The Salt Smugglers (22 page)

— No, your honor.

— You are a disturber of the peace?

— No, your honor.

— I know that, back at that inn, you claimed your name was de Bucquoy; but if you are indeed the abbé de La Bourlie, also known as the marquis de Guiscard, you can go ahead and admit it, for you will receive the same treatment. He got mixed up in the affairs of the Cévennes; you have compromised yourself with the salt smugglers ... Whoever you are, I shall be obliged to have you escorted to the prison of Sens. »

Archambault de Bucquoy found himself there in the company of some thirty salt smugglers who were being tried by the presidial court of Sens; the circuit judge, who had been sent over from Melun for this case, considered his arrest to have been ill-advised and rather unfounded. Nonetheless, he was already facing several charges.

He had been a military man for five years, then had become what was back in those days called a
petit maître
or man of the world . . . and then « without taking much account of the Christian religion», he embraced the system of belief « claimed by some to be a gentleman's religion », that is, what used to be termed
deism
.

After an adventure whose details remain rather sketchy but which would seem to involve affairs of the heart, the count de Bucquoy threw himself into a religious devotion so fervid that it seemed merely the
impulse of a moment. He joined the order at La Trappe and vowed to observe its law of silence, so difficult to maintain . . . Eventually he grew tired of this discipline, put his military uniform back on, and left the Trappist monastery without so much as a goodbye.

Back on the road, he quarreled with a man who had insulted him and wounded him with his sword. This stroke of bad luck landed him back in the lap of religion. He became convinced that he should shed his earthly garments and exchange them with those of a pauper and it was at this point that, converted to the doctrines of St. Paul, he founded a community or seminary at Rouen which he directed under the name of
Le Mort
, that is, The Dead Man. For him, this name symbolized the forgetting of all of life's sorrows and the desire for eternal rest.

He proved to be extremely eloquent as a teacher, which may well have been the result of his protracted silence among the Trappists. At any rate, hearing of this, the Jesuits wanted to invite him to join their order; but he was afraid that this might too greatly « expose him to society ».

Although some of this previous history may well have caused the officials at Sens to view the abbé de Bucquoy with suspicion, it was his unfortunate luck to have been mistaken for the abbé de La Bourlie, who had been heavily implicated in the Cévennes uprisings.

In addition, the abbé de Bucquoy's position had been further aggravated by the fact that in his carriage there had been found « books dealing extensively with revolutions, a mask, and
a number of caps
», not to mention tablets covered with ciphers.

When asked to justify these items, he managed to explain himself quite well, and his case was beginning
to look up
. But having grown restless during this stay in prison, he took it upon himself to attempt an escape, having persuaded the thirty salt smugglers who were locked up with him
to join forces
, together with a number of other inmates who had been arrested on petty charges in order to impress them into the regiment of the Count de Tonnerre. Back in those days, all along the highways men were being seized by this kind of
levy
in order to supply soldiers for the wars of Louis XIV.

The escape plan was soon discovered and the abbé de Bucquoy was accused of having enticed the daughter of the concierge to aid him in his scheme. At two in the morning they entered his jail cell, clapped his hands and feet into irons
in a very civil fashion
and then
stuffed
him into a
van
, escorted by a dozen constables of the watch.

At Montereau, he invited his escort to dine with him and, even though they were keeping a very close eye on him, he managed to get rid of certain compromising documents. The constables paid no great attention to this detail, but while
bantering
over the dinner table they told him that they dared him to escape.

They put him to bed, chaining one of his feet to the bedpost. They then bedded down in an entryway . . . When he had made sure that they were asleep, the abbé de Bucquoy managed to lift up the canopy of his bed and slipped the chain over the top of the bedpost to which he had been attached. Then he started toward the window, but bumped against the boots of one of the guards, who woke up and started yelling for help.

They chained him up more tightly, put him on the coach from Sens and brought him to the hotel of the
Silver
Key
on the rue de la Mortellerie in Paris. Not being one to bear grudges, he paid for his escorts' supper.

Now under secure guard, he was escorted by two of the constables to the
Fort-l'Évêque
, which was located on the quai now known as quai de la Vallée.

There he remained for eight days without being questioned. He was free, however, to walk around the prison yard, where he reflected on just how one might escape from this place.

Upon arriving, he had noticed that the façade of the Fort-l'Évêque featured a series of grated windows reaching all the way up to the attics and that these grates could easily serve as ladders, except for the spaces formed by the gaps between floors.

After his official questioning, in the course of which he proved that he was not the abbé de La Bourlie but indeed the abbé de Bucquoy, and after having let it be known that « he was nonetheless in a position to rely on the influence of some very prominent personages », they no longer kept him under close watch and he was allowed to roam the corridors of the prison unsupervised.

Since he still had some gold coins on him, the jailer allowed him to go up into the attic area during the evening in order to get the fresh air he said was indispensable to his health. During the day, he passed his time twisting the linen of his bed sheets and towels into ropes and one evening, pretending absent-mindedness, he tricked them into forgetting all about him as he wandered through one of the highest corridors.

It was no great affair to force the attic door and throw the mansard window open. When he cast his eyes down onto the quai de la Vallée (then known as the Vallée de la Misère), he gave a start, frightened at the sight of all these moonlit
branches
covered with spikes and wire entanglements and other obstacles which, he said « created the most fearsome spectacle . . . it was as if one were looking at a forest bristling with spears. »

Nonetheless, in the middle of night, when the sounds of the city had died down and he could no longer hear the patrols passing by, the abbé de Bucquoy cast his ropes over the edge of the roof and, despite all the spikes along the window grates, managed to slide down safely onto the pavement of the quai de la Valléé . . .

We have not gone into all the details of the abbé de Bucquoy's escape from Fort-l'Évêque for fear of interrupting our principal narrative. Once he had come up with his plan of escape, — namely, to slip out through one of the mansard windows in the attic, — he realized that the door that led to the gables had a lock on it. He had no tools on him, so he decided to burn down the door. His keeper had allowed him to cook in his room and had sold him some eggs . . . i.e. charcoal and a tinder box.

It was by means of these that he set fire to the door, wanting simply to burn a hole in it large enough to allow him to squeeze through. But the flames shot up and threatened to set fire to the roof timbers; luckily he was able to find a bucket of water to extinguish them but the smoke nearly asphyxiated him and the fire singed much of his clothing.

We have thought it fitting to mention these details in order to explain what happened to him once he set foot on the quai de la Vallée. As he lowered himself down the rope, the spikes on the window grates and the wire entanglements ripped his already charred clothing to shreds, so that he presented quite a sight to the various shopkeepers who were opening for business at the break of day. But nobody breathed a word, — except for a bunch of street urchins who scampered after him,
pursuing him with hoots
, before a sudden downpour scattered them.

Thanks to the distraction of this rain shower, which also kept the sentries in their boxes, the abbé was able to cross the Pont-Neuf, make his way to the Saint-Eustache quarter, and finally arrive in the neighborhood of the Temple, where he found a tavern that was open.

The sorry state of his clothing, to which he had not yet paid much attention, provoked a certain amount of merriment; he said nothing, paid for his fare, and went looking for a safe hideout. It would not have been a good idea to hole up at the home of his aunt, the dowager countess of Bucquoy, but he remembered that one of his servants'relatives lived at the Enfant-Jésus near the Madelonnets.

The abbé arrived at this woman's house at an early hour, telling her that he had just gotten into town from the provinces and that, while passing through the forest of Bondy, he had been attacked by robbers, — which explained his sorry state. She kept him there all day and cooked him up some food. Toward evening, he sensed she was casting him suspicious glances, which led him to decide to look for a safer hideout . . . He was on good terms with a number of those noble-minded persons who frequented the salon of Ninon de Lenclos, who was over eighty years old at the time and still had her share of lovers, despite what Mme de Sévigné claims in her letters. The great houses of the Marais provided the last remaining asylum for those townspeople and members of Parliament who formed the opposition to the king. A few aristocrats, the last remnants of the Fronde, were occasionally to be seen in these ancient homes whose deserted buildings nostalgically recalled the days when the counselors of the Grande Chambre and of the Hôtel des Tournelles used to stride through the crowds in their red robes, saluted and applauded as if they were the Roman senators of the party of the people.

There was a small establishment on the île Saint-Louis that they called the café Laurent. It was there that the modern
Epicureans
gathered: they hid the dying embers of their simmering but stubborn opposition to the monarchy under an outward display of skepticism and gaiety, just as Harmodius and Aristogiton hid their swords under roses.

Their rapier wit, sharpened to a philosophical point by the reading of Descartes and Gassendi, was something to be reckoned with. This group was kept under strict surveillance but thanks to the protection of several great lords, such as d'Orléans, Conti, and Vendôme, and thanks also to their mastery of wit and gallantry, — which seduced even the police (or easily hoodwinked them), — the
neo-frondeurs
were generally left in peace, even if the court society of the day thought it could sully their reputation by referring to them as a mere clique or
cabal
.

Fontenelle, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, Lafare, Chaulieu were at various points regulars at the café Laurent.
Molière had previously frequented the place; Boileau was too old. The older habitués chatted about Molière and Chapelle and the dinners in Auteuil which had been the center of their first gatherings.

Most of the regulars of the café still remembered the days when the lovely Ninon reigned in her salon on the rue des Tournelles, where she died at the age of eighty-six, leaving a pension of two thousand pounds to the young Arouet, — the future Voltaire, — who had been introduced to her by the abbé de Châteauneuf, the last of her lovers . . .

The abbé de Bucquoy had a number of longstanding friends who were members of the cabal. He waited for them to leave the café and, pretending to be a beggar, approached one of them, drew him aside and explained his predicament . . . This gentleman took him back to his home, outfitted him with new clothes and provided him with a secure hideout, — from which the abbé was able to contact his aunt and receive necessary help. Safely ensconced in his hideout, he addressed several appeals to the Parliament, requesting that his case be dismissed. His aunt in turn petitioned the king himself on his behalf. But no decision was taken in the end, even though the abbé de Bucquoy had agreed to give himself up to one of the prisons of the Conciergerie if he received guarantees that his case would be adjudged in an equitable fashion.

Seeing that all these appeals had come to naught, the abbé de Bucquoy made the decision to leave the kingdom of France. He set off on the road to Champagne, disguised as a traveling salesman. Unfortunately he arrived at La Fère the very moment that a detachment of the allies who had kidnapped M. le Premier saw their path cut off in the vicinity of Ham and were forced to disband. The abbé was suspected of being one of these fugitives and even though he protested that he was a mere salesman, he was deposited in the prison of La Fère pending further instructions from Paris ... His eagle eye, which had previously allowed him to discover an escape route from Fort-l'Évêque, now brought into his view certain piles of stones which offered access to the ramparts of the prison.