‘They put heavy shackles on my thin silk clothes’
In his Autobiography, Ráby starts his litany of complaints by claiming that in the prison of the Pest County Hall he was robbed of his gold wallet, gold watch, silver-hilted sword, precious gold-mounted seal, seal wax and the drafts of his petitions. He was locked up with criminals, had no bed, and the heat and the stench were unbearable. He obtained writing materials but was shackled in punishment and was ‘tortured in a thousand ways.’ His fellow prisoners offered to help him to escape, but he knew that was not the way to regain his freedom. Later he was transferred to a more comfortable cell for noblemen, but then he was put in a worse cell again, where he was given only bread and water. Two of the three windows were walled in, he wrote, and the third was fitted with a grille, the door was padlocked and his books were taken away. Then months of interrogations began. The only solace he could find was the company of tiny creatures: first a small bluetit, then a heron, and finally a mouse, but all were killed. Meanwhile, he wrote letters to Joseph II. He could do so because he bribed servants at the County Hall, who brought him writing materials and posted his letters, for each of which he paid 50 gold coins.
After nearly half a year in prison, he was sprung under incredible circumstances. Twenty-four armed men in Turkish costumes, he wrote, appeared in his cell on 6 December, shortly after midnight, pointing their knives and pistols at him and shouting in Hungarian and Serbian. They said they were coming from Szentendre and had been instructed by the emperor to take him to Vienna. They gave him a document in Serbian with 12 articles, and told him to take it, under threat of death, to the emperor. Ráby first fainted from fright, then was dressed in Serbian women’s clothes and taken to Vienna. His sudden freedom did not last long because he was thrown into a Pest prison in February and was not released until the summer of 1789.
The prison years and the mysterious escape
Ráby was accused of several counts of disturbing the peace, including misleading and slandering the townsfolk of Szentendre, the enforcement of secret meetings and the extortion of money, as well as usurping public functions. The convoluted trial lasted for years and produced hundreds of pages of documents, which are now in the Pest County Archives.
Rules at the county hall prison were enforced less severely than one would think: it was overcrowded, awaiting renovation, and there were holes in the wall where the inmates (mostly thieves) could hide things. There was an in-house market of writing materials, candles, keys and alibis. Ráby took advantage of the conditions, and admitted to having a place of his own where he could hide things. When he was captured after his escape and returned to the prison, he handed over the tools (nail and drill) that had been brought to his cell so he could force the door open. The conditions allowed him to write petitions and maintain contact with the outside world, as with Benedek Király, his clerk in Szentendre. According to fellow inmates, Ráby referred to himself as an ‘imperial chamberlain’ and promised to help them. In 1786 alone, eight more prisoners managed to escape, so his jailbreak cannot be said to have been extraordinary.
However, the documents in the archives shed little light on the mystery of how he broke out on 7 December 1786 and made his way towards Vienna. The circumstances could not be ascertained; his guard (Pál Marton) seems to have left his post and was considered an accomplice, but he denied the charges. Another guard saw Ráby in his cell in the morning, and a third heard him cough, and it was not until noon that his escape was discovered. The conflicting testimonies agree on one thing: no one knew how he got out. One of the witnesses, Rozália Lábodi, the daughter of a nobleman in custody, noticed that at 9 a.m. the padlock was open on Ráby’s door, and that his ‘jackdaw was tapping on the window with its beak.’ In his Autobiography, Ráby does mention having bird companions, though not a jackdaw.
The escape of the Serbian girl – Dressing up Ráby, the prisoner
Jókai does not dwell on the years of imprisonment as long as Ráby, who elaborates on it at length, and he added interesting characters, like the inmates of the noblemen’s prison. Ráby’s escape is easily the most astonishing episode in the novel, with Jókai further amplifying the adventurousness of the account he found in the Autobiography. In his version, Ráby is carefully shaved during the day and is then surprised in his cell at night by a party of armed men, who speak Serbian, and then Hungarian, and wear Turkish costumes. They claim to be friends from Szentendre, there to release him on the orders of the emperor (who happened to give them instructions in Serbian), and he is to represent their cause in Vienna. Last but not least, he is kidnapped in the novel because he knows where the treasure chest is. The twenty-four ruffians dress up the protesting Ráby as a Serbian girl, and break him out of the jail. When it comes to the testimonies, Jókai has one of the guards, János Nagy (who is modelled on the real-life Pál Nagy) say this: ‘What happened, Your Grace, was that on the 6th of December, I was standing guard outside the noblemen’s prison, while my pal, Sipos, was outside Ráby’s cell, and then we heard a loud crack, and Ráby’s door opened, and out he came in a fiery carriage that was hitched up to six black cats and that had a devil sitting in the coachman’s seat in a red coat, which then slapped first my pal, and then myself, in the face with its tail so hard that after that I didn’t hear or see a thing. Whereupon Ráby flew out of the window with the fiery carriage amidst a great thunderclap’ (Jókai: Rab Ráby, Chapter 43).
