We experienced what our Puritan ancestors would have called a "fearful joy" during our afternoon at Loches, for anything more horrible than the dungeons above ground and under it would be difficult to imagine. I shall spare you a full description of them, as I refused to descend into the darkest depths to see the worst of them, and Walter is probably writing Allen a full-length account of them,--iron cages, hooks, rings, and all the other contrivances of cruelty. Loches, however, is not all cells and dungeons, as the chateau is beautifully situated upon a headland above the Indre, and the gray castle rising above the terraces, with its many towers, tourelles, and charming pointed windows, presents a picturesque as well as a formidable appearance. Our way lay by winding roads and between high walls. We thought ourselves fortunate to make this steep circuitous ascent in a coach; but once within the _enceinte_ of the castle we were on a level and felt as if we were walking through the streets of a little village. Many small white houses, with pretty gardens of blooming plants, lie below the fortress on one side, in sharp contrast to the frowning dungeons of Fulk Nerra and Louis XI which overshadow them. The great square mass of Fulk Nerra's keep stood out dark against the blue of the sky to-day; this with the Tour Neuf and the Tour Ronde are said to be the "most beautiful of all the dungeons of France," as if a dungeon could ever be beautiful! And it was Louis XI, that expert and past master in cruelty, who is said to have "perfected these prisons," which only needed the iron cage, designed to suit the King's good pleasure, to complete their horror. The invention of the iron cage has been accredited to Jean la Balue, Bishop of Angers, and also to the Bishop of Verdun. Perhaps both of these devout churchmen had a hand in the work, as fate, with a dash of irony, and the fine impartiality of the mother who whipped both of her boys because she could not find out which one had eaten the plums, clapped them both into iron cages. Louis XI was in these instances the willing agent of avenging fate. Cardinal la Balue survived the sorrows of his iron cage for eleven years, "much longer than might have been expected," as Mr. Henry James says, "from this extraordinary mixture of seclusion and exposure." The historian, Philip de Commines, described these cages as "Rigorous prisons plated with iron both within and without with horrible iron works, eight foote square and one foote more than a man's height. He that first devised them was the Bishop of Verdun, who forthwith was himself put into the first that was made, where he remained fourteen years."