thout light and air. In
the centre of the floor is a hole connected with a reservoir of water
below.

This Tour de Constance continued to be the principal prison for
Huguenot women in France for a period of about a hundred years. It was
always horribly unhealthy; and to be condemned to this dungeon was
considered almost as certain though a slower death than to be
condemned to the gallows. Sixteen Huguenot women confined there in
1686 died within five months. Most of them were the wives of merchants
of Nismes, or of men of property in the district. When the prisoners
died off, the dungeon was at once filled up again with more victims,
and it was rarely, if ever, empty, down to a period within only a few
years before the outbreak of the French Revolution.

The punishment of the men found attending religious meetings, and
taken prisoners by the soldiers, was to be sentenced to the galleys,
mostly for life. They were usually collected in large numbers, and
sent to the seaports attached together by chains. They were sent
openly, sometimes through the entire length of the kingdom, by way of
a show. The object was to teach the horrible delinquency of professing
Protestantism; for it could not be to show the greater beautifulness
and mercifulness of Catholicism.

The punishment of the Chain varied in degree. Sometimes it was more
cruel than at other times. This depended upon the drivers of the
prisoners. Marteilhe describes the punishment during his conveyance
from Havre to Marseilles in the winter of 1712.[47] The Chain to which
he belonged did not reach Marseilles until the 17th January, 1713. The
season was bitterly cold; but that made no difference in the treatment
of Huguenot prisoners.

[Footnote 47: "Autobiography of a French Protestant condemned
to the Galleys because of his Religion." Rotterdam, 1757.
(Since reprinted by the Religious Tract Society.)]

The Chain consisted of a file of prisoners, chained one to another in
various ways. On this occasion, each pair was fastened by the neck
with a thick chain three feet long, in the middle of which was a round
ring. After being thus chained, the pairs were placed in file, couple
behind couple, when another long thick chain was passed through the
rings, thus running along the centre of the gang, and the whole were
thus doubly-chained together. There were no less than four hundred
prisoners in the chain described by Marteilhe. The number had,