Linguet and Latude, unquestionably, were the two men whose habit of drawing the long bow has done most to propagate the fables about the Bastille, the falsity of which is established by incontrovertible documents. Party spirit has not failed to take seriously the interested calumnies of Linguet, who used his spurious martyrdom to advertise himself, and the lies of Latude, exploiting to good purpose a captivity which he had made his career. Let us leave Linguet, who, after having so earnestly urged the demolition of the Bastille, had reason to regret it at the Conciergerie at the moment of mounting the revolutionary tumbril, and speak a little of the other, this captive who was as ingenious in escaping from prison, when locked up, as in hugging his chains when offered the means of release. For the bulk of mankind, thirty-five years of captivity was the price Latude paid for a mere practical joke: the sending to Madame de Pompadour of a harmless powder that was taken for poison. The punishment is regarded as terrific: I do not wonder at it. But if, instead of relying on the gentleman's own fanfaronades, the reader will take the trouble to look at the biography written by M. Funck-Brentano and amply supported by documents, he will speedily see that if Latude remained in prison for thirty-five years, it was entirely by his own choice; and that his worst enemy, his most implacable persecutor, the author of all his miseries was--himself. If, after the piece of trickery which led to his arrest, he had followed the advice of the excellent Berryer, who counselled patience and promised his speedy liberation, he might have got off with a few months of restraint at Vincennes, where his confinement was so rigorous that he had only to push the garden gate to be free! That was the first folly calculated to injure his cause, for the new fault was more serious than the old. He was caught; he was locked in the cells of the Bastille: but the kind-hearted Berryer soon removed him. Instead of behaving himself quietly, however, our man begins to grow restless, to harangue, to abuse everybody, and on the books lent him to scribble insulting verses on the Pompadour. But they allow him an apartment, then give him a servant, then a companion, Allègre. And then comes the famous escape. One hardly knows which to wonder at the most: the ingenuity of the two rogues, or the guileless management of this prison which allows them to collect undisturbed a gimlet, a saw, a compass, a pulley, fourteen hundred feet of rope, a rope ladder 180 feet long, with 218 wooden rungs; to conceal all these between the floor and the ceiling below, without anyone ever thinking to look there; and, after having cut through a wall four and a half feet thick, to get clear away without firing a shot!