Dumas' Paris Part 26

"Lauzun had been very near marrying, or did actually marry, the Grande Mademoiselle.

"It is exceedingly imprudent to dare to marry the niece of King Louis XIII., the granddaughter of Henri IV.

"But Latude, poor devil, what had he done?

"He had dared to fall in love with Mlle. Poisson, Dame de Pompadour, the king's mistress.

"He had written a note to her.

"This note, which a respectable woman would have sent back to the man who wrote it, was handed by Madame de Pompadour to M. de Sartines, the lieutenant-general of police."

"To the Bastille!" was the cry upon which Dumas built up his story.

"'To the Bastille!'

"Only that it was a senseless idea, as the soldiers had remarked, that the Bastille could be taken.

"The Bastille had provisions, a garrison, artillery.

"The Bastille had walls, which were fifteen feet thick at their summit, and forty at their base.

"The Bastille had a governor, whose name was De Launay, who had stored thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder in his cellars, and who had sworn, in case of being surprised by a _coup de main_, to blow up the Bastille, and with it half the Faubourg St. Antoine."

Dumas was never more chary of tiresome description than in the opening chapters of this book. Chapter XVI. opens as follows:

"We will not describe the Bastille--it would be useless.

"It lives as an eternal image, both in the memory of the old and in the imagination of the young.

"We shall content ourselves with merely stating, that, seen from the boulevard, it presented, in front of the square then called Place de la Bastille, two twin towers, while its two fronts ran parallel with the banks of the ca.n.a.l which now exists.

"The entrance to the Bastille was defended, in the first place, by a guard-house, then by two lines of sentinels, and besides these by two drawbridges.

"After having pa.s.sed through these several obstacles, you came to the courtyard of the government-house--that is to say, the residence of the governor.

"From this courtyard a gallery led to the ditches of the Bastille.

"At this other entrance, which opened upon the ditches, was a drawbridge, a guard-house, and an iron gate."

Then follow some pages of incident and action, which may be fact or may be fiction. The detail which comes after is picturesque and necessary to the plot:

"The interior court, in which the governor was waiting for Billot, was the courtyard which served as a promenade to the prisoners. It was guarded by eight towers--that is to say, by eight giants. No window opened into it.

Never did the sun shine on its pavement, which was damp and almost muddy.

It might have been thought the bottom of an immense well.

"In this courtyard was a clock, supported by figures representing enchained captives, which measured the hours, from which fell the regular and slow sounds of the minutes as they pa.s.sed by, as in a dungeon the droppings from the ceiling eat into the pavement slabs on which they fall.

"At the bottom of this well, the prisoner, lost amid the abyss of stone, for a moment contemplated its cold nakedness, and soon asked to be allowed to return to his room....

"At the Bastille, all the places were sold to the highest bidder, from that of the governor himself, down to that of the scullion. The governor of the Bastille was a gaoler on a grand scale, an eating-house keeper wearing epaulets, who added to his salary of sixty thousand livres sixty thousand more, which he extorted and plundered....

"M. de Launay, in point of avarice, far surpa.s.sed his predecessors. This might, perhaps, have arisen from his having paid more for the place, and having foreseen that he would not remain in it so long as they did.

"He fed his whole house at the expense of his prisoners. He had reduced the quant.i.ty of firing, and doubled the hire of furniture in each room.

"He had the right of bringing yearly into Paris a hundred pipes of wine, free of duty. He sold his right to a tavern-keeper, who brought in wines of excellent quality. Then, with a tenth part of this duty, he purchased the vinegar with which he supplied his prisoners."

The rest of Dumas' treatment of the fall of the Bastille is of the historical kind. He does not blame De Launay for the fall, but by no means does he make a hero of him.

"A flash of fire, lost in a cloud of smoke, crowned the summit of a tower; a detonation resounded; cries of pain were heard issuing from the closely pressed crowd; the first cannon-shot had been fired from the Bastille; the first blood had been spilled. The battle had commenced....

"On hearing the detonation we have spoken of, the two soldiers who were still watching M. de Launay threw themselves upon him; a third s.n.a.t.c.hed up the match, and then extinguished it by placing his heel upon it.

"De Launay drew the sword which was concealed in his cane, and would have turned it against his own breast, but the soldiers seized it and snapped it in two.

"He then felt that all he could do was to resign himself to the result; he therefore tranquilly awaited it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE]

"The people rush forward; the garrison open their arms to them; and the Bastille is taken by a.s.sault--by main force, without a capitulation.

"The reason for this was that, for more than a hundred years, the royal fortress had not merely imprisoned inert matter within its walls--it had imprisoned thought also. Thought had thrown down the walls of the Bastille, and the people entered by the breach."

The life-history of the Bastille was more extended than was commonly recalled. Still the great incident in its life covered but fifteen short days,--from the 30th June to the 14th July, 1789,--when it fell before the attack of the Revolutionists. There is rather vague markings in the pavement on the Boulevard Henri Quatre and the Rue St. Antoine, which suggest the former limits of this gruesome building.

It were not possible to catalogue all the scenes of action celebrated or perpetuated by Alexandre Dumas.

In his "Crimes Celebres" he--with great definiteness--pictures dark scenes which are known to all readers of history; from that terrible affair of the Cenci, which took place on the terrace of the Chateau de Rocca Petrella, in 1598, to the a.s.sa.s.sination of Kotzebue by Karl Ludwig Sand in 1819.

Not all of these crimes deal with Paris, nor with France.

The most notable was the poisoning affair of the Marquise de Brinvilliers (1676), who was forced to make the "_amende honorable_" after the usual manner, on the Parvis du Notre Dame, that little tree-covered place just before the west facade of the cathedral.

The Chevalier Gaudin de Ste. Croix, captain of the Regiment de Tracy, had been arrested in the name of the king, by process of the "_lettre de cachet_" and forthwith incarcerated in the Bastille, which is once more made use of by Dumas, though in this case, as in many others, it is historic fact as well. The story, which is more or less one of conjugal and filial immorality, as well as political intrigue, shifts its scene once and again to the Cul-de-sac des Marchands des Chevaux, in the Place Maubert, to the Foret de l'Aigue--within four leagues of Compiegne, the Place du Chatelet, the Conciergerie, and the Bastille.

Here, too, Dumas' account of the "question by water," or, rather, the notes on the subject, which accompanied the first (1839) edition of "Les Crimes Celebres," form interesting, if rather horrible, reading.

Not alone in the Bastille was this horrible torture practised, but in most of the prisons of the time.

"_Pour la 'question ordinaire,' quatre coquemars pleins d'eau, et contenant chacun deux pintes et demi, et pour 'la question extraordinaire'

huit de meme grandeur._"

This was poured into the victim through a funnel, which entered the mouth, and sooner or later drowned or stifled him or her, or induced confession.

The final act and end of the unnatural Marquise de Brinvilliers took place at the Place de la Greve, which before and since was the truly celebrated place of many noted crimes, though in this case it was justice that was meted out.

As a sort of sequel to "The Conspirators," Dumas adds "A Postscriptum,"