The Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869)/Chapter 71
CHAPTER V.
A FEARFUL PLACE.
THE 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 of cells within. Nothing could be more funereal than the appearance of these prisons, where spiders and justice spun their webs, and where John Howard, that ray of light, had not yet penetrated. Like the old Gehenna of Brussels, they might well have been designated Treurenberg,—"the house of tears." Before such buildings, at once so savage and inhospitable, men felt the same distress that the ancient navigators suffered before the hell of slaves mentioned by Plautus,—islands of creaking chains, ferricrepiditæ insulæ,—when they passed near enough to hear the clank of the fetters.
Southwark Jail, an old place of exorcisms and torture, was originally used solely for the imprisonment of sorcerers, as was proved by two verses engraved on a defaced stone at the foot of the wicket:—
Sunt arreptitii, vexati dæmone multo
Est energumenus, quem dæmon possidet unus,—
lines which draw a subtle, delicate distinction between the demoniac and the man possessed of a devil. At the bottom of this inscription, nailed flat against the wall, was a stone ladder, originally of wood, but which had been changed into stone by being buried in earth of petrifying quality at a place called Apsley Gowis, near Woburn Abbey.
The prison of Southwark, now demolished, opened on two streets, between which, as a gate, it formerly served as a means of communication. It had two doors,—in the large street a door used by the authorities; and in the lane the criminals' door, used by the rest of the living and by the dead also, because when a prisoner in the jail died, it was through that doorway his body was carried out,—a liberation not to be despised. Death is release into infinity. It was by this doorway that Gwynplaine had been taken into the prison.
The lane, as we have said, was nothing but a little passage, paved with flints, enclosed between two walls. There is one of the same kind in Brussels called Rue d'une Personne. The walls were unequal in height. The high one was the prison; the low one, the cemetery (the enclosure for the mortuary remains of the jail), was not higher than the ordinary stature of a man. In it, almost opposite the prison wicket, was a gate. The dead had only to cross the street; the cemetery was but twenty yards from the jail. Above the high wall loomed a gallows; on the low one was sculptured a Death's head. Neither of these walls made its opposite neighbour more cheerful.