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Table of Contents

Provincial prisons—Loches, in Touraine, still standing—Favorite gaol of Louis XI—The iron cage—Cardinal La Balue, the Duc d’Alençon, Comines, the Bishops—Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and his mournful inscriptions—Diane de Poitiers and her father—Mont St. Michel—Louis Napoleon—Count St. Pol—Strongholds of Touraine—Catherine de Medicis—Massacre of St Bartholomew—Murder of Duc de Guise—Chambord—Amboise—Angers—Pignerol—Exiles and the Isle St. Marguerite.

The early history of France is made up of the continuous struggle between the sovereign and the people. The power of the king, though constantly opposed by the great vassals and feudal lords, steadily grew and gained strength. The state was meanwhile torn with dissensions and passed through many succeeding periods of anarchy and great disorders. The king’s power was repeatedly challenged by rivals and pretenders. It was weakened, and at times eclipsed, but in the long run it always triumphed. The king always vindicated his right to the supreme authority and, when he could, ruled arbitrarily and imperiously, backed and supported by attributes of autocracy which gradually overcame all opposition and finally established a despotic absolutism.

The principal prisons of France were royal institutions. Two in particular, the chief and most celebrated, Vincennes and the Bastile, were seated in the capital. With these I shall deal presently at considerable length. Many others, provincial strongholds and castles, were little less conspicuous and mostly of evil reputation. I shall deal with those first.

Loches in the Touraine, some twenty-five miles from Tours, will go down in history as one of the most famous, or more exactly, infamous castles in mediæval France. It was long a favored royal palace, a popular residence with the Plantagenet and other kings, but degenerated at length under Louis XI into a cruel and hideous gaol. It stands to-day in elevated isolation dominating a flat, verdant country, just as the well-known Mont St. Michel rises above the sands on the Normandy coast. The most prominent object is the colossal white donjon, or central keep, esteemed the finest of its kind in France, said to have been erected by Fulk Nerra, the celebrated “Black Count,” Count of Anjou in the eleventh century. It is surrounded by a congeries of massive buildings of later date. Just below it are the round towers of the Martelet, dating from Louis XI, who placed within them the terrible dungeons he invariably kept filled. At the other end of the long lofty plateau is another tower, that of Agnes Sorel, the personage whose influence over Charles VII, although wrongly acquired, was always exercised for good, and whose earnest patriotism inspired him to strenuous attempts to recover France from its English invaders. Historians have conceded to her a place far above the many kings’ mistresses who have reigned upon the left hand of the monarchs of France. Agnes was known as the lady of “Beauté-sur-Marne,” “a beauty in character as well as in aspect,” and is said to have been poisoned at Junièges. She was buried at Loches with the inscription, still legible, “A sweet and simple dove whiter than swans, redder than the flame.” The face, still distinguishable, preserves the “loveliness of flowers in spring.” After the death of Charles VII, the priests of Saint-Ours desired to expel this tomb. But Louis XI was now on the throne. He had not hesitated to insult Agnes Sorel while living, upbraiding her openly and even, one day at court, striking her in the face with his glove, but he would only grant their request on condition that they surrender the many rich gifts bestowed upon them at her hands.

It is, however, in its character as a royal gaol and horrible prison house that Loches concerns us. Louis XI, saturnine and vindictive, found it exactly suited to his purpose for the infliction of those barbarous and inhuman penalties upon those who had offended him, that must ever disgrace his name. The great donjon, already mentioned, built by Fulk Nerra, the “Black Count,” had already been used by him as a prison and the rooms occupied by the Scottish Guard are still to be seen. The new tower at the northwest angle of the fortress was the work of Louis and on the ground floor level is the torture chamber, with an iron bar recalling its ancient usage. Below are four stories, one beneath the other. These dungeons, entered by a subterranean door give access to the vaulted semi-dark interior. Above this gloomy portal is scratched the jesting welcome, “Entrez Messieurs—ches le Roi nostre maistre,”—“Come in, the King is at home.” At this gateway the King stood frequently with his chosen companions, his barber and the common hangman, to gloat over the sufferings of his prisoners. In a cell on the second story from the bottom, the iron cage was established, so fiendishly contrived for the unending pain of its occupant. Comines, the “Father of modern historians,” gives in his memoirs a full account of this detestable place of durance.

Comines fell into disgrace with Anne of Beaujeu by fomenting rebellion against her administration as Regent. He fled and took refuge with the Duke de Bourbon, whom he persuaded to go to the King, the infant Charles VIII, to complain of Anne’s misgovernment. Comines was dismissed by the Duke de Bourbon and took service with the Duke d’Orleans. Their intrigues were secretly favored by the King himself, who, as he grew older, became impatient of the wise but imperious control of Anne of Beaujeu. In concert with some other nobles, Comines plotted to carry off the young King and place him under the guardianship of the Duke d’Orleans. Although Charles was a party to the design he punished them when it failed. Comines was arrested at Amboise and taken to Loches, where he was confined for eight months. Then by decree of the Paris parliament his property was confiscated and he was brought to Paris to be imprisoned in the Conciergerie. There he remained for twenty months, and in March, 1489, was condemned to banishment to one of his estates for ten years and to give bail for his good behavior to the amount of 10,000 golden crowns. He was forgiven long before the end of his term and regained his seat and influence in the King’s Council of State.

“The King,” says Comines, “had ordered several cruel prisons to be made; some were cages of iron and some of wood, but all were covered with iron plates both within and without, with terrible locks, about eight feet wide and seven feet high; the first contriver of them was the Bishop of Verdun (Guillaume d’Haraucourt) who was immediately put into the first of them, where he continued fourteen years. Many bitter curses he has had since his invention, and some from me as I lay in one of them eight months together during the minority of our present King. He (Louis XI) also ordered heavy and terrible fetters to be made in Germany and particularly a certain ring for the feet which was extremely hard to be opened and fitted like an iron collar, with a thick weighty chain and a great globe of iron at the end of it, most unreasonably heavy, which engine was called the King’s Nets. However, I have seen many eminent men, deserving persons in these prisons with these nets about their legs, who afterwards came out with great joy and honor and received great rewards from the king.”

Another occupant beside d’Haraucourt, of this intolerable den, so limited in size that “no person of average proportions could stand up comfortably or be at full length within,” was Cardinal la Balue,—for some years after 1469. These two great ecclesiastics had been guilty of treasonable correspondence with the Duke of Burgundy, then at war with Louis XI. The treachery was the more base in La Balue, who owed everything to Louis, who had raised him from a tailor’s son to the highest dignities in the Church and endowed him with immense wealth. Louis had a strong bias towards low-born men and “made his servants, heralds and his barbers, ministers of state.” Louis would have sent this traitor to the scaffold, but ever bigoted and superstitious, he was afraid of the Pope, Paul II, who had protested against the arrest of a prelate and a prince of the Church. He kept d’Haraucourt, the Bishop of Verdun, in prison for many years, for the most part at the Bastile while Cardinal La Balue was moved to and fro: he began at Loches whence, with intervals at Onzain, Montpaysan, and Plessis-lez-Tours, he was brought periodically to the Bastile in order that his tormentor might gloat personally over his sufferings. This was the servant of whom Louis once thought so well that he wrote of him as “a good sort of devil of a bishop just now, but there is no saying what he may grow into by and by.” He endured the horrors of imprisonment until within three years of the death of the King, who, after a long illness and a paralytic seizure, yielded at last to the solicitations of the then Pope, Sixtus IV, to release him.

The “Bishops’ Prison” is still shown at Loches, a different receptacle from the cages and dungeons occupied by Cardinal La Balue and the Bishop of Verdun. These other bishops did their own decorations akin to Sforza’s, but their rude presentment was of an altar and cross roughly depicted on the wall of their cell. Some confusion exists as to their identity, but they are said to have been De Pompadour, Bishop of Peregneux, and De Chaumont, Bishop of Montauban, and their offense was complicity in the conspiracy for which Comines suffered. If this were so it must have been after the reign of Louis XI.

Among the many victims condemned by Louis XI to the tender mercies of Loches, was the Duc d’Alençon, who had already been sentenced to death in the previous reign for trafficking with the English, but whose life had been spared by Charles VII, to be again forfeited to Louis XI, for conspiracy with the Duke of Burgundy. His sentence was commuted to imprisonment in Loches.

A few more words about Loches. Descending more than a hundred steps we reach the dungeon occupied by Ludovico Sforza, called “Il Moro,” Duke of Milan, who had long been in conflict with France. The epithet applied to him was derived from the mulberry tree, which from the seasons of its flowers and its fruit was taken as an emblem of “prudence.” The name was wrongly supposed to be due to his dark Moorish complexion. After many successes the fortune of war went against Sforza and he was beaten by Trionlzio, commanding the French army, who cast him into the prison of Novara. Il Moro was carried into France, his destination being the underground dungeon at Loches.

Much pathos surrounds the memory of this illustrious prisoner, who for nine years languished in a cell so dark that light entered it only through a slit in fourteen feet of rock. The only spot ever touched by daylight is still indicated by a small square scratched on the stone floor. Ludovico Sforza strove to pass the weary hours by decorating his room with rough attempts at fresco. The red stars rendered in patterns upon the wall may still be seen, and among them, twice repeated, a prodigious helmet giving a glimpse through the casque of the stern, hard looking face inside. A portrait of Il Moro is extant at the Certosa, near Pavia, and has been described as that of a man “with the fat face and fine chin of the elderly Napoleon, the beak-like nose of Wellington, a small, querulous, neat-lipped mouth and immense eyebrows stretched like the talons of an eagle across the low forehead.”

Ludovico Sforza left his imprint on the walls of this redoubtable gaol and we may read his daily repinings in the mournful inscriptions he recorded among the rough red decorations. One runs: “My motto is to arm myself with patience, to bear the troubles laid upon me.” He who would have faced death eagerly in open fight declares here that he was “assailed by it and could not die.” He found “no pity; gaiety was banished entirely from his heart.” At length, after struggling bravely for nearly nine years he was removed from the lower dungeons to an upper floor and was permitted to exercise occasionally in the open air till death came, with its irresistible order of release. The picture of his first passage through Paris to his living tomb has been admirably drawn:—“An old French street surging with an eager mob, through which there jostles a long line of guards and archers; in their midst a tall man dressed in black camlet, seated on a mule. In his hands he holds his biretta and lifts up unshaded his pale, courageous face, showing in all his bearing a great contempt for death. It is Ludovico, Duke of Milan, riding to his cage at Loches.” It is not to the credit of Louis XII and his second wife, Anne of Brittany, widow of his predecessor Charles VIII, that they often occupied Loches as a royal residence during the incarceration of Ludovico Sforza, and made high festival upstairs while their wretched prisoner languished below.

The rebellion of the Constable de Bourbon against Francis I, in 1523, implicated two more bishops, those of Puy and Autun. Bourbon aspired to create an independent kingdom in the heart of France and was backed by the Emperor Charles V. The Sieur de Brézé, Seneschal of Normandy, the husband of the famous Diane de Poitiers, revealed the conspiracy to the King, Francis I, unwittingly implicating Jean de Poitiers, his father-in-law. Bourbon, flying to one of his fortified castles, sent the Bishop of Autun to plead for him with the King, who only arrested the messenger. Bourbon, continuing his flight, stopped a night at Puy in Auvergne, and this dragged in the second bishop. Jean de Poitiers, Seigneur de St. Vallier, was also thrown into Loches, whence the prisoner appealed to his daughter and his son-in-law. “Madame,” he wrote to Diane, “here am I arrived at Loches as badly handled as any prisoner could be. I beg of you to have so much pity as to come and visit your poor father.” Diane strove hard with the pitiless king, who only pressed on the trial, urging the judges to elicit promptly all the particulars and the names of the conspirators, if necessary by torture. St. Vallier’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment, “between four walls of solid masonry with but one small slit of window.” The Constable de Bourbon made St. Vallier’s release a condition of submission, and Diane de Poitiers, ever earnestly begging for mercy, won pardon at length, which she took in person to her father’s gloomy cell, where his hair had turned white in the continual darkness.

The wretched inmates of Loches succeeded each other, reign after reign in an interminable procession. One of the most ill-used was de Rochechouart, nephew of the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, who was mixed up in a court intrigue in 1633 and detained in Loches with no proof against him in the hopes of extorting a confession.

Mont St. Michel as a State prison is of still greater antiquity than Loches, far older than the stronghold for which it was admirably suited by its isolated situation on the barren sea shore. It is still girt round with mediæval walls from which rise tall towers proclaiming its defensive strength. Its church and Benedictine monastery are of ancient foundation, dating back to the eighth century. It was taken under the especial protection of Duke Rollo and contributed shipping for the invading hosts of William the Conqueror. Later, in the long conflict with the English, when their hosts over-ran Normandy, Mont St. Michel was the only fortress which held out for the French king. The origin of its dungeons and oubliettes is lost in antiquity. It had its cage like Loches, built of metal bars, but for these solid wooden beams were afterwards substituted.

Modern sentiment hangs about the citadel of Ham near Amiens, as the prison house of Louis Napoleon and his companions, Generals Cavaignac, Changarnier and Lamoricière, after his raid upon Boulogne, in 1830, when he prematurely attempted to seize supreme power in France and ignominiously failed. Ham had been a place of durance for political purposes from the earliest times. There was a castle before the thirteenth century and one was erected on the same site in 1470 by the Count St. Pol, whom Louis XI beheaded. The motto of the family “Mon mieux” (my best) may still be read engraved over the gateway. Another version is to the effect that St. Pol was committed to the Bastile and suffered within that fortress-gaol. He appears to have been a restless malcontent forever concerned in the intrigues of his time, serving many masters and betraying all in turn. He gave allegiance now to France, now England, now Burgundy and Lorraine, but aimed secretly to make himself an independent prince trusting to his great wealth, his ambitious self-seeking activity and his unfailing perfidies. In the end the indignant sovereigns turned upon him and agreed to punish him. St. Pol finding himself in jeopardy fled from France after seeking for a safe conduct through Burgundy. Charles the Bold replied by seizing his person and handing him over to Louis XI, who had claimed the prisoner. “I want a head like his to control a certain business in hand; his body I can do without and you may keep it,” was Louis’s request. St. Pol, according to this account, was executed on the Place de la Grève. It may be recalled that Ham was also for a time the prison of Joan of Arc; and many more political prisoners, princes, marshals of France, and ministers of state were lodged there.

The smiling verdant valley of the Loire, which flows through the historic province of Touraine, is rich in ancient strongholds that preserve the memories of mediæval France. It was the home of those powerful feudal lords, the turbulent vassals who so long contended for independence with their titular masters, weak sovereigns too often unable to keep them in subjection. They raised the round towers and square impregnable donjons, resisting capture in the days before siege artillery, all of which have their gruesome history, their painful records showing the base uses which they served, giving effect to the wicked will of heartless, unprincipled tyrants.

Thus, as we descend the river, we come to Blois, with its spacious castle at once formidable and palatial, stained with many blood-thirsty deeds when vicious and unscrupulous kings held their court there. Great personages were there imprisoned and sometimes assassinated. At first the fief of the Counts of Blois, it later passed into the possession of the crown and became the particular property of the dukes of Orleans. It was the favorite residence of that duke who became King Louis XII of France, and his second queen, Anne of Brittany. His son, Francis I, enlarged and beautified it, and his son again, Henry II, married a wife, Catherine de Medicis, who was long associated with Blois and brought much evil upon it. Catherine is one of the blackest female figures in French history; “niece of a pope, mother of four Valois, a Queen of France, widow of an ardent enemy of the Huguenots, an Italian Catholic, above all a Medicis,” hers was a dissolute wicked life, her hands steeped in blood, her moral character a reproach to womankind. Her favorite device was “odiate e aspettate,” “hate and wait,” and when she called anyone “friend” it boded ill for him; she was already plotting his ruin. She no doubt inspired, and is to be held responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the murder of the Duc de Guise in this very castle of Blois was largely her doing. It was one of the worst of the many crimes committed in the shameful reign of her son Henry III, the contemptible king with his unnatural affections, his effeminate love of female attire, his little dogs, his loathsome favorites and his nauseating mockeries of holiness. His court was a perpetual scene of intrigue, conspiracy, superstition, the lowest vices, cowardly assassinations and murderous duels. One of the most infamous of these was a fight between three of his particular associates and three of the Guises, when four of the combatants were killed.

The famous league of the “Sixteen,” headed by the Duc de Guise, would have carried Henry III back to Paris and held him there a prisoner, but the King was resolved to strike a blow on his own behalf and determined to kill Guise. The States General was sitting at Blois and Guise was there taking the leading part. The famous Crillon, one of his bravest soldiers, was invited to do the deed but refused, saying he was a soldier and not an executioner. Then one of Henry’s personal attendants offered his services with the forty-five guards, and it was arranged that the murder should be committed in the King’s private cabinet. Guise was summoned to an early council, but the previous night he had been cautioned by a letter placed under his napkin. “He would not dare,” Guise wrote underneath the letter and threw it under the table. Next morning he proceeded to the cabinet undeterred. The King had issued daggers to his guards, saying, “Guise or I must die,” and went to his prayers. When Guise lifted the curtain admitting him into the cabinet one of the guards stabbed him in the breast. A fierce struggle ensued, in which the Duke dragged his murderers round the room before they could dispatch him. “The beast is dead, so is the poison,” was the King’s heartless remark, and he ran to tell his mother that he was “once more master of France.” This cowardly act did not serve the King, for it stirred up the people of Paris, who vowed vengeance. Henry at once made overtures to the Huguenots and next year fell a victim to the knife of a fanatic monk at Saint Clou.

Blois ceased to be the seat of the Court after Henry III. Louis XIII, when he came to the throne, imprisoned his mother Marie de Medicis there. It was a time of great political stress when executions were frequent, and much sympathy was felt for Marie de Medicis. A plot was set on foot to release her from Blois. A party of friends arranged the escape. She descended from her window by a rope ladder, accompanied by a single waiting-woman. Many accidents supervened: there was no carriage, the royal jewels had been overlooked, time was lost in searching for the first and recovering the second, but at length Marie was free to continue her criminal machinations. Her chief ally was Gaston d’Orleans, who came eventually to live and die on his estate at Blois. He was a cowardly, self indulgent prince but had a remarkable daughter, Marie de Montpensier, commonly called “La Grande Mademoiselle,” who was the heroine of many stirring adventures, some of which will be told later on.

Not far from Blois are Chambord, an ancient fortress, first transformed into a hunting lodge and later into a magnificent palace, a perfect wilderness of dressed stone; Chaumont, the birth-place of Cardinal d’Amboise and at one time the property of Catherine de Medicis; Amboise, the scene of the great Huguenot massacre of which more on a later page; Chenonceaux, Henri II’s gift to Diane de Poitiers, which Catherine took from her, and in which Mary Queen of Scots spent a part of her early married life; Langeais, an Angevin fortress of the middle ages; Azay-le-Rideau, a perfect Renaissance chateau; Fontevrault, where several Plantagenet kings found burial, and Chinon, a triple castle now irretrievably ruined, to which Jeanne d’Arc came seeking audience of the King, when Charles VII formally presented her with a suit of knight’s armor and girt on her the famous sword, said to have been picked up by Charles Martel on the Field of Tours after that momentous victory which checked the Moorish invasion, and but for which the dominion of Islam would probably have embraced western Europe.

Two other remarkable prison castles must be mentioned here, Amboise and Angers. The first named is still a conspicuous object in a now peaceful neighborhood, but it offers few traces of antiquity, although it is full of bloody traditions. Its most terrible memory is that of the Amboise conspiracy organised by the Huguenots in 1560, and intended to remove the young king, Francis II, from the close guardianship of the Guises. The real leader was the Prince de Condé, known as “the silent captain.” The ostensible chief was a Protestant gentleman of Perigord, named Renaudie, a resolute, intelligent man, stained with an evil record, having been once sentenced and imprisoned for the crime of forgery. He was to appear suddenly at the castle at the head of fifteen hundred devoted followers, surprise the Guises and seize the person of the young king. One of their accomplices, a lawyer, or according to another account, a certain Captain Lignières, was alarmed and betrayed the conspirators. Preparations were secretly made for defence, Renaudie was met with an armed force and killed on the spot, and his party made prisoners by lots, as they appeared. All were forthwith executed, innocent and guilty, even the peasants on their way to market. They were hanged, decapitated or drowned. The court of the castle and the streets of the town ran with blood until the executioners, sated with the slaughter, took to sewing up the survivors in sacks and throwing them into the river from the bridge garnished with gibbets, and ghastly heads impaled on pikes. A balcony to this day known as the “Grille aux Huguenots” still exists, on which Catherine de Medicis and her three sons, Francis II, the reigning monarch, Charles, afterwards the ninth king of that name, and Henry II, witnessed the massacre in full court dress. Mary, Queen of Scots, the youthful bride of her still younger husband, was also present. The Prince de Condé had been denounced, but there was no positive evidence against him and he stoutly denied his guilt, and in the presence of the whole court challenged any accuser to single combat. No one took up the glove and he remained free until a fresh conspiracy, stimulated by detestation of the atrocities committed by the Guises, seriously compromised the prince. Condé was arrested at Orleans, found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. He was saved by the death of Francis. Mary Stuart afterward returned to Scotland to pass through many stormy adventures and end her life on the scaffold.

The fiendish butchery just described was the last great tragedy Amboise witnessed, but it received one or two notable prisoners as time went on, more particularly Fouquet, the fraudulent superintendent of finances whom Louis XIV pursued to the bitter end; and Lauzun le Beau, the handsome courtier who flew too high “with vaulting ambition, but fell” into the depths of a dungeon. A detailed account of both these cases will be found in another chapter.