“ A miserable human existence, once interred there; farewell light, air, life, ogni speranza—every hope; it only came forth to the scaffold or the stake. Sometimes it rotted there; human justice called this forgetting. ”
 Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831). copy citation

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“Dante could never imagine anything better for his hell. These tunnels of cells usually terminated in a sack of a lowest dungeon, with a vat-like bottom, where Dante placed Satan, where society placed those condemned to death. A miserable human existence, once interred there; farewell light, air, life, ogni speranza—every hope; it only came forth to the scaffold or the stake. Sometimes it rotted there; human justice called this forgetting. Between men and himself, the condemned man felt a pile of stones and jailers weighing down upon his head; and the entire prison, the massive bastille was nothing more than an enormous, complicated lock, which barred him off from the rest of the world.
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