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In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete, there was almost as much of it in the earth as above it Unless built upon piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had always a double bottom In cathedrals, it was, in some sort, another subterranean cathedral, low, dark, mysterious, blind, and ht and reverberating with organs and bells day and night

Sometimes it was a sepulchre In palaces, in fortresses, it was a prison, sohty buildings, whose etation we have elsewhere explained, had not si through the soil in chaalleries, 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 looraduated Dante could never i better for his hell

These tunnels of cells usually tereon, with a vat-like bottom, where Dante placed Satan, where society placed those condemned to death A ht, air, life, ~ogni speranza~--every hope; it only came forth to the scaffold or the stake So" Between men and himself, the conde down upon his head; and the entire prison, themore than an enormous, complicated lock, which barred hi cavity of this description, in the ~oubliettes~ excavated by Saint-Louis, in the ~inpace~ of the Tournelle, that la Esh 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