A man who made more mark was Linguet, whose "Memoirs," containing a bitter indictment of the Bastile, from personal experience, were widely read both in England and France. They were actually written in London, to which he fled after imprisonment, and are now held to be mendacious and untrustworthy. Linguet had led a strangely varied life. He had tried many lines--had been in turn poet, historian, soldier, lawyer, journalist. He wrote parodies for the Opera Comique and pamphlets in favor of the Jesuits. Such a man was certain to find himself in the Bastile. He spent a couple of years there, and the book he subsequently wrote was full of the most extravagant and easily refuted lies. Yet there is reason to believe that his statements did much to inflame the popular mind and increase the fierce hatred of the old prison, which ere long was to lead to its demolition.
The Bastile also received that infamous creature, most justly imprisoned, the Marquis de Sade, whose name has been synonymous with the grossest immorality and is now best known to medical jurisprudence. Beyond doubt he was a lunatic, a man of diseased and deranged mind, who was more properly relegated to Charenton, where he died. He was at large during the Revolutionary period and survived it, but dared to offer some of his most loathsome books to Napoleon, who when First Consul wrote an order with his own hand for the return of the Marquis to Charenton as a dangerous and incurable madman.
One of the last celebrities confined in the Bastile was the Cardinal de Rohan, a grandee of the Church and the holder of many dignities, who was involved in that famous fraud, dear to dramatists and romance writers, the affair of the Diamond Necklace. His confederates, some of whom shared his captivity, were the well known Italian adventurer and arch impostor, who went by the name of Cagliostro, who played upon the credulity of the gullible public in many countries as a latter day magician, and the two women, Madame de La Motte-Valois, who devised the fraud of impersonating the Queen before de Rohan, and Mdlle. d'Oliva, who impersonated her.
We come now to the eventful year 1789, when the waters were closing over the Bastile, and it was to sink under the flood and turmoil of popular passion in the first stormy phase of the French Revolution. Paris was in the throes of agitation and disturbance, the streets filled with thousands of reckless ruffians, who terrorised the capital, breaking into and plundering the shops, the convents, even the royal _Garde-Meuble_, the repository of the Crown jewels; and committing the most violent excesses. A large force of troops was collected in and about Paris, more than sufficient to maintain order had the spirit to do so been present in the leaders or had they been backed up by authority. But the King and his Government were too weak to act with decision, and, as the disorders increased, it was seen that no reliance could be placed upon the French Guards, who were ripe for revolt and determined to fraternise with the people. The people clamored for arms and ammunition, and seized upon a large quantity of powder as it was being removed secretly from Paris. Fifty thousand pikes were turned out in thirty-six hours.