La Salpêtrière

The Red Brand and the Coarse Frock

On the morning of June 21, 1786, the Cour du May, fronting the Parlement of Paris, reeked of gathering storm and burnt tinder. Before a jostling, compact mob, a woman writhed like a cornered beast between the calloused grips of the executioner’s assistants. It was Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Countess de La Motte—the brilliant, damnable contriver of the scandal that had just shaken the throne of France to its foundations: the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace. Sentenced to be publicly scourged and branded with a red-hot iron bearing the letter “V” for voleuse upon each shoulder, the adventuress refused to bend. She shrieked imprecations, bit her captors till the blood ran, and clawed her rags to shreds; the incandescent iron slipped from her thrashing shoulder to sear her breast with a sickening sizzle. Swooning, bleeding, and drenched in spit, she was flung into the depths of a closed fiacre whose iron-shod wheels were soon churning through the clinging mud of the Faubourg Saint-Victor. Her destination: the Salpêtrière.

The vast hospital-prison founded by Louis XIV rose like an imposing fortress of human wreckage at the confluence of the Bièvre and the Seine. Within its walls was immured everything the capital could not bear to behold: madwomen chained in the reeking cloacae of the lower courtyards, incurable mendicants, destitute courtesans, and criminals of state. When the massive iron-studded oak portal slammed shut behind Jeanne, the prison clerk scribbled his signature in an intake ledger that resounded like an order of burial alive: perpetual confinement in the Maison de Force.

“The colossal vaults of the Salpêtrière seemed reared to defy time itself and the justice of men; never yet had the skiff of an outcast drifted back from that ocean of mud and iron.”

The Citadel of Sorrows

Within the Salpêtrière, the quarter known as La Force was a universe unto itself, severed from the remaining wretches by soaring grilles bristling with sharpened iron spikes. There, turnkey and matron wielded the whip and the ring of heavy keys with mechanical brutality. Yet, from the very first weeks of her captivity, the illustrious prisoner refused to dissolve into the mass of convicts clad in drab grey homespun. Though her flesh bore the suppurating burns of royal justice, her spirit remained unbent, honed keen by hatred and unyielding pride.

The authorities, terrified by the secrets of state in Jeanne’s possession—confidences of sufficient venom to besmirch Marie Antoinette beyond redemption—isolated her within the dormitory of the incurables, and presently to a private chamber attended by a devoted servant-nun, Sister Marianne. Beyond the walls, unseen hands were stirring. In the gilded galleries of Versailles as in the shadow-cabinets of the Paris police, high-born schemers trembled at the prospect of a retrial that might reignite the conflagration. Heavy gold louis began to find their way beneath the coarse smocks of the warders. A discreet patron procured fine linen, soothing balms for her raw flesh, and, chief of all, an unspoken pact: the ramparts of the Salpêtrière were no match for the cunning of a woman resolved to live free.

Conspiracy Beneath the Surplice

Nearly a year dragged by in the icy gloom of the wards, where the screams of the demented mingled with the incessant rattling of iron bolts. May 1787 drew to a close amid stifling, sulfurous heat. By then, the countess had forged an indispensable alliance. Marianne, whether moved by the prisoner's tears or seduced by the promise of fabulous recompense from across the English Channel, became the linchpin of the plot. High-placed patronage reached further still: familiars of the Duke of Luxembourg and the House of Rohan were maneuvering behind the scenes to whisk this perilous witness from the French political chessboard.

One evening, an unmarked bundle was deposited at the foot of Jeanne’s pallet. Within lay a pair of men’s fustian trousers, a sailor’s pea-jacket, a cravat of coarse homespun, and a wide-brimmed round hat. The escape was timed with geometric precision to coincide with the lull between the guards’ rounds, in the interval dividing evening prayer from the locking of the perimeter grilles. For three days, Jeanne feigned a mortal languor, burying herself beneath her blankets to accustom the wardresses to her absence from the communal yards. By virtue of lavishly distributed coin, the heavy bolt of her cell was left thrown only to the first catch.

The Breach into the Night

On June 5, 1787, in the ambiguous dusk when human silhouettes merge with the crumbling ashlar of ancient bastions, Jeanne cropped her hair and donned her male disguise. Her heart hammered against her bruised ribs. Guided by Marianne, she glided past the sleeping dormitory, skirted the refuse-strewn deserted alleys, and reached the Cour Saint-Antoine. A postern door opening onto the prison officers’ gardens yielded without a sound to the persuasion of an accomplice’s key.

Before her rose the final barrier: a low curtain wall temporarily breached and lowered by ditch-digging works. The countess sprang forward, tearing her hands against briars and loose rubble, gained a footing on a mound of gravel, and leaped into the void. She landed with a muffled thud upon the greasy turf of the Boulevard des Gobelins. She was free. Less than an hour later, a hired chaise was carrying her headlong through the night toward the Flanders post-road, whence she would take ship for London to loose her incendiary memoirs upon the world.

When dawn revealed her empty cell, the discovery burst like a bombshell over the Parlement and the Lieutenant-General of Police. The yellowed registers of the Salpêtrière still preserve the stunned notation recording a flight that struck the dying monarchy like an open-handed blow. The adventuress branded with the double “V” had proved that, before an indomitable will to cast off its irons, the grandest bastilles of the King were built of nothing more than clay.