The Tour de Nesle is one of those bygones of the history of Paris, which as a name is familiar to many, but which, after all, is a very vague memory.
It perpetuates an event of bloodshed which is familiar enough, but there are no tangible remains to mark the former site of the tower, and only the name remains—now given to a short and unimportant rue.
The use of the title “La Tour de Nesle,” by Dumas, for a sort of second-hand article,—as he himself has said,—added little to his reputation as an author, or, rather, as a dramatist.
In reality, he did no more than rebuild a romantic drama, such as he alone knows how to build, out of the framework which had been unsuccessfully put together by another—Gaillardet. However, it gives one other historical title to add to the already long list of his productions.
The history of the Conciergerie is most lurid, and, withal, most emphatic, with regard to the political history of France. For the most part, it is more associated with political prisoners than with mere sordid crime, as, indeed, to a great extent were many of the prisons of France.
The summer tourist connects it with Marie Antoinette; visits the “Cachot de Marie Antoinette;” the great hall where the Girondists awaited their fate; and passes on to the Palais des Beaux Arts, with never a thought as to the great political part that the old prison played in the monarchial history of France.
To know it more fully, one should read Nogaret’s “Histoire des Prisons de Paris.” There will be found anecdotes and memoirs, “rares et precieux” and above all truthful.
It has been eulogized, or, rather, anathematized in verse by Voltaire,—