Part 27

We descended a narrow stairway, so narrow, in fact, that we went singly, and so low that we were obliged to stoop to avoid hitting our heads. The place was hewn out of the rock on which Warsaw is built, and it was arched over to sustain the weight resting upon it. Reaching the floor of the cellar, we were first led between rows of casks, and the ages of the casks were stated as we walked among them. One was pointed out that had been in the cellar thirty years, and another that had been there two or three times as long. They were covered with dust and cobwebs, and looked as if good for a much longer stay. Over our heads we could hear the rumbling of carriages in the streets, just as one can hear the carriages in exploring the ruins of Herculaneum.

Cask after cask was pointed out, until our eyes were wearied, and we were then taken to the old cellar where the bottles were stored.

Our guide explained that the cellar we had just visited was a modern one, only two hundred and sixty years old. The old cellar, he said, was made in the days when Poland was a kingdom, and more powerful by far than the now great Muscovite empire. I do not remember positively the age he gave it, but I think it was some nine hundred or a thousand years old. I was too busy looking among the bottles to take particular notice of what he said, and am not willing to trust too much to my memory, especially on the occasion of visiting a cellar like this. The real interest of the place began when we entered the locality where the bottles were stored. Here were little shelves—I say little, though many of them were three or four feet wide—covered with bottles, some standing upright, while others were carefully packed away. There was one shelf where the bottles had been lying undisturbed for twenty years; another where they had not been touched for thirty, another for forty, and another for fifty years. Above most of the shelves a date was chiselled into the rock, and the date, as I was told, indicated the time when the wine was bottled and placed there. These chiselled places were, however, comparatively few, as the most common designation was that of a date cut in a small piece of board which rested above the bottles.

[Sidenote: OLD BOTTLES OF WINE.]

In some places the dust of ages had almost obliterated the dates, but our guide seemed to know them all from recollection. I remember one date of 1750, another of 1634, and I believe there was one board dated somewhere about 1590. Shelves were pointed out which were said to contain wine that had not been moved or disturbed in any way for three hundred years. I do not vouch for the truth of the statement, but merely give it as I heard it.

It was interesting to observe how the dust and cobwebs had gathered about the bottles, and also to observe the shapes of the bottles. The more recent shapes were those familiar to all drinkers and friends of drinkers of the present day. Then there were short, thick-set bottles, while others were dumpy and very long in the neck, reminding one of an overfed goose or a camel suffering with the dropsy. Some of the earlier bottles indicated that the art of blowing glass was not well known at the time of their construction, as they were badly shaped, and frequently had deep indentations in their sides. Some of them could be called flasks, rather than bottles, as they had no necks at all, and were round at both ends. All the bottles that I examined were carefully sealed, and I was shown several bottles with long, tapering necks, that had been tightly closed by melting their ends in a flame after the wine had been placed inside, just as the tube of a thermometer is closed after it has been filled with quicksilver or alcohol. In order to get at the wine enclosed in this way, it is necessary to break away the top of the neck.

[Sidenote: ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS A BOTTLE.]

The cellar was perfectly dry, so that no moisture collected anywhere. I may remark, by the way, that a dry cellar is always desirable. There was no moisture, but there was a liberal supply of dust and cobwebs. On bottles that had been in their places only a few years, there would be a slight film or covering of dust. Those that could boast of twenty years, and those that had remained undisturbed a hundred or two hundred years, were covered so thickly that it was almost impossible to distinguish the bottles from the mass which covered them. I saw one shelf—I forget its age—where not a bottle was visible; it seemed to be a mass of cobwebs, and nothing more. To judge from its appearance, I would not have given twenty-five cents for the contents of that shelf; but if I had offered twenty-five hundred dollars, my offer would have been spurned with disdain. I asked the value of the wine on this shelf, and was told that it was twenty guineas a bottle. I did not want any of it at that price, but I presume that there are plenty of men in the world who are ready to pay it.

After we had seen the curiosities of the place, the proprietor insisted that we should make a practical test of his wine. He did not open any of the twenty-guinea stuff, and we could not expect him to, though I secretly hoped he would consider himself sufficiently honored by our presence to do the handsome thing, and break a bottle or two of it just to give us a taste. The best he would do was to open a ten-guinea bottle from another shelf. It is not every day you can smack your lips over wine worth fifty dollars in gold a bottle, and we sipped it very carefully, and allowed it to trickle not too rapidly down our throats. I found it a very agreeable wine; it had a rich and fruity, though rather sweetish taste. I know nothing to which it can be compared, and therefore I will not make any comparison.

[Sidenote: WINE TASTING AND ITS EFFECT.]

The proprietor treated us on the descending scale, for the next bottle he brought us was a five-guinea one. It was only forty or fifty years old, a very juvenile stuff, but we were unable to discover any great difference between it and the other. Two or three kinds of this wine were shown us, and then he brought all sorts of new wines just in the cellar, that is to say, they had only been there some five or ten, or it may be twenty years. Other wines were brought forward for our deglutition; and after a time the thing became a little monotonous, and I suspected that we might get our heads and feet a little tangled. I suggested that we had other business to attend to, and had better not indulge in the wine business any longer; but the proprietor was polite, and was constantly offering us just one more sample.

“Have the gentlemen taste this one,” he would say to the officer who accompanied us, and at the urgent request of the officer we would indulge the proprietor.

The officer repeatedly stated, on presenting the wine, that that would be the last; but somehow there was always something new to be tasted, and something that we could not decline without giving offence. Before we got through, we tasted nearly every wine in the cellar, and finally asked to be let off.

When we reached the foot of the stairway, we found it had shrunken greatly in size. We had descended without difficulty, but now it was necessary to move up edgewise, and I firmly believe, that if we had remained below much longer, the shrinking process would have made the staircase so narrow, and the roof above so low, that we should have been unable to get out, and might have staid there forever. Think of one’s terrible fate in being shut up in a wine cellar to die.

[Sidenote: TURNING AN AMERICAN HEAD.]

My companion wanted to sit down on the foot of the stairs and go to sleep, but I told him it was not a custom in Poland on visiting wine cellars, or, so far as I knew, in any other country. He then asked me to write to his friends, if I succeeded in getting out, and tell them to send money enough to buy out the concern to take it home to America. He would take cellar and all if he had to carry the whole city of Warsaw and the Ex-King of Poland in his trunk. He had a friend at New York who would just like this sort of thing. He would be willing to sell all his interest in the United States if he could only assemble his friends in that cellar, and get them as blind drunk as he was. I saw that he was wandering mentally, although unable to wander much physically, owing to the extreme suppleness of his legs. He began to chide me for taking so much wine, and said I ought to have followed his example, and drank nothing.

The situation became alarming. There was the staircase growing narrower until it resembled a loophole in the wall of a fortress. I was very much inclined to sit down with my friend, and wait until the place grew larger. While thinking what to do, we were roused by the appeal of our officer comrade to taste of another wine, a very superior article from Hungary. We told him politely that we must refuse, intimated that we should feel much better without it, and if he could only plan some way by which we could get out of that cellar and reach our hotel, we should be very much obliged.

He led the way up stairs. We observed that luckily they were large enough for him to ascend without difficulty, and finally we reached the space above. Once there we breathed more easily. We thanked our host for the attention he had shown us; we thanked him by shaking his hand, and keeping our mouths closed. To thank him in English would do no good, as he did not understand our language, and we were a little doubtful of our ability to pronounce our words correctly. I am sorry that my friend made so free with this ancient wine, as it totally incapacitated him from saying a word in Polish or any other language with which he was not familiar.

When we reached the open air we found that our heads became level again, and in a little while the effect of our wine-sampling excursion had passed away. Assuming the dignity of a couple of emperors, we rode to our hotel, took a lunch, and felt better.

All over the world it is a trick of the proprietors of wine cellars to put their visitors through the system of sampling, so that, drink as sparingly as they may,—a teaspoonful at a time only,—they will be very much confused in body and mind before they emerge from the clutches of their entertainers.

[Sidenote: A DANGEROUS BRIDGE.]

In one of the Western States I am acquainted with a wine dealer whose cellar is entered by crossing a narrow bridge over a brook. The bridge is ten or twelve feet long, about three feet wide, and has no railing. I have heard him say that no visitor to his wine vaults ever yet walked that plank on his return from the cellar without tumbling into the brook. From what I have heard of his establishment, I think he is not very far from the truth. Many a visitor to that cellar has received an involuntary plunge bath as he came out into the open air.

XXIV.

THE BASTILLE.

ITS HISTORY AND CONSTRUCTION.—THREE AMERICANS SEARCHING FOR IT.—A FRENCH JOKE AT THEIR EXPENSE.—HOW PRISONERS WERE RECEIVED AND TREATED.—HORRIBLE DUNGEONS.—THE OUBLIETTES.—CRUELTIES OF THE BASTILLE.—THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.—HIS ROMANTIC STORY.—DESTRUCTION OF THE BASTILLE.

One of the most famous dungeons or prisons in the world was the Bastille of Paris.

It was a state prison and citadel of the city, was built in the year 1369, and destroyed by the mob in the beginning of the revolution of 1789, or more than four centuries after its construction.

It is a curious fact that no plan of the Bastille as originally constructed is in existence, neither is there any plan extant of the Bastille as it appeared at the time of its destruction. Somehow the kings of France were averse to giving the public much information about this famous prison of state. They appear to have been satisfied with the knowledge that the place existed, and that those who displeased them could be shut up there, and they never troubled themselves to know the exact plan or model of the concern.

There has been a great deal of exaggeration concerning the Bastille, and many stories have been told about it which had little or no foundation. After all, there was really no need of exaggeration, for the atrocities committed within the walls of the Bastille are quite horrible enough for all practical purposes.

In ordinary life the French are a quiet, harmless people, and they are the last in the world whom you would suspect of atrocities; but every revolution in France has been full of horror, whether in past times or in the present. It has been said that you may take the mildest Frenchman in the world, give him a place of authority where his acts will not be called into question, and the chances are great that he will conduct himself in a very savage manner. I do not assert this of my own knowledge, but leave the reader to judge whether the history of the French prisons and French tyranny does not, in some degree at least, corroborate the statement.

The day after my arrival in Paris, a friend proposed that we should visit the Bastille. We were talking upon some topic, and I had actually stepped inside the carriage with him and given the order to the driver before it occurred to me that the Bastille did not exist, and had not existed for several scores of years. When I remembered this, and told my companion, he said,—

“I came very near selling you. I want to get even on selling myself.”

[Sidenote: SEARCHING FOR THE BASTILLE.]

Then he told me a story of his experience in searching for the Bastille. Bear in mind that he was an editor, familiar with history (editors of course know everything), and if he had given the subject a moment’s thought it would have occurred to him that there was no Bastille in Paris worth mentioning. Let me tell his story as he told it.

“There were three of us who came over in the steamer, landed at Brest, and came to Paris. We arrived here in the evening. We put up at the Grand Hotel, and the next morning started out to ‘do’ the city. The first thing we saw as we stepped out of the hotel door to the Boulevard was an omnibus, on which was the sign ‘_Place de la Bastille_.’ We mounted to the top of this omnibus, and away we rode down the Boulevard.

[Sidenote: VERDANT AMERICANS.]

“By and by we stopped near a large, open square, with a monument in the centre. The conductor motioned us to get off, and said something which we did not understand, but took to mean that this was the end of his route. Moreover, the omnibus turned round, and we understood pretty well that we must get ashore. I was the only one who could speak French, and I couldn’t speak much of it. As we left the omnibus, I said to the conductor, ‘_Monsieur, où est la Bastille?_’

“The conductor stared at us, smiled, and turned away. Then we stepped on the sidewalk and looked around. Close by us was a ‘_Restaurant de la Bastille_,’ and on the corner we could see the sign of ‘_Place de la Bastille_.’ There was a cake shop close by, and that had a sign which indicated that it was the cake shop ‘_de la Bastille_.’

“Then we stopped a well-dressed Frenchman, and said to him, ‘_Monsieur, où est la Bastille?_’ The fellow was too polite to laugh in our faces, as the conductor did, but he said not a word, and walked off. I saw, though, when his back was turned towards us, that he was shaking his sides, and evidently grinning.

“Then we stepped into the restaurant, and I said to a waiter, ‘_Garçon, où est la Bastille?_’ and that infernal waiter laughed in my face. I said to the other boys, ‘These confounded Frenchmen round the Bastille are all fools. I thought Frenchmen were polite, but these fellows have no politeness at all.’ We climbed out of that restaurant, and went out on the square on a Bastille hunt.

“There was no more sign of a prison than there is inside your boot. We walked round that square about ten minutes, when it got into one of our heads,—not into mine though,—that the Bastille had been destroyed in 1789. I had nothing more to say, except that we were the three biggest fools in all Paris. Here we had been hunting round, boring everybody, and asking them to show us a prison which was destroyed eighty years before, as we perfectly well knew, only we did not happen to recollect it. We went back to the Grand Hotel, and the next time we went out sight-seeing we made sure that the thing we inquired for was in existence.”

[Sidenote: DESCRIPTION OF THE BASTILLE.]

The Bastille was an irregular building in shape, as the original construction, in the time of Charles V. had been added to by each successive monarch. It had as its principal feature eight round towers, connected by curtains of masonry, and was encircled by a ditch a hundred and twenty-five feet wide. This ditch was generally dry, and was surrounded on its outside by a wall sixty feet high, to which was attached a wooden gallery running round the whole inner circumference of the ditch opposite the castle. This gallery was called the “Rounds.” Sentinels were stationed on these Rounds, and it was their duty to be perpetually in motion, in order to discover any movement of the prisoners for escaping. The Bastille had a governor and a staff of assistants, and it had a garrison of one hundred men, with their proper officers.

Whenever a prisoner was brought to the Bastille, his trunks and clothing were carefully examined, in order to discover whether he had any concealed papers or weapons. The advocate Linguet, who had been detained there for three years, says,—

“The new comer is as much surprised as alarmed to find himself subjected to a personal examination by four men, whose appearance seems to belie their functions; men clad in uniforms, which leads one to look for a regard to decencies, and wearing decorations which presuppose a service which endures no stain. This man takes from him his money, that he may have no means of corrupting any one of their number, his jewelry on the same consideration, his papers for fear he should find any resource against the tedium to which he is henceforth devoted, and his knives and scissors are taken from him for fear he should commit suicide or assassinate his jailers.”

After this examination he was led to the cell intended for him to occupy. These cells were situated in all the towers. The walls were at least twelve feet in thickness at the top, and at the base they were thirty or forty feet. Each cell had a small window defended by three iron gratings, one within, the second without, and the third in the middle thickness of the masonry.

The bars of this grating were an inch thick. No fire was allowed, and there was no glass in the windows, so that in winter these cells were like ice-houses, and in summer they were hot and damp.

[Sidenote: CHARACTER OF THE DUNGEONS.]

The dungeons were nineteen feet below the level of the court-yard, and five below that of the ditch. They had no openings but a narrow loophole communicating with the ditch. The inhabitant of these dungeons was deprived of air and daylight, and lived in a damp and infected atmosphere. Oftentimes the floor of his cell was covered with mud, and he found himself surrounded by reptiles, rats, and other disagreeable creeping or walking things.

The written history of the Bastille shows that these horrible cells were frequently used for the confinement of prisoners in order to make their existence as terrible as possible. There is a tradition that iron cages were used for the confinement of prisoners, but writers who have given their attention to this subject say that nothing of the sort was discovered at the time the Bastille was destroyed. There is also a tradition in regard to the _Oubliettes_, which are described as holes into which condemned prisoners were lowered, where they should languish and die forgotten. There is also a tradition in regard to a Question Chamber, in which suspected prisoners were tortured to make them confess their guilt, or to reveal the names of their accomplices.

The Bastille could contain fifty state prisoners in solitary cells, and by putting two persons in one cell the number could be raised to a hundred. Sometimes as many as three hundred persons were in the Bastille at once, and in that case they were densely crowded. According to history the prisoners were wretchedly fed, but it should be said, in justice to the government, that this state of affairs was probably due to the frauds of the subordinates rather than to any intended cruelty on the part of the government, as the latter generally made liberal allowances for the support of the prisoners of state. One writer asserts that in his time the governor of the Bastille had a great number of prisoners, many of whom were paid for at twenty-five francs a day, and that their subsistence did not cost as many sous. There was a regular tariff for expenses for the table, lights, and washing of all prisoners, according to their rank. A prince was allowed fifty francs a day, a marshal of France thirty-six francs, a lieutenant general thirty-four francs, and so on down to the inferior prisoners, who were allowed two francs and a half.

[Sidenote: TREATMENT OF PRISONERS.]

A prisoner might be examined at the moment of his arrest, or not until weeks, months, or years afterwards. He had no mode of offering any defence, or of telling his friends where he was, or why he was detained; and sometimes he did not himself know these facts. He was allowed no books or papers; he could not communicate with anybody except by special permission. He could not be visited except on an order from the lieutenant of police, and at such visits all the conversation must be in the presence of an officer of the prison, and no allusion could be made to the cause of detention, the term of imprisonment, or any topic of that sort.

The treatment of prisoners varied greatly. Some, whom it was desired to kill by slow torture, without trial, or even without a hearing, were shut up in the horrible dungeons already described, where they were fed on the worst possible food until death relieved them from their suffering. Others, whom it was not designed to punish or destroy, but simply to detain, enjoyed every comfort, and a great deal of luxury. They had large rooms, fine furniture, excellent and abundant food, plenty of wine, books, and papers, could have their own servants, could be visited by their friends or families; in fact, could do pretty nearly as they pleased, except to go out of the Bastille.