Documents throwing any light on the Bastille at the time when the Red Man, as Victor Hugo named Richelieu, was supreme, are however very rare. An advocate, Maton de la Varenne, published in 1786, in his _Revolutions of Paris_, a letter which ostensibly had been written on December 1, 1642, to Richelieu, at that time ill. In it we read: "I, whom you are causing to rot in the Bastille for having disobeyed your commandment, which would have brought upon my soul condemnation to eternal hell, and would have made me appear in eternity with hands stained with blood----" It is impossible to guarantee the authenticity of this document. To us it appears suspicious, the text having been published at a time when many apocryphal documents were produced as coming from the archives of the Bastille. More worthy of arresting our attention is the "return of the prisoners who are in the château of the Bastille," a document of Richelieu's time which M. Bournon discovered in the archives of the Foreign Office. This catalogue, containing fifty-three names, is the oldest list of prisoners of the Bastille known up to the present time. Among the prisoners several are suspected or convicted of evil designs against "Monsieur le cardinal," some are accused of an intention to "complot," that is, to conspire against the throne, or of being spies. There is an "extravagant" priest, a monk who had "opposed Cluni's election," three hermits, three coiners, the Marquis d'Assigny, condemned to death, but whose punishment had been commuted to perpetual imprisonment, a score or so of lords designated as "madmen, vile scoundrels, evil wretches," or accused of some definite crime, theft or murder; finally, those whose name is followed by the simple note, "Queen-mother," or "Monsieur,"[24] whence we may conclude that the clerk had no exact information about the prisoners of the cardinal. We shall give later the list of the prisoners in the Bastille on the day of its capture, July 14, 1789; and the comparison between the two lists at the two periods, the remotest and the most recent that we could select, will be instructive. We have also, to assist us in forming a judgment of the Bastille in Richelieu's time, the memoirs of Bassompierre and of Laporte, which transport us into a state prison, elegant, we might almost say luxurious, reserved for prisoners of birth and breeding, where they lived observing all social usages in their mutual relations, paying and returning calls. But the Bastille preserved its military character for many more years, and among the prisoners we find especially a number of officers punished for breaches of discipline. Prisoners of war were confined there, and foreign personages of high rank arrested by way of reprisal, secret agents and spies employed in France by hostile nations; finally, powerful lords who had incurred the king's displeasure. The court intrigues under Richelieu and Mazarin contributed to the diversion of the Bastille from its original