It is Richelieu who must be considered the founder of the Bastille--the Bastille, that is, as a royal prison, the Bastille of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before him, imprisonment in the old fortress was merely casual; it is to him that we must trace the conception of the state prison as an instrument of government. Here we shall be arrested by the question, what is to be understood by a state prison? The term, vague and open to discussion, is explained by M. Bournon. "By a state prison--taking the Bastille as a particular instance--must be understood a prison for those who have committed a crime or misdemeanour not provided for by the common law; for those who, rightly or wrongly, have appeared dangerous to the safety of the state, whether the nation itself is concerned, or its head, or a body more or less considerable of citizens, a body sometimes no larger than the family of the suspect. If we add to this class of prisoners personages too conspicuous to be punished for a crime at common law on equal terms with the ordinary malefactor, and for whom it would appear inevitable that an exceptional prison should be reserved, we shall have passed in review the different kinds of delinquents who expiated their misdeeds at the Bastille from the time of Richelieu to the Revolution." The administration of the Bastille, which, up to the reign of Louis XIII., was entrusted to great lords, dukes, constables, marshals of France--the Marshal de Bassompierre, the Constable de Luynes, the Marshal de Vitry, the Duke of Luxemburg, to mention only the last of them--was placed by Richelieu in the hands of a real jailer, Leclerc du Tremblay, brother of Père Joseph.[23]