for the lives of friends and foes.

The ministers of Charles X, in 1830, had cause to regret the strength of
the chateau walls; and Barbes, Blanqui and Raspail, in 1848, and various
Republicans, who had been seized as dangerous elements of society after
the Coup d'Etat of 1851, also here found an enforced hospitality. The
Chateau de Vincennes had become a second Bastille.

The incident of the arrest and death of the Duc d'Enghien is one of the
most dramatic in Napoleonic history. The scene was Vincennes. Louis
Antoine Henri de Bourbon, son of the Prince de Conde, born at Chantilly
in 1772, became, without just reason, suspected in connection with the
Cadoudal-Pichegreu plot, and was seized by a squadron of cavalry at the
Schloss Ettenheim in the Duchy of Baden and conducted to Vincennes.
Here, after a summary judgment, he was shot at night in the moat behind
the guardhouse. The obscurity of the night was so great that a lighted
lantern was hung around the neck of the unfortunate man that the
soldiers might the better see the mark at which they were to shoot.

Napoleon confided to Josephine, who repeated the secret to Madame de
Remusat, that his political future demanded a _coup d'Etat_. On the
morning of the execution, the emperor, awakening at five o'clock, said
to Josephine: "By this time the Duc d'Enghien has passed from this
life."

The rest is history--of that apologetic kind which is not often
recorded.

In the chapel at Vincennes a commemorative tablet was placed, by the
orders of Louis XVIII, in 1816, to mark the death of the young duke.

The Bois de Vincennes is not the fashionable parade ground of the Bois
de Boulogne. On the whole it is a sad sort of a public park, and not at
all fashionable, and not particularly attractive, though of a vast
extent and possessed of a profoundly historic past of far more
significance than that of its sweet sister by the opposite gates of
Paris.

[Illustration: _A Hunt under the Walls of Vincennes_

_From a Fourteenth Century Print_]

It contains ten hundred and sixty-nine hectares and was due originally
to Louis XV, who sought to have a sylvan gateway to the city from the
east. Under the Second Empire the park was considerably transformed, new
roads and alleys traced, and an effort made to have it equal more
nearly the beauty of the more popular Bois de Boulogne. It occupies the
plateau lying between the Seine and the bend in the Marne, just above
the junction of t