Meanwhile a garde-chiourme returned with our passports, which M. le gouverneur had wished to see; then he motioned us to follow him; he opened doors, drew bolts, and led us through a maze of halls, vaults and staircases.  Really, one can lose oneself in this labyrinth, for a single visit does not enable you to understand the complicated plan of these combined buildings, where a fortress, a church, an abbey, a prison and a dungeon, are mingled, and where you can find every style of architecture, from the Romance of the eleventh century to the bewildering Gothic of the sixteenth.  We could catch only a glimpse of the knights’ hall, which has been converted into a loom-room and is for this reason barred to the public.  We saw only four rows of columns supporting a ceiling ornamented with salient mouldings; they were decorated with clover leaves.  The monastery is built over this hall, at an altitude of two hundred feet above the sea level.  It is composed of a quadrangular gallery formed by a triple line of small granite, tufa, or stucco columns.  Acanthus, thistles, ivy, and oak-leaves wind around their caps; between each mitred ogive is a cut-out rose; this gallery is the place where the prisoners take the air.

The cap of the garde-chiourme now passes along these walls where, in olden times, passed the shaved heads of industrious friars; and the wooden shoes of the prisoners click on the slabs that used to be swept by the trailing robes of monks and trodden by their heavy leather sandals.

The church has a Gothic choir and a Romance nave, and the two architectures seem to vie with each other in majesty and elegance.  In the choir, the arches of the windows are pointed, and are as lofty as the aspirations of love; in the nave, the arcades open their semi-circles roundly, and columns as straight as the trunk of a palm-tree mount along the walls.  They rest on square pedestals, are crowned with acanthus leaves, and continue in powerful mouldings that curve beneath the ceiling and help support it.

It was noon.  The bright daylight poured in through the open door and rippled over the dark sides of the building.

The nave, which is separated from the choir by a green curtain, is filled with tables and benches, for it is used also as a dining-hall.  When mass is celebrated, the curtain is drawn and the condemned men may be present at divine service without removing their elbows from the table.  It is a novel idea.

In order to enlarge the platform by twelve yards on the western side of the church, the latter itself has been curtailed; but as it was necessary to reconstruct some sort of entrance, one architect closed the nave by a facade in Greek style; then, perhaps, feeling remorseful, or desiring (a presumption which will be accepted more readily), to embellish his work still further, he afterwards added some columns “which imitate fairly well the architecture of the eleventh century,” says the notice.  Let us be silent and bow our heads.  Each of the arts has its own particular leprosy, its mortal ignominy that eats its face away.  Painting has the family group, music the ballad, literature the criticism, and architecture the architect.