"I am the sorcerer of the château of Landon. I promised an Abbé of Citeaux to find, by magic, a sum of money that had been stolen from him. Alas! it was a dear jest for me; torture, and death on the Place de Grève. Look ... there is blood upon my shroud!"
"I am a poor madman. I thought that heaven had given me the glorious mission of sustaining on earth the servants of Jesus Christ. I went humbly to the bishop and said: The envoy of God salutes you! They brought me here to an oubliette, and I left it only with the headsman. Look ... there is blood on my shroud!"
The factions of the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons cost Paris a river of blood in the early years of the fifteenth century, and the massacre of the Armagnacs in May-August, 1418, was a terrible affair. On the first day, five hundred and twenty-two were put to the sword by the Bourguignons in the streets of the capital. Every Armagnac, or suspected Armagnac, was laid hold of, and the prisons overflowed with the captives. The Bourguignons assailed the Châtelet, "and the threshold of the prison became the scaffold of fifteen hundred unfortunates." The attack upon the Châtelet was renewed by the Bourguignons in August; and the Provost of Paris, powerless to check or even to stem their fury, bade them at length "Do what they would": Mes amis, faites ce qu'il vous plaira. This time the prisoners organised a defence, and a regular siege began. On the north side of the fortress was a lofty terrace, crowning the wall, so to say, and running the length of the prison. Here the imprisoned Armagnacs threw up barricades, but the Bourguignons reared scaling-ladders, and made light of climbing the walls, sixty feet in height. The attack on the one side and the defence on the other were long, bloody, and desperate; but the advantage was with the assailants. Foiled at this point and that, they fired the prison; and where the flames did not penetrate, they hacked their way in, and drove their game to take refuge on the heights. As the fire soared upwards, the Armagnacs flung themselves over the walls, and were caught upon the pikes of the Burgundians, "who finished them with axe and sword."
The name of Louis XI., which is writ large in the histories of the Bastille and the Dungeon of Vincennes, attaches to one curious episode in the history of the Châtelet. In 1477, on the day of the festival of Saint Denis, Louis "took the singular fancy of giving their liberty" to the prisoners of the Great and Little Châtelet. A chronicler of this fact, evidently puzzled, "hastens to add" that at that epoch the two Châtelets "held merely robbers, assassins, and vagabonds. Not even to honour the memory of Saint Denis could Louis bring himself to liberate his political prisoners in Vincennes and the Bastille." It was in Louis XI.'s reign that one Chariot Tonnelier, a hosier turned brigand, lying in the Châtelet on a score of charges, and dreading lest the Question should weaken him into betrayal of his companions, snatched a knife from a guard at the door of the torture chamber, and deliberately cut his tongue out.
The Fort-l'Évêque and the Little Châtelet were suppressed in 1780, in virtue of an ordonnance of Louis XVI., countersigned by Necker; and the prisoners were transferred to La Force. The buildings, which were even then in a state of ruin, were thrown down two years later. The Great Châtelet existed as a prison for another decade, and the fortress itself was not demolished until 1802-4. A triumphal column replaced the ancient dungeon of the Provosts of Paris.
