I N his own entertaining way, Mr. Andrew Lang has recently been taking the scientific historian to task, and giving him a very admirable lesson on “history as she ought to be wrote.” But though the two professors to whom he mainly addresses himself are Frenchmen, it would be doing an injustice to France to infer that she is the alma mater of the modern dryasdust. The exact contrary is the case: France is rich in historical writers like the Comte d’Haussonville, M. de Maulde la Clavière, M. Gasto

A T the great Exhibition of 1889 I visited, in company with some friends, the reproduction of the Bastille, calculated to give all who saw it—and the whole world must have seen it—an entirely false impression. You had barely cleared the doorway when you saw, in the gloom, an old man enveloped in a long white beard, lying on the “sodden straw” of tradition, rattling his chains and uttering doleful cries. And the guide said to you, not without emotion, “You see here the unfortunate Latude, who rem

“T HE 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

J ULIUS C ÆSAR describes a structure three stories high which his legionaries used rapidly to erect in front of towns they were besieging. Such was the remote origin of the “bastides” or “bastilles,” as these movable fortresses were called in the Middle Ages. Froissart, speaking of a place that was being invested, says that “bastides were stationed on the roads and in the open country” in such a manner that the town could get no food supplies. It was not long before the designation was applied t

H AVING sketched rapidly and with bold strokes the outlines of the history of the Bastille from its foundation to its fall, we intend to show how the rule to which prisoners in the fortress of the Suburb Saint-Antoine were submitted underwent its own process of transformation, parallel with the transformation of the prison itself. To understand the facts which follow, and which are of a kind to astound the mind of everyone in these days, it is necessary to remember what we have already said as t

F OR two centuries no question has excited public opinion more than that of the Man in the Iron Mask. The books written on the subject would fill a library. People despaired of ever lifting the veil. “The story of the Iron Mask,” says Michelet, “will probably remain for ever obscure,” and Henri Martin adds: “History has no right to pronounce judgment on what will never leave the domain of conjecture.” To-day, the doubt no longer exists. The problem is solved. Before disclosing the solution which

S PEAKING of men of letters in France under the ancien régime , Michelet calls them “the martyrs of thought”; he adds: “The world thinks, France speaks. And that is precisely why the Bastille of France, the Bastille of Paris—I would rather say, the prison-house of thought—was, among all bastilles, execrable, infamous, and accursed.” In the course of the article devoted to the Bastille in the Grande Encyclopédie , M. Fernand Bournon writes: “After Louis XIV. and throughout the eighteenth century,

F EW historical figures have taken a higher place in the popular imagination than Masers de Latude. That celebrated prisoner seems to have accumulated in his life of suffering all the wrongs that spring from an arbitrary government. The novelists and playwrights of the nineteenth century have made him a hero; the poets have draped his woes in fine mourning robes, our greatest historians have burnt for him the midnight oil; numerous editions of his Memoirs have appeared in quick succession down t

I N the remarkable book entitled Paris during the Revolution , M. Adolphe Schmidt writes: “All the purely revolutionary events, the events of the Fourteenth of July, of October 5 and 6, 1789, were the work of an obscure minority of reckless and violent revolutionists. If they succeeded, it was only because the great majority of the citizens avoided the scene of operations or were mere passive spectators there, attracted by curiosity, and giving in appearance an enhanced importance to the movemen