In 1814-1815 the chateau became a great arsenal and general storehouse for the army. It was attacked by the Allies and besieged twice, but in vain. It was defended against the armies of Blucher by the Baron Daumesnil. Summoned to surrender his charge, "Jambe de Bois" (so called because he had lost a leg the year before) replied: "I will surrender when you surrender to me my leg." A statue to this brave warrior is within the chateau, and commemorates further the fact that he capitulated only on terms laid down by himself out of his humane regard for the lives of friends and foes. The ministers of Charles X, in 1830, had cause to regret the strength of the chateau walls; and Barbes, Blanqui and Raspail, in 1848, and various Republicans, who had been seized as dangerous elements of society after the Coup d'Etat of 1851, also here found an enforced hospitality. The Chateau de Vincennes had become a second Bastille. The incident of the arrest and death of the Duc d'Enghien is one of the most dramatic in Napoleonic history. The scene was Vincennes. Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon, son of the Prince de Conde, born at Chantilly in 1772, became, without just reason, suspected in connection with the Cadoudal-Pichegreu plot, and was seized by a squadron of cavalry at the Schloss Ettenheim in the Duchy of Baden and conducted to Vincennes. Here, after a summary judgment, he was shot at night in the moat behind the guardhouse. The obscurity of the night was so great that a lighted lantern was hung around the neck of the unfortunate man that the soldiers might the better see the mark at which they were to shoot. Napoleon confided to Josephine, who repeated the secret to Madame de Remusat, that his political future demanded a _coup d'Etat_. On the morning of the execution, the emperor, awakening at five o'clock, said to Josephine: "By this time the Duc d'Enghien has passed from this life." The rest is history--of that apologetic kind which is not often recorded. In the chapel at Vincennes a commemorative tablet was placed, by the orders of Louis XVIII, in 1816, to mark the death of the young duke. The Bois de Vincennes is not the fashionable parade ground of the Bois de Boulogne. On the whole it is a sad sort of a public park, and not at all fashionable, and not particularly attractive, though of a vast extent and possessed of a profoundly historic past of far more significance than that of its sweet sister by the opposite gates of Paris. [Illustration: _A Hunt under the Walls of Vincennes_ _From a Fourteenth Century Print_]