MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“The Spielberg. — The Austrian Bastille.”The Prisons of Europe · Volume V
Beneath the frozen casemates of Brünn, the Austrian monarchy elevated torment into an administrative masterpiece, shackling the flower of Italy to the stones of the Pandour.
The Moravian night resembles no other. It is a dense vapor, drenched with soot and hoarfrost, rising from the marshes of the Svratka to drape Brünn in an impenetrable shroud. Whenever the heavy post-chaises from Vienna completed their journey at the foot of the mound, the horses drew up of their own accord, as if gripped by a brute dread. Before them reared the Spielberg. Neither palace nor martial citadel: a carcass of gloomy brick and rough limestone, crouching atop the hill like a monster keeping vigil over a graveyard of living men.
For the Italian political convicts—those gentleman Carbonari plucked from the gilded salons of Milan or Brescia—the voyage closed inexorably before the southern postern. There, under the dull stare of sentries in white shakos, rang out the first signal of annihilation: the screech of a drawbridge that was never lowered for a return. The entry registers of the Spielberg recorded not individuals, but ledger marks destined to fade from the memory of mankind. Fine broadcloth coats, cambric shirts, and the portraits of wives stitched into secret linings were confiscated by an intendant with ink-yellowed fingers. In their stead, they were flung the livery of infamy: a bicolored jacket, half grey and half brown, cut from a serge so coarse that it flayed the skin at the first sweat, and rough breeches slit up the sides to allow passage for the irons.
“Whosoever crosses this threshold must gaze upon the heavens for the very last time; here begins the realm where the Emperor measures out the breath he deigns to lend you.”
It was into this vestibule of nothingness that Silvio Pellico, that delicate poet whose voice had so recently sung the glories of Lombardy, set foot in that baleful month of April 1822. Behind him slammed the oak leaf lined with iron plates, sealing perpetual silence over his youth.
The Spielberg possessed an invention whose cruelty outstripped the clumsy tortures of the Middle Ages: the mathematical precision of the carcere duro. The engineers of His Imperial and Royal Majesty Francis I had calculated the exact allowance of air, bread, and light requisite for a body to suffer without utterly expiring. The casemates were hollowed out within the ancient ditches of the fortress. To descend into them, one had to thread a winding stair slick with saltpetre, where the flare of the jailers’ torches sputtered out for lack of oxygen.
At the end of a narrow corridor pierced with blind loopholes, a low door gave onto a fireless dungeon. Neither bed nor clean straw was to be found: merely a plank of bare oak, slung from two eye-bolts and sloping down toward the packed earth. Into the wall was cemented a forged iron ring from which hung an eight-pound chain. The prison smith, attended by the corporal of the guard, stepped forward bearing his portable anvil and hammer. Every blow struck upon the glowing rivet to close the band around the captive’s ankle reverberated down into the very marrow of his spine. The prisoner was riveted to his timber bed; the tether’s length barely permitted him to drag himself to the wooden tub or reach the bowl of lukewarm water brought at daybreak.
For the recalcitrant or spirits too proud, the penal code reserved the carcere durissimo: the chain was no longer fastened to the bed, but directly to the masonry by a link so short that the condemned wretch could neither lie down nor stand erect, forced into an agonizing, stooping posture, his hands at times bound together by a transverse iron rod. The fare consisted of a broth of spoiled broad beans and half a loaf of black bread of such biting acidity that it tore through the captives' scorbutic gums.
The air of the Spielberg seemed still poisoned by the memory of its former tenants. A century earlier, it was here that Franz von Trenck had gasped out his life—the dreaded baron of the Pandours, a beast of war and magnificent swashbuckler, whose ferocity had made Prussia tremble before Austria locked him away to shield herself from his wrath. Legend had it that Trenck’s damned soul still drifted along the glacis, and that his desiccated bones, preserved in the crypt of the Capuchins at the foot of the town, still gave commands to the sentinels on stormy nights. Yet the martyrs of the nineteenth century were no cutthroats of the highway; they were thinkers, tribunes, apostles of the liberty of nations.
In cell number ten, Pellico was wasting away, consumed by a racking cough, spitting blood onto his bi-colored tunic. Yet the absolute silence demanded by imperial regulations was vanquished by the ingenuity of despair. Through the three feet of solid masonry separating his pit from the adjoining cell, Silvio caught one evening a steady scratching, a dull vibration. It was Count Luigi Oroboni, a young nobleman full of fire, transferred like himself from the Venetian lagoon. With a nail pried from the sole of his shoe, Oroboni was striking the stone. One tap for A, two for B. A grammar of the catacombs had been born.
For months, these two phantoms conversed through the rock without ever having laid eyes upon each other. They traded fragments of verse, fervent prayers, sublime consolations. But, as the Moravian winter froze the earth into iron, Oroboni’s blows grew slower, farther apart. One morning in June 1823, following a night in which the prisoner had coughed without respite, no sound returned to answer Pellico’s signal. The poet pressed his ear against the icy wall: he heard only the sepulchral clinking of keys belonging to the under-warden Schiller, and the heavy scraping of a deal coffin being dragged along the damp flags of the corridor.
The true jailer of the Spielberg wore no ring of keys at his belt; he resided at the Hofburg. Every week, a mounted courier rode forth from Brünn to bear to the Emperor of Austria the bulletin of his captives’ agony. With the pedantic scrutiny of an assize clerk, His Majesty Francis I personally annotated the pages in his cramped margins. It was he who denied a woolen blanket to Pellico as he shivered with fever; he who commanded the confiscation of Italian bibles to substitute heavy tomes of German theology; he who measured the diameter of the fetters and demanded reports on the hue of the consumptives' sputum.
When Count Federico Confalonieri, the most redoubtable chieftain of Milanese liberalism, passed in his turn beneath the portcullis of the Spielberg—shattered by interrogation, condemned to death before his sentence was commuted to perpetual imprisonment—the Emperor had taken care to dictate the very arrangement of his dungeon. The Lombard nobleman, cut off from all human intercourse, was made to watch his limbs wither beneath the weight of the irons, without a single letter from his beloved wife, without a solitary line to record his thoughts.
Yet tyranny perpetually forgets that stone does not smother the spirit; it petrifies it into diamond. When Silvio Pellico, moribund but miraculously pardoned, at last emerged from these catacombs after eight years of calvary, he unsheathed neither sword nor dagger. He took up a pen. The publication of My Prisons shook the Habsburg edifice with greater violence than ten lost battles. Europe discovered, with a shudder of horror, what manner of life was being extinguished within the fortress of Brünn. The Spielberg had thought to erect the sepulcher of Italian liberty; it had only built its most immortal Golgotha.