Scenes harsh enough, though not wholly unrelieved (for romance is of the essence of their story), are at hand within the walls of certain prisons whose names and memories have survived. I have undone the bolts of nearly all the more celebrated prisons of historic Paris, few of which are standing at this day. One or two have been passed by, or but very briefly surveyed, for the reason that to include them would have been to commit myself to a certain amount of not very necessary repetition. I fear that even as the book stands I must have repeated myself more than once, but this has been for the most part in the attempt to enforce points which seemed not to have been brought out or emphasised with sufficient clearness elsewhere. Dealing with prisons which were in existence for centuries, and some of which were associated with almost every great and stirring epoch of French history, selection of periods and events was a paramount necessity. The endeavour has been to give back to each of these cruel old dungeons, Prison d'État, Conciergerie, or Maison de Justice, its special and distinctive character; to shew just what each was like at the most interesting or important dates in its career; and, as far as might be, to find the reason of that dreary proverb, "Sad as the gates of Prison." Light chequers the shades in some of these dim vaults, and the echoes of the dour days they witnessed are not all tears and lamentations. Something is shewn, it is hoped, of every kind of "justice" that was recognised in Paris until the days of '89, when everything that had been, fell with the terrific fall of the monarchy:—feudal justice, the justice of absolute kings and of ministers who were but less absolute, provosts' and bishops' justice, and the justice of prison governors and lieutenants of police. Often it is no more than a glimpse that is afforded; but the picture as a whole is, perhaps, not altogether lacking in completeness. Once inside a prison, the prisoner is the first study; and there are no more moving or pitiful objects in the annals of France than the victims of its criminal justice in every age. Slit the curtain of cobweb that has formed over the narrow _grille_ of the dungeon, put back on their shrill hinges the double and triple doors of the cell, peer into the hole that ventilates the conical _oubliette_, and one may see once more under what conditions life was possible, and amid what surroundings death was a blessing, in the days when Paris was studded with prisons, when every abbot was free to wall-up his monks alive, and every seigneur to erect his gallows in his own courtyard.