The Bastille was not, like the Louvre, and most castles of the Middle Ages, a square, or a parallelogram of crenelated ramparts, with towers at intervals, capped with conical roofs and steeples, gay with blazoned weathercocks, and crested with elegant metal work, but it was an oblong irregular mass of thick double walls, containing rooms, halls, passages throughout their length, flanked by eight towers scarcely detaching themselves from the surface of the curtain, projecting slightly only from the bed of masonry connecting them, and not surpassing the walls in height,--a monument black and sinister, whose appearance and history were alike gloomy. Under Louis XIV, the Bastille attained its exclusive destination as a State prison. Cardinal Richelieu did not suffer the rust to gather on the hinges of its gates; but it was not till the second period of the reign of the Great Monarch, that this royal château became an awful gulf swallowing up, year after year, multitudes of unfortunates, of every rank and station, persecuted and oppressed at the caprice of the monarch, his ministers, his confessors, and his favourites. In feudal times, only prisoners of a high rank had been consigned to the Bastille; but, under the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV and Louis XVI, no citizen, however obscure he might be, could consider himself safe from these _oubliettes_ incessantly gaping for victims. The action of the regular tribunals and of the municipal authorities was null in the presence of the Bastille, which was filled and emptied by order of the king, without trial. _Lettres de cachet_ given, not only by his majesty and the ministers, but also by the lieutenant-general of police, consigned often innocent persons to an unlimited imprisonment, without a form of trial; so that often a prisoner was ignorant of the reason of his incarceration. On the death of Louis XIV, thirty thousand unfortunates were found in the State prisons; their only crime in the majority of cases was a suspicion of heresy.