"Sire!" exclaimed Oliver. "Prisoners so close to your Majesty's own apartments! But you might hear their groans."
"Ha! They groan, Oliver? The prisoners groan, do they? But there's no need why I should live in the château here. Hark you both, gossips, I'd like my guests to groan and cry at their pleasure, without the fear of inconveniencing their King."
And the King, and his hangman, and his barber fell a-laughing.
From that day, in a word, Louis ceased to inhabit the château of Vincennes, and the dungeon which appertained to it was made a terrible fastness for his Majesty's prisoners of State. It was already a place of some antiquity. The date of the original buildings is quite obscure. The immense foundations of the dungeon itself were laid by Philippe de Valois; his son, Jean le Bon, carried the fortress to its third story; and Charles V. finished the work which his fathers had begun.
All prisons are not alike in their origin. In the beginnings of states, force counts for more than legal prescripts, and ideas of vengeance go above the worthier idea of the repression of crime. Such-and-such a prison, renowned in history, is the expression in stone and mortar of the power or the hatred of its builders. Thus and thus did they plan and construct against their enemies. There was no mistaking, for example, the purpose of the architect of the Bastille,—it must be a fortress stout enough to resist the enemy outside, and a place fit and suitable to hold and to torture him when he had been carried a prisoner within its walls.
But Vincennes, in its origin, at all events, may be viewed under other and softer aspects. Those prodigious towers, for all the frightful menace of their frown, were not first reared to be a place of torment. The name of Vincennes came indeed, in the end, to be not less dreadful and only less abhorrent than that of the Bastille. A few revolutions of the vicious wheel of despotism, and the King's château was transformed into the King's prison, for the pain of the King's enemies, or of the King's too valiant subjects. But the infancy and youth of Vincennes were innocent enough, a reason, perhaps, why it was always less hated of the people than the Bastille. Vincennes lived and passed scathless through the terrors and hurtlings of the Revolution; and presently, from its cincture of flowers and verdant forest, looked down upon that high column of Liberty, which occupied the blood-stained site of the vanquished and obliterated Bastille.
THE KEEP OR DUNGEON OF VINCENNES.
King Louis lived no more in the château, and his masons made good the breaches in the dungeon which neglect, rather than age, had occasioned. When it stood again a solid mass of stone,—