more than a whiff of farce

 The opening acts of Latude's Bastille story carry more than a whiff of farce. After serving as a surgeon and barber in the army (the two professions being interchangeable at the time), he came to Paris in 1748, and devised a hare-brained scheme to find fortune and favour among the royal court. His plan was to foil an assassination plot against the king's mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour. A noble cause, perhaps. Except that Latude had manufactured the plot himself after overhearing two men criticising the Marquise while walking in the garden of the Tuileries. He sent a poison letter (in fact containing a harmless powder) to his mark, and then obtained an audience with her at Versailles to warn her of the danger. Before he could leave, however, he was tricked into providing a sample of his own handwriting. When this was compared to the script on the letter, it was immediately clear that saviour and conspirator were one. 

Within days Latude was making his first acquaintance with the Bastille. After a few months, he was transferred to the prison of Vincennes. He duly escaped, making his way through fields and vineyards to a safe-house in Paris. From there, he wrote to the king for clemency - including on his memorandum a return address. Latude was back in the Bastille in a matter of hours. 

- from Fallen Glory, James Crawford, 353

They are clearly starving me to death here

 In fact conditions for many of the Bastille's inmates were markedly better than in most other prisons of the time, and indeed their relative luxury may surprise our modern sensibilities. By the time of Louis XVI, the majority of prisoners were held in spacious, sixteen-foot-wide octagonal cells, positioned in the middle levels of the fortress towers. Each cell had a four-poster bed lined with green curtains, as well as tables, chairs, a stove and a chimney. In the case of the Marquis de Sade, held in the Bastille until the week before it was stormed, these included a wardrobe stocked with shirts, silk breeches, dressing gowns, hats, coats and boots, and a library of 133 volumes, including Hume's histories and Homer's Iliad. 

Breakfast in the Bastille was served at seven, lunch at eleven, and dinner at six in the evening. The typical menu for the midday repast was soup, an entreé and a meat course of mutton, pork, sausage or veal, washed down with a bottle of wine. Supper consisted of two dishes, one of which was meat, often roast chicken or calf's liver. Seafood options included pike, sole, trout, prawns and even oysters. De Sade was not impressed: "They are clearly starving me to death here," he wrote to his wife Reneé in 1784. He supplemented prison fare by ordering in pâtés, terrines, and jams, as well as the chocolates that he was "accustomed to get from [his] regular shop"; he was provided with fresh flowers every week, and was served strawberries every day. 

- from Fallen Glory, James Crawford, pg. 348