intention: they began to incarcerate there _valets de chambre_ who had somehow become mixed up in the plots of sovereigns. Religious persecution was revived by the government of Louis XIV., and ere long a whole world of gazetteers and "novelists," the journalists of the period, were seen swarming like flies in the sun. Louis XIV. was not precisely a stickler for the liberty of the press, but on the other hand he shrank from cooping up men of letters, Jansenists and Protestants convinced of the truth of their beliefs, pell-mell with the vagabonds and thiefs confined at Bicêtre, Saint-Lazare, and the other prisons of Paris. He threw open to them, too generously no doubt, the portals of his château in the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where they mixed with young men of family undergoing a mild course of the Bastille at the request of their parents, and with quarrelsome nobles whom the marshals of France, anxious to avoid duels, used to send there to forget their animosities. Further, the reign of Louis XIV. was marked by some great trials which produced a strange and appalling impression, and threw around the accused a halo of mystery--trials for magic and sorcery, cases of poisoning and base coining. The accused parties in these cases were confined in the Bastille. And here we encounter a fresh departure from the primitive character of the old fortress; prisoners were sent there whose cases were tried by the regularly constituted judges. Henceforth prisoners who appeared before the court of the Arsenal were divided between the Bastille and the fortress of Vincennes.