Down the passage yonder, which communicates underground with the great donjon, Louis and his Tristan entered to torment the Cardinal, swinging like a huge bird in his cage. The walls still show two holes in each side into which the beams supporting the cage, were inserted,--the chains from each corner thereof met in a ring at the top, which was fastened into the beams and turned on a pivot. The cage composed of wood, bound and riveted with iron, formed a cube four feet in size, wherein its occupant could neither lie down or stand up, and there the Cardinal spent eleven years exposed and yet confined. A singular refinement of torture that. This cage in Loches, in which the historian Philippe de Comines was also confined, was very different from that in the Bastille,--the prison for fourteen years of the Bishop of Verdun. The expense account of the period holds the following item concerning that cage: "For making a great wooden cage of heavy beams, joists, and rafters, measuring inside nine feet long by eight broad and seven high between the planks, mortised and bolted with great iron bolts, which has been fixed in a certain chamber of one of the towers of the Bastille St. Antoine, in which said cage, is put and kept, by command of our Lord the King, a prisoner that before inhabited an old, decayed, and worn-out cage. Used in making said new cage ninety-six horizontal beams and fifty-two perpendiculars, ten joists each eighteen feet long; employed in squaring, planing, and fitting all the said woodwork in the yard of the Bastille, nineteen carpenters for twenty days,--used in the cage two hundred and twenty great iron bolts nine feet long,--with plates and nuts for fastening of said bolts, the iron weighing three thousand seven hundred and thirty-five pounds,--besides eight heavy iron _equières_, for fixing the said cage in its place with cramp-irons and nails weighing all together two hundred and eighteen pounds, without reckoning the iron for the trellis work of the windows of the chamber in which said cage has been placed, the iron bars of the door of the chamber and other articles. The whole amounts to three hundred and seventeen livres, five sol and seven deniers." A great, cubical mass of masonry, iron, and woodwork, its windows so thickly latticed with bars of iron that no glass was visible,--its door, one large flat stone like a tomb,--a door for entrance only! "Our Lady!" exclaimed the King, "here is a cage out of all reason."