Compared to other prisons that were around at the 17th and 18th century height of the fortress, a stay in the Bastille generally wasn’t so bad. However, your experience could vary greatly depending on the exact location of your cell.

Author Geri Walton reports that the dungeons were probably one of the worst parts of the prison, as they were damp and full of vermin. Meanwhile, the rooms at the top of the Bastille, while likelier farther away from the rats, were also closest to the poorly insulated roof and all the weather just beyond. The best spots were right in between. Unless the prison was truly crowded, prisoners were most likely to be housed in the middle floors, which were generally the most comfortable ones in the place.

As for the rooms themselves, most of them had stoves to keep the occupants warm, and windows, though any openings that would have helped a prisoner escape were covered with a secure grate. The History Blog also notes that, despite the comfort of a heating system and an actual bed in each cell, the Bastille was nonetheless still a prison where inmates were locked in by guards and access to the outside world was restricted.

Newly minted inmates of the Bastille were first subject to what could be a pretty intense round of questioning. Author Geri Walton reports that this examination, as it was called, was supposed to take place soon after the prisoner entered the Bastille. However, sometimes there was a delay that added up to weeks, presumably frustrating indeed for someone who was truly innocent and stood a chance of proving it. After all, if the results of the questioning persuaded the lieutenant of the police that the inmate didn’t belong there, they would theoretically be released.

Even if someone were confident of their innocence, the questioning was undoubtedly pretty creepy. By the 18th century, this process appears to have sometimes relied on an extensive intelligence network. As The International History Review reports, the France of Louis XIV was full of spies, including observant agents working in upper class circles in Paris and beyond. Some directly sent prisoners to the Bastille, including the author of a slanderous poem about the royal family who blabbed to friends that he had written the offending lines. The friends turned informants, according to Smithsonian Magazine. And so the poet in question — now known to us as Voltaire — was sent to the Parisian prison.

Perhaps one of the worst things about prison is the sheer, stultifying boredom of the experience. Even for the rather pampered inhabitants of the Bastille, the fact that they were confined to the same restricted space for years on end was surely galling, if not crushing. But there was relief, assuming that a prisoner could read and write. Beginning in the 17th century, “Legends of the Bastille” says, prisoners could visit a hodgepodge library within the prison. However, it was incomplete, being made up generally of donations from former prisoners and the occasional warm-hearted citizen on the outside. There were apparently plenty of religious volumes, along with some light fiction and tomes on science and philosophy.

Censorship abounded here, especially if officials thought that a book could overexcite people or was “too melancholy a subject for prisoners” (via “Legends of the Bastille“).

Some inmates also used the time to write, including the infamous Marquis de Sade, who wrote his manuscript while imprisoned at the Bastille. According to Smithsonian Magazine, de Sade spent his term in the prison writing “The 120 Days of Sodom.” This book, considered lewd in the extreme by even modern readers, was written by the marquis on a cobbled-together scroll in ultra-tiny text. It was thought to be destroyed in the 1789 storming of the Bastille, but someone had spotted the scroll in its hiding place and snatched it up days before.

For some prisoners, the monotony, depersonalization, and restriction of their lives in the Bastille at least had an endpoint: their release. Yet even that longed-for day came with certain conditions. As author Geri Walton notes, most prisoners were granted their freedom with the warning that they were to keep their mouths shut. This was emphasized to the point where individual detainees were compelled to sign an agreement promising they would keep mum. What happened in the Bastille was supposed to stay in the Bastille.

Yet, given how many people wrote about their experiences anyway, this measure backfired pretty significantly. University of Missouri Libraries reports that the Bastille gained its terrifying reputation as a dank torture dungeon in part because of all the pamphlets, books, and other accounts purporting to tell of the author’s time there. Though some publications were a little more even-handed, it appears that the more dramatic tales stuck around.

Some of the authors did at least seem wary of bringing attention to themselves. A few accounts were published anonymously, while some, like the spy Constantin de Renneville, waited until they were all the way in a different country (in de Renneville’s case, England) to write and distribute their tale. For their part, Bastille officials said nothing in rebuttal, thus allowing the prison’s dark reputation to grow out of proportion to its reality.

As former prisoners reported that conditions inside the Bastille were harsh, public sentiment began to turn against the prison. Sensing that the prison’s reputation could backfire, administrators walked back some of the harshest rules at the Bastille and imprisoned fewer people overall, according to Mental Floss. Indeed, there was even some talk of demolishing the old prison entirely to make way for a nice public square — named after the king, of course. That, plus the end of the lettres de cachet, might have helped the reputation of Louis XVI, perhaps even literally saving his neck in the French Revolution. However, the Bastille remained.

Yet, it was all too little, too late. By the late 18th century, “The Bastille” reports, public perception of the prison as a dank, dreary torture center was pervasive. It didn’t help that officials were stubbornly quiet on what, exactly, went on within the Bastille’s walls. In some respects, they were forced to keep mum, lest they reveal sensitive government information or embarrass some prominent and politically powerful French family. It’s even possible that the reforms of this era may have convinced some people on the outside that not only was the Bastille a corrupt institution, but that it was a steadily weakening one at that.

The reality of life as a Bastille prisoner was surprisingly complicated. Life inside the fortress wasn’t all that bad, at least compared to worse prisons within France. Yet, it was still a place where one’s freedom was put on lockdown, not to mention an extension of a royal government that wasn’t afraid to simply put away people it had deemed annoying or inconvenient, with little regard for their rights or liberty.

That complexity got muddled throughout the years, both during the time of the Bastille and after its decaying ruins were finally demolished in the 1840s, according to “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.” Yet, though the physical structure of the prison was gone, it remained as a symbol of government corruption and overreach for generations of revolutionaries. Per ThoughtCo, it’s likely that the Bastille was more powerful as an image than it ever was as an actual prison. Writers and artists, like Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens made hay of this scary reputation and high drama for many decades after the fall of the Bastille proper.