ver saw the like of. But there
is a court-yard inside; surrounded by prisons, oubliettes, and old
chambers of torture; so terrifically sad, that death itself is not more
sorrowful. And oh! a wicked old Grand Duke's bedchamber upstairs in the
tower, with a secret staircase down into the chapel, where the bats were
wheeling about; and Bonnivard's dungeon; and a horrible trap whence
prisoners were cast out into the lake; and a stake all burnt and
crackled up, that still stands in the torture-ante-chamber to the saloon
of justice (!)--what tremendous places! Good God, the greatest mystery
in all the earth, to me, is how or why the world was tolerated by its
Creator through the good old times, and wasn't dashed to fragments."

On the ninth of August he wrote to me that there was to be a prodigious
fete that day in Lausanne, in honour of the first anniversary of the
proclamation of the New Constitution:[123] "beginning at sunrise with
the firing of great guns, and twice two thousand rounds of rifles by two
thousand men; proceeding at eleven o'clock with a great service, and
some speechifying, in the church; and ending to-night with a great ball
in the public promenade, and a general illumination of the town." The
authorities had invited him to a place of honour in the ceremony; and
though he did not go ("having been up till three o'clock in the morning,
and being fast asleep at the appointed time"), the reply that sent his
thanks expressed also his sympathy. He was the readier with this from
having discovered, in the "old" or "gentlemanly" party of the place
("including of course the sprinkling of English who are always tory,
hang 'em!"), so wonderfully sore a feeling about the revolution thus
celebrated, that to avoid its fete the majority had gone off by steamer
the day before, and those who remained were prophesying assaults on the
unilluminated houses, and other excesses. Dickens had no faith in such
predictions. "The people are as perfectly good tempered and quiet
always, as people can be. I don't know what the last Government may have
been, but they seem to me to do very well with this, and to be
rationally and cheaply provided for. If you believed what the
discontented assert, you wouldn't believe in one solitary man or woman
with a grain of goodness or civility. I find nothing _but_ civility; and
I walk about in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, where they live
rough lives enough, in solitary cottages." The issue was