VISITE GUIDÉE DE LA TOUR DES PRISONS, LA VIE DE CACHOT
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Cultural
What do you do with a defensive tower when, for lack of danger, the city walls are knocked down?
When the threat is no longer necessarily from outside the city, but also from part of its population?
The answer is simple: if the tower was able to keep enemies out, it was also able to keep prisoners in! And so, 4 centuries after they were built, the tower walls were transformed into a terrible prison, functional until the First World War.
Prisoners, victims of the Wars of Religion and then common criminals, endured appalling conditions of incarceration in a bastion where the only symbolic escape was to tell their stories on the walls.
With a flashlight in hand, the guide helps you decipher some of the 300 messages left by the prisoners, first engraved in stone, then pencilled in. Through these graffiti, some expressed their faith, others their pain at being locked up, still others a message addressed to whoever would read it? You, perhaps?
In the darkness of the dungeons, do you think you hear voices whispering in your ear? You?re not dreaming: it?s the echo of prisoners? pleas that reaches you through the centuries.
Prisoners, victims of the Wars of Religion and then common criminals, endured appalling conditions of incarceration in a bastion where the only symbolic escape was to tell their stories on the walls.
With a flashlight in hand, the guide helps you decipher some of the 300 messages left by the prisoners, first engraved in stone, then pencilled in. Through these graffiti, some expressed their faith, others their pain at being locked up, still others a message addressed to whoever would read it? You, perhaps?
In the darkness of the dungeons, do you think you hear voices whispering in your ear? You?re not dreaming: it?s the echo of prisoners? pleas that reaches you through the centuries.