Masers de Latude was born in 1725, at the castle of Craiseih, near Montagnac, in Languedoc. His father, the Marquis de Latude, was an officer in high rank, and the young Latude was destined for the military profession. While, however, he was studying at Paris, in 1749, he unfortunately conceived the idea of having recourse to subterfuge, in order to attract the notice of Madame de Pompadour, and to obtain her protection. He accordingly placed a small cardboard box in the post containing a harmless powder, and addressed to the marchioness, and then went straight to Versailles with the information that two individuals wished to poison the royal favourite, and that he had discovered their secret. The marchioness at first thanked him in the warmest terms; but he had scarcely left her presence when she began to suspect that she had been the victim of a shameful fraud. She obtained a few lines in his own handwriting from her pretended preserver; and comparing them with the address on the box, had her suspicions confirmed. Some few days after that, Latude found himself in the Bastille.

When he had remained there four months, he was taken to the castle of Vincennes, and he had every reason to fear that his imprisonment was to last for life, for the enraged woman proved inexorable to every appeal in his favour.

“I kept up my courage,” he says in his “Memoirs,” “with the hope that I should one day obtain my liberty, and that I should owe it to my own exertions alone, not to the favour of my gaolers. I was constantly forming plans. Among my fellow-prisoners I noticed an aged ecclesiastic, who appeared at a particular time every day in the garden of the chateau. He had been deprived of his liberty a long while on account of Jansenism. He was frequently visited by the abbÉ of St. Sauveur, and he devoted a great deal of his leisure to teaching the children of the officers to read and write. He was allowed to go almost wherever he pleased when in the company of his little pupils. He usually took his walk at about the time when I was led into a small garden adjoining the one I have spoken of—an indulgence granted me through the kindness of M. Berryer, the lieutenant of police. Two turnkeys used to accompany me on my leaving the cell, and on my return; but sometimes the elder of the two would wait for me in the garden, while the younger came up alone to let me out. I gradually accustomed the latter to see me run down the stairs in advance of him, and join his comrade in the garden, so that he always moved in the most leisurely manner when he came to fetch me.

“On a certain day I had resolved, at any price, to make an effort for liberty. As soon, therefore, as he came into my cell I ran downstairs with inconceivable swiftness, and hastily bolting the door on the outside, left him a prisoner within. There were then four sentinels to deal with. The first was on the other side of a door which led from the donjon, and which was always closed. I knocked; the door was opened. ‘Where is the abbÉ of St. Sauveur?’ I asked, hurriedly. ‘Our priest has been waiting for him in the garden over two hours, and I have been looking for him everywhere.’ I ran forward, as I spoke, till I came to a second sentinel, to whom I put the same question, and who allowed me to pass in the same way; and to a third, posted on the other side of the drawbridge, with whom I was equally fortunate. The fourth sentinel did not for a moment suspect I was a prisoner, seeing I had passed the others. I crossed the threshold of the outermost gate; I ran forward and was lost to view: I was free.

“I made my way across the fields, avoiding the high road as much as possible, and at length I came to Paris, where I took furnished lodgings, and tasted to the full the joys of liberty, with an appetite sharpened by fourteen months of captivity.”

Having had the imprudence to write to the king to excuse his fault, and to urge that he had already made sufficient expiation for it, Latude was again arrested and taken to the Bastille, where he was confined in a very strong cell. After remaining there eighteen months, however, he was removed, by M. Berryer’s orders, to a tolerably comfortable room, which he occupied jointly with a young man of his own age, named AlÈgre, whose crime was also that of having given offence to Madame de Pompadour.

“Under such circumstances, young men could come to but one resolution—to escape, or perish in the attempt. But every one able to form the slightest idea of the Bastille will conceive that this project had in it a touch of the wildness of delirium. In adopting it, however, I knew what I was about, and I hope I shall be credited with a soul a little above the common for having invented, formed, and carried it out.

“It was now no longer of any use to think of escaping from the Bastille by the gates. Every physical impossibility tended to render that idea impracticable. The ground being thus denied me, there was but one other way—to mount into the air. There was in our room a chimney running to the top of the tower; but, like every other in the place, it was so fortified with bars of iron as scarcely to leave a free passage to the smoke; and any one making his way to the top of the tower would find himself cut off from all communication with surrounding buildings, and with a ditch, commanded by a high wall some two hundred feet beneath him. Yet all these obstacles, all these dangers, could not daunt me. I communicated my ideas to my companion, but his timorous soul at first shrunk from the possible sufferings they involved. He chose to regard me as a madman, and for a time I thought and worked alone.

“There were many things to provide for, and to do: to climb to the top of the chimney, in spite of the iron bars; to make a ladder long enough to reach to the foot of the tower, and a second one (of wood) for mounting the ditch on the other side. In order to do all this I should have to procure tools and materials, and to use them in secret, yet, as it were, under the gaoler’s eyes.

“My first care was to find out a place in which I could hide my implements and the other things as soon as I should obtain them. Through thinking earnestly about it, I at length hit on a happy idea. I had been in several rooms in the Bastille, and I had always been able to ascertain whether the one below or above me happened to be occupied, by the noise the prisoner made. On this occasion I heard sounds from above, but none from below, and yet I knew that some one was in the room beneath me. This led me to believe that there was a double thickness of boards between us; and I took the following means to test the correctness of my conclusion:—

“There was a chapel in the Bastille, where mass was said once a day during the week, and three times on Sunday. Permission to be present on these occasions was a favour very rarely granted, and obtained with no little difficulty. Both myself and my companion, however, with the prisoner in the room beneath us, were allowed to attend the service.

“I resolved to seek the opportunity of our leaving the chapel together, to obtain a hasty glimpse of this prisoner’s room, and I told AlÈgre how he could help me. He was to let his knife case fall down stairs, as though by accident, in drawing out his pocket-handkerchief, so that one of the turnkeys would be obliged to run back to pick it up. All this was managed to perfection. The turnkey went down to find the case; and I, in the meantime, hurried away to our fellow-prisoner’s room. The ceiling was a very low one, and measuring it and the height of the entire storey with my eye, I judged that there was an unoccupied space of about five feet between the two chambers. ‘My friend,’ said I to AlÈgre on my return, ‘we are saved; we have hiding-place enough for a whole workshop full of things.’ ‘But how are we to get them?’ he asked impatiently. ‘Well, as for materials, this trunk of mine will supply us with more rope than we are likely to want.’ ‘Trunk! rope! why, the thing does not contain a single yard of rope!’ ‘What! have I not a quantity of linen—several dozens of shirts, and a number of napkins, stockings, and other things? We have only to tear them up into strips to make a ladder of any length we please.’

“There was a folding table in our room with a good deal of iron work about it; and, by cutting away part of this iron work with our pocket knives, we soon obtained a kind of rough chisel for loosening the bars of the chimney. As soon as our guards had left us for the night, we prized up a portion of the flooring with this implement, and we then began to pick a hole in the brickwork beneath. After we had worked in this way for some six hours, I found that my hasty calculation had not deceived me. There was a clear space of four feet between our floor and the ceiling below. This was work enough for one day; so we carefully swept all the rubbish into the hole, and replaced the piece of flooring that had been torn up.

“Our next operation was to unstitch two of my shirts—carefully preserving the thread—and by cutting them in pieces, and tying or stitching them together, we made a ladder some twenty feet long, which enabled us to move from place to place in the chimney while we were removing the bars. This part of the undertaking was of the most painful and trying character, and its execution cost us six months of an agony which even now I shudder to think of. We were obliged to work in the most uncomfortable and torturing positions, and we had scarcely struck a dozen strokes before our hands were covered with blood. The bars were fixed in an extremely hard cement, on which we could make no impression with our tools till we had moistened it with water, and the water had to be carried up in our mouths. Our progress was so slow that we were well satisfied when we removed a single square inch of the cement in the course of a night. As soon as we had loosened one bar we left it in its place, not daring to remove it until the very last moment, for fear the chimney should be examined in the meantime.

“When this odious labour was at length completed, we set to work upon the wooden ladder, by means of which we were to make our way into the governor’s garden that lay beyond the ditch. It had to be from twenty to twenty-five feet in length; and to make it, we set aside the pieces of wood sent up as firing, using part of an old chandelier, notched with our pocket knives for a saw. With this and another rude tool, made from the ironwork of the table, we cut our logs of wood into smaller pieces, which we fastened together with small bits of metal and bolts of wood, that served as hinges and screws. Through the single pole thus made we placed the rounds of the ladder, which projected some six inches on either side. The whole thing could be taken to pieces easily, and therefore we had no difficulty in hiding it beneath the flooring of our room.

“Our little subterranean workshop (as I may call it) was now quite nicely furnished, and its contents were known to none but ourselves. We had contrived to avoid detection in a most wonderful manner, but there was one danger which still gave us particular uneasiness. It was the custom with the officers of the Bastille, not only to make irregular and unexpected visits to the cells, but even to set spies upon the prisoners’ most secret hours. We had to take care therefore to do all our work by night, and not to leave the faintest trace of it behind us. But guards have ears as well as eyes. We were, of course, talking over our projects incessantly; and since we could not avoid the necessity for doing this, we had to invent a language intelligible only to ourselves. This was easily done; the saw was called faun; a hook, Tubal Cain; the hole in the floor, Polyphemus; the wooden ladder, Jacob; and the rounds, sprigs; the ropes, doves (from their whiteness); the pocket knife, puppy, and so forth. We were constantly on our guard, however, in using even this gibberish, and we succeeded perfectly in keeping our guards in the dark.

“When the operations already spoken of were completed, we began to think about our great ladder. We calculated that it would have to be at least one hundred and eighty feet in length; and to find material for it we had to sacrifice shirts, napkins, stockings, flannels—in short, nearly the whole of our underclothing. As soon as we had made a hank, or twist, out of the shreds, we hid it away in ‘Polyphemus.’ When we had a sufficient number of these, we spent the whole night in binding them together; and I would defy any ropemaker to produce a stouter cable (of its size) than the one we then possessed.

“At the summit of all the towers of the Bastille a ledge projected some four or five feet beyond the wall. This we knew would cause any one using our ladder to swing about in the air, and in all probability to lose his hold from giddiness, and fall to the ground. We were obliged, there fore, to invent an apparatus for steadying the ladder, which was far too complicated to describe here. Suffice it to say, that it involved the use of another rope, some three hundred and sixty feet long; and this we actually made, together with shorter ropes for tying our ladder to a cannon, and for other necessities of the moment.

“When all these ropes were ready we measured them, and found they were fourteen hundred feet in length. Our ladders, all taken together, had two hundred and eight rounds.

“There was one other danger to be dreaded—the noise likely to be made by the friction of our ladders against the wall. We endeavoured to avoid this by carefully binding up the ladders with pieces of our dressing-gowns, etc., at the places where they were likely to touch the stonework.

“We had been employed some eighteen months in these preparations, and yet our work was not done. We had found a means of reaching the top of the tower, and for dropping into the ditch; but now other operations would be needed to enable us to leave the place. The first was to mount the parapet of the governor’s wall, which looks into the ditch of the Porte St. Antoine. But this parapet was always guarded by sentinels. We might choose a very rainy and dark night for our attempt; but then it might rain while we were leaving the chimney, and yet be perfectly fine by the time we reached the parapet and the sentinels. And, besides, there were not only the sentinels, but the guard going the grand rounds. To be seen by the latter was to be hopelessly lost.

“The second operation promised to be less of a danger than a difficulty. It consisted of making a passage through the wall separating the ditch of the Bastille from the Porte St. Antoine. It would necessitate the use of a couple of crowbars, and these we could easily obtain from our chimney.

“We fixed on Monday, the 25th of February, 1756, for our flight. The river had overflowed its banks, and there was water to the depth of four feet in the ditches of the Bastille. We judged it prudent, therefore, to pack up a change of clothes in a portmanteau, so that we might not run the risk of perishing of cold if we happened to be fortunate enough to escape from the prison.

“Immediately after our dinner hour, on the appointed day, we took our rope-ladder from its hiding-place beneath the floor, and having seen that all the rounds were in order, put it away again in a more convenient place for instant use. At the same time we tied the three pieces of the wooden ladder together, bound our crowbars in rags, to prevent the metal from coming in contact with the wall, and furnished ourselves with a small bottle of brandy for our sustenance during the nine hours we were to pass up to our necks in water in the ditch. This done, we waited impatiently for the hour of supper. It came at length, and our gaolers left us for the night.

“I was the first to mount the chimney. I was suffering from rheumatism in the left arm, but I paid very little attention to that. I was nearly suffocated, however, with the soot accumulated in the upper part of the chimney beyond the bars, and the rough brickwork tore open my elbows and my knees, and made them run with blood. I was in this state when I reached the roof; I nevertheless, without thinking of my wounds, dropped a rope down the chimney, and drew up the portmanteau, which AlÈgre had fastened to the end of it. In the same manner we conveyed the wooden ladder, the crowbars, and the other packets to the top of the roof. AlÈgre made the ascent more easily than I, thanks to my having lowered the rope ladder for him. We then slid down from the top of the chimney on the outside, and stood both together on the roof of the Bastille.

“We lost no time in preparing for our descent. Doubling up our rope ladder till it formed a kind of ball, we rolled it along the roof till we came to the Treasury Tower, where we tied one end of it to a cannon and let the other fall gently into the ditch. I then fastened the single rope round my body, and AlÈgre holding it, to steady me, I stepped on to the ladder. But I swayed about dreadfully, nevertheless, and became so giddy that once or twice I felt myself on the point of losing consciousness, and gave up all for lost. I reached the ditch, however, without serious accident; and when AlÈgre had lowered the things to me, I was lucky enough to find a little eminence to place them on, so that they did not get wetted. My companion then made the descent, but he had one advantage over me—I was at the bottom to hold the ladder for him, so that he did not suffer from giddiness nearly so much as I had done. When we had both reached the bottom we could not suppress a sigh of regret at being obliged to leave behind us the ladder it had cost so much pains to make.[D]

“It was not raining, and we could distinctly hear the footfall of a sentinel, at the distance of a few paces. We were obliged therefore, to give up the idea of reaching the parapet, and to turn our steps towards the governor’s garden. We accordingly shouldered our crowbars, and went straight to the wall between the ditches, where we began to work. But unfortunately, just at the spot we were obliged to choose, the ditch was deepest, so that we were up to our armpits in water, instead of being up to our breasts. There had been a thaw but a few hours previously, and the ditch was full of lumps of ice, yet we had to endure all this for more than nine hours, our strength exhausted by labour of the most fatiguing kind, and our limbs more than half frozen. Hardly had we began to work, when I saw on

the parapet, some twelve feet above us, the soldiers of the grand round. Their lantern lit up the place where we were perfectly, and there was no way of avoiding discovery but to plunge down into the water, an operation which had to be repeated at each visit of the grand round—that is to say, every half-hour. At length after nine hours of labour and of terror, and after having picked stone from stone with inconceivable difficulty, we succeeded in making, through a wall four feet and a half in thickness, a hole large enough to admit of our passing, and we dragged ourselves through to the other side. Our souls were already full of joy, when we experienced a new and wholly unforeseen danger. We were now crossing the ditch of St. Antoine in order to gain the road to Bercy. We had hardly advanced twenty steps in the water when we fell into the aqueduct, which is in the middle of the ditch, and where we had ten feet of water above our heads; and beneath our feet some two feet of a thick purifying substance (for the most part salt) on which it was well-nigh impossible to walk. But for this latter circumstance, there could have been no difficulty in gaining the opposite side, for the aqueduct was only six feet in breadth. D’AlÈgre, when he found himself out of his depth, was foolish enough to clutch me convulsively. But I saw this must infallibly end in the ruin of us both, since if by any accident we should fall into the salt mud, we should not have strength enough to raise ourselves again. I therefore dealt D’AlÈgre a heavy blow with my fist, and having freed myself from him, I succeeded by a vigorous push in gaining the side of the aqueduct, and thus saving us both, for nothing was easier than to stretch out my hand and drag him ashore from my vantage-ground. It struck five when we emerged from the ditch: the sound of the bell had hardly died away, when we stood together on the main road—free men.

“Transported with the same sentiment, we threw ourselves into one another’s arms in a close embrace, and then fell upon our knees to express our gratitude to God. This first duty fulfilled, we began to think about a change of dress, and we then felt by what a happy inspiration of prudence and foresight, we had been prompted to furnish our portmanteau with some spare clothes. The cold had frozen our limbs, and, as I had anticipated, we suffered a good deal more now than during the nine hours we were in the water. Each of us had far too little control over his movements to be able to undress and dress himself, but by rendering some assistance to one another, we contrived at length to effect these operations. We then jumped into a fiacre and drove straight to the house of M. de Silhouette; the chancellor of the Duke of Orleans, but unfortunately we learned that he had gone to Versailles.”

They however, found an asylum with some friends, natives of Languedoc, like themselves, and, after hiding with them a month, left separately for Brussels. D’AlÈgre arriving first, was immediately arrested by the agents of the French government. He was taken back to France, and fifteen years later Latude found him at Charenton. He had become mad. As for Latude, during his stay in Brussels, he managed to avoid the snares laid for him by the French police, but he was finally arrested at Amsterdam, and conducted back to France, with irons on his ankles and wrists.

In 1764 he was transferred to Vincennes, and subjected to the most cruel treatment by order of M. de Sartines. After a time Guyonnet, the governor, released him from his cell, and gave him a furnished room to live in, at the same time permitting him to take exercise in the gardens of the chateau, two hours every day.

“What I valued most about this favour was that it promised to afford me sooner or later, the prospect of another escape. For eight months however, so carefully was I watched, I did not find a single opportunity of putting my project into execution, and I began to feel that I could owe my liberty only to some happy chance. Such a chance presented itself at length in a most unexpected manner.

“On the 23rd of November, 1765, I was walking in the garden at about four o’clock in the afternoon, when a thick fog suddenly rose from the ground. The idea of escape immediately occurred to me; but how was I to get rid of my guards? for, to say nothing of the many sentinels in the passages, I had two at my side, with a sergeant who never quitted me an instant. I could not attack them, nor could I glide quietly from their side, for their orders were to accompany me everywhere and to follow all my movements. I therefore addressed myself boldly to the sergeant, and called his attention to the fog which had come upon us so suddenly.

“‘What do you think of this weather?’ I asked.

“‘It is very bad, monsieur.’

“‘Do you think so?’ I replied in an instant, and in the calmest and most natural tone. ‘It seems to me, on the contrary, the very weather to favour my escape.’

“While uttering these words I raised my elbows suddenly and thrust the soldiers from me, and at the same time, giving the sergeant a violent push, I took to flight, passing a third sentinel, who did not seem to perceive what I was doing until I was at some distance from him. They all, however, rapidly recovered from their surprise, and pursued me with cries of ‘Stop him! stop him!’ The guard assembled: the windows began to open; everybody ran into the courtyard, and ‘Stop him! stop him!’ was heard on every side. How to escape? I did not remain long at a loss. There was nothing for it but to dash right into the midst of the crowd and take up their cry. ‘Stop thief! stop thief!’ I bawled louder than any of them, pointing in front of me at the same time. They took the bait admirably, following their noses in search of nothing at all with the most praiseworthy energy and zeal. I outran them easily; there was scarcely a step between me and liberty. I had reached the end of the royal court; there was but one sentinel to pass, but to pass him would not be easy, for, alarmed by the uproar, he would naturally be suspicious of the first comer in the crowd. I had, in fact, foreseen the exact state of things. At the first cry, the sentinel had placed himself in the middle of the pathway, which was very narrow in this place; and, to add to the ill luck of the situation, the man knew me. He was named Chenu. I came up; he stopped the way, and bade me stand still, or he would run me through with his bayonet.

“‘Chenu,’ said I, ‘you know me; your duty is to arrest, not to kill me.’ I slackened my pace and drew near to him slowly, and when I was within a yard or two I suddenly threw myself upon him, and snatched his gun with so much and such unexpected violence that he fell to the ground. I leaped over his body, and hurled his gun as far from him as I could, for fear he should recover it and fire. And now I was free once more. I easily hid myself in the park, for I had at once avoided the main road; I leaped over the low wall, and I awaited the night to enter Paris.”

Having taken refuge with two girls, with whom he had

entered into correspondence from the top of the towers of the Bastille, and who had vainly tried to serve him by delivering letters to his friends, he could think of no better means of providing for his safety than that of writing to implore M. de Sartines to become his protector. It would seem that Latude’s active and acute spirit, which, while he was a captive, enabled him so well to calculate his opportunities of escape, and to profit by them, abandoned him the moment he was at liberty. Not content with having invited the attention of M. de Sartines, he could conceive of nothing wiser, fugitive and prison-breaker as he was, than to go to Fontainebleau, to see M. de Choiseul and M. de la ValliÈre, both ministers, and to recommend himself to them. He was, of course, re-arrested and taken back to Vincennes, where he was put in a cell, called the black hole. In 1775 he was transferred to Charenton, and he was set at liberty in 1777 by a lettre de cachet, ordering his exile to Montagnac, his native place. He delayed his departure some time, but at length he set out, only to be arrested once more, when he was some fifty leagues from Paris, and taken to the BicÊtre. He was then fifty-three years of age; and since his twenty-fourth year he had passed very little time out of prison. At length, in 1784, Madame Necker humanely exerted her influence to procure his total release.