But skeletons were necessary! They had found some: they might as well profit by them!
The demolisher of the Bastille, that charlatan Palloy, exhibited them to the veneration of the faithful in a cellar by the light of a funereal lamp, after which they were honoured with a magnificent funeral, with drums, clergy, a procession of working men, between two lines of National Guards, from the Bastille to the Church of St. Paul. And finally, in the graveyard adjoining the church, they raised to them, amid four poplars, a monument of which a contemporary print has preserved the likeness.
After such a ceremony, dispute if you dare the authenticity of the relics!
The memory of the Man in the Iron Mask is so closely bound up with the story of the Bastille that M. Funck-Brentano could not neglect this great enigma about which for two hundred years so much ink has been spilt. He strips off this famous mask-which, by the way, was of velvet-and shows us the face which the world has been so anxious to see: the face of Mattioli, the confidant of the Duke of Mantua and the betrayer of both Louis XIV. and his own master.
M. Funck-Brentano's demonstration is so convincing as to leave no room for doubt. But one dare not hope that the good public will accept his conclusions as final. To the public, mystery is ever more attractive than the truth. There is a want of prestige about Mattioli; while about a twin brother of Louis XIV.-ah, there is something that appeals to the imagination!
And then there are the guides, the showmen, to reckon with-those faithful guardians of legends, whose propaganda is more aggressive than that of scholars. When you reflect that every day, at the Isles of Saint-Marguerite, the masked man's cell is shown to visitors by a good woman who retails all the traditional fables about the luxurious life of the prisoner, his lace, his plate, and the attentions shown him by M. de Saint-Mars, you will agree that a struggle with this daily discourse would be hopeless. And you would not come off with a whole skin!
I was visiting the Château d'If before the new buildings were erected. The show-woman of the place, another worthy dame, pointed out to us the ruined cells of the Abbé Faria and Edmond Dantès.[20] And the spectators were musing on the story as they contemplated the ruins.
"It seems to me," I said, "that these cells are rather near one another, but surely Alexandre Dumas put them a little farther apart!"
"Oh, well!" replied the good creature, withering me with a glance of contempt, "if, when I'm relating gospel truth, the gentleman begins quoting a novelist-!"
To come nearer home. Follow, one of these days, a batch of Cook's tourists at Versailles, shown round by an English cicerone. You will see him point out the window from which Louis XVI. issued, on a flying bridge, to reach his scaffold, erected in the marble court! The guide is no fool. He knows well enough that the Place de la Concorde would not appeal to the imagination of his countrymen; while it is quite natural to them to draw a parallel in their minds between the scaffold of Louis XVI. at Versailles and that of Charles I. at Whitehall.
And the conclusion of the whole matter is this: that whatever may be said or written, nothing will prevail against the popular beliefs that the Bastille was "the hell of living men," and that it was taken by storm. Legends are the history of the people, especially those which flatter their instincts, prejudices, and passions. You will never convince them of their falsity.
M. Funck-Brentano must also expect to be treated as a "reactionary," for such is, to many people, any one who does not unreservedly decry the ancien régime. It had, assuredly, its vices and abuses, which the Revolution swept away-to replace them by others, much more tolerable, to be sure; but that is no reason for slandering the past and painting it blacker than it really was. The fanatical supporters of the Revolution have founded in its honour a sort of cult whose intolerance is often irritating. To hear them you would fancy that before its birth there was nothing but darkness, ignorance, iniquity, and wretchedness! And so we are to give it wholehearted admiration, and palliate its errors and its crimes; even gilding, as Chateaubriand said, the iron of its guillotine. These idolaters of the Revolution are very injudicious. By endeavouring to compel admiration for all that it effected, good and ill without distinction, they provoke the very unreasonable inclination to regard its whole achievement with abhorrence. It could well dispense with such a surplusage of zeal, for it is strong enough to bear the truth; and its work, after all, is great enough to need no justification or glorification by means of legends.
Victorien Sardou.
LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE
Table of Contents CHAPTER I.
THE ARCHIVES.
Table of Contents "THE Bastille," wrote Sainte-Foix, "is a castle which, without being strong, is one of the most formidable in Europe, and about it I shall say nothing." "Silence is safer than speech on that subject," was the saying in Paris.
At the extremity of the Rue Saint-Antoine, as one entered the suburb, appeared the eight lofty towers, sombre, massive, plunging their moss-grown feet into pools of muddy water. Their walls were pierced at intervals with narrow, iron-barred windows: they were crowned with battlements. Situated not far from the Marais, the blithe and wealthy quarter, and quite near to the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where industry raised its perpetual hum, the Bastille, charged with gloom and silence, formed an impressive contrast.
The common impression it made is conveyed by Restif de la Bretonne in his Nights of Paris: "It was a nightmare, that awesome Bastille, on which, as I passed each evening along the Rue Saint-Gilles, I never dared to turn my eyes."
The towers had an air of mystery, harsh and melancholy, and the royal government threw mystery like a cloud around them. At nightfall, when the shutters were closed, a cab would cross the drawbridge, and from time to time, in the blackness of night, funeral processions, vague shadows which the light of a torch set flickering on the walls, would make their silent exit. How many of those who had entered there had ever been seen again? And if perchance one met a former prisoner, to the first question he would reply that on leaving he had signed a promise to reveal nothing of what he had seen. This former prisoner had, as a matter of fact, never seen anything to speak of. Absolute silence was imposed upon the warders. "There is no exchanging of confidences in this place," writes Madame de Staal, "and the people you come across have all such freezing physiognomies that you would think twice before asking the most trifling question." "The first article of their code," says Linguet, "is the impenetrable mystery which envelops all their operations."
We know how legends are formed. Sometimes you see them open out like flowers brilliant under the sun's bright beams, you see them blossom under the glorious radiance that lights up the life of heroes. The man himself has long gone down into the tomb; the legend survives; it streams across the ages, like a meteor leaving its trail of light; it grows, broadens out, with ever-increasing lustre and glow: in this light we see Themistocles, Leonidas, Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon.
Or may be, on the contrary, the legend is born in some remote corner, covered with shade and silence. There men have lived their lives, there it has been their lot to suffer. Their moans have risen in solitude and confinement, and the only ears that heard them were harder than their stone walls. These moans, heard by no compassionate soul, the great resounding soul of the people catches up, swelling them with all its might. Soon, among the mass of the people, there passes a blast irresistible in its strength, like the tempest that upheaves the restless waves. Then is the sea loosed from its chains: the tumultuous breakers dash upon the affrighted shore: the sea-walls are all swept away!
In a letter written by Chevalier, the major of the Bastille, to Sartine, the chief of the police, he spoke of the common gossip on the Bastille that was going about. "Although utterly false," he said, "I think it very dangerous on account of its dissemination through the kingdom, and that has now been going on for several years." No attention was paid to Chevalier's warning. Mystery continued to be the rule at the Bastille and in all that related to it. "The mildness of manners and of the government," writes La Harpe, "had caused needlessly harsh measures in great part to disappear. They lived on in the imagination of the people, augmented and strengthened by the tales which credulity and hate seize upon." Ere long the Memoirs of Latude and of Linguet appeared. Latude concealed his grievous faults, to paint his long sufferings in strokes of fire. Linguet, with his rare literary talent, made of the Bastille a picture dark in the extreme, compressing the gist of his pamphlet into the sentence: "Except perhaps in hell, there are no tortures to approach those of the Bastille." At the same period, the great Mirabeau was launching his powerful plea against lettres de cachet, "arbitrary orders." These books produced a mighty reverberation. The Revolution broke out like a clap of thunder. The Bastille was disembowelled. The frowning towers crumbled stone by stone under the picks of the demolishers, and, as if they had been the pedestal of the ancien régime,...
