prisoner was a Mr. White, who went mad, and it could
never be discovered who or what he was: by the name he must
have been English.

When Lord Albemarle was ambassador at Paris, in the year
1753, he by mere accident caught a sight of the list of
persons confined in the Bastille, lying on the table of the
French minister, with the name of Gordon at their head.
Being struck with the circumstance, he inquired into the
meaning of it; but the French minister could give no account
of it; and on the prisoner himself being released and sent
for, he could only state that he had been confined there
thirty years, but had not the slightest knowledge or
suspicion of the cause for which he had been arrested. Nor
is this wonderful, when we consider that _lettres de cachet_
were sold, with blanks left for the names to be filled up at
the pleasure or malice of the purchasers.

If it was only to prevent the recurrence of one such
instance (with the feeling in society at once shrinking from
and tamely acquiescing in it), the Revolution was well
purchased. When the crowd gained possession of this
loathsome spot, they eagerly poured into every corner and
turning of it, went down into the lowest dungeons with a
breathless curiosity and horror, knocking with
sledge-hammers at their triple portals, and breaking down
and destroying everything in their way. The stones and
devices on the battlements were torn off and thrown into the
ditch, and the papers and documents were at the same time
unfortunately destroyed.

A low range of dungeons was discovered underground, close to
the moat; and so contrived that, if those within had forced
a passage through, they would have let in the water of the
ditch and been suffocated. In one of these a skeleton was
found hanging to an iron cramp in the wall. In reading the
accounts of the demolition of this building, one feels that
indignation should have melted the stone walls like flax,
and that the dungeons should have given up their dead to
assist the living!

The Bastille was begun in 1370, in Charles V's time, by one
Hugh Abriot, provost of the city, who was afterward shut up
in it in 1381. It at first consisted only of two towers: two
more were added by Charles VI, and four more in 1383. Two
days