When he had pressed Billot and Pitou in his arms, he turned towards the crowd who had filled his dungeon. Then, as if a moment had sufficed to restore all his self-possession:—
"The day which I had foreseen has then arrived," said he. "Thanks to you, my friends,—thanks to the eternal genius which watches over the liberty of nations!"
And he held out both his hands to the men who had assisted Billot to break down the door, and who, recognizing in him, from the dignity of his demeanor and his proud look, a man of superior genius, hardly dared to touch them.
On leaving the dungeon, he walked before all these men, leaning on Billot's shoulder, and followed by Pitou and his liberators.
The first moment had been devoted by Gilbert to friendship and to gratitude, the second had re—established the distance which existed between the learned doctor and the ignorant farmer, the warm—hearted Pitou, and the whole throng which had liberated him.
When he reached the door at the foot of the staircase Gilbert stopped, on perceiving the broad sunshine which beamed full upon him. He paused, crossing his arms over his breast and raising his eyes to heaven. "Hail to thee, lovely Liberty!" he exclaimed. "I saw thee spring to life in another world, and we are old friends. Hail to thee, lovely Liberty!"
And the smile of the doctor clearly said that the cries he then heard of a whole people, inebriated with independence, were no new thing to him.
Then, meditating for a few seconds:—
"Billot," said he, "the people, then, have vanquished despotism?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you came here to fight?"
"I came to liberate you."
"You knew, then, of my arrest?"
"Your son informed me of it this morning."
"Poor Sebastien! Have you seen him?"
"I have seen him."
"And he remained quietly at his school?"
"I left him struggling with four of the attendants of the infirmary."
"Is he ill—has he been delirious?"
"He wanted to come with us to fight."
"Ah!" ejaculated the doctor, and a smile of triumph passed over his features. His son had proved himself to be what he had hoped.
"And what did you say to him?" inquired the doctor. "I said, since Doctor Gilbert is in the Bastille, let us take the Bastille; and now the Bastille is taken. But that is not all."
"What is there, then, besides?" asked the doctor.
"The casket has been stolen."
"The casket which I had confided to your care?"
"Yes."
"Stolen! and by whom?"
"By some men dressed in black, who came into my house under the pretext of seizing your pamphlets: they arrested me, locked me up in a room; they searched the house all over, found the casket, and carried it off."
"When did this happen?"
"Yesterday."
"Ho! ho! there is an evident connection between my arrest and this robbery. The person who caused my arrest, at the same time had the casket stolen. Let me but know the persons who contrived my arrest, and I shall know who it was contrived the robbery. Where are the archives of the fortress" continued the doctor, turning to the jailer.
"In the courtyard of the government house, sir," replied the jailer.
"Then to the archives, my friends—to the archives!" cried the doctor.
"Sir," said the jailer, stopping him, "let me go with you, or speak a word in my favor to these worthy people, that no harm may happen to me."
"Be it so," said Gilbert.
Then, addressing the crowd who surrounded him, and gazed at him with curiosity mingled with respect:—
"My friends," said he, "I recommend this worthy man to you; he only fulfilled his office in opening and shutting the prison doors; but he was kind towards the prisoners. Let no injury happen to him."
"No, no!" cried the crowd with one accord, "no!—he need not fear; no harm shall be done to him. Let him come with us."
"I thank you, sir," said the jailer to the doctor; "but if you wish for anything in the archives, I advise you to move quickly, for I believe they are burning the papers."
"Oh, then there is not an instant to be lost," cried Gilbert; "to the archives!"
And he hastened towards the courtyard of the government house, followed by the crowd, at the head of which were still Billot and Pitou.
| Go to Contents |
Chapter XIX
The Triangle
ON reaching the door of the office in which the archives were kept, Gilbert perceived that a large heap of old papers was being burnt.
Unhappily, it is a general consequence that after having obtained a victory, the first desire the people have to gratify is that of destruction.
The archives of the Bastille had been invaded.
This office was a vast hall, heaped up with registry books and plans; the documents relating to all the prisoners who had been confined in the Bastille during the last hundred years were confusedly enclosed in it.
The people tore these papers to pieces with senseless rage; it doubtless appeared to them that, by destroying these registrations of imprisonment, they were legally bestowing freedom on the prisoners.
Gilbert went into the hall; seconded by Pitou, he began to examine the register books, which were still standing on the shelves; that of the current year was not to be found.
The doctor, a man who was always so cool and calm, turned pale, and stamped with impatience.
At that moment Pitou caught sight of one of those heroic urchins who are always to be found in popular triumphs, who was carrying off on his head, and running with it towards the fire, a volume similar in shape and binding to that which Dr. Gilbert had been examining.
He ran after him, and, with his long legs, speedily overtook him.
It was the register of the year 1789.
The negotiation did not occupy much time. Pitou was considered as one of the leaders of the conquerors, and explained to the boy that a prisoner had occasion to use that register, and the urchin yielded up his prey to him, consoling himself with the observation,—
"It is all the same to me; I can burn another."
Pitou opened the book, turned over the leaves, hunted through it, and on the last page found the words:—
"This day, the 9th July, 1789, came in the Sieur G., a philosopher and political writer, a very dangerous person; to be kept in close and secret confinement."
He carried the book to the doctor.
"Here, Monsieur Gilbert," said he to him, "is not this what you are seeking for?"
"Oh!" cried the doctor, joyfully, and seizing hold of the book, "yes, that is it."
And he read the words we have given above.
"And now," said he, "let us see from whom the order emanated."
And he examined the margin.
"Necker!" he exclaimed; "the order for my arrest signed by Necker, my friend Necker! Oh, most assuredly there must have been some foul plot!"
"Necker is your friend?" cried the crowd with respect; for it will be remembered that this name had great influence with the people.
"Yes, yes, my friends," said the doctor; "I am convinced that Monsieur Necker did not know that I was in prison. But I will at once go to him."
"Go to him,—and where?" inquired Billot.
"To Versailles, to be sure."
"Monsieur Necker is not at Versailles; Monsieur Necker is exiled."
"And where?"
"At Brussels."
"But his daughter?"
"Ah! I know nothing of her," replied Billot.
"His daughter is at his country-house, at St. Ouen," said a voice from the crowd.
"I am obliged to you," replied Gilbert, not knowing even to whom his thanks were addressed.
Then, turning towards those who were occupied in burning the papers:—
"My friends," he said, "in the name of history, which in these archives would find matter for the condemnation of tyrants, let me conjure you not to purs
ue this work of destruction; demolish the Bastille, stone by stone, that not a vestige, not a trace of it may remain, but respect the papers, respect the registers; the enlightenment of the future is contained in them."
The crowd had scarcely heard these words, than, with its usual admirable intelligence, it duly weighed this reasoning.
"The doctor is right," cried a hundred voices; "no more devastation of these papers. Let us remove all these papers to the Hôtel de Ville."
A fireman who, with a number of his companions, had dragged an engine into the courtyard, on hearing the report that the governor was about to blow up the fortress, directed the pipe of his hose upon the burning pile, which, like to that of Alexandria, was about to destroy the archives of a world; in a few minutes it was extinguished.
"And at whose request were you arrested?" said Billot to Gilbert.
"Ah! that is precisely what I am endeavoring to discover and cannot ascertain,—the name is left in blank."
Then, after a moment's reflection:—
"But I will find it out," said he.
And tearing out the leaf on which the entry was made regarding him, he folded it up, and put it into his pocket. Then, addressing himself to Billot and Pitou:—
"My friends," said he, "let us leave this place; we have nothing further to do here."
"Well, let us go," replied Billot; "only it is a thing more easily said than done."
And in fact the crowd, urged into the interior courtyards by curiosity, were so closely packed that egress was almost impossible. And, to add to the difficulty, the other liberated prisoners were standing close to the principal gate.
Eight prisoners, including Gilbert, had been liberated that morning.
Their names were: Jean Bechade, Bernard Laroche, Jean Lacaurège, Antoine Pujade, De White, Le Comte de Solage, and Tavernier.
The first four inspired but little interest. They were accused of having forged a bill of exchange, without any proof whatsoever being brought against them, and which led to the supposition that the charge against them was false; they had been only two years in the Bastille.
The Count de Solage was a man about thirty years of age, of joyous and expansive temperament; he embraced his liberators, congratulated them upon their victory, which he loudly extolled, and related to them the story of his captivity. He had been arrested in 1782, and imprisoned at Vincennes, his father having obtained a lettre de cachet against him, and was removed from that castle to the Bastille, where he had remained five years, without ever having seen a judge, or having been examined even once; his father had been dead two years, and no one had ever thought of him. If the Bastille had not been taken, it is probable that no one would have ever remembered that he was there.
De White was a man advanced in years, somewhere about sixty; he uttered strangely incoherent words, and with a foreign accent. To the questions which poured in upon him from all sides, he replied that he did not know how long he had been incarcerated, or what had been the cause of his arrest. He remembered that he was the cousin of Monsieur de Sartines, and that was all. One of the turnkeys, whose name was Guyon, said that he had seen Monsieur de Sartines, on one occasion, go into De White's cell, where he made him sign a power of attorney. But the prisoner had completely forgotten the circumstance.
Tavernier was the oldest of them all. He had been shut up for ten years in the Iles Ste. Marguerite; thirty years had he been immured in the Bastille. He was upwards of ninety years old, with white hair and long white beard; his eyes had become dimmed by remaining so long in a dark cell, and he saw everything as through a cloud. When the crowd broke open his door, he could not comprehend what they wanted with him; when they spoke to him of liberty, he shook his head; then afterwards, when they told him that the Bastille was taken:
"Ho! ho!" cried he, " what will Louis XV., Madame de Pompadour, and the Duke de la Vrillière say to all this?"
Tavernier was not even mad, like De White; he had become an idiot.
The joy of these men was frightful to behold, for it cried aloud for vengeance, so much did it resemble terror. Two or three of them seemed almost expiring in the midst of the clamor raised by a hundred thousand voices. Poor men! they who, during the whole time of their confinement in the Bastille, had never heard two human voices speaking at the same moment,—they who were no longer accustomed to any noises but the low and mysterious one of wood, when warping with the damp, that of the spider, when, unperceived, he weaves his net with a ticking similar to that of an invisible pendulum, or of the affrighted rat, which gnaws and flies at the least stir.
At the moment that Gilbert made his appearance, the most enthusiastic among the crowd proposed that the prisoners should be carried in triumph,—a proposal which was unanimously adopted.
Gilbert would have much desired to avoid this species of ovation; but there were no means of escaping it; he had been at once recognized, as well as Billot and Pitou.
Cries of "To the Hôtel de Ville! to the Hôtel de Ville!" resounded on all sides, and Gilbert was raised in an instant on the shoulders of twenty persons.
In vain did the doctor resist, in vain did Billot and Pitou distribute among their victorious brethren the most vigorous fisticuffs; joy and enthusiasm had hardened the skins of the populace. These, and even blows given with pike-handles and the butt-ends of muskets, appeared only gentle caresses to the conquerors, and only served to redouble their delight.
Gilbert was therefore compelled to mount the triumphal car.
This car was formed of a square table, in the middle of which was stuck a lance, to serve as a support to the victor, and enable him to preserve his balance.
The doctor, therefore, was raised above this sea of heads, which undulated from the Bastille to the Arcade St. Jean, a tempestuous sea, whose waves were bearing, in the midst of pikes and bayonets, and arms of every description, of every form, and of every age, the triumphant prisoners.
But at the same time this terrible and irresistible ocean was rolling on another group, so compact and closely formed that it appeared an island. This group was the one which was leading away De Launay as a prisoner.
Around this group arose cries not less tumultuous nor less enthusiastic than those which accompanied the prisoners; but they were not shouts of triumph, they were threats of death.
Gilbert, from his elevated position, did not lose a single detail of this frightful spectacle.
He was the only one among all the prisoners who had been restored to liberty, who was in the enjoyment of all his faculties. Five days of captivity were merely a dark spot in his life. His eyes had not been weakened or rendered dim by his short sojourn in the Bastille.
A combat, generally, does not have the effect of rendering the combatants pitiless excepting during the time that it continues. Men, generally, when issuing from a struggle in which they have risked their lives, without receiving injury, are full of kindly feelings towards their enemies.
But in great popular commotions, such as those of which France has seen so many from the times of the Jacquerie down to our own days, the masses whom fear has withheld from aiding in the fight, whom noise has irritated, the masses, at once ferocious and cowardly, endeavor, after the victory has been gained, to claim their share of the triumph which they had not dared to accelerate. They take their share in the vengeance.
From the moment of his leaving the Bastille, the procession was the commencement of the governor's execution.
Elie, who had taken the governor's life under his own responsibility, marched at the head of the group, protected by his uniform and by the admiration of the people, who had seen him one of the first to advance amid the enemy's fire. He carried his sword above his head, on the point of which was the note which Monsieur de Launay had caused to be handed to the people through one of the loop-holes of the Bastille, and which had been brought by Maillard.
After him came the guard of the royal taxes, holding in his hand the keys of the fortress; then Maillard, bearing the sta
ndard; and after him a young man carrying the regulations of the Bastille on his bayonet,—an odious rescript by means of which so many bitter tears had flowed.
The governor walked next, protected by Hullin and two or three others, but disappeared amid the throng of threatening fists, of waving sabres, and of quivering lances.
By the side of this group, and rolling onward in an almost parallel line with it in the great artery of the Rue St. Antoine, which leads from the Boulevard to the river, another could be distinguished, not less threatening, not less terrible than the first. It was that which was dragging forward Major de Losme, whom we have seen for a moment combating the will of the governor, and who had at length been compelled to bow down his head before the determination which De Launay had taken to defend himself.
Major de Losme was a worthy, brave, and excellent young man. Since he had been in the Bastille he had alleviated the sorrows of many of the prisoners by his kind treatment of them. But the people were ignorant of this. The people, from his brilliant uniform, imagined that he was the governor. Whereas the governor, thanks to his gray coat, on which there was no embroidery whatsoever, and from which he had torn the ribbon of the order of St. Louis, was surrounded as it were by a protecting doubt which could be dispelled by those only who were acquainted with his person.
Such was the spectacle which offered itself to the grieved eyes of Doctor Gilbert. His face, even in the midst of dangers, bore always a calm and observing expression,—a quality which was inherent in his powerful organization.
Hullin, on leaving the Bastille, had called around him his most trusty and devoted friends, the most valiant of the popular soldiers of that day, and four or five had responded to his call, and endeavored to second him in his generous design of protecting the governor. Among them are three men of whom impartial history has consecrated the memory; their names were Arné, Chollat, and De Lépine.
These men, preceded as we have said by Hullin and Maillard, were therefore endeavoring to defend the life of one for whose death a hundred thousand men were clamorously calling.
Ange Pitou (Volume 1) Page 25