Philoctetes in the Bastille

Abstract

In early 1753 a Bastille prisoner named Antoine Allegre devised a clandestine postal system used by both detainees and persons on the outside. A hollow space behind a loose brick in a confessional stall served as the drop box where prisoners attending mass deposited and picked up mail. The success of the system depended in part on the prisonercorrespondents' agreement to destroy the incriminating letters they received. But Allegre was unable to part with his, and in August, after he was observed furtively hiding a in his cell, prison officials launched an investigation that exposed the scheme (AB 12,493, f. 206). The drop box was mortared shut and Allegre spent four months in the dungeon in chains. The only contraband letters found at the time were those in Allegre' s packet, written by the imprisoned Protestant writer Angliviel de la Beaumelle under the name Uranie and addressed to Philoctete. But there are others, including two in the Angliviel family archive written by Allegre, signed by Philoctete, and addressed to the geographer La Condamine, which were included in a packet smuggled out of the prison in late June that contained letters from La Beaumelle to Maupertuis, Montequieu, and LaLande, all of which arrived at their respective destinations.1 Philoctetes' appearance as the letters' figurai author and addressee highlights the rhetorical practices what Jacques Ranciere calls the creative of invention (Ranciere and Panagia, 116) through which illegitimate speakers insert themselves where they do not belong. But such creative activities do not spring ex nihilo from the mind or pen of the writer, and in framing my reading of this criminal epistolarity as an instance of classical reception, I mean to expand our understanding of the networks of literary transmission through which