Dorat-Cubières, who was one of the literary disgraces of the eighteenth century, goes further! He saw, with his own eyes, one of those dens where the captive, shut up with enough bread to last him a week, had thereafter nothing else to subsist on but his own flesh. "In this den," he says, "we came upon a horrible skeleton, the sight of which made me shrink back with horror!" And the popular picture-mongers did not fail to propagate these insanities. I have an engraving of the time nicely calculated to stir sensitive hearts. Upon the steps of a gloomy cellar the conquerors are dragging along a man whom his uniform shows to be one of the defenders of the Bastille, and are pointing out to him an old man being carried away, another being cut down from the ceiling where he is hanging by the arms; yet others lying on a wheel furnished with iron teeth, chained to it, twisted into horrible contortions by abominable machines; and in a recess behind a grating appears the skeleton--which Dorat-Cubières never saw! The non-existence of these dungeons and holes with skeletons was too great a shock to settled beliefs. This Bastille _must_ contain concealed below ground some unknown cells where its victims were moaning! And naturally enough, when one bent down the ear, one heard their despairing appeals! But after having pierced through vaults, sunk pits, dug, sounded everywhere, there was no help for it but to give up these fancies, though--an agreeable thing to have to say!--with regret. They fell back then on instruments of torture. For though the rack had been abolished for a hundred years, how was it possible to conceive of the Bastille without some slight instruments of torture? They had no difficulty in finding them--"chains," says Louis Blanc, "which the hands of many innocent men had perhaps worn, machines of which no one could guess the use: an old iron corslet which seemed to have been invented to reduce man to everlasting immobility!" As a matter of fact, these chains belonged to two statuettes of prisoners which stood on either side of the great clock in the courtyard. The machines, the use of which no one could guess, were the fragments of a clandestine printing-press that had been pulled to pieces. And the iron corslet was a piece of fifteenth-century armour! Skeletons, too, were missing, though indeed some bones were found in the apartment of the surgeon of the fortress; but the utmost bad faith could not but be compelled to acknowledge that these were anatomical specimens. Happily for the legend, a more serious discovery was made: "two skeletons, chained to a cannon-ball," as the register of the district of Saint-Louis la Culture declared.