For centuries this method of attack and defence flourished, and it was not until the beginning of the fourteenth century that the machicolated battlements came into existence. From ancient times the old crenellated battlements had served through ages that were engaged in fighting. The ancient Egyptians and Assyrians used them, and it was reserved for the military genius of the Middle Ages to invent the machicolated parapet. This consisted of building out from the main walls of the tower or castle a curtain of masonry, supported by stone brackets. This gave a thorough protection to the besieged, who could look down through the apertures between the corbels and drop their missiles, molten lead, burning sulphur and melted pitch, on to the heads of their assailants. The Tower of Philip the Fair is built with a machicolated battlement, and over the small doorway there is an “échauguette,” or small projecting tower, which commands the entrance. Even if the besiegers managed to escape the missiles dropped through the floor of the little tower, and forced their way into the porch, their task was not accomplished, for from the roof of the narrow passage leading into the large ground-floor chamber a long chimney runs right up to the top of the tower and down this projectiles could still be dropped. The tower contains three lofty chambers, one above the other, each of which has a finely vaulted roof, the ribs resting upon fantastically carved corbels. These chambers are in an absolutely perfect state of preservation, a rare thing in a fourteenth-century building in this part of the country. The narrow winding staircase lit by oylets, which betray the thickness of the walls, has at intervals little branch stairways of only a few steps. These give [Illustration: GATEWAY, TARASCON. p. 80] access to small openings into the shaft that runs from the roof of the porch to the roof of the building. If for any reason the roof had to be abandoned, the besieged could still command the entrance through these apertures. The top chamber in the tower seems to have been used as a prison at some early time, for it is covered with pathetic inscriptions, cut with such care that they could only have been executed by persons upon whose hands the time hung heavily. One cannot know for certain that they are not the work of a besieged garrison, or the guardians of the tower, but the presence of strong iron bars across the outside of the windows, and other evidences, would indicate that prisoners occupied this tower at some time in its history; and one would think that all these precautions to prevent the escape of a prisoner from this lofty room were hardly necessary: unless indeed the prisoner had a rope or was able to construct a makeshift one out of his clothing, he would be very unlikely to run far after he had dropped from this lofty tower on to the rough rocks below.