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Donjon   Listen
noun
Donjon  n.  The chief tower, also called the keep; a massive tower in ancient castles, forming the strongest part of the fortifications.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Donjon" Quotes from Famous Books



... innermost enclosure arose the Castle itself, containing buildings of all periods, crowded around, and united with the ancient and grim looking donjon keep, which was older than any of them, and which rose, like a black Ethiopian giant, high into the air, while the absence of any windows larger than shot holes, irregularly disposed for defence, gave the spectator the same unpleasant feeling which ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... to return from the donjon, than D'Artagnan placed himself in ambuscade close to the Rue du Petit-Muse, so as to see every one who might leave the gates of the Bastille. After he had spent an hour on the look-out from the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... connected by a low seat, a few yards of isthmus; and the three divisions, all strongly marked, bear buildings. The profile from east and west shows four groups: to the extreme north a tower, backed by the castle donjon, on the knob of granite here and there scarped; the works upon the thread of isthmus; and the walls and bastions crowning the southern knob, which, being lower, is even more elaborately cut to ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... complex structures, buildings of gradation and transition, which may be Roman at the base, Gothic in the middle, and Greco-Roman at the top. This is caused by the fact that it took six hundred years to build such a fabric. This variety is rare. The donjon- keep at Etampes is a specimen. But monuments of two formations are more frequent. Such is Notre-Dame at Paris, a structure of the pointed arch, its earliest columns leading directly to that Roman zone, of which the portals of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain des Pres ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... preparing we strolled to the old castle, now in a state of dilapidation. It is not spacious, but is a picturesque relic. Within the exterior walls is a fine kitchen garden. From the top of what might have been the donjon, we surveyed the surrounding country—at that moment rendered hazy by an atmosphere of dense, heated, vapour. Indeed it was uncommonly hot. Upon the whole, both the village and Castle of Blamont merit at least the leisurely ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... Shakspere"—and who was playfully accused of making wooden models of the plots of his melodramas—Gautier says that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, fight, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... across the Rhone. I spent a couple of hours in visiting these objects, and there was a kind of pictorial sweetness in the episode; but I have not many details to relate. The isolated tower I just mentioned has much in common with the detached donjon of Montmajour, which I had looked at in going to Les Baux and to which I paid my respects in speaking of that excursion. Also the work of Philippe le Bel (built in 1307), it is amazingly big and stubborn, and formed the opposite limit of the broken bridge whose first ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... lady and her name thrilled him. He thought he remembered the latter in Froissart: it conjured up "baronial halls" and "donjon keeps," rang resonantly in his mind like "Let the portcullis fall!" At home he had been wont to speak of the "oldest families in Cranston," complaining of the invasions of "new people" into the social territory of the McCords ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington

... conquered! The Forest has conquered! The Forest has conquered! The Princess wakes from sleep; For the soft green keys of the wood-land Have opened her donjon-keep! ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... on Norham's castled steep, And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, And Cheviot's mountains lone. The battled towers, the donjon keep, The loophole grates where captives weep, The flanking ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes

... twenty; a whole convent had been assaulted, sacked, burnt,—all the monks had been killed, and all the nuns had been kissed! Murder! fire! sacrilege! Never was city in such an uproar. From St. George's gate to St. Dunstan's suburb, from the Donjon to the borough of Staplegate, it was noise and hubbub. "Where was it?"—"When was it?"—"How was it?" The Mayor caught up his chain, the Aldermen donned their furred gowns, the Town Clerk put on his spectacles. "Who was he?"—"What was he?"—"Where was he?"—He should be hanged,—he ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various

... need but slight revision. Morrin College occupies one wing, and the other contains the well-stocked library of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. Valuable manuscripts have taken the place of useless malefactors in the donjon keep, and the vaults are full of the gold and myrrh ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... gradation and transition, which may be Roman at the base, Gothic in the middle, and Greco-Roman at the top. This is caused by the fact that it took six hundred years to build such a fabric. This variety is rare. The donjon- keep at tampes is a specimen. But monuments of two formations are more frequent. Such is Notre-Dame at Paris, a structure of the pointed arch, its earliest columns leading directly to that Roman zone, of which the portals of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain des Prs are perfect specimens. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... massive stone, with donjon keep and high crenellated wall, gateway tower, moat and drawbridge, was a strange, incongruous sight in one of the purple-red stony slopes of Palestine, with Hermon's snowy peak rising high above. It was accounted for, however, ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the sea. In the northern rising ground the wedge-like outline is complete; in the southern one it is somewhat modified by the gigantic Scuir, which rises direct on the apex of the height, i.e., the thick part of the wedge; and which, seen bows-on from this point of view, resembles some vast donjon keep, taller, from base to summit, by about a hundred feet, than the dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown and moory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trap terraces, with rudely columnar fronts; its middle space is mottled with patches of green, and ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... she lived soberly and sagely. But the devil entered into the heart of Jaques le Grys, and he rode, one morning, from the earl's house to the castle of his friend, where he was hospitably received by the unsuspicious lady. He requested her to show him the donjon, or keep of the castle, and in that remote and inaccessible tower forcibly violated her chastity. He then mounted his horse, and returned to the earl of Alencon within so short a space, that his absence had not been perceived. The lady abode within the donjon, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott



Words linked to "Donjon" :   stronghold, keep, dungeon, fastness, Black Hole of Calcutta, castle



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