Louis XIV and the lettre de cachet—Society corrupt—Assassination common—Cheating at cards—Shocking state of Paris—“The Court of Miracles”—Prisons filled—Prisoners detained indefinitely—Revived persecution of the Protestants—General exodus of industrious artisans—Inside the Bastile—Sufferings of the prisoners—The Comte Pagan—Imprisonment for blasphemy, riotous conduct in the streets and all loose living—Kidnapping of the Armenian Patriarch, Avedik—His sudden death—Many heinous crimes disgrace the epoch—Plot of the Chevalier de Rohan—Its detection—De Rohan executed.

The three notable cases of arrest and imprisonment given in the last chapter are typical of the rÉgime at last established in France under the personal rule of a young monarch whom various causes had combined to render absolute. The willing submission of a people sick of civil war, the removal or complete subjection of the turbulent vassals, his own imperious character,—that of a strong willed man with a set resolve to be sovereign, irresponsible master,—all combined to consolidate his powers. Louis was the incarnation of selfishness. To have his own way with everyone and in everything, to gratify every whim and passion was the keynote of his sensuous and indulgent nature. No one dared oppose him; no one stood near him. His subjects were his creatures; the greatest nobles accepted the most menial tasks about his person. His abject and supple-backed courtiers offered him incense and dosed him with the most fulsome flattery. He held France in the hollow of his hand and French society was formed on his model, utterly corrupt and profligate under a thin veneer of fine manners which influenced all Europe and set its fashions.

The worst example set by Louis was in his interference with personal liberty. The privilege of freedom from arrest had been won by the Parliament, in the Fronde. They had decreed that any one taken into custody one day must be produced for trial the next and his detention justified. This safeguard was shortlived. The law was defied and ignored by Louis XIV who invented the lettres de cachet, or sealed warrants, which decreed arbitrary arrest without reason given or the smallest excuse made for the committal. It came to be a common thing that persons who were not even suspected of crimes, and who had certainly never been guilty of crimes, were caught up and imprisoned indefinitely. They might lie for years in the Bastile or Vincennes, utterly uncared for and forgotten, kept in custody not because anybody was set upon their remaining but because nobody was interested in their release. In the absence of any statement of the offense no one could say whether or not it was purged and no one was concerned as to whether the necessity for punishment still survived. These lettres de cachet were abundantly in evidence, for they were signed in blank by the King himself and countersigned by one of his ministers whenever it was desired to make use of one.

It may be well to explain here that it was customary for the King of France to make his sovereign will known by addressing a communication to the various State functionaries in the form of a letter which was open or closed. If the former, it was a “patent,” it bore the King’s signature, it was countersigned by a minister and the great Seal of State was appended. This was the form in which all ordinances or grants of privileges appeared. These “letters patent” were registered and endorsed by the Parliament. But there was no check upon the closed letter or lettre de cachet, famous in the history of tyranny, as the secret method of making known the King’s pleasure. This was folded and sealed with the King’s small seal, and although it was a private communication it had all the weight of the royal authority. It became the warrant for the arbitrary arrest, at any time and without any reason given, of any person who, upon the strength of it, was forthwith committed to a State prison. The chief ministers and the head of the police had always lettres de cachet in stock, signed in blank, but all in due form, and they could be completed at any time, by order, or of their own free will, by inserting the name of the unfortunate individual whose liberty was to be forfeited. Arrest on a lettre de cachet, as has been said, sometimes meant prolonged imprisonment purposely or only because the identity of the individual or the cause of the arrest was forgotten.

Society was horribly vicious and corrupt in the time of Louis XIV. Evil practices prevailed throughout the nation. Profligacy was general among the better classes and the lower ranks committed the most atrocious crimes. While the courtiers openly followed the example set by their self-indulgent young monarch, an ardent devotee of pleasure, the country was over-run with thieves and desperadoes. Assassination was common, by the open attack of hired bravos or secretly by the infamous administration of poison. Security was undermined and numbers in every condition of life were put out of the way. The epoch of the poisoners presently to be described is one of the darkest pages in the annals of the Bastile. Cheating at cards and in every form of gambling was shamelessly prevalent, and defended on the specious excuse that it was merely correcting fortune. Prominent persons of rank and fashion such as the Chevalier de Gramont and the Marquis de Saissac won enormous sums unfairly. The passion for play was so general and so engrossing that no opportunity of yielding to it was lost; people gambled wherever they met, in public places, in private houses, in carriages when travelling on the road. Cheating at play was so common that a special officer, the Grand Provost, was attached to the Court to bring delinquents immediately to trial. Many dishonest practices were called in to assist, false cards were manufactured on purpose and cardmakers were a part of the great households. Strict laws imposed heavy penalties upon those caught loading dice or marking packs. Fraud was conspicuously frequent in the Italian and most popular game of hoca played with thirty balls on a board, each ball containing a number on a paper inside.

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 were lansquenet, hazard, portique and trou-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 at hoca to 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, when invited 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 are mariages de convenance in 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 the demeanor 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 creed by 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 infamous dragonnades, when the soldiers pillaged and laid waste the provinces.

The passion for proselytising was carried to the extent of bribing the poverty stricken to change their 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 side and 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 hardships ever 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 at hoca. 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 the De Profundis as they 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 to Cardone, 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’Harcourt and 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 the bill. 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 now the 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 confess him 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, that he 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 been frequent. 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 resisted capture, 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.