison.”
The accused still remained obstinately dumb, but at last an eloquent priest, l’Abbé Pirot, worked upon her feelings of contrition, and obtained a full avowal, not only of her own crimes, but those also of her accomplices. Sentence was at once pronounced, and execution quickly followed. Torture, both ordinary and extraordinary, was to be first inflicted. The ordeal of water, three buckets-full, led her to ask if they meant to drown her, as assuredly she could not, with her small body, drink so much. After the torture she was to make theamende honorableand the acknowledgment, candle in hand, that vengeance and greed had tempted her to poison her father, brothers and sisters. Then her right hand was to be amputated as a parricide; but this penalty was remitted. The execution was carried out under very brutal conditions. No sooner were the prison doors opened than a mob of great ladies rushed in to share and gloat over her sufferings, among them the infamous Comtesse de Soissons, who was proved later to have been herself a poisoner. An enormous crowd of spectators, at least one hundred thousand, were assembled in the streets, at the windows and on the roofs, and she was received with furious shouts. Close by the tumbril rode Desgrez, the officer who had captured her inLiége. Yet she showed the greatest fortitude. “She died as she had lived,” writes Madame de Sévigné, “resolutely. Now she is dispersed into the air. Her poor little body was thrown into a fierce furnace, and her ashes blown to the four winds of heaven.”
Another person was implicated in this black affair, Reich de Pennautier, Receiver-General of the clergy. When the St. Croix casket was opened, a promissory note signed by Pennautier had been found. He was suspected of having used poison to remove his predecessor in office. Pennautier was arrested and lodged in the Conciergerie, where he occupied the old cell of Ravaillac for seven days. Then he was put on his trial. He found friends, chief of them the reticent Madame de Brinvilliers, but he had an implacable enemy in the widow of his supposed victim, Madame de St. Laurent, who continually pursued him in the courts. He was, however, backed by Colbert, Archbishop of Paris, and the whole of the French clergy. In the end he was released, emerging as Madame de Sévigné put it, “rather whiter than snow,” and he retained his offices until he became enormously rich. Although his character was smirched in this business he faced the world bravely to a green old age.
In France uneasiness was general after the execution of the Brinvilliers and the acquittal of Pennautier. Sinister rumors prevailed that secret poisoning had become quite a trade, facilitated bythe existence of carefully concealed offices, where the noxious drugs necessary could be purchased easily by heirs tired of waiting for their succession, and by husbands and wives eager to get rid of one another. Within a year suspicion was strengthened by the picking up of an anonymous letter in the confessional of the Jesuit Church of the rue St. Antoine, stating that a plot was afoot to poison both the King and the Dauphin. The police set inquiries on foot, and traced the projected crime to two persons, Louis Vanens and Robert de la Nurée, the Sieur de Bachimont.
The first of these dabbled openly in love philtres and other unavowable medicines; and he was also suspected of having poisoned the Duke of Savoy some years previously. Bachimont was one of his agents. From this first clue, the police followed the thread of their discoveries, and brought home to a number of people the charge of preparing and selling poisons, two of whom were condemned and executed. A still more important arrest was that of Catherine Deshayes, the wife of one Voisin or Monvoisin, a jeweller. From this moment the affair assumed such serious proportions that it was decided to conduct the trial with closed doors. The authorities constituted a royal tribunal to sit in private at the Arsenal, and to be known to the public as theChambre Ardenteor Court of Poisons. La Reynie and another counsellor presided, and observed extreme caution, but were quite unable tokeep secret the result of their proceedings. It was soon whispered through Paris that the crime of poisoning had extensive ramifications, and that many great people, some nearly related to the throne, were compromised with la Voisin. The names were openly mentioned: a Bourbon prince, the Comte de Clermont, the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Princesse de Tingry, one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting, and the Marchionesse d’Alluye, who had been an intimate friend of Fouquet. The Duc de Luxembourg and others of the highest rank were consigned to the Bastile. Yet more, the Comtesse de Soissons, the proudest of Cardinal Mazarin’s nieces and one of the first of the King’s favorites, had, by his special grace, been warned to fly from Paris to escape imprisonment.
No such favor was shown to others. Louis XIV sternly bade La Reynie to spare no one else, to let justice take its course strictly and expose everything; the safety of the public demanded it, and the hideous evil must be extirpated in its very root. There was to be no distinction of persons or of sex in vindicating the law. Such severity was indeed necessary. Although the King wished all the documents in the case to be carefully destroyed, some have been preserved. They exhibit the widespread infamy and almost immeasurable guilt of the criminals. Colbert stigmatised the facts as “things too execrable to be put on paper; amounting to sacrilege, profanity and abomination.” The verybasest aims inspired the criminals to seek the King’s favor; disappointed beauties would have poisoned their rivals and replaced them in the King’s affections. The Comtesse de Soissons’s would-be victim was the beautiful La Vallière, and Madame de Montespan was suspected of desiring to remove Mdlle. de Fontanges. Madame La Féron attempted the life of her husband, a president of Parliament. The Duc de Luxembourg was accused of poisoning his duchess. M. de Feuquières invited la Voisin to get rid of the uncle and guardian of an heiress he wished to marry. The end of these protracted proceedings was the inevitable retribution that waited on their crimes. Two hundred and forty-six persons had been brought to trial, of whom thirty-six went to the scaffold, after enduring torture, ordinary and extraordinary. Of the rest, some were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, some to banishment, some to the galleys for life. Among those who suffered the extreme penalty were la Voisin, La Vigouroux, Madame de Carada, several priests and Sieur Maillard, who was charged with attempting to poison Colbert and the King himself. The Bastile, Vincennes and every State prison were crowded with the poisoners, and for years the registers of castles and fortresses contained the names of inmates committed by theChambre Ardenteof the Arsenal.
The edict which dissolved this special tribunal laid down stringent laws to protect the publicagainst future poisoning. A clean sweep was made of the charlatans, the pretended magicians who came from abroad and imposed upon the credulity of the French people, who united sacrilege and impious practices with the manufacture and distribution of noxious drugs. Several clauses in the edict dealt with poisons, describing their action and effect,—in some cases instantaneous, in others slow, gradually undermining health and originating mysterious maladies, that proved fatal in the end. The sale of deleterious substances was strictly regulated, such as arsenic and corrosive sublimate, and the use of poisonous vermin, “snakes, vipers and frogs,” in medical prescriptions was forbidden.
A few words more as to the Comtesse de Soissons, who was suffered to fly from France, but could find no resting place. Her reputation preceded her, and she was refused admittance into Antwerp. In Flanders she ingratiated herself with the Duke of Parma, and lived under his protection for several years. Finally she appeared in Madrid, and was received at court. Then the young Queen of Spain died suddenly with all the symptoms of poisoning, and Madame de Soissons was immediately suspected, for unexpected and mysterious deaths always followed in her trail. She was driven from the country, and died a wanderer in great poverty.
No account of the means of repression of those days in France would be complete without including the galleys,—the system of enforced labor at theoars, practised for many centuries by all the Mediterranean nations, and dating back to classical times. These ancient warships, making at best but six miles an hour by human effort under the lash, are in strong contrast with the modern ironclad impelled by steam. But the Venetians and the Genoese owned fine fleets of galleys and won signal naval victories with them. France long desired to rival these powers, and Henry III, when returning from Poland to mount the French throne, paused at Venice to visit the arsenal and see the warships in process of construction. At that time France had thirty galleys afloat, twenty-six of the highest order and worked by convicts (galeriens). This number was not always maintained, and in 1662 Colbert, bidding for sea power and striving hard to add to the French navy, ordered six new ships to be laid down at Marseilles, and sought to buy a number, all standing, from the Republic of Genoa and the Grand Duke of Tuscany. These efforts were crowned with success. In 1670 there were twenty galleys under the French flag, and Colbert wrote the intendant at Marseilles that his Master, Louis XIV, was eager to possess one royal ship which would outvie any hitherto launched on the seas. The increase continued, and in 1677 the fleet numbered thirty, rising to forty-two by the end of the century.
It was not enough to build the ships; the difficulty was to man them. The custom of sending condemned convicts to ply the oar was ancient, anddated back to the reign of Charles VII. But it was little used until Francis I desired to strengthen his navy, and he ordered parliaments and tribunals to consign to the galleys all able-bodied offenders who deserved death and had been condemned to bodily penalties, whatsoever crimes they had committed. The supply of this personnel was precarious, and Colbert wrote to the judges to be more severe with their sentences, and to inflict the galleys in preference to death, a commutation likely to be welcome to the culprit. But some of the parliaments demurred. That of Dijon called it changing the law, and the President, protesting, asked for new ordinances. Colbert put the objection aside arbitrarily. He increased the pressure on the courts and dealt sharply with the keepers of local gaols, who did not use sufficient promptness in sending on their quotas of convicts to Marseilles and Toulon. Many escapes from the chain were made by the way, so carelessly conducted was the transfer.
This “chain,” a disgrace to humanity, was employed in France till quite within our own day. The wretched convicts made their long pilgrimage on foot from all parts of the country to the southern coast. They were chained together in gangs and marched painfully in all weathers, mile after mile, along their weary road under military escort. No arrangements were made for them by the way. They were fed on any coarse food that could be picked up, and were lodged for the night in shedsand stables if any could be found; if not, under the sky. Death took its toll of them ere they reached their destination. They were a scarce commodity and yet no measures were adopted to preserve their health and strength. The ministers in Paris were continually urging the presidents of parliaments to augment the supplies of the condemned, and were told that the system was in fault, that numbers died in their miserable cells waiting removal, and many made their escape on the journey.
Still the demands of the galleys were insatiable, and many contrivances were adopted to reinforce the crews. Colbert desired to send to them all vagabonds, all sturdy beggars, smugglers and men without visible means of support, but a change in the law was required and the authorities for a time shrank from it. Another expedient was to hireforcatsfrom the Duke of Savoy, who had no warships. Turkish and Russian slaves were purchased to work the oars, and Negroes from the Guinea coast. As a measure of retaliation against Spain, prisoners of war of that nation were treated as galley slaves, a custom abhorrent to fair usage. It was carried so far as to include the Red Indians, Iroquois, captured in Canada in the fierce war then in progress. Numbers were taken by unworthy stratagem and passed over to France, and the result was an embittered contest, which endured for four years.
A fresh device was to seek volunteers. These“bonne-voglies,” or “bonivoglios,” the Italian form most commonly used, were so called because they contracted of their own free will to accept service in the galleys, to live the wretched life of the galley slave, to submit to all his hardships, meagre fare and cruel usage, to be chained to the oar, and driven to labor under the ready lash of the overseers. These freeforcatssoon claimed greater consideration, and it was necessary to treat them more leniently and in a way injurious to discipline in the opinion of the captains and intendants. The convicts were more submissive and more laborious, and still the authorities sought to multiply them. A more disgraceful system than any of these already mentioned was now practised,—that of illegal detention long after the sentence had expired. By an old ordinance, any captain who thus detained a convict was liable to instant dismissal. Other laws, however, fixed a minimum term of ten years’ detention, what though the original sentence was considerable. Under Louis XIII it was ruled that six years should be the lowest term, on the ground that during the two first years a galley slave was useless on account of weak physique and want of skill in rowing. Later a good Bishop of Marseilles pleaded the cause of convicts who had endured a term of twice or three times their first sentence. A case was quoted in whichthirty-four, convicted between 1652 and 1660, and sentenced to two, three or four years, were still languishing in chains in 1674. An officialdocument of that year gives the names of twenty who had served fifteen to twenty years beyond their sentence. The intendant of the galleys at Marseilles reports in 1679, that on examining the registers he had found a certain soldier still in custody who was sentenced by a military court in 1660 to five years, and who had therefore endured fourteen. Again, a man named Caneau was sentenced in 1605 to two years and was still in confinement twelve years later. True it was open to thegaleriento buy a substitute, a Turkish or other “bonivoglio,” but the price, eight hundred or one thousand francs, was scarcely within the reach of the miserable creatures at thebagnes.
It is difficult to exaggerate the horrors of the galleys. No wonder that many preferred suicide or self-mutilation to enduring it! Afloat or ashore, the convict’s condition was wretched in the extreme. On board ship each individual was chained to his bench, day and night, and the short length of the chain, as well as the nearness of his neighbors, limited his movements. His whole clothing consisted of a single loose blouse of coarse red canvas, with neither shoes nor stockings and little underlinen. His diet was of brown beans cooked in a little oil, black bread and a morsel of bacon. Personal cleanliness was entirely neglected, and all alike suffered from scurvy and were infested with vermin. Labor was incessant while at sea, and the overseers, walking on a raised platform, which ran fore and aft between the benches of rowers, stimulated effortby using their whips upon the bending backs below them. At times silence was strictly required,—as when moving to the attack or creeping away from an enemy and the whole ship’s company was gagged with a wooden ball inserted in the mouth. In the barracks ashore, when the ships were laid up for the winter, the convicts’ lot was somewhat better, for they were not at the mercy of the elements, and there was no severe labor; but the other conditions, such as diet, clothing and general discomfort, were the same. Now and again if any distinguished visitor arrived at the port, it was the custom to treat them to a cruise in one of the great galleys. The ship was dressed with all her colors, the convicts were washed clean, and wore their best red shirts, and they were trained to salute the great folk who condescended to come on board, by a strange shout of welcome: “Hou! Hou! Hou!” a cry thrice repeated, resembling the roar of a wild beast.
The merciless treatment accorded by Louis XIV to the Protestants, who dared to hold their own religious opinions, will be better realised when it is stated that great numbers of them were consigned to the galleys, to serve for years side by side with the worst malefactors, with savage Iroquois and infidel Turks, and to endure the selfsame barbarities inflicted on the wretched refuse of mankind. No greater stain rests upon the memory of a ruler, whom the weak-kneed sycophants of his age misnamed La Grande Monarque, than this monstrouspersecution of honest, honorable people, who were ready to suffer all rather than sacrifice liberty of conscience. How deep and ineffaceable is the stain shall be shown in the next chapter.
Huguenots sent to the galleys—Authentic Memoirs of Jean Marteilhe—Description of galleys—Construction—Method of rowing—Extreme severity of labor—A sea fight—Marteilhe severely wounded—His sufferings—Dunkirk acquired by the English—Huguenot prisoners sent secretly to Havre—Removed to Paris—Included in the chain gang for Marseilles—Cruelties en route—Detention at Marseilles—Renewed efforts to proselytise—More about the galleys—Dress, diet, occupation and discipline—Winter season—Labor constant—Summer season.
No blot upon the reign of Louis XIV is blacker than his treatment of the Huguenots,—most faithful of his subjects could he have perceived it, and the flower of his people. They were hardly more devoted to their faith than they were to France, and it was their faith in God that inspired their patriotism; and yet because they would not abandon their right of conscience they were hounded like a subject, savage people.
A remarkable record of the sufferings endured by one of these victims “for the faith” has come down to us in the “Memoirs of a Protestant, Condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion.” The author is said to have been one Jean Marteilhe,but the book was published anonymously at The Hague in the middle of the eighteenth century. It purports to be “A Comprehensive Account of the Various Distresses he suffered in a Slavery of Thirteen Years and his Constance in supporting almost Every Cruelty that Bigoted Zeal could inflict or Human Nature sustain; also a Description of the Galleys and the Service in which they are Employed.” The writer states that he was at last set free at the intercession of the Court of Great Britain in the reign of Queen Anne.
Jean Marteilhe belonged to a family which had been dispersed in the Dragonades, and he resolved to fly the country. Passing through Paris he made for Maestricht in Holland, but was intercepted and detained at Marienburg, a town in the French dominions, where he and his companions were imprisoned and charged with being found upon the frontier without a passport. They were called upon to abjure their faith or to be sent instantly to the galleys; they were guilty of endeavoring to quit the kingdom against the King’s ordinance. Then began a weary pilgrimage on foot, handcuffed together, “confined every evening in such loathsome prisons as shocked even us, although by this time familiarised to distress.” On reaching Tournay they were thrown into a dungeon and kept there many weeks, “laying continually upon an old pallet quite rotten and swarming with vermin, placed near a door, through a hole in which our daily allowanceof bread was thrown.” They remained six weeks in this situation, when they were joined in prison by two friends,—alleged Huguenots but less resolute than Marteilhe in their belief, for they presently went over and embraced the Catholic religion. Marteilhe sturdily resisted all attempts at conversion, although all were continually importuned by the priests; yet nevertheless entertained hopes of release, which were never realised. They passed on from gaol to gaol until at last they reached Dunkirk, at that time a French port and the home port of six war galleys. On their arrival they were at once separated and each committed to a different ship. Marteilhe’s was theHeureuse, where he took his place upon the bench, which was to be his terrible abode for many years.
The description given by our author of the system in force at the galleys and of the galleys themselves may be quoted here at some length:
“A galley is ordinarily a hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet broad. It consists of but one deck, which covers the hold. This hold is in the middle, seven feet high, but at the sides of the galley only six feet. By this we may see that the deck rises about a foot in the centre, and slopes towards the edges to let the water run off more easily; for when a galley is loaded it seems to swim under water, at least the sea constantly washes the deck. The sea would then necessarily enter the hold by the apertures where the masts are placed, were itnot prevented by what is called thecoursier. This is a long case of boards fixed on the middle or highest part of the deck and running from one end of the galley to the other. There is also a hatchway into the hold as high as thecoursier. From this superficial description perhaps it may be imagined that the slaves and the rest of the crew have their feet always in water. But the case is otherwise; for to each bench there is a board raised a foot from the deck, which serves as a footstool to the rowers, under which the water passes. For the soldiers and mariners there is, running on each side, along the gunnel of the vessel, what is called thebande, which is a bench of about the same height with thecoursier, and two feet broad. They never lie here, but each leans on his own particular bundle of clothes in a very incommodious posture. The officers themselves are not better accommodated; for the chambers in the hold are designed only to hold the provisions and naval stores of the galley.
“The hold is divided in six apartments. The first of these in importance is thegavon. This is a little chamber in the poop, which is big enough only to hold the captain’s bed. The second is theescandolat, where the captain’s provisions are kept and dressed. The third is thecompagne. This contains the beer, wine, oil, vinegar and fresh water of the whole crew, together with their bacon, salt meat, fish and cheese; they never use butter. The fourth, thepaillot. Here are kept the dried provisions, asbiscuits, pease, rice, etc. The fifth is called thetavern. This apartment is in the middle of the galley. It contains the wine, which is retailed by the comite, and of which he enjoys the profits. This opens into the powder room, of which the gunner alone keeps the key. In this chamber also the sails and tents are kept. The sixth and last apartment is called thesteerage, where the cordage and the surgeon’s chest are kept. It serves also during a voyage as a hospital for the sick and wounded, who, however, have no other bed to lie on than ropes. In winter, when the galley is laid up, the sick are sent to a hospital in the city.
“A galley has fifty benches for rowers, that is to say, twenty-five on each side. Each bench is ten feet long. One end is fixed in thecoursier, the other in thebande. They are each half a foot thick and are placed four feet from each other. They are covered with sack-cloth stuffed with flocks, and over this is thrown a cowhide, which reaching down to thebanquet, or footstool, gives them the resemblance of large trunks. To these the slaves are chained, six to a bench. Along thebanderuns a large rim of timber, about a foot thick, which forms the gunnel of the galley. To this, which is called theapostie, the oars are fixed. These are fifty feet long, and are balanced upon the aforementioned piece of timber; so that the thirteen feet of oar which comes into the galley is equal in weight to the thirty-seven which go into the water. As itwould be impossible to hold them in the hand because of their thickness they have handles by which they are managed by the slaves.”
The writer passes on to the method of rowing a galley and says: “The comite, who is the master of the crew of slaves and the tyrant so much dreaded by the wretches fated to this misery, stands always at the stern, near the captain, to receive his orders. There are two lieutenants also, one in the middle, the other near the prow. These, each with a whip of cords which they exercise without mercy on the naked bodies of the slaves, are always attentive to the orders of the comite. When the captain gives the word for rowing the comite gives the signal with a silver whistle which hangs from his neck. This is repeated by the lieutenants, upon which the slaves, who have their oars in readiness, strike all at once and beat time so exactly, that the hundred and fifty oars seem to give but one blow. Thus they continue, without requiring further orders, till by another signal of the whistle they desist in a moment. There is an absolute necessity for all rowing thus together; for should one of the oars be lifted up or let fall too soon, those in the next bench forward, leaning back, necessarily strike the oar behind them with the hinder part of their heads, while the slaves of this bench do the same by those behind them. It were well if a few bruises on the head were the only punishment. The comite exercises the whip on this occasion like a fury, while themuscles, all in convulsion under the lash, pour streams of blood down the seats; which how dreadful soever it may seem to the reader, custom teaches the sufferers to bear without murmuring.
“The labor of a galley slave has become a proverb; nor is it without reason that this may be reckoned the greatest fatigue that can be inflicted on wretchedness. Imagine six men, naked as when born, chained to their seats, sitting with one foot on a block of timber fixed to the footstool or stretcher, the other lifted up against the bench before them, holding in their hands an oar of enormous size. Imagine them stretching their bodies, their arms outreached to push the oar over the backs of those before them, who are also themselves in a similar attitude. Having thus advanced their oar, they raise that end which they hold in their hands, to plunge the opposite end, or blade, in the sea, which done, they throw themselves back on their benches for the stroke. None, in short, but those who have seen them labor, can conceive how much they endure. None but such could be persuaded that human strength could sustain the fatigue which they undergo for an hour without resting. But what cannot necessity and cruelty make men do? Almost impossibilities. Certain it is that a galley can be navigated in no other manner but by a crew of slaves, over whom a comite may exercise the most unbounded authority. No free man could continue at the oar an hour unwearied;yet a slave must sometimes lengthen out his toil for ten, twelve, nay, for twenty hours without the smallest intermission. On these occasions, the comite, or one of the other mariners, puts into the mouths of those wretches a bit of bread steeped in wine, to prevent fainting through excess of fatigue or hunger, while their hands are employed upon the oar. At such times are heard nothing but horrid blasphemies, loud bursts of despair, or ejaculations to heaven; all the slaves are streaming with blood, while their unpitying taskmasters mix oaths and threats and the smacking of whips, to fill up this dreadful harmony. At this time the captain roars to the comite to redouble his blows, and when anyone drops from his oar in a swoon, which not infrequently happens, he is whipped while any remains of life appear, and then thrown into the sea without further ceremony.”
Marteilhe fell to a galley commanded by a comite, commonly reputed of cruel character and said to be “merciless as a demon.” Yet the young Protestant, who was of fine muscular physique, found favor with this severe master, who ordered him to be chained to the bench under his immediate charge. Quoting still further from his “Memoirs,”—he writes: “It may not be unnecessary to mention that the comite eats upon a table raised over one of the seats, by four iron feet. This table also serves him for a bed, and when he chooses to sleep, it is covered with a large pavilion made of cotton. The six slavesof that bench sit under the table, which can easily be taken away when it interferes with the working of the vessel. These six slaves serve as domestics to the comite. Each has his particular employ; and whenever the comite eats or sits here, all the slaves of this bench and the benches next it are uncovered out of respect. Everyone is ambitious of being either on the comite’s bench or on one of the lieutenants’ benches; not only because they have what is left of the provisions of his table, but also because they are never whipped while at work. Those are called the ‘respectable benches;’ and being placed in one of them is looked upon as being in a petty office. I was, as already mentioned, placed in this bench, which however I did not long keep; for still retaining some of the pride of this world, I could not prevail upon myself to behave with that degree of abject submission which was necessary to my being in favor. While the comite was at meals, I generally faced another way, and, with my cap on, pretended to take no notice of what was passing behind me. The slaves frequently said that such behavior would be punished, but I disregarded their admonition, thinking it sufficiently opprobrious to be the slave of the King, without being also the slave of his meanest vassal. I had by this means like to have fallen into the displeasure of the comite, which is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall a galley slave. He inquired whether I partook of those provisions he usually left, and uponbeing told that I refused to touch a bit, said ‘Give him his own way, for the present; a few years’ servitude will divest him of this delicacy.’
“One evening the comite called me to his pavilion, and accosting me with more than usual gentleness, unheard by the rest, he let me understand that he perceived I was born of a rank superior to the rest of his crew, which rather increased than diminished his esteem; but, as by indulging my disrespectful behavior the rest might take example, he found it necessary to transfer me to another bench. However I might rest assured of never receiving a blow from him or his inferior officers upon any occasion whatsoever. I testified my gratitude in the best manner I was able; and from that time he kept his promise, which was something extraordinary in one who usually seemed divested of every principle of humanity. Never was man more severe to the slaves in general than he, yet he preserved a moderation towards the Huguenots of his galley, which argued a regard for virtue, not usually found among the lower classes of people.”