Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/110



HE wapentake entered behind Gwynplaine; then the justice of the quorum; then the constables. The heavy door swung to, closing hermetically on the stone sills, without any one seeing who had opened or shut it. It seemed as if the bolts re-entered their sockets of their own accord. Some of these mechanisms, the inventions of ancient intimidation, still exist in old prisons,—doors where you saw no door-keeper. With them the entrance to a prison becomes like the entrance to a tomb.

This wicket was the lower door of Southwark Jail. There was nothing in the harsh and worm-eaten aspect of this edifice to soften the air of rigour appropriate to a prison. Originally a pagan temple, built by the Catieuchlans for the Mogons, ancient English gods, it became a palace for Ethelwolfe and a fortress for Edward the Confessor; after which it was elevated to the dignity of a prison, in 1199, by John Lackland. Such was Southwark Jail. This jail, at first intersected by a street,—as Chenonceaux is by a river,—had been for a century or two a gate, that is to say, the gate of a suburb; the passage had then been walled up. There are still several prisons of this kind in England—Newgate, in London; Westgate, in Canterbury; Canongate, in Edinburgh; the Bastille, in France, was originally a gate. Almost all the jails of England present the same appearance,—a high wall without and a hive