The Poet and the Painter. - A Christmas Tale  by Ted Stourton.

Our story, my dear readers, sees us back in time, a time perhaps many would care to forget and a few adventurous souls might care to remember.

On a bleak snowy day in 1788, Paris, France outside the Bastille to be precise.  A day when the sky was so grey and the ground so white, that any meeting place between the two is only afforded by a moment of clear weather which comes with the turning of the wind. The chill in the air matches the lonely bare ground and that at best offers up silence with angular shapes to comfort the constant pain of hunger that hangs like the foretold death of a child.  Not far off the North West turret, a single pair of ravens circle in the air, a silhouette against the melting snow which covers this unyielding and blighted landscape.

Our two characters have been imprisoned for five years inside the Parisian hell they called the Bastille.  This site had previously been a swamp. In the dank bowels of this once princely fortress had been held the treasures of the mighty Kings of France along with Nobles, of whom it is said, that if at the late hour of alcoholic murmur had merely a thought of Royal discontent, would awaken to their horror, imprisoned, on the other side of this unforgiving Rubicon.

This paradox of regal delight and a dilemma posing as an equally delicious source of scandal and rumour mongering, was in its part, the very oil needed for the smoother running of the otherwise deadly dull and unproductive life at court.

However, over the last few years the Bastille had fallen into dilapidation and disrepute which had matched the royal pittance of a grant long since diverted by the gaoler before its arrival at the squalid gates. 

So, somewhere between the snow falling, the gaoler sleeping and France on the brink of starvation, we find our characters entombed in the granite mausoleum they called the Bastille.

Now, it so happened, that it was the custom that each day at noon that some prisoners were allowed from their cells to walk a certain large passage that stretched from one long side to the other. Off this corridor there was a sequence of cells holding prisoners who had committed high treason and had been in solitary confinement for so long that no one had ever had site of them. It had been a punishable offence to try and speak with them but over the years the guards had become more and more discontented and lazy to the point where every day for nearly eighteen months the young poet had been able to sit down outside the cast iron door for the hour to converse with the painter.

Each day the poet would sit and listen to the painter, encouraging him to give tell of the view from his window, for none of the other cells in that cell block had an outside facing window. The only site afforded to them was of the courtyard in the centre of the Prison below. The painter would describe the weather each day, with sun on the moat below framing the ducks and the geese, children playing with their dogs or singing an array of songs. The painter went to great lengths to describe the colours of the ladies and gentlemen’s dress, the walking sticks and, once a month, the passing circus that crossed the river Seine for the centre of Paris. The circus animals were often new and exotic. Market days were particularly interesting to the poet, for twice a week, all the farmers with their cattle, crops, geese and sheep would be described in minute detail, with the abstract air of the painters prose.

Over the months their friendship and bond had grown to the point where the painter felt comfortable in enquiring of the poet the true reason for his incarceration.

That day, much like any other, the painter asked the poet why he was in prison, to which he replied that he had written something that the Queen had found a little direct. The poet then asked the painter how he had managed to end up in that situation to which the painter responded that he had painted the King in a way that he saw him, which the King had found insulting, he had ordered the canvas to be destroyed and the painter sent to prison.

The following day at the usual time the poet sat outside the cell door and quietly called for his friend. There was however no reply. The poet wandered slowly over to the gaolers guard and asked him who was in the cell. The guard responded that a pardon had come through the previous evening and that now no one was there. The poet was shocked, and as he caught his breath, commanded that if he were to continue writing the gaolers letters to his mistress he would personally wish to see that the cell was indeed empty for himself.  Whereupon, the guard, without hesitation lifted up his bunch of keys and escorted the poet to the cell. He then placed the key into the top and bottom locks and with a mighty push opened the cast iron door.

It was indeed empty.

The poet stepped into the cell and looking and the four plain stone walls... gasped... for there was no window.

The Bastille fell a few months later giving freedom to all.

The poets name was Francois-Marie Arouet.

Some now know him as the great writer Voltaire.

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