History, says a French historian, shews itself never at the Bastille but with manacles in one hand and headsman's axe in the other. At Vincennes, ever and anon, it appears in the rustling silks of a king's favourite, who finds within the circle of those cruel walls soft bosky nooks and bowers, for feasting and for love. Sometimes from the bosom of those perfumed solitudes, a death-cry escapes, and the flowers are spotted with blood: Messalina has dispensed with a _lettre de cachet_. At one epoch it is Isabeau de Bavière, it is Catherine de Médicis at another; what need to exhaust or to extend the list? Catherine made no sparing use of the towers of Vincennes. It was a spectacle of royal splendours on this side and of royal tyrannies on that; banquets and executions; the songs of her troubadours mingling with the sighs of her captives. Often some enemy of Catherine, quitting the dance at her pavilion of Vincennes, fell straightway into a cell of the dungeon, to die that night by stiletto, or twenty years later as nature willed. Yes, indeed, Vincennes and the Bastille were worthy of each other. ------- Two mysterious echoes of history still reach the ear from what were once the vaulted dungeons of Vincennes. The note of the first is gay and mocking, a cry with more of victory in it than of defeat, and one remembers the captivity of the Prince de Condé. The other is like the sudden detonation of musketry, and one recalls the bloody death of the young Duc d'Enghien, the last notable representative of the house of Condé. The Prince de Condé's affair is of the seventeenth century. It was Anne of Austria, inspired by Mazarin, who had him arrested, along with his brother the Prince de Conti and their brother-in-law the Duc de Longueville. A lighter-hearted gallant than Condé never set foot on the drawbridge of Vincennes. On the night of his arrival with De Conti and the duke, no room had been prepared for his reception. He called for new-laid eggs for supper, and slept on a bundle of straw. De Conti cried, and De Longueville asked for a work on theology. The next day, and every day, Condé played tennis and shuttle-cock with his keepers; sang and began to learn music. He quizzed the governor perpetually, and laid out a garden in the grounds of the prison which became the talk of Paris. "He fasted three times a week and planted pinks," says a chronicler. "He studied strategy and sang the psalms," says another. When the governor threatened him for breaches of the rules, the Prince offered to strangle him. But not even Vincennes could hold a Condé for long, and he was liberated.