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Still retains traces of her early sorrows. When Maria Antoinette was taken from the Temple and consigned to the dungeons of the Conciergerie, there to await her trial for her life, the dauphin was imprisoned by himself, though but a child seven years of age, in a gloomy cell, where he was entirely excluded from any communication with his aunt and sister.
The dungeons of Villeneuve made a particular impression on me greater than any except those of Loches, which must surely be the most gruesome in Europe. I hasten to add that every dark hole at Villeneuve is called a dungeon; and I believe it is well established that in this manner, in almost all old castles and towers, the sensibilities of the modern tourist are unscrupulously played upon.
For a year I toiled in a Prussian fortress, chained to a wheelbarrow; thrice the Muscovites have cut up my back with stripes, and once they had me on the road to Siberia; later the Austrians buried me in the dungeons of Spielberg, at hard labour, in carcer durum—but by a miracle the Lord God delivered me and granted that I should die among my own people, with the sacraments.
The remark of Bayle upon this view of the subject is really not at all unsound, and is eminently ingenious: "Would you defend a king who should confine all his subjects of a certain age in dungeons, upon the ground that if he did not, many of the cells he had built must remain empty?" The answer of Bishop Law to this remark is by no means satisfactory.
The walls of these dungeons are as thick as some bed-chambers at home are wide fifteen feet. We saw the damp, dismal cells in which two of Dumas' heroes passed their confinement heroes of "Monte Cristo."
Only one court for debtors and felons; and no apartment for the jailer. Imagination can hardly realize the miseries of fifty or sixty pious men and women, taken from a place of public worship and incarcerated in such dens or dungeons with felons, as was the case while Bunyan was a prisoner.
If I say the word, the prisoners linger in the damp and fetid dungeons of the republic, until they welcome death as a blessing." "Alas, alas!" sobbed Strasolda; "have you the heart thus to add to my sorrow?
"Who are ye who thus dare to intrude upon me here? What is all this tumult I hear in mine own halls? "Seneschal, art thou there? Send hither to me my soldiers; bid them bind these men, and carry them to the dungeons. I will see them there. Ha, ha! I will talk with them there. I will deal with them there. What ho! Send me the jailer and his assistants!
What dost thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul greater than the world? How long wilt thou remain in the shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeons of cities? Believe me, I see here more light."
Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art the half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets, battlements, crypts, and dungeons and all in ruins.
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