9. He was imprisoned mainly on the order of the Marquis de Mirabeau, his father, whose lifelong jealousy of that brilliant son is matter of history; a finished example of the domestic bully, and a matchless humbug and hypocrite, whose every action gave the lie to his by-nameFriend of Man. In the course of his life, the Marquis procured no fewer than fiftylettres de cachetagainst members of his own family.
9. He was imprisoned mainly on the order of the Marquis de Mirabeau, his father, whose lifelong jealousy of that brilliant son is matter of history; a finished example of the domestic bully, and a matchless humbug and hypocrite, whose every action gave the lie to his by-nameFriend of Man. In the course of his life, the Marquis procured no fewer than fiftylettres de cachetagainst members of his own family.
MIRABEAU ON THE TERRACE OF VINCENNES.
MIRABEAU ON THE TERRACE OF VINCENNES.
MIRABEAU ON THE TERRACE OF VINCENNES.
"Is it by 'the rules' that my trunk is kept from me?" he demanded of the governor.
"What need have you of your trunk?"
"Need! I want clothes and linen. I am still wearing what I brought into this rat-hole!"
"What does it matter? You see no company here."
"I am to go foul, then, because I see no company! Is that your rule? Once more, let me have my trunk."
"We have not the key of it."
"Send for a locksmith,—an affair of an hour."
"Where am I to find the hour? Have I no one and nothing else to attend to? Are you the only prisoner here?"
"That is no answer. You are here to take care of your prisoners. Give me my trunk, I tell you!"
"It is against the rules.We shall see by-and-bye."
"As usual! 'We shall see.' In the meantime perhaps you will have the goodness to send a barber to shave me and cut my hair."
"Ah! I must speak about that to the minister."
"What! The minister's permission to——"
"Yes.It is the rule."
"Indeed! The doctor said as much, but I refused to credit him."
"You were wrong, you see!"
"Now that I remember, he told me something else, that in the present state of my health a bath, with as little delay as possible, was indispensable. Perhaps he did not mention that to you?"
"I fancy he did say something about it."
"Oh, he did! But the King and the Government have not debated it yet, I suppose? Well, sir, I want a bath and I'm going to have one."
"You have no right to give orders here, sir."
"Nor have you the right to withhold what the doctor prescribes for me."
"M. de Mirabeau, you are insolent. Do you forget that I represent the King?"
"He could not be more grotesquely represented. The distance between you and his Majesty is short, sir."
The governor (to make the joke more apparent) was short and of a full habit. He went out speechless, and Mirabeau would doubtless have felt the effects of his rage had it not been for the interest of Lenoir, Lieutenant-General of Police, who was always ready to stand between the prisoner and the vengeful gaoler. Through Lenoir, who won for him the intercession of the Princesse de Lamballe, Mirabeau got the use of books and pen, and some other small indulgences. He wrote to his father: "Will you not ease me of my chains? Let me have friends to see me; let me have leave to walk. Let me exchange the dungeon for the château. There as here I should be under the King's hand, and close enough to the prison, if I should abuse that measure of liberty." The implacableFriend of Manvouchsafed no response to this entreaty. The prisoner buried himself in the books that were given him, but they were for the most part "de mauvais auteurs," who had nothing to teach him. He flung them from him one by one, and as he paced his cell he began those brilliant improvisations which were soon to electrify France, and which struck absolutism at its root. In this way he worked out the scheme of thelettres de cachet, that work of flaming eloquence in which the genius of liberty approaches, seizes, and strangles the dragon of despotism. Deprived of all but his pen, Mirabeau let fall from the height of his dungeon on the head of royalty that thunderbolt of a treatise. Since De Rougemont would never, for a hundred chiefs of police, have aided him with materials for this purpose, he tore out of all the books he could lay hands on the fly-leaves and blank spaces, and covered them with his fine close writing. Each completed slip he concealed in the lining of his coat, and in this manner did the tribune compose and preserve his work, every page of which was a prophecy of the coming Revolution. When inspiration lacked for a time, he prostrated himself on the flags of his cell and wept for his absent mistress, or he renewed hostilities with De Rougemont. The battle of the trunk was followed by the battle of the looking-glass.
He could not go through his toilet without a looking-glass, he insisted; and in a letter to the governor which must have filled several manuscript pages he exhausted his logic and his sarcasm in enforcing this modest request. He got his mirror in the end, and then renewed his fruitless correspondence with his father, and made an eloquent attempt to move the clemency of the King. "Deign, sire, to save me from my persecutors," he wrote to Louis. "Look with pity on a man twenty-eight years of age, who, buried in full life, sees and feels the slow approach of brutish inertia, despair, and madness, darkening and paralysing the noblest of his years." M. Lenoir himself placed this letter in the King's hands, but nothing came of it for Mirabeau, who continued in the pauses of astonishing literary labours his fight for liberty from behind his prison bars. By clamours and entreaties he succeeded at length in forcing his way through them.
Amongst the prisoners of renown of the eighteenth century Latude must not pass unnoticed. His sojourn in and escape from the Bastille have been much more widely bruited than his captivity at Vincennes, where also he did things wonderful and suffered pains and indignities incredible. Needless to say that he gave his guards the slip, and equally needless to add that he was recovered and brought back. His second incarceration was in one of De Rougemont'scachots(De Rougemont always had acachotavailable), from, which, on the surgeon's declaration that his life was in danger, he was removed to a more habitable chamber. On his way thither he found and secreted one of those handy tools which fortune seemed always to leave in the path of Latude, and used it to establish a most ingenious means of communication with his fellow-prisoners. No one ever yet performed such wonders in prison as Masers de Latude. No one accomplished such unheard-of escapes. No one, when retaken, paid with such cruel interest the penalty of his daring. Was the man only a splendid fable, as some latter-day sceptics have suggested? The question has been put, but no one will ever affirm it with authority, and the weight of the evidence seems to lie with Latude the man and not with Latude the legend.
No great distance separated the chamber of Latude from thecachotof the Prévôt de Beaumont. The Prévôt was a great criminal: he had had the courage to denounce and expose that gigantic State fraud, thepacte de famine, in which the De Sartines before named and other persons of consequence were involved. Those were not the days for Prévôts de Beaumont to meddle as critics with criminal ventures of this sort, and the Prévôt had his name written on the customary form. He spent twenty-two years in five of the State prisons of France, and fifteen of them in the dungeon of Vincennes.
"There is not in theSaints' Martyrology," he wrote (in the record which he gave to the people of the Revolution of his experiences in the dungeon of the Monarchy), "such a tale of tribulations and torments as were suffered by me on twelve separate occasions in the fifteen years of my captivity at Vincennes. On one occasion I was confined four months in thecachot, nine months on another occasion, eighteen months on a third; of my fifteen years in the dungeon,seven years and eight monthswere passed in the black hole. The cruel De Sartines never ceased to harry me; the monster De Rougemont surpassed the orders of De Sartines. Yes, I have lain almost naked and with fettered ankles for eighteen months together. For eighteen months at a time, I have lived on a daily allowance of two ounces of bread and a mug of water. I have more than once been deprived of both for three successive days and nights."[10]
10. I have summarised here the extracts in the original from the pamphlet of the Prévôt de Beaumont quoted at great length by the authors of theHistoire du Donjon de Vincennes. As a curiosity of prison literature, the Prévôt's pamphlet, if correctly cited, goes above the little eighteenth-century work on Newgate by "B. L. of Twickenham."
10. I have summarised here the extracts in the original from the pamphlet of the Prévôt de Beaumont quoted at great length by the authors of theHistoire du Donjon de Vincennes. As a curiosity of prison literature, the Prévôt's pamphlet, if correctly cited, goes above the little eighteenth-century work on Newgate by "B. L. of Twickenham."
The dramatic interest of the Prévôt's imprisonment culminates in an assault upon him in his cell, renewed at four several ventures by the whole strength of the prison staff "and the biggest dog that I have ever seen." The Prévôt had devoted five years to the stealthy composition of an essay on theArt of True Government, which was actually a history of thepacte de famine. His attempts to get it printed were discovered by the police, and the attack on his cell was designed to wrest from him the manuscript. He sets out the affair in detail with the liveliest touches—"First Round," "Second Round," etc.—shews himself levelling De Rougemont with a brick in the stomach, the dog with a blow on the nose, and blinding a brace of warders with the contents of his slop-bucket. At last, faced by an order in the King's writing, he allowed himself to be transferred from Vincennes to Charenton, on the express understanding that his precious manuscript should be transferred with him. The Prévôt himself arrived duly at Charenton, but he never again set eyes on the essay on theArt of True Government. De Rougemont had arranged that it should be stolen on the journey, and the manuscript was last seen in the archives of the Bastille.
Mirabeau was not the only polemic of genius who helped to sharpen against the gratings of Vincennes the weapons of the dawning Revolution. Was not Diderot of theEncyclopediathere also? He paid by a month's rigorous imprisonment in the dungeon, and a longer period of mild captivity in the château, the publication of hisLetter on the Blind for the Use of those who See. This, at least, was the ostensible reason of his detention; the true reason was never quite apparent. At the château he was allowed the visits of his wife and friends, and amongst the latter Jean Jacques Rousseau was frequently admitted. Literary legend is more responsible than history for the statement that the first idea of theSocial Contractwas the outcome of Rousseau's talks with Diderot and Grimm in the park of Vincennes.
Year after year, reign after reign, the picture rarely changes within the four walls of the dungeon. Vincennes was perhaps fuller under Louis XV. than in the reigns of preceding or succeeding sovereigns, but the difference could not have been great. During the twenty years of Cardinal Fleury's ministry under Louis XV., 40,000lettres de cachetwere issued by him, mostly against the Jansenists. Madame de Pompadour made a lavish use of thelettresin favour of Vincennes; Madame Dubarry bestowed her patronage chiefly on the Bastille. Richelieu at one epoch, Mazarin at another, found occupants in plenty for the cells of Vincennes. It was Richelieu who passed a dry word one day apropos of certain mysterious deaths in the dungeon.
"It must be grief," said one.
"Or the purple fever," said the King.
"It is the air of Vincennes," observed Richelieu, "that marvellous air which seems fatal to all who do not love his Majesty."
Ministers themselves were apt to fall by the weapon of their own employment. A minister of Louis XIV., who had chosen for his proud device the motto,Quò non ascendam?—What place too high for me?—and whom chroniclers have suspected of pretensions to the gallant crown of Mademoiselle de la Vallière, fell one day from a too giddy pinnacle plump into the dungeon of Vincennes. It was Fouquet the magnificent.
Up to a point, Fouquet was the best courtier in France. The King's passion was for pomp and glitter; the minister cultivated a taste for the dazzling. Louis was prodigal to extravagance; Fouquet became lavishjusqu'à la folie. The King dipped both hands into the public moneys; the minister plunged elbow-deep into the coffers of the State. The King offered to his servitors fêtes the most sumptuous; the minister regaled his friends with spectacles beyond compare. Then Louis wearied of this too splendid emulation, and Fouquet the magnificent was attached. He all but sacrificed his head to his lust of rivalry; but Louis relented, and took from him only his goods and his freedom. Despoiled and dishonoured, the ex-minister fared from prison to prison,—Vincennes, Angers, Amboise, Moret, the Bastille, and Pignerol.Quò non ascendam?—Whither may I not mount?The unfortunate minister, who had thought to climb to the sun of Louis XIV., sank to his death in acachot.
The contrasts presented by the diverse fates of certain prisoners are sufficiently striking. Fouquet was preceded at Vincennes by Cardinal de Retz, the last prisoner of distinction whom Anne of Austria sent to the dungeon. The Cardinal's was a gilt-edged captivity. He liveden princeat Vincennes; he had valets, money, and a good table; great ladies came to distract him, friends to flatter him, and players to divert him. Literature, politics, gallantry, and the theatre—the Cardinal found all of these at Vincennes. When he chanced to remember his priestly quality, he obtained leave to say mass in the chapel of the château, "carefully concealing the end of his chain under the richest of vestments." But the chain was there, and the lightest of fetters grows heavy in prison;—the Cardinal resolved on flight.
It was a clever and most original plan. On a certain day, a party of the Cardinal's friends, mounted as for a desperate ride, were to assemble under the walls of the keep, and at a given signal were to whirl away in their midst a man attired at all points like the Cardinal himself. A rope hanging from a severed bar in the window of the cell was to give his guards to suppose that the prisoner had escaped that way; but all this while the Cardinal was to lieperduin a hole which he had discovered on the upper terrace of the prison. When the excitement over the imaginary flight had subsided, and the vigilance of the sentries was relaxed, the Cardinal was to issue from his hiding-place, disguised as a kitchen-man, and walk out of the dungeon. It might have succeeded, but the elements played into the hands of Anne d'Autriche. A storm blew up on the night that the Cardinal was to have quitted his chamber, and the wind closed a heavy door on the staircase that led to the terrace. All the Cardinal's efforts to wrest it open were unavailing, and he was forced to return to his cell. He was removed to the château of Nantes, and the imaginative daring of his flight from that place has ranked it high in the annals of prison-breaking.
One echo more shall reach us from these lugubrious caverns. Towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, a young man, Du Puits by name (victimised by an Italian Abbé into forging orders on the King's treasury), received as cell-companion the Marquis de la Baldonnière, a reputed or suspected alchemist. Du Puits, a laughing philosopher now on the verge of tears, recovered his spirits when he learned the new-comer's name.
"I heard all about you, sir, before I came here," he said. "I was secretary to M. Chamillart, the minister, and you were often talked of at the bureau. I told M. Chamillart that if you could turn iron into gold, it was a pity you were not appointed manager of the iron mines. But it is never too late to turn one's talents to account, monsieur le marquis, and as a magician of the first water you shall effect our escape."
The achievements of the noble wizard came short of this end, but they were far from contemptible. He took surreptitious impressions in wax of the keys dangling from the very belt of the warder who visited them, and manufactured a choice set of false ones, which gave the two prisoners the range of the dungeon. There was no night watch within the tower, and when the warders had withdrawn after the prisoners' supper-hour, Du Puits and the Marquis ran up and down the stairs, and from hall to hall, called on the other prisoners in their cells, and made some agreeable acquaintances, including that of a pretty and charming young sorceress. Trying a new lock one night, they found themselves in the governor's pantry—after this, some rollicking supper parties. The feasts were organised nightly in one cell or another, Du Puits and the Marquis furnishing the table from the ample larder of the governor. Healths were being drunk one night, when the door was rudely opened, and the guests found themselves covered by the muskets of the guard. An unamiable prisoner whose company they had declined had exposed the gay conspiracy, and there were no more supper parties.
The last years of Vincennes as a State prison have little of the interest either of romance or of tragedy. Its fate in this respect was settled by Mirabeau'slettres de cachet. Vincennes was the only prison of which he had directly exposed the callous and cruel régime, and the ministry thought well to close it, as a small concession to the rising wrath of the populace. In 1784, accordingly, Vincennes was struck off the list of the State prisons of France. A singular and oddly ludicrous fate came upon it in the following year, when it was transformed into a sort of charitable bakery under the patronage of Louis XVI.! Thecachotin which the Prévôt de Beaumont had lain hungry for eighteen months, and for three days without food, was stored with cheap loaves for the working people of Paris. A little later, the dungeon was a manufactory of arms for the King's troops. After the destruction of the Bastille, Vincennes was attacked by the mob, but Lafayette and his troops saved it from their hands. Under the Republic it was used for a time as a prison for women. The wretched fate of the Duc d'Enghien, Napoleon's chief captive in this fortress, has been told; and there is only to add that the last prisoners who passed within the walls of Vincennes were MM. de Peyronnet, de Guernon Ranville, de Polignac, and Chantelauze, the four ministers of Charles X. whose part in the "Revolution of July" belongs to the history of our own times. Brave old General Daumesnil, "Old Wooden-Leg," who died August 17, 1832, was the last governor of the Dungeon of Vincennes.