The inside of the Castle is well worth examination, but the prison authorities are a little particular whom they admit, and the visitor has to be conducted through the great building by a jailer, who, armed with great bunches of mediæval keys, unbolts ancient doors on creaking hinges, and bolts them just as carefully after. The internal arrangements of a fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century castle are simple, if massive, and hardly any alteration has been necessary to convert it into a prison. Very little has been changed since the good old King’s time. The Chapel has only had a movable wooden partition placed down the centre of it, to separate the prisoners who have been condemned from those awaiting trial, when they attend “the service.” The cells for solitary confinement, with their elaborate blacksmith-wrought fastenings, would defy the ingenuity of any “Jack Sheppard” seeking to escape. [Illustration: KING RENE’S CASTLE] There is not much carving or sculptured work in the Castle. It has been sparingly used, except in the porch of the Chapel, which is in fine ogival style with delicately carved archivolts. The principal chamber of the King is a noble apartment, in which the ceiling is, or rather was, a feature. It is heavily timbered, and although the panels have been removed to enrich some museum or private collection, sufficient remains to give an idea of the importance of this apartment. The embrasures of the windows are of the depth of the wall--that is, about twelve feet--and they form small chambers, around which are great stone slabs, that were used as seats. Opening off the Royal Apartment is the Salle du Garde. From this room a door formerly opened into a passage that communicated with galleries extending all over the building. On the other side of the circular staircase, that leads up to the King’s apartment, there is a sexagonal chamber with a timbered panelled roof. This was occupied by the ladies-in-waiting on the Queen, whose apartment, immediately above it, had a fine vaulted roof. In such wonderful preservation are these apartments of five hundred years ago that they want but tapestries and furniture to be as habitable as ever they were. One can easily, in imagination, fill these chambers with the laughing maids of honour, bending over their tambours and tapestry work, or poring over some book with its delicately painted pages in which the romances of the Troubadours were set forth--one reading aloud for the benefit of the others some long narration of days gone by: perchance the very popular story, rhymed in true Troubadour fashion, about the inmates of the Castle of Beaucaire, that from the windows of the King’s and the Ladies’ apartment could be seen so distinctly in the sunlight. This story of Aucassin and Nicolète has been translated [Illustration: AN OLD GARDEN. TARASCON.]