Tighe Hopkins

“ Some ten months after this carnage, tranquil amid the din of the Terror, lies beautiful Charlotte Corday, in her cell within the Abbaye walls. Her hour has not yet come; she bides it in perfect peace. By-and-bye she will go to the Conciergerie, and thence the next morning to the guillotine. Samson will lift the fair head when he has struck it off, and smite the cheek with his crimson paw, amid universal plaudits. "I have found the sweetest rest here these two days," she writes from prison; "I could not be better off, and my gaolers are the best people in the world." ”

“ At Vincennes he served his apprenticeship in the three branches of his calling—turnkey, torturer, and hangman. Like the callow barber-surgeon of the age, he bled at random, and used the knife at will; and his savage novitiate counted as so much zealous service to the State.
But Vincennes wears a greater colour than the Bastille. It stood to the larger and more famous fortress as the noblesse to the bourgeoisie. Vincennes was the great prison, and the prison of the great. Talent or genius might lodge itself in the Bastille, and often so did, very easily ”

“ Well, indeed, might Fouquier-Tinville have named it the ante-chamber of the guillotine, for two thousand prisoners, drawn from all the other gaols of Paris, went to the scaffold from the Conciergerie. And they died, most of them, as children of a Revolution should die; virgin girls were no longer timid, women were weak no longer, when their turn came to mount the steps of the scaffold. A sense of patriotism so high and pure and penetrating as to resemble the spiritual exaltation and abandonment of the Christian martyrs seemed to extinguish in the frailest breasts the natural fear of death. ”

“ It is a sort of pneumatic machine applied to the brain, which saps and exhausts it by inches. It is not an active irritation, and it is nothing resembling repose. It is not Paris, and it is not a desert solitude. It is a mélange of everything: air, a modicum; elbow-room, rather less; friends, one or two; bores, any number. It is a prison with a mirage of the world; a world not made for a prison. It is not severe, and it is infinitely wearisome. It is a kind of civilised police; it is a prodigious and perpetual paradox.... Sainte-Pélagie is insupportable! ”

“ In the tumbril, on her way to the guillotine, she was robed in white, her superb black hair floating behind her; and at the place of execution, bending her head to the statue of Liberty, she murmured: "O Liberty! what crimes are done in thy name!"—O Liberté! que de crimes on commet en ton nom!
It was not Madame Dubarry's to show this sublime fortitude in death; but after all one dies as one must. Sainte-Pélagie will tell us that poor Dame Dubarry was the feeblest and most faint-hearted of its recluses of the Revolution. ”

“ One amuses oneself at Court, and a State prison-controlled from the Court—is an ideal means of revenging oneself. The tedious machinery of the law is dispensed with. There is no trouble of prosecuting, beating up witnesses, or waiting in suspense for a verdict which may be given for the other side. The lettre de cachet, which a Court historian described as an ideal means of government, and which Mirabeau (in an essay penned in Vincennes itself) tore once for all into shreds, saved a world of tiresome procedure to the King, the King's favourites, and the King's ministers. ”

“ The strain of Dulaure, the historian of Paris, is not less depressing:
"The Conciergerie, the most ancient and the most formidable of all our prisons, which forms a part of the buildings of the Palais de Justice, one time palace of the kings, has preserved to this day the hideous character of the feudal ages. Its towers, its courtyard, and the dim passage by which the prisoners are admitted, have tears in their very aspect. Pity on the wight who, condemned to sojourn there, has not the wherewithal to pay for the hire of a bed! ”

“ The very name of Bicêtre—dungeon, madhouse, and cloaca of obscene infamies—became of dreadful import; not the Conciergerie, the Châtelet, Fort-l'Évêque, Vincennes, nor the Bastille itself inspired the common people and the bourgeoisie with such detestation and panic fear. The general imagination, out-vieing rumour, peopled it with imps, evil genii, sorcerers, and shapeless monsters compounded of men and beasts. Mediæval Paris, at a loss for the origins of things, ascribed them to the Fairies, the Devil, or Julius Cæsar. ”

“ Yes, Vincennes was the State prison, the prison for audacity in high places, for genius that could lead the general mind into paths of danger to the throne. The fetters fashioned there were for a Prince de Condé to wear, a Henri de Navarre, a Maréchal de Montmorency, a Bassompierre or a Cardinal de Retz, a Duc de Longueville or a Prince Charles Edward, a La Môle and a Coconas, a Rantzau or a Prince Casimir, a Fouquet or a Duc de Lauzun, a Louis-Joseph de Vendôme, a Diderot or a Mirabeau, a d'Enghien. ”

“ Slit the curtain of cobweb that has formed over the narrow grille of the dungeon, put back on their shrill hinges the double and triple doors of the cell, peer into the hole that ventilates the conical oubliette, and one may see once more under what conditions life was possible, and amid what surroundings death was a blessing, in the days when Paris was studded with prisons, when every abbot was free to wall-up his monks alive, and every seigneur to erect his gallows in his own courtyard. ”

“ See, then, at length, after the revolution of the 10th of August, Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette prisoners in the prison of the Temple! Marie Antoinette, most imprudent and most amiable, most unfortunate and most calumniated of women; Louis XVI., poor honest gentleman, whose passive intelligence drew from Turgot this prophetic word: "Sire, a weak prince can make choice only between the musket of Charles IX. and the scaffold of Charles I." The King was without force and without prestige; the Queen was incapable either of giving or of receiving a lesson in royalty. ”

“ In La Roquette nowadays no one can admire or contemn him until he shuffles out to meet his fate just beyond the prison door.
The condemned cell is, as in most modern prisons, both in France and England, the most comfortable quarters in the building. There are actually three cachots des Condamnés, as there are two in Newgate, and those in the Paris gaol are better lighted and rather more spacious.
The last scene of all, though it is a public execution, is no longer a feast for the ghouls. Justice is done swiftly, and the crowd sees little more than the preparation in the grey morning hours. ”

“ History, says a French historian, shews itself never at the Bastille but with manacles in one hand and headsman's axe in the other. At Vincennes, ever and anon, it appears in the rustling silks of a king's favourite, who finds within the circle of those cruel walls soft bosky nooks and bowers, for feasting and for love. Sometimes from the bosom of those perfumed solitudes, a death-cry escapes, and the flowers are spotted with blood: Messalina has dispensed with a lettre de cachet. At one epoch it is Isabeau de Bavière, it is Catherine de Médicis at another ”

“ The disgrace of prison, however, depends upon the absolute impartiality of the tribunal and the soundness of public sentiment. Nobody is disgraced by being sent into prison in a society in which arrest is arbitrary, and in which arraignment at the bar is not followed by an honest examination of the facts. Princes of the blood, nobles, ministers, and judges and magistrates themselves were equally liable with the commonest offenders against the common law to be spirited into prison, and left there, without accusation and without trial, during many centuries of French history. ”

“ This was, above all others, the aristocratic prison of the Revolution. It was fitly chosen for the reception of that brilliant contingent of nobles, just ready to fly the country, whom the famous Law of the Suspects had routed from their hôtels in Paris. To confine them in the Luxembourg, converting that ancient and renowned palace into a dungeon of aristocrats, was in itself an apt stroke of vengeance on the part of the people. ”

“ No one ever yet performed such wonders in prison as Masers de Latude. No one accomplished such unheard-of escapes. No one, when retaken, paid with such cruel interest the penalty of his daring. Was the man only a splendid fable, as some latter-day sceptics have suggested? The question has been put, but no one will ever affirm it with authority, and the weight of the evidence seems to lie with Latude the man and not with Latude the legend.
No great distance separated the chamber of Latude from the cachot of the Prévôt de Beaumont. ”

“ For generations and for centuries, absolutism, persecution, party spirit, public and private hate used the lettre de cachet to fill and keep full the cells and dungeons of the Bastille and Vincennes. It was, to be sure, a two-edged weapon, cutting either way. He who used it one day might find it turned against him on another day. But, by whomsoever employed, it was the great weapon of its time; the most effective weapon ever forged by irresponsible authority, and the most unscrupulously availed of. ”

“ As far as the outskirts of Paris, the convicts were carried in chars-à-bancs, an armed escort on either side; and when the prison doors were thrown open to let them out, the whole canaille of the town was waiting to receive them with yells of derision, to which the forçats responded with all the oaths they had. This was one of the most popular spectacles of Paris until the middle of the present century.
An essential sordidness is the character most persistent in the history of Bicêtre—a dull squalor, with perpetual crises of unromantic agony. There is no glamour upon Bicêtre ”

“ They were transferred to the Conciergerie, where their bonds were not too tight; their families kept them in money, and they received and dined their friends.
Desforges, the younger of the pair, seemed willing to accept his fate; but Dessaignes, whose blood was always tingling, ached for liberty. He watched his visitors out of the prison with hungry eyes. After all, the least cruel of prisons is a cage, and the wings will beat against the bars. Who knows what freedom means but the man who hears his lock turned nightly by some other man's hand? ”

“ The position of convicts cast for death in the Newgate of the early years of this century was every jot as cruel.
It was thus under the old order; it is more commendable to-day. The tenant of the condemned cell, withdrawn from the stare of the world, is surrounded by people who have no desire but to soften the few days or weeks that remain to him. He is no longer on view at a price. He has not, like Lacenaire, the privilege of refusing the visits of duchesses, nor the indignity to endure of being exposed at a few francs per head to the indecent gaze of sensation-mongers. ”

“ Since De Rougemont would never, for a hundred chiefs of police, have aided him with materials for this purpose, he tore out of all the books he could lay hands on the fly-leaves and blank spaces, and covered them with his fine close writing. Each completed slip he concealed in the lining of his coat, and in this manner did the tribune compose and preserve his work, every page of which was a prophecy of the coming Revolution. When inspiration lacked for a time, he prostrated himself on the flags of his cell and wept for his absent mistress, or he renewed hostilities with De Rougemont. ”

“ Herculean labours witnessed as their outcome oaks, elms, and beeches growing where the rotten ooze had bred but reeds and osiers. Vast buildings, too, arose as if by magic, with towers and turrets protecting them, drawbridges, battlemented walls, and trenches. The principal tower of the pile enclosed the treasure and arsenal of the Order, and four smaller towers or turrets served as a prison for those who had transgressed the stark monastic rules. On the broad terrace of the Temple three hundred men had space for exercise at cross-bow and halberd. ”

“ It was even so; and the next night the news sped through every corridor of the palace that Danton and his fellows had arrived, and were with the concierge. The prisoners swarmed to the reception room, and gratified their eyes with that unlooked-for spectacle. The brilliant Camille, whose young wife was a prisoner with him, was denouncing the tribunal in a storm of passion; Danton bade him be calm: "When men act with folly," he said, "one should know how to laugh at them." ”

“ Such seems to have been the external routine of life at Vincennes. Beneath the surface was the perpetual tyrannous oppression of the governor and his subordinates on the one side, and on the other a weight of suffering, extended to almost every detail of existence, endured by the great majority of the prisoners; silently even unto death in some instances, but in others not without desperate resistance, long sustained against overwhelming odds.
The recital of Mirabeau's captivity throws into curious relief the inner life of the dungeon. ”

“ Ministers themselves were apt to fall by the weapon of their own employment. A minister of Louis XIV., who had chosen for his proud device the motto, Quò non ascendam?—What place too high for me?—and whom chroniclers have suspected of pretensions to the gallant crown of Mademoiselle de la Vallière, fell one day from a too giddy pinnacle plump into the dungeon of Vincennes. It was Fouquet the magnificent.
Up to a point, Fouquet was the best courtier in France. The King's passion was for pomp and glitter; the minister cultivated a taste for the dazzling. Louis was prodigal to extravagance ”

“ 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. ”