Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old prison, we shall awaken only one; that of Hugues Aubriot, its builder and its first tenant. Made Provost of Paris by Charles V.--who, after his hapless experience with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more Provost of Merchants--Aubriot had many enemies among the guilds and among the clerics. He was frank and outspoken of speech, humane to the priest-despoiled and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he returned their children, caught and christened by force. So, on the very day of the burial of his royal master, in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested for heresy, and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, "_pour faire pénitence perpétuelle, au pain de tristesse, et à l'eau de douleur_." The Church sentence gives a poetic touch to prosaic bread and water. Aubriot fed only a short time on these delicacies, for he was rescued by the mob that, for the moment, idolized him, and led in triumph to his home. That home, from which he speedily fled out of Paris in terror of his rescuers, was given by Charles V. to this good servant, and we may stop, just here, to look on what is left of it.
Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we enter Passage Charlemagne, and go through an outer into an inner court. In its northwestern corner is a tower containing an old-time spiral staircase. This is the only visible vestige of the palace of the Provost of Paris, its unseen portions being buried under, or incorporated with, the structures of the Lycée Charlemagne, just behind us toward the east. The boundary railing, between this college and the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line of Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side of that wall, the provost's palace, with its grounds, stretched to Rue Prévôt, then Rue Percée; that name still legible in the carved lettering on its corner with Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose northern line was on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower before us has been sadly modernized and newly painted, but its fabric is intact, with its original, square, wide-silled openings at each of the three landing-places of the old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender arch, a timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder growth we shall see presently in the Hôtel de Sens.