In the ancient Rue Briçonnet, quite near,—indeed nothing is very far away in this old town,—is the house attributed to Tristan l'Hermite, who held the unenviable position of hangman-in-chief to His Majesty, King Louis. There is no foundation for this tradition, which probably owes its origin to a knotted rope and some hooks on the wall, which are sufficiently suggestive of hanging. This sculptured cord, or rope, not unlike the emblem of Anne of Brittany, may have been placed here in her honor, or in that of one of her ladies in waiting, as she frequently urged her attendants to adopt her device of the knotted rope, whose derivation has never been quite understood.
"However," as Miss Cassandra says, "we are not here in search of associations of the head executioner of Louis or of those of his royal master," and so we were free to enjoy the beauty of this fourteenth century house, which is quite picturesque enough to do without associations of any kind, with its substantial walls in which brick and stone are so happily combined, its graceful arcades, lovely spiral pilasters and richly carved Renaissance doorways. We noticed the words Priez Dieu Pur carved over a window in the courtyard which, M. La Tour says, is thought to be an anagram upon the name of Pierre de Puy, who owned the house in 1495. In the wide paved courtyard is an ancient stone well, near which is a spiral stairway leading to a loggia, from which we had a fine view of the picturesque gables and roofs of the old town, and beyond of the broad river shimmering in the sun, and still farther away of a line of low hills crowned with white villas.
Noticing the Tour de Guise as it stood out against the blue sky, M. La Tour told us an interesting tale about this tower, which is about all that is left of the royal palace built here or added to by Henry II, who was also hereditary Count of Anjou, and did much building and road making in the Touraine of his day.
The young Prince de Joinville, son of the Duke de Guise, who for some reason was imprisoned here after the murder of his father at Blois, was permitted to attend mass on Assumption Day, 1591. Tasting the sweets of freedom in this brief hour of respite, the Prince took his courage in his two hands and suddenly decided to make a bold dash for liberty. Laying a wager with his guards that he could run upstairs again faster than they, he reached his room first, bolted the door and seizing a cord, or rope, which had been brought to him by his laundress, he made it fast to the window, slipped out and dropped fifteen feet. With shots whistling all about him he flew around the tower to the Faubourg de la Riche, where he leaped upon the back of the first horse that he saw; the saddle turned and threw him and a soldier came up suddenly and accosted him. Fortunately, the soldier proved, by some happy chance, to be a Leaguer, who gave him a fresh mount, and soon the Prince had put many miles between himself and his pursuers. Ever since, the tower has borne the name of the young De Guise who so cleverly escaped from it.
Wednesday evening.
We experienced what our Puritan ancestors would have called a "fearful joy" during our afternoon at Loches, for anything more horrible than the dungeons above ground and under it would be difficult to imagine. I shall spare you a full description of them, as I refused to descend into the darkest depths to see the worst of them, and Walter is probably writing Allen a full-length account of them,—iron cages, hooks, rings, and all the other contrivances of cruelty. Loches, however, is not all cells and dungeons, as the château is beautifully situated upon a headland above the Indre, and the gray castle rising above the terraces, with its many towers, tourelles, and charming pointed windows, presents a picturesque as well as a formidable appearance. Our way lay by winding roads and between high walls. We thought ourselves fortunate to make this steep circuitous ascent in a coach; but once within the enceinte of the castle we were on a level and felt as if we were walking through the streets of a little village. Many small white houses, with pretty gardens of blooming plants, lie below the fortress on one side, in sharp contrast to the frowning dungeons of Fulk Nerra and Louis XI which overshadow them.
The great square mass of Fulk Nerra's keep stood out dark against the blue of the sky to-day; this with the Tour Neuf and the Tour Ronde are said to be the "most beautiful of all the dungeons of France," as if a dungeon could ever be beautiful! And it was Louis XI, that expert and past master in cruelty, who is said to have "perfected these prisons," which only needed the iron cage, designed to suit the King's good pleasure, to complete their horror.
The invention of the iron cage has been accredited to Jean la Balue, Bishop of Angers, and also to the Bishop of Verdun. Perhaps both of these devout churchmen had a hand in the work, as fate, with a dash of irony, and the fine impartiality of the mother who whipped both of her boys because she could not find out which one had eaten the plums, clapped them both into iron cages. Louis XI was in these instances the willing agent of avenging fate. Cardinal la Balue survived the sorrows of his iron cage for eleven years, "much longer than might have been expected," as Mr. Henry James says, "from this extraordinary mixture of seclusion and exposure."
The historian, Philip de Commines, described these cages as "Rigorous prisons plated with iron both within and without with horrible iron works, eight foote square and one foote more than a man's height. He that first devised them was the Bishop of Verdun, who forthwith was himself put into the first that was made, where he remained fourteen years."
Louis was so enchanted with this fiendish device that he longed to put all his state prisoners into iron cages. We are glad to know that when he recommended this treatment to the Admiral of France for one of his captives of high degree, the jailer replied, with a spirit and independence to which the tyrant was little wont, "That if that was the King's idea of how a prisoner should be kept he might take charge of this one himself."