Chapter VI: Latude (1)

Few historical figures have taken a higher place in the popular imagination than Masers de Latude. That celebrated prisoner seems to have accumulated in his life of suffering all the wrongs that spring from an arbitrary government. The novelists and playwrights of the nineteenth century have made him a hero; the poets have draped his woes in fine mourning robes, our greatest historians have burnt for him the midnight oil; numerous editions of his _Memoirs_ have appeared in quick succession down to our own days. Even by his contemporaries he was regarded as a martyr, and posterity has not plucked the shining crown of martyrdom from his head, hoary with the snows of long captivity. His legend is the creature of his own unaided brain. When in 1790 he dictated the story of his life, he made greater calls on his glowing southern imagination than on his memory; but the documents relating to his case in the archives of the Bastille have been preserved. At the present time they are to be found dispersed among various libraries, at the Arsenal, at Carnavalet, at St. Petersburg. Thanks to them it is easy to establish the truth.

On March 23, 1725, at Montagnac in Languedoc, a poor girl named Jeanneton Aubrespy gave birth to a male child who was baptized three days later under the name of Jean Henri, given him by his god-parents, Jean Bouhour and Jeanne Boudet. Surname the poor little creature had none, for he was the illegitimate child of a father unknown. Jeanneton, who had just passed her thirtieth year, was of respectable middle-class family, and lived near the Lom gate in a little house which seems to have been her own. Several cousins of hers held commissions in the army. But from the day when she became a mother, her family had no more to do with her, and she fell into want. Happily she was a woman of stout heart, and by her spinning and sewing she supported her boy, who shot up into a lad of keen intelligence and considerable ambition. She succeeded in getting him some sort of education, and we find Jean Henri at the age of seventeen acting as assistant surgeon in the army of Languedoc. Surgeons, it is true, made no great figure in the eighteenth century; they combined the duties of barber and dentist as well as leech. But the situation was good enough. "Assistant surgeons in the army," wrote Saint-Marc the detective, "who really worked at their trade, made a good deal of money." At this time, being reluctant to bear his mother's name, the young man ingeniously transformed his double forename into Jean Danry, under which he is designated in a passport for Alsace, given him on March 25, 1743, by the general commanding the royal forces in Languedoc. In the same year 1743, Danry accompanied the army of Marshal de Noailles in its operations on the Maine and the Rhine, receiving from the Marshal, towards the end of the season, a certificate testifying to his good and faithful service throughout the campaign.

Four years later we find Danry at Brussels, employed in the field-hospital of the army in Flanders, at a salary of 500 livres a month. He was present at the famous siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, the impregnable fortress which the French so valiantly stormed under the command of the Comte de Lowendal. But peace being concluded at Aix-la-Chapelle, the armies were disbanded, and Danry went to Paris. He had in his pocket a letter of recommendation to Descluzeaux, the surgeon of Marshal de Noailles, and a certificate signed by Guignard de La Garde, chief of the commissariat, testifying to the ability and good conduct of "the aforesaid Jean Danry, assistant surgeon." These two certificates formed the most substantial part of his fortune.

Danry arrived in Paris about the end of the year 1748. On any afternoon he might have been seen strolling about the Tuileries in a grey frock and red waistcoat, carrying his twenty-three years with a good grace. Of middle height and somewhat spare figure, wearing his brown hair in a silk net, having keen eyes and an expression of much intelligence, he would probably have been thought a handsome fellow but for the marks which smallpox had indelibly stamped on his face. His accent had a decided Gascon tang, and it is obvious, from the spelling of his letters, not only that he could not boast of a literary education, but that his speech was that of a man of the people. Yet, what with his brisk temperament, his professional skill, and his favour with his superiors, he was in a fair way to attain an honourable position, which would have enabled him at length to support his mother, then living in solitary friendlessness at Montagnac, centring on him, in her forlorn condition, all her affection and her dearest hopes.

Paris, with its gaiety and stir, dazzled the young man. Its brilliant and luxurious life, its rustling silks and laces, set him dreaming. He found the girls of Paris charming creatures, and opened his heart to them without stint, and his purse too; and his heart was more opulent than his purse. Ere long he had spent his modest savings and sunk into want. He fell into bad company. His best friend, an apothecary's assistant named Binguet, shared with him a mean garret in the Cul-de-sac du Coq, in the house of one Charmeleux, who let furnished lodgings. Than these two no greater rakes, wastrels, or thorough-paced rascals could have been found in all Paris. Danry in particular very soon got a name all over his neighbourhood for his riotous, threatening, and choleric temper. Dying of hunger, threatened with being ejected neck-and-crop from his lodging for nonpayment of rent, he was reduced at last to write for money to his mother, who, poor thing, had barely enough for her own modest wants.

As yet we are a long way from the "handsome officer of engineers" who lives in our remembrance: we see little likeness to the brilliant picture which Danry drew later of those youthful years during which he received, "by the care of his father the Marquis de La Tude, the education of a gentleman destined to serve his country and his king."

Having come now absolutely to the end of his resources, Danry took it into his head that, at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, he had been stripped by some soldiers of all his clothes but his shirt, and robbed of 678 livres into the bargain. This story he worked up in a letter addressed to Moreau de Séchelles, commissary of the army in Flanders, hoping to get it corroborated by Guignard de La Garde, the commissary under whom he had himself served. In this letter he demanded compensation for the losses he had suffered while devoting himself under fire to the care of the wounded. But we read, in the _Memoirs_ he wrote later, that so far from having been stripped and robbed, he had actually purchased at Bergen-op-Zoom a considerable quantity of goods of all kinds when they were sold off cheap after the sack of the town. However that may be, his experiment was a failure. But Danry was a man of resource, and not many days had passed before he had hit on another means of raising the wind.

Cover of the explosive box sent by Danry to the Marquise de
Pompadour. The words almost obliterated are: "Je vous prie, Madame,
d'ouvrir le paquet en particulié." Below is the record and the date
of Danry's examination, with his signature, and that of Berryer,
the lieutenant of police.
]

At this time everybody was talking about the struggle between the king's ministers and the Marquise de Pompadour, which had just ended in a triumph for the lady. Maurepas was going into exile, but it was generally believed that he was a man who would wreak vengeance on his enemy, and the favourite herself openly declared that she went in fear of poison. A light dawned on the young surgeon's mind as he heard such gossip as this; he caught a sudden glimpse of himself--even he, the ragged outcast--arrayed in cloth of gold and rolling in his carriage along the Versailles road.

This was his plan. On April 27, 1749, in a shop under the arcade of the Palais-Royal, hard by the grand staircase, he bought of a small tradesman six of those little bottle-shaped toys, once called Prince Rupert's Drops, out of which children used to get so much harmless amusement. They were globules of molten glass, which, on being thrown into cold water, had taken the shape of pears, and which, if the tapering end was suddenly snapped, crumbled with a loud report into dust. Four of these crackers Danry placed in a cardboard box, binding the thin ends together with a thread which he fixed in the lid. Over these he sprinkled some toilet powder, and this he covered with a layer of powdered vitriol and alum. The whole packet he then enclosed in a double wrapper, writing on the inner one, "I beg you, madam, to open the packet in private," and on the outer one, "To Madame the Marquise de Pompadour, at court."

At eight o'clock in the evening of the next day, Danry, having seen his packet safely in the post, hurried off himself to Versailles. He had hoped to gain admittance to the favourite herself, but being stopped by Gourbillon, her principal valet, in a voice trembling with emotion he related to him a frightful story. Happening to be at the Tuileries, he said, he had observed two men seated in animated conversation, and on going close to them heard them mouthing the most horrible threats against Madame de Pompadour. When they rose he dogged their footsteps, which led direct to the post office, where they consigned a packet to the box. Who the men were, and what was the nature of the packet, were natural questions to which Danry had no answer; all he could say was that, devoted to the interests of the Marquise, he had instantly sped off to reveal to her what he had seen.

To understand the impression produced by the young man's information, it is necessary to bear in mind the feverish excitement then prevailing at court. Maurepas, the witty and sprightly minister who had won Louis XV.'s special affection because of the charm with which he endowed mere business for "the man who was always bored"--Maurepas had just been exiled to Bourges. "Pontchartrain," the king sent word to him, "is too near." The struggle between the minister and the favourite had been one of extraordinary violence. Maurepas was for ever dashing off satirical verses on the girl who had reached the steps of the throne, and incessantly pursuing her with the cruel and insolent shafts of his wit; his muse indeed did not shrink from the most brutal insults. Nor was the Marquise a whit more tender towards her foe: she openly dubbed him liar and knave, and assured everybody that he was trying to get her poisoned. A surgeon was actually required to be in constant attendance upon her, and she always had an antidote within reach. At table she was careful never to be the first to partake of any dish, and in her box at the theatre she would drink no lemonade but what had been prepared by her surgeon.

The packet which Danry had posted arrived at Versailles on April 29, and Quesnay, the physician to the king and the Marquise, was requested to open it. Having done so with infinite precaution, he recognized the vitriol and alum and toilet powder, and declared at once that there was not a pennyworth of danger in the whole contrivance. But since alum and vitriol were substances capable of being turned to baneful uses, he thought that possibly it was a case of a criminal design clumsily executed.

There is not a shadow of doubt that Louis XV. and his mistress were seriously alarmed. D'Argenson himself, who had upheld Maurepas against the favourite, had the greatest possible interest in seeing the affair cleared up as soon as possible. The first move was altogether in favour of the informer. D'Argenson wrote to Berryer that Danry was deserving of a reward.

No time was lost in instituting a search for the authors of the plot. The lieutenant of police selected the most skilful and intelligent of his officers, the detective Saint-Marc, who put himself in communication with Danry. But he had not spent two days with the assistant surgeon before he drew up a report demanding his arrest. "It is not unimportant to note that Danry is a surgeon, and his best friend an apothecary. In my opinion it is essential to apprehend both Danry and Binguet without further delay, and without letting either know of the other's arrest, and at the same time to search their rooms."

Accordingly Danry was conveyed to the Bastille on May 1, 1749, and Binguet was secured the same day. Saint-Marc had taken the precaution to ask the assistant surgeon for a written account of his adventure. This document he put into the hands of an expert, who compared the handwriting with the address on the packet sent to Versailles. Danry was lost. Suspicion was but too well confirmed by the results of a search in his room. Being shut up in the Bastille, Danry knew nothing of all these proceedings, and when, on May 2, the lieutenant-general of police came to question him, he replied only with lies.

Berryer, the lieutenant of police, was a man of much firmness, but honourable and kindly disposed. "He inspired one's confidence," wrote Danry himself, "by his urbanity and kindness." This excellent man was vexed at the attitude taken up by the prisoner, and pointing out the danger he was incurring, he besought him to tell the truth. But at a second examination Danry only persisted in his lies. Then all at once he changed his tactics and refused to answer the questions put to him. "Danry, here we do justice to every one," said Berryer to him, to give him courage. But entreaties had no better success than threats. Danry maintained his obstinate silence; and D'Argenson wrote to Berryer: "The thorough elucidation of this affair is too important for you not to follow up any clue which may point towards a solution."

By his falsehoods, and then by his silence, Danry had succeeded in giving the appearance of a mysterious plot to what was really an insignificant piece of knavery.

Not till June 15 did he make up his mind to offer a statement very near the truth, which was written down and sent at once to the king, who read it over several times and kept it in his pocket the whole day--a circumstance which indicates to what importance the affair had now swelled. Suspicions were not dispelled by the declaration of June 15. Danry had misrepresented the truth in his former examinations, and there was reason to believe that he was equally misrepresenting it in the third. Thus he owed his ruin to his silence and his self-contradictory depositions. Six months later, on October 7, 1749, when he was at Vincennes, Dr. Quesnay, who had shown much interest in the young surgeon, was sent to find out from him the name of the individual who had instigated the crime. On his return the doctor wrote to Berryer, "My journey has been utterly useless. I only saw a blockhead, who persisted nevertheless in adhering to his former declarations." Two years more had passed away when the lieutenant of police wrote to Quesnay:--"February 25, 1751. Danry would be very glad if you would pay him a visit, and your compliance might perhaps induce him to lay bare his secret soul, and make a frank confession to you of what up to the present he has obstinately concealed from me."

Quesnay at once repaired to the Bastille, bearing with him a conditional promise of liberty. Working himself up into a frenzy, Danry swore that "all his answers to the lieutenant of police had been strictly true." When the doctor had taken his leave, Danry wrote to the minister: "M. Quesnay, who has been several times to see me in my wretchedness, tells me that your lordship is inclined to believe I had some accomplice in my fault whom I will not reveal, and that it is for this reason your lordship will not give me my liberty. I could wish, my lord, from the bottom of my heart, that your belief were true, for it would be much to my profit to put my guilt upon another, whether for having induced me to commit my sin or for not having prevented me from committing it."

It was the opinion of the ministers that Danry had been the instrument of a plot against the life of the Marquise de Pompadour directed by some person of high rank, and that at the critical moment he had either taken fright, or else had made a clean breast of the matter at Versailles in the hope of reaping some advantage from both sides. These facts must be kept in mind if we are to understand the real cause of his confinement. Kept, then, in the Bastille, he was subjected to several examinations, the reports of which were regularly drawn up and signed by the lieutenant of police. Under the _ancien régime_, this officer was, as we have seen, a regular magistrate, indeed he has no other designation in the documents of the period; he pronounced sentence and awarded punishments in accordance with that body of customs which then, as to-day in England, constituted the law.

Binguet, the apothecary, had been set at liberty immediately after Danry's declaration of June 15. In the Bastille, Danry was treated with the utmost consideration, in accordance with the formal instructions of Berryer. He was provided with books, tobacco, and a pipe; he was permitted to play on the flute; and having declared that a solitary life bored him, he was given two room mates. Every day he was visited by the officers of the fortress, and on May 25 the governor came to tell him of the magistrate's order: "That the utmost attention was to be shown him; if he needed anything he was to be requested to say so, and was to be allowed to want for nothing." No doubt the lieutenant of police hoped, by dint of kindness, to persuade him to disclose the authors of the unfortunate plot which was the figment of his imagination.

Danry did not remain long in the prison of the Suburb Saint-Antoine; on July 28 Saint-Marc transferred him to Vincennes, and we see from the report drawn up by the detective with what astonishment the Marquis du Châtelet, governor of the fortress, heard "that the court had resolved to send him such a fellow." Vincennes, like the Bastille, was reserved for prisoners of good position; our hero was sent there by special favour, as he was told for his consolation by the surgeon who attended him: "Only persons of noble birth or the highest distinction are sent to Vincennes." Danry was indeed treated like a lord. The best apartment was reserved for him, and he was able to enjoy the park, where he walked for two hours every day. At the time of his admission to the Bastille, he was suffering from some sort of indisposition which later on he ascribed to his long confinement. At Vincennes he complained of the same illness, with the same plea that his troubles had made him ill. He was attended by a specialist as well as by the surgeon of the prison.

Meantime the lieutenant came again to see him, reiterating assurances of his protection, and advising him to write direct to Madame de Pompadour. Here is what Danry wrote:--

"VINCENNES, _November 4, 1749_.

"MADAM,--If wretchedness, goaded by famine, has driven me to commit
a fault against your dear person, it was with no design of doing
you any mischief. God is my witness. If the divine mercy would
assure you to-day, on my behalf, how my soul repents of its heinous
fault, and how for 188 days I have done nothing but weep at the
sight of my iron bars, you would have pity on me. Madam, for the
sake of God who is enlightening you, let your just wrath soften at
the spectacle of my repentance, my wretchedness, my tears. One day
God will recompense you for your humanity. You are all-powerful,
Madam; God has given you power with the greatest king on all the
earth, His well-beloved; he is merciful, he is not cruel, he is a
Christian. If the divine power moves your magnanimity to grant me
my freedom, I would rather die, or sustain my life on nothing but
roots, than jeopardize it a second time. I have staked all my hopes
on your Christian charity. Lend a sympathetic ear to my prayer, do
not abandon me to my unhappy fate. I hope in you, Madam, and God
will vouchsafe an abundant answer to my prayers that your dear
person may obtain your heart's desires.

"I have the honour to be, with a repentance worthy of pardon,
Madam, your very humble and very obedient servant,

"DANRY."

A letter which it is a pleasure to quote, for it shows to great advantage beside the letters written later by the prisoner. It was only the truth that he had no evil design on the favourite's life; but soon becoming more audacious, he wrote to Madame de Pompadour saying that if he had addressed the box to her at Versailles, it was out of pure devotion to her, to put her on her guard against the machinations of her enemies, in short, to save her life.

Danry's letter was duly forwarded to the Marquise, but remained without effect. Losing patience, he resolved to win for himself the freedom denied him: on June 15, 1750, he escaped.

* * * * *

In his _Memoirs_ Danry has related the story of this first escape in a manner as lively as imaginative. He really eluded his jailers in the simplest way in the world. Having descended to the garden at the usual hour for his walk, he found there a black spaniel frisking about. The dog happened to rear itself against the gate, and to push it with its paws. The gate fell open. Danry passed out and ran straight ahead, "till, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, he fell to the ground with fatigue, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Denis."

There he remained until nine o'clock in the evening. Then he struck into the road to Paris, passing the night beside the aqueduct near the Saint-Denis gate. At daybreak he entered the city.

We know what importance was attached at court to the safe custody of the prisoner: there was still hope that he would make up his mind to speak of the grave conspiracy of which he held the secret. D'Argenson wrote at once to Berryer: "Nothing is more important or more urgent than to set on foot at once all conceivable means of recapturing the prisoner." Accordingly all the police were engaged in the search; the description of the prisoner was printed, a large number of copies being distributed by Inspector Rulhière among the mounted police.

Danry took up his lodging with one Cocardon, at the sign of the Golden Sun; but he did not venture to remain for more than two days in the same inn. He expected his old chum Binguet to come to his assistance, but Binguet was not going to have anything more to do with the Bastille. It was a pretty girl, Annette Benoist, whom Danry had known when he was lodging with Charmeleux, that devoted herself heart and soul to him. She knew she herself was running the risk of imprisonment, and already strangers of forbidding appearance had come asking at the Golden Sun who she was. Little she cared; she found assistance among her companions: the girls carried Danry's letters and undertook the search for a safe lodging. Meanwhile, Danry went to pass the night under the aqueducts; in the morning he shut himself in the lodging the girls had chosen for him, and there he remained for two days without leaving the house, Annette coming there to keep him company. Unluckily the young man had no money: how was he to pay his score? "What was to be done, what was to become of me?" he said later. "I was sure to be discovered if I showed myself; if I fled I ran no less risk." He wrote to Dr. Quesnay, who had shown him so much kindness at Vincennes; but the police got wind of the letter, and Saint-Marc arrived and seized the fugitive in the inn where he lay concealed. The unlucky wretch was haled back to the Bastille. Annette was arrested at the Golden Sun at the moment when she was asking for Danry's letters; she too was shut up in the Bastille. The warders and sentinels who were on duty at Vincennes on the day of the escape had been thrown into the cells.

By his escape from Vincennes, Danry had doubled the gravity of his offence. The regulations demanded that he should be sent down into the cells reserved for insubordinate prisoners. "M. Berryer came again to lighten my woes; outside the prison he demanded justice and mercy for me, inside he sought to calm my grief, which seemed less poignant when he assured me that he shared it." The lieutenant of police ordered the prisoner to be fed as well as formerly, and to be allowed his books, papers, knick-knacks, and the privilege of the two hours' walk he had enjoyed at Vincennes. In return for these kindnesses, the assistant surgeon sent to the magistrate "a remedy for the gout." He asked at the same time to be allowed to breed little birds, whose chirping and lively movements would divert him. The request was granted. But instead of bearing his lot with patience, Danry grew more and more irritable every day. He gave free rein to his violent temper, raised a hubbub, shrieked, tore up and down his room, so that they came perforce to believe that he was going mad. On the books of the Bastille library, which circulated from room to room, he wrote ribald verses against the Marquise de Pompadour. In this way he prolonged his sojourn in the cells. Gradually his letters changed their tone. "It is a little hard to be left for fourteen months in prison, a whole year of the time, ending to-day, in one cell where I still am."

Then Berryer put him back into a good room, about the end of the year 1751. At the same time he gave him, at the king's expense, a servant to wait on him.

As to Annette Benoist, she had been set at liberty after a fortnight's detention. Danry's servant fell sick; as there was no desire to deprive the prisoner of society, he was given a companion. This was a certain Antoine Allègre, who had been there since May 29, 1750. The circumstances which had led to his imprisonment were almost identical with those to which Danry owed his confinement. Allègre was keeping a school at Marseilles when he learnt that the enemies of the Marquise de Pompadour were seeking to destroy her. He fabricated a story of a conspiracy in which he involved Maurepas, the Archbishop of Albi, and the Bishop of Lodève; he sent a denunciation of this plot to Versailles, and, to give it some semblance of truth, addressed to the favourite's valet a letter in disguised handwriting, beginning with these words: "On the word of a gentleman, there are 100,000 crowns for you if you poison your mistress." He hoped by this means to obtain a good situation, or the success of a business project he had in hand.

Intelligent, with some education, and venturesome, Danry and Allègre were just the men to get on well together, so much the better that the schoolmaster dominated the comrade to whom he was so much superior. The years that Danry spent in company with Allègre exercised so great an influence on his whole life that the lieutenant of police, Lenoir, could say one day: "Danry is the second volume of Allègre." The letters of the latter, a large number of which have been preserved, bear witness to the originality and energy of his mind: their style is fine and fluent, of the purest French; the ideas expressed have distinction and are sometimes remarkable without eccentricity. He worked untiringly, and was at first annoyed at the presence of a companion: "Give me, I beg you, a room to myself," he wrote to Berryer, "even without a fire: I like being alone, I am sufficient for myself, because I can find things to do, and seed to sow for the future." His temperament was naturally mystical, but of that cold and acrid mysticism which we sometimes find in men of science, and mathematicians in particular. For Allègre's principal studies were mathematics, mechanics, and engineering. The lieutenant of police procured for him works on fortification, architecture, mechanics, hydraulics. The prisoner used them to compile essays on the most diverse questions, which he sent to the lieutenant of police in the hope of their procuring his liberation. Those essays which we possess show the extent of his intelligence and his education. Danry followed his example by-and-by, in this as in everything else, but clumsily. Allègre was also very clever with his fingers, and could make, so the officials of the château declared, whatever he pleased.

Allègre was a dangerous man: the warders were afraid of him. Some time after his entrance into the Bastille he fell ill, and a man was set to look after him; the two men did not agree at all. Allègre sent complaint after complaint to the lieutenant of police. An inquiry was made which turned out not unfavourable to the keeper, and he was left with the prisoner. One morning--September 8, 1751--the officers of the Bastille heard cries and clamour in the "Well" tower. Hastily ascending, they found Allègre in the act of stabbing his companion, who lay on the floor held down by the throat, wallowing in the blood that streamed from a gash in the stomach. If Allègre had not been in the Bastille, the Parlement would have had him broken on the wheel in the Place de Grève: the Bastille was his safety, though he could no longer hope for a speedy liberation.

Danry, in his turn, wore out the patience of his guardians. Major Chevalier, who was kindness itself, wrote to the lieutenant of police: "He is no better than Allègre, but though more turbulent and choleric, he is much less to be feared in every respect." The physician of the Bastille, Dr. Boyer, a member of the Academy, wrote likewise: "I have good reason to distrust the man." The temper of Danry became embittered. He began to revile the warders. One morning they were obliged to take from him a knife and other sharp instruments he had concealed. He used the paper they gave him to open communications with other prisoners and with people outside. Paper was withheld: he then wrote with his blood on a handkerchief; he was forbidden by the lieutenant of police to write to him with his blood, so he wrote on tablets made of bread crumbs, which he passed out secretly between two plates.

The use of paper was then restored to him, which did not prevent him from writing to Berryer: "My lord, I am writing to you with my blood on linen, because the officers refuse me ink and paper; it is now more than six times that I have asked in vain to speak to them. What are you about, my lord? Do not drive me to extremities. At least, do not force me to be my own executioner. Send a sentry to break my head for me; that is the very least favour you can do me." Berryer, astonished at this missive, remarked on it to the major, who replied: "I have not refused paper to Danry."

Beginning of a letter written with blood on linen by Danry (Latude)
while a prisoner at Vincennes, to Rougemont, the king's lieutenant.
]

So the prisoner forced them more and more to the conclusion that he was a madman. On October 13, 1753, he wrote to Dr. Quesnay to tell him that he wished him well, but that being too poor to give him anything else, he was making him a present of his body, which was on the point of perishing, for him to make a skeleton of. To the paper on which he wrote, Danry had sewn a little square of cloth, adding: "God has given the garments of martyrs the virtue of healing all manner of diseases. It is now fifty-seven months since I have been suffering an enforced martyrdom. So there is no doubt that to-day the cloth of my coat will work miracles; here is a bit for you." This letter was returned to the lieutenant of police in December, and on it we find a marginal note in Berryer's hand: "A letter worth keeping, as it reveals the prisoner's mind." We know in what fashion madmen were wont to be treated in the eighteenth century.

But suddenly, to the great astonishment of the officers of the château, our two friends amended their character and their conduct. No more noises were heard in their room, and they answered politely anyone who came to speak to them. But their behaviour was even more odd than ever. Allègre used to walk up and down the room half naked, "to save his toggery," he said, and he sent letter after letter to his brother and the lieutenant of police, asking them to send him things, particularly shirts and handkerchiefs. Danry followed suit. "This prisoner," wrote Chevalier to the lieutenant of police, "is asking for linen. I shall not make a requisition, because he has seven very good shirts, four of them new; he has shirts on the brain." But why decline to humour a prisoner's whim? So the commissary of the Bastille had two dozen expensive shirts made--every one cost twenty livres, more than thirty-three shillings of our money--and some handkerchiefs of the finest cambric.

If the wardrobe-keeper of the Bastille had kept her eyes open, she would have noticed that the serviettes and cloths which went into the room of the two companions were of much smaller dimensions when they came out. Our friends had established communication with their neighbours above and below, begging twine and thread from them and giving tobacco in exchange. They had succeeded in loosening the iron bars which prevented climbing up the chimney; at night they used to mount to the platforms, whence they conversed down the chimneys with prisoners in the other towers. One of these hapless creatures believed himself to be a prophet of God; he heard at night the sound of a voice descending upon his cold hearth: he revealed the miracle to the officers, who only considered him still more insane than before. On the terrace Allègre and Danry found the tools left there in the evening by the masons and gardeners employed at the Bastille. Thus they got possession of a mallet, an auger, two sorts of pulleys, and some bits of iron taken from the gun-carriages. All these they concealed in the hollow between the floor of their room and the ceiling of the room below.

Allègre and Danry escaped from the Bastille on the night of February 25, 1756. They climbed up the chimney till they reached the platform, and descended by means of their famous rope ladder, fastened to a gun-carriage. A wall separated the Bastille moat from that of the Arsenal. By the aid of an iron bar they succeeded in working out a large stone, and they escaped through the hole thus made. Their rope ladder was a work of long patience and amazing skill. When in after days Allègre went mad, Danry appropriated the whole credit of this enterprise which his friend had conceived and directed.

At the moment of leaving, Allègre had written on a scrap of paper, for the officers of the Bastille, the following note, which is an excellent indication of his character:--

"We have done no damage to the furniture of the governor, we have only made use of a few rags of coverlets of no possible use; the others are left just as they were. If some serviettes are missing, they will be found at the bottom of the water in the great moat, whither we are taking them to wipe our feet.

"_Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!_

"_Scito cor nostrum et cognosce semitas nostras._"[46]

Our two companions had provided themselves with a portmanteau, and they made haste to change their clothes as soon as they had cleared the precincts of the fortress. A foreman of works whom Danry knew interested himself in them, and conducted them to one Rouit, a tailor, who lodged them for some little time. Rouit even lent Danry forty-eight livres, which he promised to return as soon as he reached Brussels. At the end of a month our two friends were across the frontier.

It is very difficult to follow Danry's proceedings from the time when he left Rouit to the moment of his reincarceration in the Bastille. He has left, it is true, two accounts of his sojourn in Flanders and Holland; but these accounts are themselves inconsistent, and both differ from some original documents which remain to us.

The two fugitives had considered it advisable not to set out together. Allègre was the first to arrive at Brussels, whence he wrote an insolent letter to Madame de Pompadour. This letter led to his discovery. On reaching Brussels, Danry learnt that his friend had been arrested. He lost no time in making for Holland, and at Amsterdam he took service with one Paul Melenteau. From Rotterdam he had written to his mother, and the poor creature, collecting her little savings, sent him 200 livres by post. But Saint-Marc had already struck on the track of the fugitive. "The burgomaster of Amsterdam readily and gladly granted the request made by Saint-Marc on behalf of the king, through the ambassador, for the arrest and extradition of Danry." Louis XV. confined himself to claiming him as one of his subjects. Saint-Marc, disguised as an Armenian merchant, discovered him in his retreat. Danry was arrested in Amsterdam on June 1, 1756, conducted to a cell belonging to the town hall, and thence brought back to France and consigned to the Bastille on June 9. Word came from Holland that Saint-Marc was there regarded as a sorcerer.

By his second escape the unhappy man had succeeded in making his case very serious. In the eighteenth century, escape from a state prison was punishable with death. The English, great apostles of humanity as they were, were no more lenient than the French; and everyone knows what treatment was meted out by Frederick II. to Baron de Trenck. He was to have remained in prison only one year; but after his second escape he was chained up in a gloomy dungeon; at his feet was the grave in which he was to be buried, and on it his name and a death's-head had been cut.

The government of Louis XV. did not punish with such rigour as this. The fugitive was simply put in the cells for a time. At the Bastille the cells were damp and chilly dungeons. Danry has left in his _Memoirs_ an account of the forty months spent in this dismal place,--an account which makes one's hair stand on end; but it is packed full of exaggeration. He says that he spent three years with irons on his hands and feet: in November, 1756, Berryer offered to remove the irons from either hands or feet at his choice, and we see from a marginal note by Major Chevalier that he chose the feet. Danry adds that he lay all through the winter on straw without any coverlet: he was actually so well supplied with coverlets that he applied to Berryer for some others. To believe him you would think that when the Seine was in flood the water rose as high as his waist: as a fact, when the water threatened to invade the cell, the prisoner was removed. Again, he says that he passed there forty months in absolute darkness: the light of his prison was certainly not very brilliant, but it was sufficient to enable him to read and write, and we learn from letters he sent to the lieutenant of police that he saw from his cell all that went on in the courtyard of the Bastille. Finally, he tells us of a variety of diseases he contracted at the time, and cites in this connection the opinion of an oculist who came to attend him. But this very report was forged by Danry himself, and the rest he invented to match.

In this cell, where he professes to have been treated in so barbarous a manner, Danry, however, proved difficult enough to deal with, as we judge from the reports of Chevalier. "Danry has a thoroughly nasty temper; he sends for us at eight o'clock in the morning, and asks us to send warders to the market to buy him fish, saying that he never eats eggs, artichokes, or spinach, and that he insists on eating fish; and when we refuse, he flies into a furious passion." That was on fast days; on ordinary days it was the same. "Danry swore like a trooper, that is, in his usual way, and after the performance said to me: 'Major, when you give me a fowl, at least let it be stuffed!'" He was not one of the vulgar herd, he said, "one of those fellows you send to Bicêtre." And he demanded to be treated in a manner befitting his condition.

It was just the same with regard to clothes. One is amazed at the sight of the lists of things the lieutenant of police got made for him. To give him satisfaction, the administration did not stick at the most unreasonable expense, and it was by selling these clothes that Danry, at his various escapes, procured a part of the money he was so much in need of. He suffered from rheumatism, so they provided him with dressing-gowns lined with rabbit-skin, vests lined with silk plush, gloves and fur hats, and first-rate leather breeches. In his _Memoirs_ Danry lumps all these as "half-rotten rags." Rochebrune, the commissary charged with the prisoners' supplies, was quite unable to satisfy him. "You instructed me," he wrote to the major, "to get a dressing-gown made for the Sieur Danry, who asks for a calamanco with red stripes on a blue ground. I have made inquiries for such stuff of a dozen tradesmen, who have no such thing, and indeed would be precious careful not to have it, for there is no sale for that kind of calamanco. I don't see why I should satisfy the fantastic tastes of a prisoner who ought to be very well pleased at having a dressing-gown that is warm and well-fitting." On another occasion, the major writes: "This man Danry has never up to the present consented to accept the breeches that M. de Rochebrune got made for him, though they are excellent, lined with good leather, with silk garters, and in the best style." And Danry had his own pretty way of complaining. "I beg you," he wrote to the governor, "to have the goodness to tell M. de Sartine in plain terms that the four handkerchiefs he sent me are not fit to give to a galley-slave, and I will not have them on any account; but that I request him kindly to give me six print handkerchiefs, blue, and large, and two muslin cravats." He adds, "If there is no money in the treasury, go and ask Madame de Pompadour for some."

One day Danry declared that something was wrong with his eyes. Grandjean, the king's oculist, came more than once to see him, ordered aromatic fumigations for him, gave him ointments and eye-salve; but it was soon seen that all that was wrong was that Danry desired to get a spy-glass, and to smuggle out, with the doctor's assistance, memoirs and letters.

On September 1, 1759, Danry was removed from the cells and placed in a more airy chamber. He wrote at once to Bertin to thank him, and to tell him that he was sending him two doves. "You delight in doing good, and I shall have no less delight, my lord, if you favour me by accepting this slight mark of my great gratitude.

"Tamerlaine allowed himself to be disarmed by a basket of figs presented to him by the inhabitants of a town he was proceeding to besiege. The Marquise de Pompadour is a Christian lady; I beg you to allow me to send her also a pair: perhaps she will allow her heart to be touched by these two innocent pigeons. I append a copy of the letter which will accompany them:--

"'MADAM,--Two pigeons used to come every day to pick grains out of
my straw; I kept them, and they gave me young ones. I venture to
take the liberty of presenting you with this pair as a mark of my
respect and affection. I beseech you in mercy to be good enough to
accept them, with as much pleasure as I have in offering them to
you. I have the honour to be, with the profoundest respect, Madam,
your very humble and obedient servant,

"'DANRY, for eleven years at the Bastille.'"

Why did not Danry always make so charming a use of the permission accorded him to write to the minister, the lieutenant of police, Madame de Pompadour, Dr. Quesnay, and his mother? He wrote incessantly, and we have letters of his in hundreds, widely differing one from another. Some are suppliant and pathetic: "My body is wasting away every day in tears and blood, I am worn out." He writes to Madame de Pompadour:--"Madam,--I have never wished you anything but well; be then sensible to the voice of tears, of my innocence, and of a poor despairing mother of sixty-six years. Madam, you are well aware of my martyrdom. I beg you in God's name to grant me my precious liberty; I am spent, I am dying, my blood is all on fire by reason of my groaning; twenty times in the night I am obliged to moisten my mouth and nostrils to get my breath." Everyone knows the famous letter beginning with the words, "I have been suffering now for 100,000 hours." He writes to Quesnay: "I present myself to you with a live coal upon my head, indicating my pressing necessity." The images he uses are not always so happy: "Listen," he says to Berryer, "to the voice of the just bowels with which you are arrayed"!

In other letters the prisoner alters his tone; to plaints succeed cries of rage and fury, "he steeps his pen in the gall with which his soul is saturated." He no longer supplicates, he threatens. There is nothing to praise in the style of these epistles: it is incorrect and vulgar, though at times vigorous and coloured with vivid imagery. To the lieutenant of police he writes: "When a man is to be punished in this accursed prison, the air is full of it, the punishments fall quicker than the thunderbolt; but when it is a case of succouring a man who is unfortunate, I see nothing but crabs;" and he addresses to him these lines of Voltaire:--

"Perish those villains born, whose hearts of steel
No touch of ruth for others' woes can feel."

He predicts terrible retribution for the ministers, the magistrates, and Madame de Pompadour. To her he writes: "You will see yourself one day like that owl in the park of Versailles; all the birds cast water upon him to choke him, to drown him; if the king chanced to die, before two hours were past someone would set five or six persons at your heels, and you would yourself pack to the Bastille." The accused by degrees becomes transformed into the accuser; he writes to Sartine: "I am neither a dog nor a criminal, but a man like yourself." And the lieutenant of police, taking pity on him, writes on one of these letters sent to the minister of Paris: "When Danry writes thus, it is not that he is mad, but frantic from long imprisonment." The magistrate counsels the prisoner "to keep out of his letters all bitterness, which can only do him harm." Bertin corrected with his own hand the petitions Danry sent to the Marquise de Pompadour; in the margin of one of them we read, "I should think I was prejudicing him and his interests if I sent on to Madame de Pompadour a letter in which he ventures to reproach her with having _abused his good faith and confidence_." Having amended the letter, the lieutenant of police himself carried it to Versailles.

The years of captivity, far from humbling the prisoner and abasing his pride, only made him the more arrogant; his audacity grew from day to day, and he was not afraid of speaking to the lieutenants of police themselves, who knew his history, about his fortune which had been ruined, his brilliant career which had been cut short, his whole family plunged into despair. At first the magistrate would shrug his shoulders; insensibly he would be won over by these unwavering assertions, by this accent of conviction; and he ends actually by believing in this high birth, this fortune, this genius, in all which Danry had perhaps come to believe himself. Then Danry takes a still higher tone: he claims not only his freedom, but compensation, large sums of money, honours. But one must not think that this sprang from a sordid sentiment unworthy of him: "If I propose compensation, my lord, it is not for the sake of getting money, it is only so that I may smooth away all the obstacles which may delay the end of my long suffering."

In return, he is very ready to give the lieutenant of police some good advice--to indicate the means of advancement in his career, to show him how to set about getting appointed secretary of state, to compose for him the speech he is to make to the king at his first audience. He adds: "This very time is extremely favourable to you; it is the auspicious hour: profit by it. Before they take horse on the day of rejoicing for the conclusion of peace, you ought to be a counsellor of state."

He is very ready also to send to the king schemes conceived in his prison for the welfare of the realm. Now it is a suggestion to give sergeants and officers on the battlefield muskets instead of spontoons and pikes, by which the French arms would be strengthened by 25,000 good fusiliers. Now it is a suggestion for increasing postal facilities, which would augment the resources of the Treasury by several millions every year. He recommends the erection of public granaries in the principal towns, and draws up plans of battle for giving unheard-of strength to a column of men three deep. We might mention other and better suggestions. These notions were drowned in a flood of words, an unimaginable wealth of verbiage, with parallels drawn from the history of all periods and every country. His manuscripts were illustrated with pen and ink sketches. Danry copied and recopied them incessantly, sent them to all and sundry in all sorts of forms, persuaded the sentinels that these lofty conceptions intimately concerned the safety of the state and would win him an immense fortune. Thus he induced these good fellows to compromise their situation by carrying the papers secretly to ministers, members of the Parlement, marshals of France; he threw them from the windows of his room, and, wrapped in snowballs, from the top of the towers. These memoirs are the work of a man whose open and active mind, of incredible activity indeed, plans, constructs, invents without cessation or repose.

Among these bundles of papers we have discovered a very touching letter from the prisoner's mother, Jeanneton Aubrespy, who wrote to her son from Montagnac on June 14, 1759:--