[Footnote 13:  Monstrelet relates a curious anecdote, during the residence at the Castle of Vincennes of Isabeau de Baviere, strongly illustrative of the barbarous manners of those times.  “Lewis de Bourbon, who was handsome and well made, and had signalized himself upon various occasions, and amongst others at the battle of Agincourt, going one night, as was customary, to visit the Queen, Isabeau de Baviere, at the Castle of Vincennes, met the King (Charles VI.); he saluted him, without either stopping or alighting from his horse, but continued galloping on.  The King having recollected him, ordered Tangui du Chatel, prevost of Paris, to pursue, and to confine him in prison.  At night the question was applied, and he was afterwards tied up in a sack and cast into the Seine, with this inscription upon the sack, ‘Let the King’s justice take place.’”]

Dulaure, a French writer, in speaking of the persons who were confined here, observes, it would be difficult to enumerate the number of individuals that have been shut up in this prison within these few years.  “We will merely notice,” he says, “the celebrated Count Mirabeau, who was confined from 1777 to 1780; here it was that he translated his Tibulle, and Joannes Secundus, and wrote his ’Lettres originales’ to his mistress, Madame Lemonnier, which abound with passages as affecting as the letters of Heloise”.

This prison was thrown open during the reign of the unfortunate Louis XVI. by the Baron de Breteuil, Minister of the Department of Paris in 1784.  In going over it, every one was penetrated with horror; and feelings of the most melancholy interest were excited by reading the various inscriptions on the walls, indicative of the hopeless misery that had been experienced within them!  Many were expressive of piety and resignation at the approach of death!—­others complaining of the cruel oppression which had immured them!  On one wall was written, “Il faut mourir, mon frere; mon frere il faut mourir, quand il plaira a Dieu”.  On the door of another prison were, “Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter justitiam, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum”.  On the same spot were, “Carcer Socratis, templum honoris”.

This Donjon remained unoccupied until 1791.  At this period, the prisons of the capital being filled with criminals, Government ordered it to be prepared for the reception of that class of prisoners; but on the massacres that followed, the mob either murdered or released them all, after a bloody contest, and it remained again without prisoners until the Imperial Government under Buonaparte.  It was then garrisoned by a detachment of the Imperial Guard, and multitudes of victims were transferred there whose fate remains, and probably ever will remain, unknown.

It was to this place that the Duke D’Enghien, who was arrested the 15th March, 1804, at Ettenheim, in the Electorate of Baden, was conducted the 20th of the same month, at five in the evening, and condemned to death the night following, by a military commission, at which Murat presided.  He was accordingly shot on the 21st, at half past four in the evening, in the ditch of the castle which looks towards the forest, on the north side, and his body thrown into a grave, ready dug to receive it, where he fell.  The details of this cruel and wanton act of barbarity are too well known to need any repetition here.