The Temple was a Gothic fortress built in 1212 by the Knights of the Temple. It had been long inhabited by those famous warrior-knights, and consisted of two distinct towers, which were so constructed as to resemble one building. The great tower was a massive structure divided into five or six stories, above a hundred and fifty feet high, with a pyramidal roof like an extinguisher, having at each corner a turret with a conical roof like a steeple. This was formerly the keep, and had been used as treasury and arsenal by the Templars; it was accessible only by a single door in one turret, opening on a narrow stone stair. The other was called the Little Tower, a narrow oblong with turrets at each angle, and attached, without any internal communication, to its big neighbor on the north side. Close by, within the enclosure of the Temple, stood an edifice which had in olden times been the dwelling-house of the prior, and it was here the royal family were incarcerated on their arrival. The place was utterly neglected and dilapidated, but from its construction and original use it was capable of being made habitable. The king believed that they were to remain here, and visited the empty, mouldy rooms next day, observing to Cléry what changes and repairs were most urgently required. No such luxurious prospect was, however, in store for them. They were merely huddled into the Prior’s Hotel while some preparations were being made for their reception in the tower. These preparations consisted in precautions, equally formidable and absurd, against possible rescue or flight. The heavy oak doors, the thick stone walls, which had proved safe enough for murderers and rebel warriors, were not considered secure for the timid king and his wife and children. Doors and windows were reinforced with iron bars, bolts, and wooden blinds. The corkscrew stair was So narrow that only one person could pass it at a time, yet new iron-plated doors were put up, and bars thrown across it at intervals, to prevent escape. The door leading from it into the royal prisoners’ apartment was so low that when Marie Antoinette was dragged from her children, after the king’s death, to be taken to the _Conciergerie_, she knocked her head violently against the upper part of it, exclaiming to some one who hoped she was not hurt, “Nothing can hurt me now!” The Abbé Edgeworth thus describes the access to the king’s rooms: “I was led across the court to the door of the tower, which, though very narrow and very low, was so overcharged with iron bolts and bars that it opened with a horrible noise. I was conducted up a winding stair so narrow that two persons would have had great difficulty in getting past each other. At short distances these stairs were cut across by barriers, at each of which was a sentinel; these men were all true _sans-culottes_, generally drunk, and their atrocious exclamations, re-echoed by the vast vaults which covered every story of the tower,