The Salt Smugglers (26 page)

« It was now evening. Guided on their way by Corbé, two boys from the prison canteen delivered my dinner.

« This dinner consisted of: — a nicely simmered bowl of pea soup garnished with lettuce; a portion of poultry; a slice of beef; a serving of forcemeat and mutton tongue . . . For dessert there was biscuit cake and pippins . . . Burgundy wine.

— I would certainly be quite happy with prison fare like this, said the abbé de Bucquoy.

— Corbé bowed in my direction and asked: “Will the food be charged to your own account, or is the king footing the bill?”

« Not feeling very hungry after the lunch that I had been offered by the governor, I had asked Corbé to sit down and help me down the dinner; but he replied that he was not hungry and even refused to share a glass of burgundy.

— That's pretty serious! said the abbé de Bucquoy.

A bell sounded, alerting the prisoners that it was time to return to their cells.

« Did you know, said Renneville as they were making their way back from the garden, that this Corbé is quite a
ladies' man
?

— You don't say! What a monster!

— Yes, he's quite the seducer . . . though he is a bit more coercive when it comes to the female prisoners . . . Yesterday we witnessed a rather disagreeable scene in our stairwell. There was a huge ruckus going on in the dungeons at the bottom of the tower. Finally the noise died down . . .

« We saw the turnkey Ru come stumbling up the stairs, his trousers smeared with blood. He said to us: “I have just saved that poor young Irish girl whom M. Corbé wanted to please . . .” The latter had locked her up in solitary confinement because she had refused to accept his visits; and since she was still refusing his attentions, he decided to place her in one of the lower dungeons.

« When they tried to transport her downstairs, she put up so much resistance that they had to drag her all the way, with the result that her head was bouncing up and down on the steps of the stairs ... I ended
up getting all spattered with her blood. She had been dragged out of her bed half-naked . . . and Corbé, who was directing the entire operation, tortured her without mercy.

— Did she die? asked the abbé de Bucquoy.

— She strangled herself that very night. »

The society gathered on the third floor of the tower of the Corner was quite select. It was here that the
favorites of the governor
were lodged. In addition to Renneville and the abbé, their number included: a German gentleman by the name of the baron of Peken, who had been arrested for saying that « the king only sees things through the lenses of Mme de Maintenon »; then a certain de Falourdet, compromised in a case involving the forgery of titles of nobility; then a former soldier called Jacob le Berton, accused of having sung off-color songs in which the name of the king's mistress had been disrespected.

Renneville pitied the latter a great deal for having been locked up for such a minor infraction, and claimed that Mme de Maintenon should have followed the example of Catherine de Medici who, opening her window in the Louvre palace one day, saw a group of soldiers roasting a goose by the banks of the Seine and whiling their time away by singing a song directed against her. She contented herself with yelling out to them: « Why say such bad things about this poor queen Catherine, who has done you no harm whatsoever? After all, it's thanks to her money that you are able to roast this goose! »

The king of Navarre, who was standing by her side, wanted to rush downstairs and immediately punish the rascals, but she said to him: « No, stay put; all this is taking place so far beneath us. »

There was also an Italian abbé by the name of Papasaredo.

When dinner was served, Corbé as was his custom supervised the staff and asked if anybody had any complaints about the service. « I must complain, said the abbé Papasaredo, that we now have too many people in our midst, especially with the recent addition of a second abbé . . . I'd prefer having women! And God knows there are certainly a great number of women available for company here.

— This is completely against the rules, said Corbé.

— Come now, Corbé my man, can't you just lock me up in a cell with one of the female prisoners? »

Corbé shrugged his shoulders.

« Be a sport, you could certainly offer me a Marton or a Fleury or a Bondy or a Dubois, in short, one of your leftovers . . . or why not that pretty Marguerite Filandrier, who sold wigs in the cloister of Sainte-Opportune and whom we hear singing all day long.

— Is this really the way a priest ought to talk? asked Corbé . . . Gentlemen, what do you think? As for the Filandrier girl, we threw her into the hole for having exchanged words with one of the officers of the guard.

— Oh! said the abbé Papasaredo, that was not the real reason . . . You just couldn't bear the thought that she had been chatting up this officer . . . Corbé, your jealousy can render you most cruel!

— Not in the least, retorted Corbé, flattered by this observation. This girl's hobby is raising and training birds. We allowed her to keep a few sparrows here. Her window overlooks the garden. One of her sparrows escapes and is pounced upon by a cat. She cries out to the officer: “Oh! please save my little bird! It's the prettiest one I have, the one who dances the rigadoon!” The officer was gullible enough to run after the cat and didn't even succeed in saving the bird: he has been placed under arrest and she has been thrown into the hole, and that's that. »

Corbé turned on his heels and took his leave, avoiding the sarcasms directed at him by the Italian abbé. He was, moreover, in an excellent mood because one of the inmates had just bribed him with a sapphire ring and because the abbé de Bucquoy, unhappy with his prison rations, had decided to have his dinners delivered from the outside at his own cost. M. de Falourdet commented that after he had similarly decided to pay for his own meals, his treatment had notably improved, even if the price for doing this was very high and the service was miserable: you would pay a livre for champagne and they would deliver you a wine worth six sous, and so on and so forth down the line.

He had therefore said to Corbé: « Listen, I'll pay you twice the price, but I want better provisions. » Corbé had replied: « Right you are, our food suppliers are such scoundrels . . . Let me deal with the choice of wines and victuals myself. »

In fact, from that day on the quality of the fare noticeably improved.

After Corbé had left, the conversation grew more heated; only the baron of Peken sat there sulking in front of his plate, his anger slowly building up and finally exploding in the direction of the turnkey Ru.

« Jesus Christ! said the baron, why am I sitting here looking at a half bottle of wine, whereas the
new fellow
over there has a full one?

— Because, said Ru, you are paying five livres a day for your meals, whereas M. le comte de Bucquoy is paying twice that.

— What! One can't even get a full bottle of wine with one's meal at five livres! shouted the baron. Get that lousy
greasy spoon
of a Corbé back in here and let's ask him if a gentleman can be content with a half-bottle of rotgut! If I ever see that little bottle again, I break it over your head!

— Monsieur le baron, said Ru, please calm down and above all don't request M. Corbé's presence; if he is asked to return, he'll immediately throw you into the hole . . . As you may or may not know, this would be in his interest: all it costs to feed a prisoner in the hole is one sou per day and lodging amounts to nothing because it is the king who pays the bill . . . As for the profits that are being made on our food, one third of them end up in the pockets of M. Corbé and the rest go to M. de Bernaville. »

Ru, as can be seen, was a master of diplomacy and the only thing the inmates reproached him for was the occasional disappearance of certain items of food, most notably those little patés which he absolutely could not resist. — But in general, he was aware that his prison duties resembled those of a clergyman, which tended to keep him on the ecclesiastical up and up.

Renneville and the abbé de Bucquoy declared that
they were not big wine drinkers and offered some of theirs to the baron of Peken, who finished up his dinner without a fuss. Renneville recounted the hardships he had to endure when they had placed him in solitary confinment after he had engaged in a similar outburst. He had come up with an ingenious invention that enabled him to correspond with the prisoners on the floor above and below him.

He had devised an extremely simple sort of alphabet which consisted of a series of raps made with the rod of a chair. One rap for the letter
a
, two for the letter
b
and so on and so forth. His neighbors eventually deciphered his system and responded in kind, except that it took very long. Here, for example, is how the word
Monsieur
was rendered:

M
(12 raps),
o (14), n (13), s (18), i (9), e (5), u (20), r (17).

In this fashion he was able to learn the names of all the prisoners in the same tower, with the exception of a certain abbé who wished to remain anonymous.

In prison all one talks about is prison, or the ways of dealing with its inconveniences. De Falourdet told of how he had managed to establish communication with one of his friends in the prison using a system no less ingenious than the alphabet invented by Renneville. He had been housed in one of the upper rooms of the towers which were called
calottes
and whose only drawback was that they were as boiling hot during the summer as they were glacially cold during the winter; — on the other hand, they offered magnificent views. Before he was separated from his friend, M. de La Baldonnière (who had been thrown into the Bastille for having discovered the secret of making gold and not having wanted to share this secret with the ministers), Falourdet had learned that the latter was going to be transferred to the ground floor of the same tower, which opened out onto a small garden that had been laid out in one of the bastions. Using the quill pen he had manufactured out of a pigeon bone and the ink he had made out of diluted lamp black, he wrote letters which he then threw out his window and which, having been weighted with a small stone, landed at the foot of the tower.

His friend La Baldonnière had in turn trained one of the governor's dogs who was often in the garden to go fetch stray pieces of paper and to bring them back to his window grate. By supplying the dog with scraps from his table, he had transformed the canine into a useful accomplice . . . who would faithfully retrieve the little packages that Falourdet had dropped from the tower above. Their strategem was eventually discovered, however. The correspondence between the two friends was seized and they were both roundly bullwhipped by the prison guards. Falourdet, who was deemed to be the guiltier of the two, was transferred to a dungeon which he shared with a dead man whose corpse lay there for three days before being removed. Later, having been supplied with money, he was able to regain the good graces of the governor.

While he was still living up in the
calotte
, he had also found a means to correspond with his wife who had rented a room in one of the nearby houses of the faubourg Saint-Antoine. He would draw very large letters in charcoal on a plank which he would place inside his window; then, by erasing these letters and replacing them with others, he would be able to convey entire phrases in her direction.

Someone else mentioned that he had come up with a system that was even more efficient: having trained pigeons that he had caught on top of the towers, he would attach letters to their feet which they would then carry to houses on the outside.

Such were the conversations among the prisoners of this tower of the Corner, whose previous inhabitants had included Marie de Mancini, the niece of Mazarin, who had created the
Academy of Humorists
, and later the celebrated Mme Guyon who had only briefly passed through the Bastille but whose confessor, now an eighty-year-old, was still a prisoner during the days when our hero, the abbé de Bucquoy, resided there, unconcerned (unlike his fellow inmates) about finding means of corresponding with the outside. Seeing that his case was making little progress, he was instead contemplating an outright escape from the place. Having thought the matter through, he sought the advice of his fellow inmates who were quick to assure him that the thing was utterly impossible. The abbé's ingenious mind, however, had soon solved the problems that such an escape presented. Falourdet was of the opinion that the plan proposed by the abbé had a good chance of succeeding but that money would be needed to encourage Ru and Corbé to look the other way.

At which point the abbé proceeded to produce, — from where, nobody knew, — a great amount of gold and jewelry: suddenly his plan seemed to become far more feasible. It was decided to rip bed sheets into strips in order to create rope and to use the metal sawhorses supporting the beds and nails from the fireplace to fashion iron hooks.