Ravaisson says that only two kinds of torture were applied in the Bastille; the "boot," and the torture by water. Well, these were sufficient; but it is to be remembered that the archives of the Bastille date only from about the middle of the seventeenth century, and it is improbable that the _Salle de la Question_ of this prison was less horribly equipped than that of any other. The ordeal of the "boot" needs no description; for the torture by water, the victim was bound on a trestle, and water was poured down his throat by the gallon, until his sufferings became unendurable. Torture was practised in the Bastille as long as it was practised in any other French prison; a man named Alexis Danouilh underwent the Question there ("ordinary" and "extraordinary") in 1783—after the date at which Louis XVI. had forbidden and abolished it by royal edict. To so small an extent had the absolute sovereigns of France control over the administration of their own prisons of State! At no point in the existence of an ordinary captive of the Bastille is there any occasion to exaggerate his pains. Such as they were, they were very real; and scant reason is there to wonder at the bitterness, the vehemence, and even the violence of tone which characterises the memoirs or narratives of those who had endured them. The apologists of the Bastille will beg us to believe that the histories of Linguet and certain others are mendacious, have been refuted, and so forth. The gifted, caustic Linguet, who is one of their particular bugbears, was not the most upright man, nor the most scrupulous writer, in the France of his day; but the essential parts of his narrative are confirmed by the statements of a host of others. It is not because Linguet has said that the Bastille walls, which were from seven to twelve feet thick, were from thirty to forty feet thick (which he might quite possibly have supposed) that we are to discredit his account, highly wrought as it is, of the general conditions of life within the prison. It is not more highly wrought than the accounts of other prisoners of the Bastille, the accuracy of which has not been questioned. These other histories are plentiful, and we are under no necessity of resting upon the better-known narratives which, for their qualities of style or their greater picturesqueness, have been so often reproduced. Far on into the eighteenth century—indeed until within a few years of our own—there lay in the Bastille victims of public or private injustice, whose complainings, stifled in its vaulted ceilings, have sent us down a faint but faithful echo. What of Bertin de Frateaux, who was walled in there from 1752 until his death in 1782? What of Tavernier, who, imprisoned in 1759 (after a previous ten years' sojourn in another gaol), was liberated only by the wreckers of the Bastille, on the 14th of July, 1789? Here, too, in 1784, lies the Genoese, Pellissery, imprisoned, in 1777, for publishing a pamphlet on the finances of Necker.