Publisher's Synopsis
AT the great Exhibition of 1889 I visited, in company with some friends, the reproduction of the Bastille, calculated to give all who saw it-and the whole world must have seen it-an entirely false impression. You had barely cleared the doorway when you saw, in the gloom, an old man enveloped in a long white beard, lying on the "sodden straw" of tradition, rattling his chains and uttering doleful cries. And the guide said to you, not without emotion, "You see here the unfortunate Latude, who remained in this position, with both arms thus chained behind his back, for thirty-five years!" This information I completed by adding in the same tone: "And it was in this attitude that he so cleverly constructed the ladder, a hundred and eighty feet long, which enabled him to escape." The company looked at me with surprise, the guide with a scowl, and I slipped away. The same considerations that prompted my intervention have suggested to M. Funck-Brentano this work on the Bastille, in which he has set the facts in their true light, and confronted the legends which everyone knows with the truth of which many are in ignorance.
