"... if once it were left in the power of any, the highest, magistrate to imprison arbitrarily whomever he or his officers thought proper (as in France is daily practised by the Crown), there would soon be an end of all other rights and immunities."—Blackstone.

After enduring for centuries an oppression as rigorous and as cruel as any nation had ever been subjected to, this idea dawned, almost in an hour, upon the mind of France. It did not matter that the King who occupied the throne at this time was, if not at all a wise one, at least one of the most humane, and distinctly the best intentioned, and the only French sovereign who had ever really cared to soften the lot of his prisoners. He did not soften their lot in the least, because he was weak and indolent, and in the hands of the least honest of his ministers; but his predecessors, almost without exception, had lent their efforts or their sanction to the support of that old malignant policy, descended from the feudal times, that prison was properly a place of torment. The quick aspiration of liberty, born at last of a wretchedness that was past enduring, inflamed the heart of the whole nation. It took Paris, as it were, by the throat. What thing in Paris opposed itself most visibly to the "natural rights" and liberty of man? Paris said: The Bastille! Up then, and let the Bastille go down. They went there, a very ordinary crowd of rioters, and overturned it. The Bastille, which the superstitious fears of ages had thought impregnable, fell like an old ruined house (which it was) in a midsummer gust. But the fall of it shook Europe to its foundations, and before the dust had vanished, it was seen that the Bastille had carried with it the throne of France, and every shred and vestige of the system which that throne represented.

This then must have been the most terrible prison in Europe? Not at all. It was the most renowned; and, as a prison, no other name is ever likely to be greater than, or as great as, the Bastille; but at the time of its destruction it was no more than the shadow of its ancient self, and at no period of its existence was it a worse place than any other of the old State prisons of France. Vincennes was quite as cruel a hold as the Bastille had ever been; there were, I think, uglier dens in the ChÂtelet and in BicÊtre; and the torture chamber of the Conciergerie had perhaps witnessed more inhuman spectacles than any other prison in Paris.

But when, in July, 1789, a prison was to be destroyed, as the chief symbol of the tyranny of kings, it was upon the Bastille that Paris marched, as by instinct. Why was this prison abhorred above all the rest? Mainly because what had once been a fact had survived as a tradition,—that the master of the Bastille was the master of France; and the master of the Bastille was, of course, the King. In its beginnings, the Bastille was merely a gate of Paris, as Newgate was originally nothing more than the New Gate of London. It came next to be a very common little fort, for the defence of the Seine against the English and other pirates. But it grew by-and-bye to be a stout castle and prison, over against the royal residence of Vincennes; and when, on the approach of an insurgent force, the King could signal from his window at Vincennes to his commandant in the Bastille, just opposite, and the guns of both places could be primed in time, the plain between them was secure. The Bastille came thus to hold a place quite distinct from that of any other prison in Paris, and one which threatened in a much higher degree the liberties of the citizens. It was considered impossible of capture; and while the King's standard shook over the great towers of the Bastille, Paris and France were secure to him; and, in the popular imagination, his principal stronghold was also his principal prison. In this point of view, and it was the popular point of view, the Bastille was a double menace to Paris. It was the King's best means of keeping importunate subjects at arm's length, and it was also the most redoubtable of the prisons he could shut them in. Both ideas were to some extent erroneous. The Bastille, considered as a fort, was never as formidable as its name; and, as a prison, the Kings of France seldom favoured it above the Dungeon of Vincennes.

But let us seek now to put the Bastille in its proper and exact place amongst the historic gaols of France. In recent years, one or two French writers of distinction, and others of no distinction whatever, have come forward as the apologists of this too famous keep, who would persuade us that it was not only a very tolerable sort of prison, but even, in cases, a rather desirable place of retirement, for meditation, and philosophical pursuits. M. Viollet-le-Duc has assured us, quite gravely, that the famed oubliettes (the bottoms of which were shaped like sugar loaves, so that prisoners might have no resting-place for their feet) were merely ice-houses! It is not denied that these cells existed, and those who care to believe that a MediÆval architect built them under the towers of the Bastille as store-chambers for ice to cool the governor's or the prisoners' wine, are entirely welcome to do so. These were amongst the places of torment in which Louis XI. kept the Armagnac princes, who were taken out twice a week to be scourged in the presence of Governor l'Huillier, and "every three months to have a tooth pulled out." The author of The Bastille Unveiled has attempted to explain away the iron cage in which the same King confined Cardinal Balue for eleven years, and which, I believe, is still in existence. An English apologist (whose work extends to two bulky volumes) says that "prisoners were less harshly treated in the Bastille than in other French and English prisons"; that "the accusations of prisoners having been tortured in the Bastille have no serious foundation"; that the majority of the chambers "were comfortable enough"; that one of the courtyards "resembled a college playground, in which prisoners received their friends, and indulged in all kinds of games." We hear of tables which were so sumptuously furnished (three bottles of wine a day, amongst other comforts) that the prisoners complained to the governor that he was feeding them too well. We are presented with printed rules to show how carefully the sick were to be attended to, and what were to be their ghostly ministrations in their final hours. We are told, without a smile, that it was really not so easy for people to get into the Bastille as the world in general has supposed; and that, once there, their situation was not too helpless, inasmuch as the governor must present to the minister every day a written report upon the conditions of the prison. Under the pen of this or the other indulgent writer, the horrors of the Bastille have vanished as by process of magic. Unfortunately, the horrors are, with quite unimportant exceptions, facts of history.

The government of the Bastille was precisely similar to the government of the other State prisons of France. Edicts notwithstanding, these prisons were practically the property of their successive governors. To this unwritten rule the Bastille was not an exception. The governor in possession at this or that epoch might or might not be the creature of the minister through whose interest he had bought his office at a sometimes exorbitant price; it was, at all events, understood that, whatever limits were set to his authority, he was fully entitled to get back his purchase money; and this, as had been shown, he could seldom do except by villainously ill-using his prisoners. There were governors who did not do this, and then indeed came a blessed period for the prisoners. Then food was good and plentiful, the faggots were not stinted in the fire-place, the beds were not rotten and lousy, the foul linen went to the wash, and the threadbare clothes were replaced, the cells were made proof against wind and rain, the governor was prompt in looking into grievances, and all went as well for the prisoner as it was possible that it should go in a gaol of old Paris. But when a new Pharaoh arose, who was avaricious, and a tyrant, and a bully, and who had bought his prison as a speculative investment, then the clouds gathered again, and the wind blew again from the east, and the old tribulations began afresh. Now, as the records of all the French prisons of history leave no doubt as to the fact the bad governors were many, and the good governors were few, and that within his prison walls the governor was only less than omnipotent, readers of these pages will not expect often to find prisoners of the Bastille regaling themselves with three bottles of wine a day, or asking to have their tables ordered more plainly, or receiving the free visits of their friends, or playing at "all kinds of games" in courtyards resembling college playgrounds. Sprigs of the nobility and young men of family, shut up for a time for making too free with their money, or for running away with a ballet-dancer, had perhaps not too much to complain of in the Bastille; there were certain prisoners of rank, too, who came off lightly; and now and again there were other prisoners who enjoyed what were called the "liberties of the Bastille," and who were allowed a restricted intercourse. But the general rules for the keeping and conduct of prisoners in the Bastille were of the severest description, and they were carried out for the most part with inflexible rigour. Privations and humiliations of all kinds were inflicted on them; and redress for injuries, or for insults, or for mean and illegal annoyances, the outcome of the governor's spleen, was not more easy to obtain in the Bastille than in the Dungeon of Vincennes.

The statement that "it was not so easy to enter into the Bastille" is from Ravaisson, the compiler of the Archives de la Bastille. He gives his reasons, which are sufficiently curious. Incarcerations, says Ravaisson, were accomplished with the utmost care, and the Government insisted upon the most stringent precautions, inasmuch as, "acting with absolute authority, it felt the danger of an uncontrolled responsibility." Sore indeed would be the task of proving by example that the absolute monarchy had many compunctions on this score, when tampering with the liberties of its subjects. "Extreme care was taken to avoid errors and abuses" in effecting incarcerations in the Bastille; and the great safeguard was that "each lettre de cachet was signed by the King himself, and countersigned by one of his ministers!" One need go no further than this. M. Ravaisson spent from fifteen to twenty years in studying and arranging the archives of the Bastille, and his knowledge of his subject must have been immense. Was this the writer from whom one would have expected the suggestion that the King and his minister, in signing a lettre de cachet, took care to assure themselves that no injustice was being done, and made themselves immediately and personally responsible for the guilt of the victim whom it was to consign to captivity in the Bastille? Leave aside the cases in which the document was used to imprison a person in order that charges or suspicions might afterwards be inquired into,—though there are countless instances to show, (1) that no proper investigation was held, and (2), that the clearest proofs of innocence were not always sufficient to procure the prisoner's liberation. But what shall be said of the cases, infinitely more numerous than these, in which no charge was ever formulated, and in which none could have been formulated, save some fictitious one inspired by private greed, hatred, or vengeance? Where in these cases was that "greatest care" which "was taken to prevent errors and abuses"? Kings and their ministers sent to the Bastille and other prisons many thousands of prisoners who had no justice, and who never expected justice. But these same "closed letters," duly signed and sealed, were the instruments of imprisoning hundreds of thousands of other persons—to whom life was sweet and liberty was dear—in whose affairs neither King nor minister had the most shadowy interest, and whose very names most probably they had never heard of. During the reign of one King, Louis XV., one hundred and fifty thousand lettres de cachet were issued. For how many of those was Louis himself responsible? They carried his signature, but is it necessary at this day to say that the King wrote his name upon the blank forms, which the minister distributed amongst his friends? The lieutenant-general of police also had his blank forms at hand, in which it was necessary only to insert the names of the victims. Wives obtained these forms against their husbands, husbands against their wives, fathers against their children, men-about-town against their rivals in love, debtors against their creditors, opera-dancers against the lovers who had slighted them. If one but had the ear of the King, or the King's mistress, or the King's minister, or the King's chief of police, or of a friend or a friend's friend of any of these potentates, there was no grudge, jealousy, or enmity which one might not satisfy by means of a lettre de cachet,—that instrument which was so sure a safegard against the "errors and abuses" of imprisonment, because it carried the signature of the King and his minister! And the cases in which these scraps of paper were used merely for the ruin, the torment, or the temporary defeat of a private enemy, often had the cruelest results. The enemy and the enmity were forgotten, but the lettre de cachet had not been cancelled, and the prisoner still bided his day. Persons who had never been convicted of crimes, and other persons who had never been guilty of crimes, lay for years in the Bastille, forgotten and uncared for. "There are prisoners who remain in the Bastille," said Linguet (who spent two years there), "not because anybody is particularly anxious that they should remain, but because they happen to be there and have been forgotten, and there is nobody to ask for their release." Captain Bingham, the English apologist of the Bastille, discussing the cases of certain criminals who were arbitrarily dealt with by lettres de cachet, says that in England at the present day they "would be prosecuted according to law, and most probably committed to prison." Very good! But is there no difference between the situation of the criminal who, after conviction in open court, is sent to prison for a fixed term of weeks, months, or years, and that of the "criminal" who goes to prison uncondemned and untried, and who cannot gauge the length of his imprisonment? Far enough from being "not so easy" to get into the Bastille, the passage across those two drawbridges and through those five massy gates was only too dreadfully simple for all who were furnished against their wills with the "open sesame" of the lettre de cachet.

The interior of the Bastille had nothing worse to show than has been discovered in the chapters on Vincennes, the ChÂtelet, and BicÊtre. There were, perhaps, uglier corners in the two last-named prisons than in either of the two more famous ones. The Bastille, however, has stood as the type, and the almost plutonic fame which it owes to romance seems likely to endure. Romance has not been guilty of much exaggeration, but this saving clause may be put in, that what has been written of the Bastille might have been written with equal truth of most other contemporary prisons. Its eight dark towers, its walls of a hundred feet, its drawbridges, its outer and its four great inner gates, its ditches, its high wooden gallery for the watch, and its ramparts bristling with cannon,—these external features have been of infinite service to romance, and romantic history. But within the walls of the Bastille there was nothing extraordinary. Lodging was provided for about fifty prisoners, and it was possible to accommodate twice that number.

The fifth and last gate opened into the Great Court, some hundred feet in length and seventy in breadth, with three towers on either side. The Well Court, about eighty feet by five and forty, lay beyond, with a tower in the right and a tower in the left angle. Each tower had its name; those in the Great Court were de la ComtÉ, du TrÉsor, de la Chapelle, de la BazaniÈre, de la BertaudiÈre, and de la LibertÉ; those in the Well Court were the du Coin and the du Puits. The comely garden on the suburban side of the chÂteau was closed to all prisoners by order of De Launay, the last governor of the Bastille, who also forbade them the use of the fine airy platforms on the summit of the towers. The main court was then the only exercise ground, a dreary enclosure which Linguet describes as insufferably cold in winter ("the north-east wind rushes through it") and a veritable oven in summer.

The oubliettes have been mentioned. Besides these there were the dungeons, below the level of the soil; dens in which there was no protection from wind or rain, and where rats and toads abounded. The ordinary chambers of the prisoners were situated in the towers. The upper stories were the calottes (skull-caps), residence in which seems to have been regarded as only better than that belowground. "One can only walk upright in the middle." The windows, barred within and without, gave little light; there was a wretched stove in one corner (which had six pieces of wood for its daily allowance during the winter months), and one has no reason to doubt the statements of prisoners, that only an iron constitution could support the extremities of heat and cold in the calottes. In contrast to these, there were rooms which had fair views of Paris and the open country. The lower chambers looked only on the ditches; all the chambers (and the stairs) were shut in by double doors with double bolts; and all, with the exceptions of those which a few privileged persons were allowed to upholster at their own cost, were furnished in the most beggarly style. But in all of these respects, nothing was worse in the Bastille than elsewhere.

In principle, the dietary system here was the same as in other State prisons. The King paid a liberal sum for the board of every prisoner, but the governor contracted for the supplies, and might put into his pocket half or three-fourths of the amount which he drew from the royal treasury. In the Bastille, as in other prisons, there were periods when the prisoners were fed extremely well; and in all these prisons there were persons who, by favour of the Government or the governor, kept a much more luxurious table than was allowed to the rest. But one must take the scale of diet which was customary. Two meals a day were the rule. On flesh days, the dinner consisted of soup and the meat of which it had been made; and for supper there were "a slice of roast meat, a ragout, and a salad." Sunday's dinner was "some bad soup, a slice of a cow which they call beef, and four little pÂtÉs"; supper, "a slice of roast veal or mutton, or a little plate of haricot, in which bones and turnips are most conspicuous, and a salad with rancid oil." On three holidays in the year, "every prisoner had an addition made to his rations of half a roast chicken, or a pigeon." Holy Monday was celebrated by "a tart extraordinary." There was always or usually dessert at dinner, which "consists of an apple, a biscuit, a few almonds and raisins, cherries, gooseberries, or plums." Each prisoner received a pound of bread a day, and a bottle of wine. De Launay's method of supplying his prisoners with wine was no doubt the usual one. He had the right of taking into his cellars about a hundred hogsheads, free of duty. "Well," says Linguet, "what does he do? He sells his privilege to one Joli, a Paris publican, who pays him £250 for it; and from Joli he receives in exchange, for the prisoners' use, the commonest wine that is sold,—mere vinegar, in fact."^[23] A prisoner of the same period sums up the matter thus: "There is no eating-house in all France where they would not give you for a shilling a better dinner than is served in the Bastille."

Apart from all exceptional hardships and privations, the oppression of the first months of captivity in the Bastille must have been very terrible. The prisoner who was not certain of his fate, and who did not know to whom he owed his imprisonment, lay under a suspense which words are inadequate to describe. Mystery and doubt environed him; his day-long silence and utter isolation were relieved only by the regular visits of his gaoler. He was not allowed to see anyone from without, and could not get leave to write or receive a letter. Nothing could be done for him, he was told, until his examination had been concluded; and this was sometimes delayed for weeks or months. If he were a person of some consequence in the State, powerful enough to have enemies at Court, his examination in the council-chamber of the Bastille was conducted in a manner quite similar to (and probably borrowed from) that adopted by the Inquisition. He was asked his connection with plots or intrigues which he had never heard of; he was coaxed or menaced to denounce or betray persons with whom perhaps he had never associated; papers were held up before him which he was assured contained clear proofs of his guilt; and he might be told that the King had unfortunately been inflamed against him, and would not hear his name. If, mystified by threats, hints, and arguments which had no meaning for him, he asked to be confronted by an accuser or witnesses, his request was not allowed. These were the exact methods of the Inquisition. The lieutenant of police, or the commissioner from the ChÂtelet, who presided over the interrogation, would not hesitate to tell the accused that his life was at stake, and that if his answers were not complete and satisfactory he would be handed over forthwith to a commission extraordinaire. Every device was resorted to (says the author of the Remarques politiques sur le chÂteau de la Bastille) in order to draw from the prisoner some sort of admission or avowal which might compromise either himself or some other person or persons in whom the Government had a hostile interest. The examiner might say that he was authorised to promise the prisoner his freedom, but if he allowed himself to be taken by this ruse it was generally the worse for him; for, on the strength of the confession thus obtained, he was told that it would be impossible to release him at present, but every effort would be made, etc. If the ministry had reason to suspect that the prisoner was really a dangerous character, and involved in political intrigue, there was little hesitation in resorting to torture.

Ravaisson says that only two kinds of torture were applied in the Bastille; the "boot," and the torture by water. Well, these were sufficient; but it is to be remembered that the archives of the Bastille date only from about the middle of the seventeenth century, and it is improbable that the Salle de la Question of this prison was less horribly equipped than that of any other. The ordeal of the "boot" needs no description; for the torture by water, the victim was bound on a trestle, and water was poured down his throat by the gallon, until his sufferings became unendurable. Torture was practised in the Bastille as long as it was practised in any other French prison; a man named Alexis Danouilh underwent the Question there ("ordinary" and "extraordinary") in 1783—after the date at which Louis XVI. had forbidden and abolished it by royal edict. To so small an extent had the absolute sovereigns of France control over the administration of their own prisons of State!

At no point in the existence of an ordinary captive of the Bastille is there any occasion to exaggerate his pains. Such as they were, they were very real; and scant reason is there to wonder at the bitterness, the vehemence, and even the violence of tone which characterises the memoirs or narratives of those who had endured them. The apologists of the Bastille will beg us to believe that the histories of Linguet and certain others are mendacious, have been refuted, and so forth. The gifted, caustic Linguet, who is one of their particular bugbears, was not the most upright man, nor the most scrupulous writer, in the France of his day; but the essential parts of his narrative are confirmed by the statements of a host of others. It is not because Linguet has said that the Bastille walls, which were from seven to twelve feet thick, were from thirty to forty feet thick (which he might quite possibly have supposed) that we are to discredit his account, highly wrought as it is, of the general conditions of life within the prison. It is not more highly wrought than the accounts of other prisoners of the Bastille, the accuracy of which has not been questioned. These other histories are plentiful, and we are under no necessity of resting upon the better-known narratives which, for their qualities of style or their greater picturesqueness, have been so often reproduced. Far on into the eighteenth century—indeed until within a few years of our own—there lay in the Bastille victims of public or private injustice, whose complainings, stifled in its vaulted ceilings, have sent us down a faint but faithful echo. What of Bertin de Frateaux, who was walled in there from 1752 until his death in 1782? What of Tavernier, who, imprisoned in 1759 (after a previous ten years' sojourn in another gaol), was liberated only by the wreckers of the Bastille, on the 14th of July, 1789? Here, too, in 1784, lies the Genoese, Pellissery, imprisoned, in 1777, for publishing a pamphlet on the finances of Necker. Dishonourable terms of release are offered him which he will not accept, although "rheumatic in every joint, scorbutic, and spitting blood for fifteen months, owing to the atrocious treatment I have had here during seven years." Here, two years later, is Brun de la Condamine, the inventor of an explosive bomb, which he has importuned the ministry to make test of. After a captivity of four years and a half, enraged at the indignities he receives, he makes a wild attempt to escape. Here, at the same period, is Guillaume Debure, the oldest and most respected bookseller in France, lodged in the Bastille for refusing to stamp the pirated copies of works issued by his brethren in the trade; treated apparently like a common malefactor, and released only on the indignant representations of the whole bookselling fraternity of Paris. Thus lightly was the liberty of the subject held, even while the Revolution was fermenting.

The prisoner who was released never knew until then the full bitterness of the treatment he had endured. It was perhaps the acutest part of his sufferings, that the letters he had written to family and friends, the entreaties he had addressed to ministers, magistrates, and chiefs of police, brought him never a word in answer. It was thus that was produced in so many cases that sense of utter desolation and abandonment by the whole world which resulted in the madness of very many prisoners. Those who were restored to liberty with their reason unimpaired learned that their letters and petitions had never been received. They had never, in fact, passed out of the Bastille. It was well to have the truth of this at any time; but we are to remember the prisoners who died in the belief that their dearest ones had denied them one kind or sympathetic word. When the Bastille was sacked, piles of letters were found which had never passed beyond the governor's hands. Amongst them was one which (considering the circumstances of the writer, and the fact that no line was ever vouchsafed him in response) may be regarded as perhaps the very saddest ever penned: "If for my consolation," wrote the prisoner to the lieutenant of police, "Monseigneur would have the goodness, in the name of the God above us both, to give me but one word of my dear wife, her name only on a card, that I might know she still lives, I would pray for Monseigneur to the last day of my life." This letter was signed "Queret DÉmery," a name known to nobody, but which will be remembered while the Bastille is remembered. One does not choose to ask, were there even a chance of an answer, how many other letters not less piteous than this were read and drily docketed by governors of the Bastille.

This inveterate and almost inviolable secrecy in which the government of the Bastille enwrapped the majority of its prisoners seems on the whole to have been the most cruel feature of its policy. After reading some fifty volumes of cells with rats in them, and dungeons frozen or fiery, and torture rooms, and filthy beds, and food not enough to keep life on, one is shocked to find that the due and natural poignancy of sympathy with human suffering begins insensibly to weaken. But this refinement of pain, inflicted as a part of the routine, upon the common prisoners of the Bastille, revives the sense of pity. It was the habit to pretend that prisoners who were dungeoned there were not in there at all. Asked as to the fate of this prisoner or the other, ministers would respond with a blank look, assure the questioner that they had never heard the prisoner's name, and that, wherever he might be, he was certainly not in the Bastille. The governor and chief officers of the prison, who saw the prisoner every day, would say that he was not in their keeping, and that no such person was known to them. The common practice of imprisoning men in the Bastille under names other than their own made these denials easy. At other times, when it was desired to prejudice his friends or society against a prisoner, the answer would be, that the less said about him the better. The nominal cause of his imprisonment, his friends were told, was not the real one; the Government had their information, and if it could possibly be published the prisoner would be known in his true character. The prisoner himself was often told that his friends had ceased to believe in his innocence, or that they thought him dead, or that they had given up all hope of procuring his release. The Bastille and the Inquisition were singularly alike in their methods.

Dreary beyond expression must have been the daily round for all but the privileged few. "Every hour was struck on a bell which was heard all through the Faubourg St. Antoine." The sentries on the rampart challenged one another ceaselessly throughout the night. There were prisoners in solitary confinement to whom no other sounds than these ever penetrated, except the grating of the key in the lock which announced the daily visits of the gaoler. This was the life of such prisoners as the Iron Mask, and of Tavernier, who told his liberators that, during the thirty years of his captivity, he had passed nineteen consecutive ones without crossing the threshold of his cell. Exercise in the yard, for those who enjoyed this favour, was limited to an hour a day, and this period might be reduced to a few minutes if there were many prisoners to be exercised in turn,—for, in general, the utmost care was taken to prevent them from meeting one another. If a stranger were shewn into the yard, the prisoner who was taking his mouthful of air had to retreat to a cabinet in the wall. These walks were solitary, except for the presence of a dumb sentinel; and, unless the prisoner were now and then permitted or compelled to share his chamber with a fellow-captive, not less solitary was his whole existence. The most stringent rules were in force respecting the admission of friends or relatives. "Strangers cannot enter the Bastille," ran the official injunction, "without very precise orders from the governor"; and such rare interviews as were permitted took place in the council-chamber, in the presence of this officer or his deputy. The length of the interview was always fixed in the letter which the visitor bore from the lieutenant of police, and nothing might be said relative to the cause of the prisoner's detention.

A certain Mme. de Montazau, visiting her husband in the Bastille, took with her a little dog, and, while pretending to caress it in her own Portuguese tongue, was trying to tell Montazau what efforts she was making for his release. "Madame," interrupted De Launay, his gaoler's instinct aroused, "if your dog does not understand French you cannot bring him here." Even such poor barren visits as these were of the rarest possible occurrence.

But, M. Ravaisson will tell us, prisoners were frequently visited by the lieutenant of the King or some other high personage. It would be more to the point to say that such visits were occasionally inflicted, for the comfort that prisoners derived from them was slender. AbbÉ Duvernet receives the visit of the minister Amelot, who tells him that he can have nothing to complain of, since he has had access to the prison library. The Bastille library, by the way, seems to have been founded not by the Government, but by a prisoner who was confined there early in the eighteenth century. AbbÉ Duvernet had made a catalogue of the collection. "I have catalogued your library," he replied to the minister, "and there are not ten volumes in it which a man of ordinary education would trouble himself to read. Library, indeed! Listen, monsieur: when a man has had the hardihood to expose one of the blunders of you ministers, you will spend any quantity of money to be avenged on him. You will hunt him to Holland, England, or the heart of Germany, if it costs the State two thousand pounds. But to afford a little solace to the poor devils in your Bastille, by buying a few books for them to read—no! I dare be sworn that Government has not spent ten pounds on books for this place since the Bastille was built!"

"Well, monsieur l'AbbÉ," said Amelot, "may I ask why you are here?"

"Why am I here! Because you yourself gave some one a lettre de cachet, which had your own name and the King's attached to it. I am very sure that his Majesty knows nothing of my detention, or the motive of it; but you can scarcely pretend to the same ignorance. Or, will you have me believe that you set your signature to these lettres without knowing what it is that you are signing?" Then, turning to Lenoir, the Lieutenant of Police, the AbbÉ asked: "Do you, sir, demand lettres de cachet of M. Amelot without giving him a reason? Come, as you are both here together, perhaps one of you will be good enough to tell me what is the excuse for my imprisonment." I have condensed this interview from Les Prisons de Paris. It is not likely that ministers and chiefs of police were often faced in this style by prisoners of the Bastille, but it is probable enough that most interviews of the kind ended with the same fruitless inquiry on the part of the prisoner.

It may be inferred from this how much protection was afforded to prisoners by the daily reports of the governor or the major to the minister, who was nominally responsible for the Bastille. These reports, in fact, seem to have been merely a part of the system of espionage which was regularly practised there. The governor writes:

"I have the honour to inform you that the sieur Billard was engaged with the sieur Perrin yesterday, from six to nine in the evening.

"This morning M. de la Monnoye saw and spoke with AbbÉ Grisel a good half-hour.

"M. MoncarrÉ had an interview with his wife in the afternoon, in accordance with your instructions.

"In obedience to your instructions of the 28th of this month, I have handed letters to AbbÉ Grisel and M. Ponce de LÈon.—I am, etc."