Cartouche: Myths and Mr. Maurice

Myth#7: The author of the comedy Cartouche, Mr. Legrand, gave the prisoner 300 pounds royalty in his cell.

The truth: Cartouche’s name was on everyone’s lips in Paris, no matter how hard the official French gazette Le Mercure de France tried to ignore him. The Dutch gazette, Le Mercure Hollandais, on the contrary, wrote about him almost every day. He had become a living legend; and while incarcerated in Le Grand Châtelet, he received a lot of visitors, including the Regent himself, allegedly dressed up as a rich bourgeois but whom he made out at once. Among the curious were four play writers: two Italians named Thomasso and Antonio Vincentini, and two Frenchmen named Legrand and Quinault. All intended to write a play about a man who hadn’t yet been condemned! Legrand wrote his own play as soon as 1719; it was then entitled Le R. de C. (for Le Règne de Cartouche, or Cartouche’s Reign) and had even received the official King’s privilege. But censorship realized it was very critical toward the people who were hunting down the outlaw, and the publication was postponed. Legrand went to see Cartouche a couple of times, and even spent a memorable evening with him, his accomplice Balagny and the King’s Attorney, drinking and talking together. In his Death Will, the twenty-year old Balagny related the evening: “They offered us some drinks then asked us to show them some tricks of the trade and to speak slang, which we gladly did. The two actors were taking notes and re-enacted everything. Eventually, the King’s Attorney and the Criminal Lieutenant exercised at robbing a handkerchief, a watch and a snuffbox. They were first quite clumsy but got better after a while. Cartouche even stated that the Criminal Lieutenant was talented; had he been trained from a young age as he had been himself, he would have become quite a good pickpocket. We all laughed a lot and spent a very pleasant evening.” The comedy of the Italian authors was played on October the 20^th, only six days after Cartouche’s arrest! It was given thirteen times, and then interrupted. Legrand’s one also met with considerable success until it was also banned. But Cartouche never received 300 pounds from the author. As both men were talking inside the prison, Legrand “took notice of a handful of coins of 25 sous, and asked Cartouche if he needed money,” wrote B. Maurice. That’s all Cartouche ever got from him, apart from a very nicely bound copy of the play that he sent to the prison a few days later.

B. Maurice claimed that the truth he revealed surpassed fiction. For instance, the cold and factual report of Cartouche’s brutal questioning he reproduced is terrible. The brodequin consisted in breaking one’s legs in a very cruel manner, crushing bones and flesh by pushing eight pieces of wood between one’s tied legs. The report read: “After the first piece: said he was innocent. After the second one, didn’t say a word. (...) After the fifth one, said he was innocent, and dead. (...) After the eighth one, said he was innocent, and that we were killing him.” These few and simple words are horrific! The official report of the execution itself, written by one Drouet, is also very dull: precise and lifeless, it reminds us of the unrealistic atmosphere of Victor Hugo’s Le Dernier jour d’un condamné (1829). The truth thus triumphed in B. Maurice’s book. But myths are forever, as they transcend history and facts. And no matter how hard Mr. Maurice defended the French language in his book, he never wrote it good enough to match the wild style of the anonymous author of Loves and Life of Cartouche: “My father was a cooper; his boring probity had always been opposite to my wishes. He wanted to find some honest position for me, but as I could never fully understand this senseless idea, I decided to (...) take a shortcut to fame.” And when it came to ladies, our mythological hero (or our author, God only knows who’s who) was as persuasive as if holding a loaded pistol: “She sat on the grass,” he said about a scared and respectful lady that had just fallen in his power. “Fear, such an excusable and powerful feeling, probably motivated her first reaction; but when she realized I was as good as any other one, she surrendered to my charming ardour, and forgetting about her misadventure, in the middle of pleasure, fully dedicated to the present moment, she kept on crying, while answering my caresses: Ah! My dear bandit, what a blissful moment!”

If you believe this scene ever truly happened, then you’re probably wrong. But who really wants to be right on that occasion?

by Thibault Ehrengardt

(reliuresetdorures.blogspot.fr)

- Cartouche, Histoire Authentique, by B. Maurice (Paris, 1859). Half-title, frontispiece, title page, 1page, 276 pages. The book includes the faithful reproduction of the comedy Cartouche, ou les Voleurs, by Marc-Antoine Legrand, played for the first time on the 14^th of October 1721 (Cartouche was still alive then).