The Dungeons of Old Paris
Being the Story and Romance of the most Celebrated Prisons of the Monarchy and the Revolution
9781465615077
201 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
If walls had tongues, those of the Conciergerie might rehearse a wretched story. This is, I believe, the oldest prison in Europe; it would speak with the twofold authority of age and black experience. Give these walls a voice, and they might say: "Look at the buildings we enclose. There is a little of every style in our architecture, reflecting the many ages we have witnessed. Paris and France, in all the reigns of all the Kings, have been locked in here, starved here, tortured here, and sent from here to die by hanging, by beheading, by dismembering by horses, by fire, and by the guillotine. We have found chains and a bitter portion for the victims of all the tyrannies of France,—those of the Feudal Ages, those of the Absolute Monarchy, those of the Revolution, and those of the Restoration. There is no discord, trouble, passion, or revolution in France which is not recorded in our annals. Politics, religion, feuds of parties and of houses, private rancours and the enmities of queens, the vengeance of kings and the jealousies of their ministers, have filled in turn the vaults of this little city of the dead-in-life. We have seen the killing of the innocent; the torment of a Queen; the tears of a Dubarry and the stoicism of a hideous Cartouche; the collapse of a Marquise de Brinvilliers under torture and the silent heroism of a Charlotte Corday on her way to the guillotine; the bold immodesty of a La Voisin on the rack and the solemn abandon of the 'last supper' of the Girondins. We have seen the worst that France could shew of wickedness and the best that it could shew of patriotism; we have seen the beginning and the end of everything that makes the history of a prison." Most French writers who have touched upon the Conciergerie seem to have felt the oppression of the place; their recollections or impressions are recorded in a spirit of melancholy or indignation. "Ah, that Conciergerie!" exclaims Philarète Chasles; "there is a sense of suffocation in its buildings; one thinks of the prisoner, innocent or guilty, crushed beneath the weight of society. Here are the oldest dungeons of France; Paris has scarcely begun to be when those dungeons are opened."
