Men are less wicked and less cruel, tyrants are less tyrannical nowadays than when so-called criminals, often the best men in their country, were chained by iron rings to dungeon stones for years and years, or fastened to pillars and tortured by slow fires, or thrown down "oubliettes" into the lake below, falling first on a revolving machine stuck full of sharp blades-of all which horrors we were shown the scene and the remains.
"Lady-John-Russell"
MacCarthy, Desmond
Instantly there came back to my memory a horrible German tale, read and forgotten fifteen years ago, of a certain old and unjust steward, Daniel by name, who, having murdered his master by casting him down an oubliettes, ever haunted the fatal tower, first as a sleep-walker, then as a restless ghost-moaning and gibbering to himself, and tearing at a walled-up door with bleeding hands.
"Border and Bastille"
George A. Lawrence
But, as he came out from the murk of those chambers with their rotting floors, many of them undermined by oubliettes and dungeons, he felt a chill of fear.
"Plotting in Pirate Seas"
Francis Rolt-Wheeler