He could not go through his toilet without a looking-glass, he insisted; and in a letter to the governor which must have filled several manuscript pages he exhausted his logic and his sarcasm in enforcing this modest request. He got his mirror in the end, and then renewed his fruitless correspondence with his father, and made an eloquent attempt to move the clemency of the King. "Deign, sire, to save me from my persecutors," he wrote to Louis. "Look with pity on a man twenty-eight years of age, who, buried in full life, sees and feels the slow approach of brutish inertia, despair, and madness, darkening and paralysing the noblest of his years." M. Lenoir himself placed this letter in the King's hands, but nothing came of it for Mirabeau, who continued in the pauses of astonishing literary labours his fight for liberty from behind his prison bars. By clamours and entreaties he succeeded at length in forcing his way through them. ------- Amongst the prisoners of renown of the eighteenth century Latude must not pass unnoticed. His sojourn in and escape from the Bastille have been much more widely bruited than his captivity at Vincennes, where also he did things wonderful and suffered pains and indignities incredible. Needless to say that he gave his guards the slip, and equally needless to add that he was recovered and brought back. His second incarceration was in one of De Rougemont's _cachots_ (De Rougemont always had a _cachot_ available), from, which, on the surgeon's declaration that his life was in danger, he was removed to a more habitable chamber. On his way thither he found and secreted one of those handy tools which fortune seemed always to leave in the path of Latude, and used it to establish a most ingenious means of communication with his fellow-prisoners. No one ever yet performed such wonders in prison as Masers de Latude. No one accomplished such unheard-of escapes. No one, when retaken, paid with such cruel interest the penalty of his daring. Was the man only a splendid fable, as some latter-day sceptics have suggested? The question has been put, but no one will ever affirm it with authority, and the weight of the evidence seems to lie with Latude the man and not with Latude the legend. No great distance separated the chamber of Latude from the _cachot_ of the Prévôt de Beaumont. The Prévôt was a great criminal: he had had the courage to denounce and expose that gigantic State fraud, the _pacte de famine_, in which the De Sartines before named and other persons of consequence were involved. Those were not the days for Prévôts de Beaumont to meddle as critics with criminal ventures of this sort, and the Prévôt had his name written on the customary form. He spent twenty-two years in five of the State prisons of France, and fifteen of them in the dungeon of Vincennes.