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Updated: June 8, 2025
His lower lip was mangled, where his teeth had nearly met, through it. Already, a confused murmur of sound was developing, from the black opening of the passage that had led the Legionaries down to this crypt of the wine-sacks and the pit. He smiled, oddly. "Many a corpse has been flung down this oubliette," said he.
Hundreds of terrified, yet innocent and nameless victims of Russia's mediæval barbarism, persons of both sexes alas! that I should speak so of my own country have, during the past ten years of enlightenment, stood in their narrow dimly-lit oubliette and watched in horror the black tide trickle through the rat holes in the stone floor, slowly, ever slowly, until water has filled the cell to the arched stone roof and drowned them as rats in a trap.
With the native sound judgment of the father of a heroine of romance, the von Berlichingen of that day shut his daughter up in his donjon keep, or his oubliette, or his culverin, or some such place, and resolved that she should stay there until she selected a husband from among her rich and noble lovers.
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.
He was immediately led down a winding stair by torch-light; and, conceiving that he was descending into some subterraneous dungeon, said to one of the soldiers of the escort, "Am I to be immured in an oubliette?" "Monseigneur," the man replied, sobbing, "be tranquil on that point."
The career of these adventurers is usually as brief as it is inglorious; when apprehended they are handed over to the French authorities, and the place that knew them knows them no more. They are shot into some mysterious oubliette. The rest is silence, or, as a mediaeval chronicler would say, "Let him have a priest."
Words abounded without explanations, and blows seemed possible, when Cleghorn, as it were apologetically raised a pitcher and a bowl into the shaft of light that came through the oubliette. "They're all like that, Dick," he protested. "It's your lucky day. I congratulate you."
In the cells above, in the dungeons beneath, one stumbled over rifts of hard earth, in the centre or in a corner of which yawned now the mouth of an unsealed oubliette, now a well. Finally, at the summit of one of the towers, that at the left as one entered, there was a roofed gallery running parallel to a circular foothold cut from the rock.
"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!
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.
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