ambers, galleries,
and staircases, like the construction above. Thus churches, palaces,
fortresses, had the earth half way up their bodies. The cellars of an
edifice formed another edifice, into which one descended instead
of ascending, and which extended its subterranean grounds under the
external piles of the monument, like those forests and mountains which
are reversed in the mirror-like waters of a lake, beneath the forests
and mountains of the banks.

At the fortress of Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice of Paris,
at the Louvre, these subterranean edifices were prisons. The stories of
these prisons, as they sank into the soil, grew constantly narrower and
more gloomy. They were so many zones, where the shades of horror were
graduated. Dante could never imagine anything better for his hell. These
tunnels of cells usually terminated in a sack of a lowest dungeon, with
a vat-like bottom, where Dante placed Satan, where society placed those
condemned to death. A miserable human existence, once interred there;
farewell light, air, life, _ogni speranza_--every hope; it only came
forth to the scaffold or the stake. Sometimes it rotted there; human
justice called this "forgetting." Between men and himself, the condemned
man felt a pile of stones and jailers weighing down upon his head;
and the entire prison, the massive bastille was nothing more than an
enormous, complicated lock, which barred him off from the rest of the
world.

It was in a sloping cavity of this description, in the _oubliettes_
excavated by Saint-Louis, in the _inpace_ of the Tournelle, that la
Esmeralda had been placed on being condemned to death, through fear of
her escape, no doubt, with the colossal court-house over her head. Poor
fly, who could not have lifted even one of its blocks of stone!

Assuredly, Providence and society had been equally unjust; such an
excess of unhappiness and of torture was not necessary to break so frail
a creature.

There she lay, lost in the shadows, buried, hidden, immured. Any one
who could have beheld her in this state, after having seen her laugh and
dance in the sun, would have shuddered. Cold as night, cold as death,
not a breath of air in her tresses, not a human sound in her ear,
no longer a ray of light in her eyes; snapped in twain, crushed with
chains, crouching beside a jug and a loaf, on a little straw, in a
pool of water, which was formed under her by the sweating of the prison
walls; without moti