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"You've claimed my daughter as your wife before them all, and when you die to-morrow morning you'll leave her neither wife nor maid. I think I think you'd best make that lie of yours the truth." If one of his thin hands that clutched the chair arms had pressed a secret spring and loosed a trap to send me gasping down an oubliette, I should have been the less astounded.
In the pocket of his coat of mail Carpezan has a letter from Sister Agnes herself, in which she announces that she is going to be buried indeed, but in an oubliette of the convent, where she may either be kept on water and bread, or die starved outright. He seizes the unflinching Abbess by the arm, whilst Captain Ulric lays hold of the chaplain by the throat.
"They did not get in by this way when the first attempt was made," he said. "No," answered Malipieri. "I cannot find out how they made an entrance." "There used to be a story of an oubliette that was supposed to be somewhere in the house," said Sabina. "I have found it. You will see it in a moment, for we have to pass through the bottom of it." "How amusing! I never saw one."
The last silver cup the castle had possessed had to be given as a reward to the pursuivant, and mayhap Frau Kunigunde reckoned this as another offence of her daughter-in-law, since, had Sir Kasimir been safe in the oubliette, the twins might have shared his broad lands on the Danube, instead of contributing to the fees of his pursuivant. The cup could indeed be ill spared.
As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led to something.
All these prison vaults are more horrible than can be imagined without seeing them; but there are worse places here, for the guide lifted a trap-door in one of the passages, and held his torch down into an inscrutable pit beneath our feet. It was an oubliette, a dungeon where the prisoner might be buried alive, and never come forth again, alive or dead.
The top storey of the central tower is a large, well-lighted apartment, called the "Chapel," having evidently served that purpose in times past. At one end is what is said to be an oubliette, now almost filled up. Occasionally in the evenings, people walking along the roads or in the fields see the windows of this chapel lighted up for a few seconds as if many lamps were suddenly brought into it.
There were narrow passages down which tortured men must once have been carried, or at the end of which some oubliette opened to sudden destruction. Many horrible things must be in the knowledge of this massive masonry.
We might suppose it the bottom of a well; it is a miniature garden no bigger than the opening of an oubliette, overhung on all sides by the crushing height of the mountain and receiving from on high but the dim light of dreamland. Nevertheless, here is simulated a great natural ravine in all its wild grandeur: here are caverns, abrupt rocks, a torrent, a cascade, islands.
But the most popular room of all with visitors and quite naturally is the little boudoiresque study of Francis I, with its voluptuous ladies on the ceiling and the secret treasure-room leading from it, while on the way, just outside the door, is a convenient oubliette into which to push any inconvenient visitor. The loggia, which Mr.
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