“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 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 49 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 this 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, near 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 49 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 man 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 if 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 50 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 in 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, that too toppled over with a crash.
One of the halls of the Bastille contained, in boxes carefully arranged, the entire history of the celebrated fortress from the year 1659, at which date the foundation of this precious store of archives had been begun. There were collected the documents concerning, not only the prisoners of the Bastille, but all the persons who had been lodged there, either under sentence of exile, or simply arrested within the limits of the generality of Paris in virtue of a lettre de cachet.
The documents in this store-room had been in charge of archivists, who throughout the eighteenth century had laboured with zeal and intelligence at putting in order 51 papers which, on the eve of the Revolution, were counted by hundreds of thousands. The whole mass was now in perfect order, classified and docketed. The major of the château, Chevalier, had even been commissioned to make these documents the basis of a history of the prisoners.
The Bastille was taken. In the disorder, what was the fate of the archives? The ransacking of the papers continued for two days, writes Dusaulx, one of the commissioners elected by the Assembly for the preservation of the archives of the Bastille. “When, on Thursday the 16th, my colleagues and myself went down into the sort of cellar where the archives were, we found the boxes in very orderly arrangement on the shelves, but they were already empty. The most important documents had been carried off : the rest were strewn on the floor, scattered about the courtyard, and even in the moats. However, the curious still found some gleanings there.” The testimony of Dusaulx is only too well confirmed. “I went to see the siege of the Bastille,” writes Restif de la Bretonne; “when I arrived it was all over, the place was taken. Infuriated men were throwing papers, documents of great historical value, from the top of the towers into the moats.” Among these papers, some had been burnt, some torn, registers had been torn to shreds and trailed in the mud. The mob had invaded the halls of the château : men of learning and mere curiosity hunters strove eagerly to get possession of as many of these documents as possible, in 52 which they thought they were sure to find startling revelations. “There is talk of the son of a celebrated magistrate,” writes Gabriel Brizard, “who went off with his carriage full of them.” Villenave, then twenty-seven years of age and already a collector, gathered a rich harvest for his study, and Beaumarchais, in the course of a patriotic ramble through the interior of the captured fortress, was careful to get together a certain number of these papers.
The papers purloined from the archives on the day of the captures and the day following became dispersed throughout France and Europe. A large packet came into the hands of Pierre Lubrowski, an attaché in the Russian embassy. Sold in 1805, with his whole collection, to the Emperor Alexander, the papers were deposited in the Hermitage Palace. To-day they are preserved in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg.
Fortunately, the custody of the captured fortress was entrusted on July 15 to the company of arquebusiers, which received orders to prevent the removal of any more papers. On July 16 one of the members present at a sitting of the Electoral Assembly, sprang forward to the table, and cried, “Ah, gentlemen, let us save the papers! It is said that the papers of the Bastille are being plundered; let us hasten to collect the remnants of these old title-deeds of an intolerable despotism, so that we may inspire our latest posterity with their horror!” There was rapturous applause. A committee was nominated, consisting of Dusaulx, De Chamseru, 53 Gorneau, and Cailleau. Let us follow the style of the period : “Before the Bastille the commissioners received a triumphant reception. Amid the cheers of the people, who had been informed of their mission, ten distinguished men of letters besought them to lead the commissioners into the heart of that famous fortress, so long detested.” When they got into the Bastille, the commissioners were not long in perceiving that they were a little behind the fair : “Many boxes were empty, and there was an immense heap of papers in complete disorder.”
The question of the papers of the Bastille grew day by day extraordinarily popular. The Electoral Assembly had just appointed commissioners to collect them; La Fayette, commander of the National Guards, imposed a similar duty on the St. Elizabeth district; Bailly, the mayor of Pairs, delegated Dusaulx to the same office. In the Constituent Assembly, the Comte de Châtenay-Lanty proposed that the municipality of Paris should be instructed to get together the papers found at the Bastille, so that they might be arranged, and that extracts from them might be printed and published, “in order to keep for ever alive in the hearts of Frenchmen, by means of this reading, the detestation of arbitrary orders and the love of liberty”! This book was to be the preface to the constitution. Finally, the district of St. Roch took the initiative in calling upon the electors to restore to the nation the papers carried off from the Bastille by Beaumarchais.
In the sitting of July 24, the Electoral Assembly 54 passed a resolution enjoining such citizens as were in possession of papers from the Bastille to bring them back to the Hôtel de Ville. The appeal was responded to, and the restitutions were numerous.
When the pillage and destruction had been stopped and possession had been regained of a part of the stolen documents, the papers were consigned to three different depositories; but it was not long before they were deposited all together in the convent of St. Louis la Culture. At length, on November 2, 1791, the commune of Paris resolved to have the precious documents placed in the city library. The decision was so much the more happy in that the transfer, while placing the papers under the guardianship of trained men and genuine librarians, did not necessitate removal, since the city library at that date occupied the same quarters as the archives of the Bastille, namely, the convent of St. Louis la Culture.
To the revolutionary period succeeded times of greater calm. The archives of the Bastille, after being the object of so much discussion, and having occupied the Constituent Assembly, the Electoral Assembly, the Paris Commune, the press, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, all Paris, the whole of France, fell into absolute oblivion. They were lost from sight; the very recollection of them was effaced. In 1840, a young librarian named François Ravaisson discovered them in the Arsenal library at the bottom of a veritable dungeon. How had they got stranded there?
55Ameilhon, the city librarian, had been elected on April 22, 1797, the keeper of the Arsenal library. Anxious to enrich the new depository of which he had become the head, he obtained a decree handing over the papers of the Bastille to the Arsenal library. The librarians recoiled in dismay before this invasion of documents, more than 600,000 in number and in the most admired disorder. Then, having put their heads together, they had the papers crammed into a dusty back-room, putting off the sorting of them from day to day. Forty years slipped away. And if it happened that some old antiquary, curious and importunate, asked to be allowed to consult the documents he had heard spoken of in his youth, he was answered — no doubt in perfect good faith — that they did not know what he was talking about.
In 1840 François Ravaisson had to get some repairs done in his kitchen at the Arsenal library. The slabs of the flooring were raised, where there came to view, in the yawning hole, a mass of old papers. It happened by the merest chance that, as he drew a leaf out of the heap, Ravaisson laid his hand on a lettre de cachet. He understood at once that he had just discovered the lost treasure. Fifty years of laborious effort have now restored the order which the victors of the 14th of July and successive removals had destroyed. The archives of the Bastille still constitute, at the present day, an imposing collection, in spite of the gaps made by fire and pillage in 1789, for ever to be regretted. The administration of the Arsenal library has acquired copies of 56 the documents coming from the Bastille which are preserved at St. Petersburg. The archives of the Bastille are now open to inspection by any visitor to the Arsenal library, in rooms specially fitted up for them. Several registers had holes burnt in them on the day of the capture of the Bastille, their binding is scorched black, their leaves are yellow. In the boxes the documents are now numbered, and they are daily consulted by men of letters. The catalogue has been compiled and published recently, through the assiduity of the minister of public instruction.
It is by the light of these documents, of undeniable genuineness and authority, that the black shade which so long brooded over the Bastille has at length been dispelled. The legends have melted away in the clear light of history, as the thick cloak of mist with which night covers the earth is dissipated by the morning sun; and enigmas which mankind, wearied of fruitless investigations, had resigned itself to declare insoluble, have now at last been solved.