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Updated: June 20, 2025
The deeds that are done behind the walls of that fortress-prison by men who call themselves Christians, are the most tremendous denial of Christ that this era has witnessed. Sick at heart, I turned away, and walked moodily back to my hotel. The proprietor was in the lobby, and the whole staff seemed to be on the spot.
I found a way across the moat, scrambled over a wall smothered in brambles, and got into the garden. A few lean hydrangeas and geraniums pined in the flower-beds, and the ancient house looked down on them indifferently. Its garden side was plainer and severer than the other: the long granite front, with its few windows and steep roof, looked like a fortress-prison.
Weary and faint from loss of blood I dressed myself with extreme difficulty and then proceeded to examine my present abode. We are familiar with the cramped quarters at the Tower of London into which our mediæval sovereigns were wont to thrust our ancestors who fell foul of authority. Wesel Prison is the German counterpart of our famous quondam fortress-prison.
As we turned to look back at Amboise from the bridge, some heavy clouds hung over the castle, making it look grim and gray, more like the fortress-prison that it had proved to so many hundreds of brave, unfortunate Frenchmen than the cheerful château, basking in the sunshine, that we had seen this morning.
Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a "member of the Institute, the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt."
To pass from the palace of Pelusium to the fortress-prison was to pass, by a few steps, from the Oriental life, in all its sensuous splendour, to Orientalism in its most degraded savagery. The prison was a half-underground kennel of stone and brick, on which the parching sun beat pitilessly, and made the galleries and cells like so many furnaces in heat.
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