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As to writing to the Army Council apart from K., the War Office is an oubliette. The foregoing sage reflections were jotted down between 10 and 10.30 a.m., when I was clapped into solitary confinement under armour. An aeroplane had reported that the Goeben had come into the Narrows, presumably to fire over the Peninsula with her big guns.
But virtue was its own reward, for as we were looking into the depths of the first real oubliette which I ever had seen, and I was just shivering with the vision of that fiendish Catharine de' Medici who used to drop people into these holes every morning before breakfast, just as an appetizer, we heard a most blood-curdling shriek, and there stood that wretched Jimmie watching us from an open door, waving his Baedeker at us, with Mrs.
"Ah!" she retorted, shortly. "To sleep in the oubliette, one may suppose. For there is no other bed in the chateau, as you quite well know, Monsieur l'Abbe. It is another of your kings no doubt. Oh! you need not hold up your hands when Monsieur Albert reads aloud that letter from Monsieur le Marquis, in England, without so much as closing the door of the banquet hall!
When the footman had laid out his clothes, and his step grew fainter along the passage, until it was suddenly swallowed up with the closing of a red baize door in the turret staircase, like a trap in an oubliette, the whole building seemed to sink back into repose.
The gloomy chamber, however, is generally called an oubliette. Above, there are other floors, the top one having been used by the governor of the castle. In the thickness of the wall there is a deep well which now contains no water.
There was also, high up, a strong beam across, where criminals were hung; and a door, now walled up, by which they were thrown into the lake. I shivered. "'Twas cruel," she said; "'twas almost as cruel as your slavery in America." Then she took us into a tower where was the "oubliette."
All honor, then, to Powell and his comrades who braved not alone the actual dangers thus described, but stood continually alert for unknown perils, which any bend in the swift, snake-like river might disclose, and which would make the gloomy groove through which they slipped a black-walled oubliette, or gate to Acheron.
Was it to be believed that he had lived all this time, buried in some oubliette at Tournebut, and could one expect that Mme. de Combray would reveal the secret of his retreat? As soon as she arrived at the Conciergerie, Licquet, without showing himself, had gone to "study" his prisoner.
He belonged to the class of his countrymen who have a dungeon-vault for feelings that should not be suffered to cry abroad, and into this oubliette he cast them, letting them feed as they might, or perish. It was his heart down below, and in no voluntary musings did he listen to it, to sustain the thing. Grimly lord of himself, he stood emotionless before the world.
In the seventeenth century Earl Gilbert made great improvements in it, and early in the eighteenth Earl Charles added the front. In 1836 it was rebuilt by Earl William George, the father of the present owner, with the exception of the lower part of the original tower. In this there used to be in olden times an oubliette in which unhappy prisoners were let down.
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