[1] Author’s Note.--The Bombec Tower, it may be well to point out,
was that tower of the Conciergerie prison in Paris in which torture
was generally inflicted. I have added nothing in this story to
historical descriptions of the cells in this horrible place. It was
not until the end of the last century that these sunless dungeons were
altered radically. At that time, the swords in the walls, and the
loathsome creatures which the Seine washed into the cells, were still
the talk of the curious.