Chapter XXX: The Bastille

When I alighted, the musketeers closed round me. We were under the shadow of an immense dark building, the massive outline of which was broken at intervals by eight round towers. A jagged gateway frowned above the carriage; there was a clanking of iron bars; a horrible jarring of bolts upon the pavement as an iron gate was opened and shut; a swinging of chains and exchange of papers as De Brissac gave my sword to the governor with a malicious and undisguised smile of triumph; and then I found myself in the custody of the Bastille--fairly enclosed within its walls.

The Bastille!

How much of terror had not that name conjured up within me; and now visions of dungeons and of sufferings inconceivable came vaguely before me, as I was requested, with cold politeness, to 'step _this way_,' and mechanically I followed, my heart sinking lower at every step, along passages, vaulted, dark, and strong, on the slimy or cold and whitewashed walls of which the torches of the gaolors flared and gleamed; and a horror came over me, that if I did not reach a pestilential vault at the end of these devious corridors, some secret plank or paving-stone might suddenly sink beneath my feet, and precipitate me, crushed and mangled, into some hideous oubliette or subterranean tributary of the Seine, where, among the festering bones of former victims, mine would rot, unburied and forgotten. I had often heard of such things; and was there aught too horrible to be associated with that edifice?

Bastille meant simply an ancient castle; but that of Paris alone retained the name; though we in some manner adopted it in Scotland by designating our fortified mansions _Bastel-houses_.

The terrible Bastille of Paris, begun by order of Charles V. in 1383 for the defence of the city, was completed by his successor, Charles the Well-beloved; and since then it had been the infernal abode of misery and of tears, dedicated solely to the secret purposes of despotism and tyranny.

As we advanced into the interior of its vast and gloomy keep, I was deeply impressed by the number and complication of low-browed doorways, steep staircases, and narrow corridors by which its enormous walls were perforated; and by the number of huge iron locks, bolts, bars, and chains by which all the entrances were secured. At last we crossed a high and spacious hall, having a roof and floor of stone. In the centre stood a square mass of stone-work, having one little orifice or window, but all cramped and bound together by bars of iron run into the stone with lead. It was one of those terrible cages made by the decrepit tyrant, Louis XI., for the confinement of great state-prisoners--a notable invention of the Cardinal de Baluc, who was the first to experience the comforts of them. The Most Christian King was charmed by the invention, however, and had several made; thus they were styled by the lively French, 'the King's little daughters.' Each had a door of stone--a slab like the lid of a coffin; and none on whom that dreadful door was closed ever came out again--alive, at least. In this vast sepulchral-looking hall the torches flared and gleamed with a red and smoking light.

Rage and hatred began to mingle with my alarm as we passed from thence along a corridor beyond the hall, and I was ushered through a Gothic doorway into an apartment. Then the Captain of the Bastille turned to me, and said--

'M. Blane, this is your chamber and sleeping-place.'

I glanced round me. The room was circular, as it was in one of the towers attached to the keep. Its walls were covered by pale leather stamped over with gilded flowers. It had one long and narrow window, having a pointed arch, well barred without and glazed with stained glass charged with the arms of France, and latticed with brass wire within. The furniture was very plain, but a comfortable fire of wood was blazing on the stone hearth.

'Monsieur's apartment is quite historical,' said the Captain of the Bastille, with a well-bred smile, which to me seemed then a hideous leer; 'it was in this place that the Scottish archer, a Huguenot who was accused of a design to fire the city of Paris, was tortured to death; and here the Comte d'Auvergne, son of Charles IX., was confined until 1616.'

'Confined--how long?'

'About _fifty_ years, I think, monsieur.'

I made no reply, for my tongue seemed cleaving unto the roof of my parched mouth. He bowed and left me; and the clatter of bolts and locks as the door was secured, together with the sound of retiring footsteps, as the Captain and his people withdrew, sank like iron into my soul.

My bed, which was destitute of curtains, stood close by me, and I flung myself upon it, exclaiming with bitterness--

'And this is the reward of my service to a faithless King! Send a fool to France and he will still be a fool--'tis our old Scottish proverb, and truly it applies to me.'

It seemed almost incredible that the events of the last hour, or of the past day, were reality; that within so short a period, I had been graciously received by the King at Versailles, and had delivered those triumphant despatches which filled all Paris with joy; that within an hour, I had been in the gay and brilliant salon of the beautiful Marion de l'Orme, surrounded by the chief wits of Paris; and now, that I was a lonely state prisoner, without an accuser and without a crime; a prisoner, perhaps to remain so in secret during the caprice of the King; to be handed over, as others have been, from gaoler to gaoler, from chatelain to chatelain; for my name a number substituted, until my hair became white, and even my oldest friends had forgotten that I had once lived and mysteriously disappeared from among them!

These thoughts were bitter agony!

I thought of the Countess d'Amboise, and the Marquis de Gordon; but I had no means of communicating with either of them, and thus they would remain probably in ignorance of my situation. Who was my enemy--who were my accusers? I started up and traversed my room to and fro, with impatient strides, until I grew weary, and again seated myself on the bed to watch the embers on the hearth as they flickered, reddened, and died in the uncertain currents of air that came down the huge chimney, the aperture of which was secured by an iron grating; and so the long, long night wore away and the lingering dawn began to brighten over sleeping Paris and the distant country.

I opened the stained-glass casement and looked out. Far down below, beyond the outer rampart of the Bastille, I saw all the chimneys of Paris vomiting smoke; the arsenal of Henry IV., a spacious pile, having three great courts and a portal, the pillars of which were cannon set on end. Beyond lay the Seine and the Isles of St. Louis and the Cité--the Paris of the kings of the first race and of Philip Augustus--rising like a mass of rugged castles, moated round by the river, which was bridged across by the quaint piles of the Pont de Notre Dame and the Pont de la Cité. Nearer still, waved the green trees which covered all the Isle Louviers. A yellow flush spread across the eastern quarter of the sky; above it rolled clouds of murky amber, rendered darker by the morning smoke; and as the sun ascended behind the horizontal stripes of cloud, which his rays turned to bars of seeming gold and fire; he tipped with a rosy gleam the countless quaint façades and features of the city, which spread around me, with all its churches, spires, and glittering vanes; and chief of all, the huge dark double towers of Notre Dame, whose foundations were laid by Charles the Great. The queen of French cathedrals, she rose from a sea of ancient roofs, steep, sharp, and conical; and there, too, yawned the Parvis, a handsome old square, overhung by quaint houses, full of bustling shops, hurrying passengers, and a hundred varying noises. Then, as morning advanced, I heard the bells ringing in all the convents, monasteries, and steeples--St. Landry, St. Pierre aux Boeuf, St. Denis du Pas, St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and all the old churches of Paris as the city awoke, and roused itself to life and business, prayer and sin.

The live-long day, from my lofty perch, I watched far down below the sights and sounds of Paris passing and buzzing round me, until the rattle of fiacres and the clatter of hoofs died away, and the arteries of life that intersected the town became dark and still as night drew on again, and, with a sigh of weariness, I threw myself on my bed, to sigh and pray, and to utter futile imprecations and maledictions on the hour I came to France. My gaoler was a kind but taciturn fellow. He had served a long apprenticeship to chains and groans, and to sighs of unavailing anguish; thus he seldom spoke; yet, when he did, it was only to drop casual hints of the horrors by which I was surrounded, but quite in a common-place way, for the man had scarcely an idea of anything beyond the precincts of the Bastille; and from him I learned that in this living tomb were state prisoners who had been committed to it on no better warrant than a lettre-de-cachet, of which letters any French noble might get a dozen from the premier any forenoon; prisoners who had not seen the blessed light of day for more than forty years; poor creatures whose crimes, if any, had long since been forgotten, even as their names were forgotten by their keepers, and as their existence was forgotten by the world; like the dead of forty years ago; and the whole record of whose mysterious disappearance from life and upper air, if record of it existed at all, might be found in some mouldy portfolio of Richelieu or his predecessors.

Such were the inmates of the Bastille!

One day I beheld a long train of personages on foot pass through the gate of St. Antoine. There were gentlemen guards, grooms, pages, and lacqueys. Six of the former bore a blue-silk canopy over the head of a tall and stately lady, who was also on foot, and carried in her right hand a lighted taper. As she passed along, cries of 'Vive la Reine' reached me.

'What is all this?' I inquired of my keeper, who chanced to be in my apartment.

'It is her Majesty, Madame Anne of Austria, proceeding on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Fiacre, to pray for the health of the King, who is ill, and to return thanks for her own cure.'

'Cure from what?'

'A dangerous issue of blood, which M. Richelieu affirmed to be the malice of sorcerers, and which had baffled her physicians with all their skill.'

'You believe in all this?'

'Parbleu, yes! If M. Seguier, Bishop of Meaux in 1649, and Jean, Comte de Blois, bore testimony to the wonderful cures wrought upon them by praying to St. Fiacre, why should not a poor unlettered fellow such as I?'

'True; this is unanswerable.'

'And we all know, monsieur, that M. Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, began a _novena_ of prayers to implore the divine intercession for the Queen, who was thereafter safely delivered of a boy, who may be Louis XIV. if he lives, yet is as unlike his father as I am.'

'Perhaps you resemble the Cardinal,' said I.

'If court scandal is dangerous in the open air, monsieur, it is much more dangerous in the Bastille,' replied the man, with a hasty glance around him, as he withdrew.

'It is strange,' said I to him on the sixth or seventh day of my captivity, 'that your face seems familiar to me.'

'Perhaps, monsieur,' said he, smiling, 'those who see our faces here, remember them for ever.'

'What is your name?' I asked.

'Martin Omelette.'

'How? any relation to my maitre d'hôtel, Pierre Omelette?'

'Who keeps the Fleur-de-lis, in the Rue d'Ecosse?'

'Yes.'

'I am his brother, M. Blane, and have had the pleasure of seeing you, and M. le Vicomte Dundrennan, and other gentlemen of the Garde du Corps Ecossais, there often.'

'Alas! times are changed with me now, my friend Martin; I am alike poor and unfortunate.'

'Take courage, monsieur; you have been here only seven days.'

'D--n, only seven!'

'We have had prisoners here for seven-and-forty, and yet they have been released at last--released when their minds had sunk to such apathy, however, that they would as readily have remained.'

'Martin, you torture me!'

'We had one for forty-six years in this very room; see, he has scribbled the walls all over with invocations of St. Fiacre, his patron, and the dates will show you an ordinary lifetime spent within this little place.'

'Martin,' said I, in a voice like a sob, 'I should die of this place in one month.'

'So at first they all say who come here; yet they get used to it--even those who are secret prisoners, and who, without date or name, are handed over per list from chatelain to chatelain. Ma foi! we have one in the lowest vaults who is so old that he has worn out a set of fetters, and is supposed to have been put in when M. de Salvaison was captain of the Bastille.'

'In what time did this worthy flourish?'

'In the days of Henry II.--about 1560.'

'Impossible!'

'Seventy-five years ago, monsieur.'

'It is alike horrible and incredible!'

Martin smiled faintly, and whispered,--

'He is supposed to be a kinsman of Anne du Bourg, whom the Cardinal de Lorraine, a fierce and passionate man, hanged and burned in the Place de la Grève; but only supposed, monsieur, since he never speaks now, and we know not his name.'

As if he had said too much, Martin Omelette hastily withdrew, leaving me to torture myself with dark anticipations of the future, and to spell over the prayers with which my hapless predecessor had supplicated the intercession of St. Fiacre. But my mind would recur again and again with stinging poignancy to my present predicament. I thought now of all my futile aspirations after fame; of all I had done at Bitche, at Ingweiler, and La Mothe, in the service of this ungrateful Louis of France, whose wanton war against Duke Charles of Lorraine I saw in all its wickedness. Then I thought of my distant home and the scenes I never more might see; of the green pastoral hills and the woods of Blanerne, that cast their shadows on the Dee, whose waters rush to meet the Solway; of the birchen glen, on the brow of which the towers of old Tungland Abbey raised their gray-worn pinnacles above the waving coppice; of the breezy upland slopes, where the yellow corn ripened on the long golden rigs, where the bonneted ploughboy whistled, nor dreamed there was such a thing as tyranny in the world; where the black crow and the eagle that had their eyry in St. Mark's lovely isle were wheeling aloft, and I panted for freedom and for _home_!

Home! Alas! I had more friends in the grave than in the world; yet their graves were in Scottish earth, and that was all the world to me.

I thought of my unavenged quarrel with the house of Nithsdale; of my slaughtered father, as he lay all 'boltered' in his blood by Lochar Moss; of our ravaged lands and ruined homes, all sunk in smoke and flame, as I had last seen the tower of Blanerne when I, a fugitive, looked back from the green hills of Galloway, and saw the weapons of the Maxwell troopers glitter on my track, as I forded the foaming waters of Urr. Then I thought of the horrors of the Bastille, and dashed my head upon my bed, as I longed--madly longed for liberty!

Louis XIII. I abhorred, but could not petition either him or the Countess d'Amboise, for paper and ink were denied me. How had our petty intrigue--if intrigue it could be called--been discovered?

I remembered the loss of the miniature at Versailles, and the malevolent smile of the jealous De Brissac, and planned a hundred impossible schemes of escape and revenge; and so, amid all these bitter, burning, and impatient thoughts, the second weary week of my captivity wore slowly and monotonously away.