Intercourse by letters was equally shackled, though there was an insulting affectation of a readiness to facilitate correspondence. It has, indeed, been conjectured, that “this apparent indulgence to prisoners was one of the many artifices employed to discover their secrets, and the persons with whom they were connected;” and this supposition may not be far from the truth. There can be no doubt, that of the letters written by captives few arrived at their destination. We have seen, in the narrative of a prisoner, that the whole of those which he wrote were suppressed. M. Linguet tells us, that, knowing the king’s brothers, Monsieur and the Count d’Artois, (afterwards Louis XVIII. and Charles X.) to be favourable to him, he wrote to them, to solicit their intercession. “The letters,” says he, “were sealed. The lieutenant of police, some time after, told me he had read but not transmitted them; that he had not been allowed. When I observed to him that, since he knew the contents, he might make them known to the generous princes from whom he had detained them, he replied, that he had no access to such high personages. Thus the man, who was prohibited from approaching such high personages, had the privilege of breaking open and suppressing their letters, of rendering fruitless their good intentions and those of the monarch, and, in short, of raising round me ramparts more impenetrable than all the magic castles with which imagination has ever peopled our romances.” Profound secrecy and mystery were among the most prominent features in the management of the Bastile. He who was fortunate enough to emerge from this den of Cacus, was previously compelled to swear that he would never reveal whatever he had seen or heard during his abode in it. He who was retained, to waste away life within its dreary limits, was sedulously shut out from all knowledge of what was passing in the world. The malignant enemy, by whom he had been deprived of freedom, might be gone to his last account, but to _him_ he still lived and tyrannized, for no whisper of his departure was suffered to reach him. When the fact of a person being in the Bastile was not so notorious as to preclude the possibility of denying it, his being there was unblushingly denied. When enquiry was made, the officers, the governor, the minister himself, would not scruple to affirm, and that, too, in the most solemn manner, that they knew nothing of any such individual. Thus were his friends discouraged, and led to slacken in their exertions for his relief, or wholly to discontinue them. If, however, they discovered the falsehood, and persisted in their efforts, there was still another resource for defeating them; slander was resorted to, the worst crimes were attributed to him, and he was held up as an abandoned miscreant, whom it was a disgrace to patronize, and mercy to confine. At last, weariness, disgust, or death, robbed him of all who had loved or pitied him, and, even though