For during all these days, dragging slowly into ages, justice has seldom more than one face to shew us: a face of cruelty and vengeance. The thing which we call the "theory of punishment" had really no existence. Punishment was not to chasten and reform; it was scarcely even to deter; it was mainly and almost solely to revenge. What the notion of prison was, I have tried briefly to explain in the chapters on "The Conciergerie," "The Dungeon of Vincennes," and, I think, elsewhere. We are strictly to remember, however, that the vindictive idea of punishment, and the idea of prison as a place in which (1) to hold and (2) to torment anyone who might be unfortunate enough to get in there, were not at all peculiar to France. The history of punishment in our own country leaves no room for boasting; and France has not more to reproach herself with in the memory of the Bastille, than we have in the actual and visible existence of Newgate. France has _Archives de la Bastille_; we have Howard's _State of Prisons_ and Griffiths's _Chronicles of Newgate_. We are not to forget that, in the "age of chivalry" in England, it was unsafe for visitors in London to stroll a hundred yards from their inn after sunset; and that, in the reign of Elizabeth, Shakespeare might have penned his lines on "the quality of mercy" within earshot of the rabble on their way to gloat over the disembowelling of a "traitor," or flocking to surround the stake at which a woman was to die by fire. In a word, the sense of vengeance, and the thirst for vengeance, which underlay the old criminal law of France, and of all Europe, were not less the basis of our own criminal law until well on into the second quarter of this century. But the French, it would seem, have paid the cost of their quick dramatic sense. They have handed down to us, in history, drama, and romance, the picture of Louis XI. arm in arm with his torturer and hangman, Tristan; the spectacle of the noble whose sword was convertible into a headsman's axe; and of the abbot whose girdle was ever ready for use as a halter. Histories akin to these (and, at the root, there is more of history than of legend in all of them) are to be delved out of our own records; but the French have been more candid in the matter, and a good deal more skilled with the pen in chronicles of the sort. On the other hand, England never had quite such bitter memories of her prisons as France had of hers. The struggle for freedom in England was never a struggle against the prisons; and it was not consciously a struggle against the prisons in France. But the destruction of a prison was the beginning of the French Revolution; and when the Revolution was over, its first historians took the prisons of France as the type and example of the immemorial tyranny of their kings. In one important respect, therefore, the dungeons of old Paris stand apart from the prisons of the rest of Europe.