Vincennes is now a fort and artillery barracks, and may neither be sketched nor photographed. The great court below was parcelled into little close gardens, where, under rigid surveillance, favoured prisoners took their dreary exercise. Few prisons the like of Vincennes have been erected. Those tremendous towers, those almost impenetrable walls, those double and triple doors garnished with iron, the trenches forty feet in depth, those wide outer galleries to give the sentries command at every point—what more could genius and industry invent to combat the prisoner's passion for liberty? There were, indeed, few escapes from Vincennes. The prisoner who broke prison from the Bastille, and won his way into the trenches, nearly always made good his flight; but in the trenches of Vincennes, if he ever reached them, he was more helpless than a rat in a bucket. The architect of Vincennes was up some half-hour earlier than the architect of the Bastille. Twice every hour of the twenty-four the patrol made a complete tour of the dungeon; and night and morning, before the closing and opening of the doors, the trenches (which were forbidden to the turnkeys except by express order) were surveyed from end to end, that no letters might be thrown there by prisoners upon whom the State had set a seal like that of the _Masque de Fer_. Over and above all these _précautions barbares_, the sentries had orders to turn the eyes of every passerby from the dungeon towers. No one might stand or draw bridle in the shadow of Vincennes. It might be a relative or friend seeking to learn in what exact cell the captive was lodged! From light to dusk, the sentry reiterated his changeless formula: _Passez votre chemin!_ We have yet to see what life the prisoners led. II. The hour, the manner, and the circumstances of his reception at Vincennes were little adapted to lessen the apprehensions of a prisoner regarding the fate that awaited him. It was generally at night that the arrest was effected, and the dismal ceremony of admission lost nothing amid the general gloom of the scene, streaked here and there by the thin light of the warders' lanterns. It would have been distressing enough to pass into that black keep as the King's prisoner, after a fair trial in open court, and with full knowledge of the term of one's captivity; how much more so to find oneself thrust in there on some vague or fabulous charge, a victim not of offended laws but of some cold caprice of vengeance, to stay the pleasure of an enemy who might forget his prisoner before he forgot his wrath. At Vincennes as in the Bastille, prisoners lived on, hopelessly forgotten, years after the death of their accusers.