aving of the
Topography of Paris, in the Collection of Engravings of the National
Library.]

The subterranean cells of the Bastille (Fig. 354) did not differ much from
those of the Chatelet. There were several, the bottoms of which were
formed like a sugar-loaf upside down, thus neither allowing the prisoner
to stand up, nor even to adopt a tolerable position sitting or lying down.
It was in these that King Louis XI., who seemed to have a partiality for
filthy dungeons, placed the two young sons of the Duke de Nemours
(beheaded in 1477), ordering, besides, that they should be taken out twice
a week and beaten with birch rods, and, as a supreme measure of atrocity,
he had one of their teeth extracted every three months. It was Louis XI.,
too, who, in 1476, ordered the famous _iron cage_, to be erected in one of
the towers of the Bastille, in which Guillaume, Bishop of Verdun, was
incarcerated for fourteen years.

The Chateau de Loches also possessed one of these cages, which received
the name of _Cage de Balue_, because the Cardinal Jean de la Balue was
imprisoned in it. Philippe de Commines, in his "Memoires," declares that
he himself had a taste of it for eight months. Before the invention of
cages, Louis XI. ordered very heavy chains to be made, which were fastened
to the feet of the prisoners, and attached to large iron balls, called,
according to Commines, the King's little daughters (_les fillettes du
roy_).

[Illustration: Fig. 355.--Movable Iron Cage.--Fac-simile of a Woodcut in
the "Cosmographie Universelle" of Munster, in folio, Basle, 1552.]

The prison known by the name of The Leads of Venice is of so notorious a
character that its mere mention is sufficient, without its being necessary
for us to describe it. To the subject of voluntary seclusions, to which
certain pious persons submitted themselves as acts of extreme religious
devotion, it will only be necessary to allude here, and to remark that
there are examples of this confinement having been ordered by legal
authority. In 1485, Renee de Vermandois, the widow of a squire, had been
condemned to be burnt for adultery and for murdering her husband; but, on
letters of remission from the King, Parliament commuted the sentence
pronounced by the Provost of Paris, and ordered that Renee de Vermandois
should be "shut up within the walls of the cemetery of the
Saints-Innocents, in a small house, built at her expense, that she might
therein do penance and end h