Winged Wheels in France

by Michael Myers Shoemaker

THE CAGE IN WHICH JEAN DE LA BALUE WAS IMPRISONED FOR ELEVEN YEARS

Down the passage yonder, which communicates underground with the great donjon, Louis and his Tristan entered to torment the Cardinal, swinging like a huge bird in his cage. The walls still show two holes in each side into which the beams supporting the cage, were inserted,—the chains from each corner thereof met in a ring at the top, which was fastened into the beams and turned on a pivot. The cage composed of wood, bound and riveted with iron, formed a cube four feet in size, wherein its occupant could neither lie down or stand up, and there the Cardinal spent eleven years exposed and yet confined. A singular refinement of torture that.

This cage in Loches, in which the historian Philippe de Comines was also confined, was very different from that in the Bastille,—the prison for fourteen years of the Bishop of Verdun. The expense account of the period holds the following item concerning that cage:

"For making a great wooden cage of heavy beams, joists, and rafters, measuring inside nine feet long by eight broad and seven high between the planks, mortised and bolted with great iron bolts, which has been fixed in a certain chamber of one of the towers of the Bastille St. Antoine, in which said cage, is put and kept, by command of our Lord the King, a prisoner that before inhabited an old, decayed, and worn-out cage. Used in making said new cage ninety-six horizontal beams and fifty-two perpendiculars, ten joists each eighteen feet long; employed in squaring, planing, and fitting all the said woodwork in the yard of the Bastille, nineteen carpenters for twenty days,—used in the cage two hundred and twenty great iron bolts nine feet long,—with plates and nuts for fastening of said bolts, the iron weighing three thousand seven hundred and thirty-five pounds,—besides eight heavy iron equières, for fixing the said cage in its place with cramp-irons and nails weighing all together two hundred and eighteen pounds, without reckoning the iron for the trellis work of the windows of the chamber in which said cage has been placed, the iron bars of the door of the chamber and other articles. The whole amounts to three hundred and seventeen livres, five sol and seven deniers."

A great, cubical mass of masonry, iron, and woodwork, its windows so thickly latticed with bars of iron that no glass was visible,—its door, one large flat stone like a tomb,—a door for entrance only! "Our Lady!" exclaimed the King, "here is a cage out of all reason."

Therefore he curtailed expenses and space when he caused to be constructed the habitation for his Eminence of Balue, and then again there was exercise for the Cardinal as the cage was swung to and fro or whirled on its pivot at the bidding of Louis. What a picture! The great, gloomy, conical shaped prison, with the cage swinging to and fro, now in dense shadow and anon in the rift of sunlight shooting in through the slits in the wall,—the grotesque figure of the wretched old King crouching on the incline in yonder passage mumbling prayers before the leaden figures of the Virgin with which his greasy old hat is laden, and stopping now and then to command Tristan to "further agitate his Eminence." It is not reported that any remarks came from the Cardinal in the cage for he knew he had been guilty of treason and hope was not for him.

Cages would appear to have been the fad of King Louis. There were two in Loches, and one at the old palace of the Tournelles. The one in the Bastille was evidently too spacious (9 x 8 x 7 feet), and it was considered necessary to attach a ball to the ankle of the unfortunate Bishop of Verdun, who, it is also stated, was the originator of these cages and not Cardinal Balue. It was a distinction scarcely coveted, I fancy, to be confined in one of these "filets du Roi." The cages in Loches existed in perfect condition until the days of 1789, when they were destroyed and the wood given to the poor, but a relic of one still exists in the barred door through which you pass into the corridor just outside. That is the same door which shut in the Cardinal for so many years, and you feel like leaving one of your number—not your heir at law—on guard, to see that it does not do likewise for yourself. Knowing Louis, one is quite certain that these prisoners were not allowed to feel forgotten, as Louis XIV. probably forgot Matthioli, the Man of the Iron Mask, whose master, Charles of Mantua, was in Paris when he died in 1703. It is very doubtful whether master or captor would, at first, have remembered who the poor wretch was who was being dragged to his grave in the Cemetery of St. Paul whilst they feasted in the Luxembourg.

The Bastille witnessed few such horrors as those so common within the walls of Loches.

Passing up the corridor to lesser prisons, one comes to a chamber with a vast chimney where the question, ordinary and extraordinary, was applied, and where one still finds many of the instruments of torture. I know of no more gruesome spot on earth than this castle, unless it be those chambers at Nuremberg, where chamber after chamber is filled with every conceivable instrument of torture until one stands shuddering before the Iron Virgin. Still, after all, those chambers and their instruments meant a speedy death, but Louis knew that life, as he could dole it out here, was more horrible than any death.

It is a relief to mount a winding stair in the thickness of the walls and emerge into the free fresh air. The panorama over city and rolling country is charming, and my red auto down there at the portal re-assuring, but neither can hold us long from a renewed contemplation of this château.