[7]. Up to the reign of Louis XVI., every prison in Paris and the principal courts of justice had a torture chamber, and precise rules existed as to the various kinds of torture that might be resorted to, the mode in which each was to be applied, the persons who were to be present during the Question, the preliminary examination of the prisoner by a surgeon, the manner of binding, stretching, etc., together with the minutest details respecting the several forms of the Question, and the means to be employed to restore the sufferer for a second application.
On the ground floor of the dungeon were the dark cells. These were in no way connected with the Salle de la Question, but served as the abodes for months, or even for years, of those unhappy prisoners against whom absolutism had a special grudge, or whom the governor took a pleasure in reducing to the last extremity of misery. Here was a bed hollowed in the stone wall, and littered with mouldy straw; and rings in the wall and floor for waist-chains and leg-irons. Such a dwelling as this might receive the unfortunate whose lettre de cachet bore the appalling legend: Pour être oublié!—(To be forgotten!).
But there were darker profundities yet in this Tartarus of the Kings of France. Almost as far as its towers rose above the ground, the dungeon plunged downwards in subterranean abysses, deep below deep. How many victims sank in those secure abysses, and were silently extinguished!
In a place which witnessed so many last earthly moments, a chapel was a necessity. Hasty absolution was often given for the crimes real or imaginary which were so rudely expiated within the royal manor; and sometimes prisoners were carried in a dying state from the Salle de la Question to receive the last rites of the Church in one of the three small chapel cells with double doors. Here, on the very threshold of death, one lay in semi-darkness to hear the mass which was pronounced on the other side of the wall. Over the chaplain's apartment was the singular inscription, Carcer sacerdotis (Prison of the Priest), which allows the inference that the chaplain, whilst in the exercise of his functions, was not allowed to communicate with the outer world.
A narrow stone staircase of two hundred and sixty-five high steps, obstructed at frequent intervals by sealed doors, conducted to a small and well made terrace at the very top of the dungeon. It is probable that this terrace is still in existence.[[8]] It was little used—perhaps because it was the pleasantest place in the prison,—but tradition has represented Mirabeau as taking an occasional airing on that superb summit. The little lantern-shaped tower placed here contained the chapel which was once the oratory of the Kings of France. Some nerve must have been needed for Majesty to pray at ease, whilst crushing with its knees that mass of human wretchedness!
[8]. Vincennes is now a fort and artillery barracks, and may neither be sketched nor photographed.
The great court below was parcelled into little close gardens, where, under rigid surveillance, favoured prisoners took their dreary exercise.
Few prisons the like of Vincennes have been erected. Those tremendous towers, those almost impenetrable walls, those double and triple doors garnished with iron, the trenches forty feet in depth, those wide outer galleries to give the sentries command at every point—what more could genius and industry invent to combat the prisoner's passion for liberty? There were, indeed, few escapes from Vincennes. The prisoner who broke prison from the Bastille, and won his way into the trenches, nearly always made good his flight; but in the trenches of Vincennes, if he ever reached them, he was more helpless than a rat in a bucket. The architect of Vincennes was up some half-hour earlier than the architect of the Bastille.
Twice every hour of the twenty-four the patrol made a complete tour of the dungeon; and night and morning, before the closing and opening of the doors, the trenches (which were forbidden to the turnkeys except by express order) were surveyed from end to end, that no letters might be thrown there by prisoners upon whom the State had set a seal like that of the Masque de Fer.
Over and above all these précautions barbares, the sentries had orders to turn the eyes of every passerby from the dungeon towers. No one might stand or draw bridle in the shadow of Vincennes. It might be a relative or friend seeking to learn in what exact cell the captive was lodged! From light to dusk, the sentry reiterated his changeless formula: Passez votre chemin!