"Where there are monks," exclaimed brusquely the authors of Les Prisons de Paris, "there are prisoners." The folds of the priestly garb concealed a place of torment which monastic justice, with a grisly humour, named a Vade in Pace; the last bead of the rosary grazed the first rings of a chain which bore the bloody impress of the sworn tormentor. At BicÊtre, as at the Luxembourg, ages ago, big-bellied cenobites sang and tippled in the cosy cells piled above the dungeons of the church.

BicÊtre—more anciently Bissestre—is a corrupt form of Vincestre, or Winchester, after John, Bishop of Winchester, who is thought to have built the original chÂteau, and who certainly held it in the first years of the thirteenth century. It was famous amongst the pleasure-houses of the Duc de Berri, who embellished it with windows of glass, which at that epoch were only beginning to be an ornament of architecture—"objects of luxury," says Villaret, "reserved exclusively for the mansions of the wealthiest seigneurs." In one of the rather frequent "popular demonstrations" in the Paris of the early fifteenth century, these "objects of luxury" were smashed, and little of the chÂteau remained except the bare walls. It was rebuilt by the Duc de Berri, a noted amateur of books, and was by him presented to an order of monks in 1416.

A colony of Carthusians under St. Louis; John of Winchester under Philippe-Auguste; AmÉdÉe le Rouge, Count of Savoy, under Charles VI.; the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs in the fifteenth century; the canons of Notre-Dame de Paris under Louis XI.; the robbers and bohÈmiens in the sixteenth century; the Invalides under Cardinal Richelieu, and the foundlings of St. Vincent de Paul,—all these preceded at BicÊtre the vagabonds, the bons-pauvres, the epileptics and other diseased, the lunatics, and "all prisoners and captives." In becoming an asylum and hospital, in a word, BicÊtre became also one of the most horrible of the countless prisons of Paris; it grew into dreadful fame as "the Bastille of the canaille and the bourgeoisie."

The enormous numbers of the poor, the hordes of sturdy mendicants who "demanded alms sword in hand," and the soldiers who took the road when they could get no pay, became one of the chief scourges of Paris. Early in the seventeenth century it was sought to confine them in the various hospitals or houses of detention in the Faubourg Saint-Victor, but under the disorders and weaknesses of the Government these establishments soon collapsed. Parliament issued decree after decree; all strollers and beggars were to be locked up in a prison or asylum specially appropriated to them; the buildings were commenced and large sums of money were spent on them, but they were never carried to completion. In course of time the magistrates took the matter in hand, dived into old records, but drew no counsel thence, for the evil, albeit not new, was of extraordinary proportions; went to the King for a special edict, and procured one "which ordered the setting up of a general hospital and prescribed the rules for its governance." The chÂteau of BicÊtre and the Maison de la SalpÊtriÈre were ceded for the purpose.

Children and women went to the SalpÊtriÈre; at BicÊtre were placed men with no visible means of subsistence, "widowers," beggars, feeble or sturdy, and "young men worn out by debauchery." Before taking these last in hand, the doctors "were accustomed to order them a whipping."

This destiny of BicÊtre is pretty clear, and as hospital and asylum combined it should, under decent conduct, have played a useful part in the social economy of Paris. But the absolutism of that age had its own notions as to the proper functions of "hospitals," and the too familiar ordres du roi, and the not less familiar lettres de cachet (which Mirabeau had not yet come forward to denounce), were presently in hot competition with the charitable ordonnances of the doctors. Madness was a capital new excuse for vengeance in high places, and the cells set apart for cases of mental disease were quickly tenanted by "luckless prisoners whose wrong most usually consisted in being strictly right." BicÊtre, it must be admitted, did the thing conscientiously, and with the best grace in the world. Rational individuals were despatched there whom, according to the authors of Les Prisons de Paris, BicÊtre promptly transformed into imbeciles and raging maniacs.

Indeed the "philanthropists" and the criminologists of the early part of this century need not have taxed their imaginations for any scheme of cellular imprisonment. The system existed in diabolical perfection at BicÊtre. That much-abused "depÔt" of indigent males, "widowers," and young rakes had an assortment of dark cells which realised À merveille the conditions of the vaunted programme of the penitentiary—isolation and the silence of the tomb. Buried in a cabanon or black hole of BicÊtre, the prisoner endured a fate of life in death; he was as one dead, who lived long, tÊte-À-tÊte with God and his conscience. If a human sound penetrated to him, it was the sobbing moan of some companion in woe.

There was a subterranean BicÊtre, of which at this day only the dark memory survives. For a dim idea of this, one has to stoop and peer in fancy into a far-reaching abyss or pit, partitioned into little tunnels: in each little tunnel a chain riven to the wall; at the end of the chain a man. Now there were men in these hellish tunnels who had been guilty of crimes, but far oftener they stifled slowly the lives or the intelligences, or both, of men who had done no crimes at all. Innocent or guilty, BicÊtre in the long run had one way with all its guests; and when the prisoners and their wits had definitely parted company, the governor of the prison effected a transfer with his colleague the administrator of the asylum. It was expeditious and simple, and no one asked questions or called for a report.

It is on record, nevertheless, that existence in underground BicÊtre was a degree less insupportable than a sojourn in the cabanons. Hear the strenuous greet of Latude, with its wonted vividness of detail:

"When the wet weather began, or when it thawed in the winter, water streamed from all parts of my cell. I was crippled with rheumatism, and the pains I had from it were such that I was sometimes whole weeks without getting up.... In cold weather it was even worse. The 'window' of the cell, protected by an iron grating, gave on the corridor, the wall of which was pierced exactly opposite at the height of ten feet. Through this aperture (garnished, like my own window, with iron bars), I received a little air and a glimmer of light, but the same aperture let in both snow and rain. I had neither fire nor artificial light, and the rags of the prison were my only clothing. I had to break with my wooden shoe the ice in my pail, and then to suck morsels of ice to quench my thirst. I stopped up the window, but the stench from the sewers and the tunnels came nigh to choke me; I was stung in the eyes, and had a loathsome savour in the mouth, and was horribly oppressed in the lungs. The eight and thirty months they kept me in that noisome cell, I endured the miseries of hunger, cold, and damp.... The scurvy that had attacked me showed itself in a lassitude which spread through all my members; I was presently unable either to sit or to rise. In ten days my legs and thighs were twice their proper size; my body was black; my teeth, loosened in their sockets, were no longer able to masticate. Three full days I fasted; they saw me dying, and cared not a jot. Neighbours in the prison did this and that to have me speak to them; I could not utter a word. At length they thought me dead, and called out that I should be removed. I was in sooth at death's gate when the surgeon looked in on me and had me fetched to the infirmary."^[15]

Whether Masers de Latude existed, or was but a creature projected on paper by some able enemy of La Pompadour, those famous and titillating MÉmoires are excellent documents—all but unique of their kind—of the prisons of bygone France. If the question be of the Bastille, of the Dungeon of Vincennes, of Charenton, or of BicÊtre, these pungent pages, with a luxuriance and colour of realistic detail not so well nor so plausibly sustained by any other pen, are always pat and complete to the purpose. To compare great things with small, it is as unimportant to inquire who wrote Shakespeare as to seek to know who was the author of the MÉmoires of Latude. It is necessary only to feel certain that the writer of this extraordinary volume was as intimately acquainted with the prisons he describes as Mirabeau was with the Dungeon of Vincennes, or Cardinal de Retz with the chÂteau de Nantes. His book (an epitome of what men might and could and did endure under the absolute monarchy, when his rights as an individual were the least secure of a citizen's possessions) is the main thing, and the sole thing; the name and identity of the author are not now, if they ever were, of the most infinitesimal consequence.

A fine sample of the work of BicÊtre, considered as a machine for the manufacture of lunatics, is offered in the person of that interesting, unhappy genius, Salomon de Caus. A Protestant Frenchman, he lived much in England and Germany, and at the age of twenty he was already a skilled architect, a painter of distinction, and an engineer with ideas in advance of his time. He was in the service of the Prince of Wales in 1612, and of the Elector Palatine, at Heidelberg, 1614-20. In 1623 he returned to live and work in France, dans sa patrie et pour sa patrie. He became engineer and architect to the King.

Eight years before his return to France, De Caus had published at Frankfort his Raison des Forces Mouvantes, a treatise in which he described "an apparatus for forcing up water by a steam fountain," which differs only in one particular from that of Della Porta. The apparatus seems never to have been constructed, but Arago, relying on the description, has named De Caus the inventor of the steam engine.

It is not, however, with the inventive genius that we are concerned, but with the ill-starred lover of Marion Delorme. The minister Particelli took De Caus one day to the petit lever of the brilliant and beautiful Aspasia of the Place Royale. Particelli, one of the most prodigal of her adorers, wanted De Caus to surpass, in the palace of Mademoiselle Delorme, the splendours he had achieved in the palace of the Prince of Wales. "At my charge, look you, Monsieur Salomon, and spare nothing! Scatter with both hands gold, silver, colours, marble, bronze, and precious stuffs—what you please. Imagine, seek, invent,—and count on me!"

But Monsieur Salomon had no sooner seen the goddess of Particelli than he too was lifted from the earth and borne straight into the empyrean. At the moment of leaving her, when she suffered him to kiss her hand, and let him feel the darts of desire which shot from those not too prudish eyes, Salomon de Caus "devint amoureux À en perdre la tÊte." Thenceforth, in brief,

"His chief good and market of his time"

was to obey and anticipate every wild and frivolous fantasy of Marion Delorme. Michel Particelli's hyperbolical commission should be fulfilled for him beyond his own imaginings! He threw down the palace of Marion and built another in its place. The new palace was to cede in nothing to the Louvre or Saint-Germain. With his own hands Salomon de Caus decorated it; and then, at the bidding of his protector, Particelli, he consented, bon grÈ, mal grÈ, to paint the picture of the divinity herself.

"Alone one morning with his delicious model," the distracted artist flung brushes and palette from him, and cast himself at her feet. "Mon coeur se dÉchire, ma tÊte se perd.... Je deviens fou, je vous aime, et je me meurs!" It was a declaration of much in little, and Marion, a connaisseuse of such speeches, absolved and accepted him with a kiss.

Installed by right of conquest in that Circean boudoir, which drew as a magnet the wit and gallantry of Paris, Salomon stood sentinel at the door "like a eunuch or a Cerberus." Brissac and Saint-Evremont received the most Lenten entertainment, and the proposals of Cinq-Mars were rejected. Marion was even persuaded to be not at home to Richelieu himself. But the happy Salomon grew unhappy, and more unhappy. Every moment he came with a sigh upon some souvenir, delicately equivocal, of the vie galante of his mistress; and when love began to feed upon the venom of jealousy, his complacent goddess grew capricious, vexed, irritated, and at length incensed. After that, she resolved coldly on Salomon's betrayal. It was the fashion of the age to be cruel in one's vengeance. Marion penned a note to Richelieu:

"I want so much to see you again. I send with this the little key which opens the little door.... You must forgive everything, and you are not to be angry at finding here a most learned young man whom the love of science and the science of love have combined to reduce to a condition of midsummer madness. Does your friendship for me, to say nothing of your respect for yourself, suggest any means of ridding me instantly of this embarrassing lunatic? The poor devil loves me to distraction. He is astonishingly clever, and has discovered wonders—mountains that nobody else has seen, and worlds that nobody else has imagined. He has all the talents of the Bible, and another, the talent of making me the most miserable of women. This genius from the moon, whom I commend to your Eminence's most particular attention, is called Salomon de Caus."

A missive of that colour, from a Marion Delorme to a Richelieu, was the request polite for a lettre de cachet. Salomon de Caus was invited to call upon the Cardinal. Behind his jealous passion for his mistress, Salomon still cherished his passion for science, and he went hot-foot to Richelieu with his hundred schemes for changing the face of the world, with steam as the motive power. It must have been a curious interview. At the end, Richelieu summoned the captain of his guard.

"Take this man away."

"Where, your Eminence?"

"To what place are we sending our lunatics just now?"

"To BicÊtre, your Eminence."

"Just so! Ask admission for Monsieur at BicÊtre." So, from the meridian of his glory, Salomon de Caus hastened to his setting, and at this point he vanishes from history. Legend, not altogether legendary, shows him once again.

Some eighteen months or two years after he had been carried, "gagged and handcuffed," to BicÊtre, it fell to Marion Delorme (in the absence of her new lover Cinq-Mars) to do the honours of Paris for the Marquis of Worcester. The marquis took a fancy to visit BicÊtre, which had even then an unrighteous celebrity from one end of Europe to the other. As they strolled through the quartier des fous a creature made a spring at the bars of his cell.

"Marion—look, Marion! It is I! It is Salomon! I love you! Listen: I have made a discovery which will bring millions and millions to France! Let me out for God's sake! I will give you the moon and all the stars to set me free, Marion!"

"Do you know this man?" said Lord Worcester.

"I am not at home in bedlam," said Marion, who on principle allowed no corner to her conscience.

"What is the discovery he talks of?" asked Lord Worcester of a warder.

"He calls it steam, milord. They've all discovered something, milord."

Lord Worcester went back to BicÊtre the next morning and was closeted for an hour with the madman. At Marion Delorme's in the afternoon he said:

"In England we should not have put that man into a madhouse. Your BicÊtre is not the most useful place. Who invented those cells? They have wasted to madness as fine a genius as the age has known."

Salamon de Caus died in BicÊtre in 1626.

Earlier than this, BicÊtre the asylum shared the evil renown of BicÊtre the prison. To prisoners and patients alike popular rumour assigned an equal fate. The first, it was said, were assassinated, the second were "disposed of." Now and again the warders and attendants amused themselves by organising a pitched battle between the "mad side" and the "prison side"; the wounded were easily transferred to the infirmary, the dead were as easily packed into the trench beneath the walls.

The very name of BicÊtre—dungeon, madhouse, and cloaca of obscene infamies—became of dreadful import; not the Conciergerie, the ChÂtelet, Fort-l'ÉvÊque, Vincennes, nor the Bastille itself inspired the common people and the bourgeoisie with such detestation and panic fear. The general imagination, out-vieing rumour, peopled it with imps, evil genii, sorcerers, and shapeless monsters compounded of men and beasts. MediÆval Paris, at a loss for the origins of things, ascribed them to the Fairies, the Devil, or Julius CÆsar. It was said that the Devil alighted in Paris one night, and brought in chains to the "plateau de BicÊtre" a pauper, a madman, and a prisoner, with which three unfortunates he set agoing the prison on the one side and the asylum on the other, to minister to the menus plaisirs of the denizens of hell. Such grim renown as this was not easily surpassed; but at the end of Louis XIV.'s reign the common legend went a step farther, and said that the Devil had now disowned BicÊtre! Rhymes sincere or satirical gave utterance to the terror and abhorrence of the vulgar mind.

Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, up to the time of the Revolution, say MM. Alhoy and Lurine,^[16] BicÊtre continued a treatment which in all respects is not easily paralleled: the helot's lot and labour for pauperism; the rod and worse for sickness of body and of mind; the dagger or the ditch, upon occasion, for mere human misfortune. Till the first grey glimmer of the dawn of prison reform, in the days of Louis XVI, BicÊtre offered to "mere prisoners" the "sanctuary of a lion's den," and lent boldly to king, minister, nobles, clergy, police, and all the powers that were, the cells set apart for the mad as convenient places for stifling the wits and consciences of the sane.

In 1789, Paris had thirty-two State prisons. Four years later, the Terror itself was content with twenty-eight. One of the earliest acts of that vexed body, the National Assembly, was to appoint a commission of four of its members to the decent duty of visiting the prisons. The commissioners chosen were FrÉteau, BarriÈre, De Castellane, and Mirabeau. Count Mirabeau at least—whose hot vagaries and the undying spite of his father had passed him through the hands of nearly every gaoler in France—had qualifications enough for the task!

The commissioners found within the black walls of ce hideux BicÊtre a population of close upon three thousand creatures, including "paupers, children, paralytics, imbeciles and lunatics." The administrative staff of all degrees numbered just three hundred. The governor, knowing his inferno, was not too willing to accord a free pass to the explorers, and Mirabeau and his colleagues had to give him a taste of their authority before he could be induced to slip the bolts of subterranean cells, whose inmates "had been expiating twenty years the double crime of poverty and courage," against whom no decree had been pronounced but that of a lettre de cachet, or who had been involved, like the PrÉvÔt de Beaumont, in the crime of exposing some plot against the people's welfare. Children were found in these cells chained to criminals and idiots.

In April, 1792, BicÊtre gave admission to another set of commissioners. This second was a visit of some mystery, not greatly noised, and under cover of the night. It was not now a question of diving into moist and sunless caverns for living proofs (in fetters and stinking rags) of the hidden abuses of regal justice. The new commissioners came, quietly and almost by stealth, to make the first official trial of the Guillotine.

The invention of Dr. Guillotin (touching which he had first addressed the Constituent Assembly in December, 1789: "With this machine of mine, gentlemen, I shall shave off your heads in a twinkling, and you will not feel the slightest pain") does not date in France as an instrument of capital punishment until 1792; but under other names, and with other accessories, Scotland, Germany, and Italy had known a similar contrivance in the sixteenth century. In Paris, where sooner or later everything finishes with a couplet, the newspapers and broadsheets, not long after that midnight essai at BicÊtre, began to overflow gaily enough with topical songs (couplets de circonstance) in praise of the Doctor and his "razor." Two fragmentary samples will serve:—

Air—"Quand la Mer Rouge apparut."

"Sur l'inimitable machine du MÈdecin Guillotin, propere À couper les tÊtes, et dite de son nom Guillotine."

Air—"Du Menuet d'Exaudet."

It was on the 17th of April, 1792, that proof was made of the first guillotine—not yet famed through France as the nation's razor. Three corpses, it is said (commodities easily procured at BicÊtre), were furnished for the experiment, which Doctors Guillotine and Louis directed. Mirabeau's physician and friend Cabanis was of the party, and—a not unimportant assistant—Samson the headsman, with his two brothers and his son. "The mere weight of the axe," said Cabanis, "sheared the heads with the swiftness of a glance, and the bones were clean severed (coupÉs net)" Dr. Louis recommended that the knife should be given an oblique direction, so that it might cut saw-fashion in its fall. The guillotine was definitely adopted; and eight days later, the 25th of April, it settled accounts with an assassin named Pelletier, who was the first to "look through the little window," and "sneeze into the sack (Éternuer dans le sac)."

Four months after the first trial of the "inimitable machine" BicÊtre paid its tribute of blood to the red days of September. In BicÊtre, as elsewhere in Paris, that Sunday, 2d of September, 1792, and the three days that followed were long remembered. "All France leaps distracted," says Carlyle, "like the winnowed Sahara waltzing in sand colonnades!" In Paris, "huge placards" going up on the walls, "all steeples clangouring, the alarm-gun booming from minute to minute, and lone Marat, the man forbid," seeing salvation in one thing only—in the fall of "two hundred and sixty thousand aristocrat heads." It was the beginning or presage of the Terror.

The hundred hours' massacre in the prisons of Paris, beginning on the Sunday afternoon, may be reckoned with the hours of St. Bartholomew. "The tocsin is pealing its loudest, the clocks inaudibly striking three." The massacre of priests was just over at the Abbaye prison; and there, and at La Force, and at the ChÂtelet, and the Conciergerie, in each of these prisons the strangest court—which could not be called of justice but of revenge—was hurriedly got together, and prisoner after prisoner, fetched from his cell and swiftly denounced as a "royalist plotter," was thrust out into a "howling sea" of sans-culottes and hewn to pieces under an arch of pikes and sabres. "Man after man is cut down," says Carlyle; "the sabres need sharpening, the killers refresh themselves from wine-jugs." Dr. Moore, author of the Journal during a Residence in France, came upon one of the scenes of butchery, grew sick at the sight, and "turned into another street." Not fewer than a thousand and eighty-nine were slaughtered in the prisons.

The carnage at BicÊtre, on the Paris outskirts, was on the Monday, and here it seems to have been of longer duration and more terrible than elsewhere. Narratives of this butchery are not all in harmony. Prud'homme, author of the Journal des RÉvolutions de Paris, says that the mob started for BicÊtre towards three o'clock, taking with them seven pieces of cannon; that a manufactory of false paper-money (assignats) was discovered in full swing in the prison, and that all who were concerned in it were killed without mercy; that Lamotte, husband of the "Necklace Countess," was amongst the prisoners, and that the people "at once took him under their protection"; that the debtors and "the more wretched class of prisoners," were enlarged; and that the rest fell under pike, sabre, and club.

BarthÉlemi Maurice contradicts Prud'homme wholesale. The attack was at ten in the morning, he says, and not at three; there were no cannon; the paper-notes manufactory existed only in M. Prud'homme's imagination; prisoners for debt were not lodged in BicÊtre; the sick and the lunatics suffered no harm; and the famous Lamotte "never figured in any register of BicÊtre."

Thiers^[17] insists upon the cannon, says the killing was done madly for mere lust of blood, and that the massacre continued until Wednesday, the 5th of September.

Peltier in his turn, royalist pamphleteer, gives his version of the tragedy. This BicÊtre, says Peltier, was "the den of all the vices," the sewer, so to speak, of Paris. "All were slain; impossible to figure up the number of the victims. I have heard it placed at as many as six thousand!" Peltier is not easily satisfied. "Eight days and eight nights, without one instant's pause, the work of death went forward." Pikes, sabres, and muskets "were not enough for the ferocious assassins, they had to bring cannon into play." It was not until a mere handful of the prisoners remained "that they had recourse again to their small-arms" (que l'on en revenait aux petites armes).

Doubtless the most accurate account of this merciless affair is contained in the statement made to BarthÉlemi Maurice by PÈre Richard, doyen of the warders of BicÊtre, and an eyewitness. It may be summarised from the pages of MM. Alhoy and Lurine:

"Master Richard traced on paper the three numbers, 166, 55, and 22,—What are those? I asked him.—166, that is the number of the dead.—And 55 and 22, what are they?—55 was the number of children in the prison, and only 22 were left us. The scoundrels killed 33 children, besides the 166 adults.—Tell me how it began.—They came bellowing up at ten that Monday morning, all in the prison so still that you might have heard a fly buzzing, though we had three thousand men in that morning.—But you had cannon they say; you defended yourselves.—Where did you get that tale, sir? We had no cannon, and we didn't attempt to defend ourselves.—What was the strength of the attacking party?—A good three thousand, I should say; but of those not more than about two hundred were active, so to speak. —Did they bring cannon?—It was said they did, but I saw none, though I looked out of the main gate more than once.—What were their arms, then?—Well, a few of them had second-hand muskets (de mÉchants fusils), others had swords, axes, bludgeons (bÛches), and bills (crochets), but there were more pikes than anything else.—Were there any well-dressed people amongst them?—Oh, yes; the 'judges' especially; though the bulk of them were not much to look at.—How many 'judges' were there?—A dozen; but they relieved one another.—If there were judges, there was some sort of formality, I suppose. What was the procedure? How did they judge, acquit, and execute?—They sat in the clerk's office, a room down below, near the chapel. They made us fetch out the register; looked down the column of 'cause of imprisonment,' and then sent for the prisoner. If you were too frightened to feel your legs under you, or couldn't get a word out quick, it was 'guilty' on the spot.—And then?—Then the 'president' said: 'Let the citizen be taken to the Abbaye.' They knew outside what that meant. Two men seized him by the arm and led him out of the room. At the door he was face to face with a double row of cut-throats, a prod in the rear with a pike tossed him amongst them, and then ... well, there were some that took a good deal of finishing off.—They did not shoot them then?—No, there was no shooting.—And the acquittals?—Well, if it was simply, 'take the citizen to the Abbaye,' they killed him. If it was 'take him to the Abbaye,' with Vive la nation! he was acquitted. It wasn't over at nightfall. We passed the night of the 3d with the butchers inside the prison; they were just worn out. It began again on the morning of the 4th, but not quite with the same spirit. It was mostly the children who suffered on the Tuesday.—And the lunatics, and the patients, and the old creatures—did they get their throats cut too?—No, they were all herded in the dormitories, with the doors locked on them, and sentinels inside to keep them from looking out of window. All the killing was done in the prison.—And when did they leave you? At about three on Tuesday afternoon; and then we called the roll of the survivors.—And the dead?—We buried them in quicklime in our own cemetery."

The hideous mise-en-scÈne of PÈre Richard is, at the worst, a degree less reproachful than that of Prud'homme, Peltier, or M. Thiers.

There was one worthy man at BicÊtre, Dr. Pinel, whose devotion to humanitarian science (a form of devotion not over-common in such places at that day) very nearly cost him his life at the hands of the revolutionary judges. Dr. Pinel, who had the notion that disease of the mind was not best cured by whipping, was accused by the Committee of Public Safety (under whose rule, it may be observed, no public ever went in greater terror) of plotting with medical science for the restoration of the monarchy! It was a charge quite worthy of the wisdom and the tenderness for "public safety" of the ComitÉ de Salut Public. Pinel, disdaining oratory, vouchsafed the simplest explanation of his treatment at BicÊtre,—and was permitted to continue it.

Not so charitable were the gods to ThÉroigne de Mericourt, a woman singular amongst the women of the Revolution. Readers of Carlyle will remember his almost gallant salutations of her (a handsome young woman of the streets, who took a passion for the popular cause, and rode on a gun-carriage in the famous outing to Versailles) as often as she starts upon the scene. When he misses her from the procession, in the fourth book of the first volume, it is:

"But where is the brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted Demoiselle ThÉroigne? Brown eloquent beauty, who, with thy winged words and glances, shalt thrill rough bosoms—whole steel battalions—and persuade an Austrian Kaiser, pike and helm lie provided for thee in due season, and alas! also strait waistcoat and long lodging in the SalpÊtriÈre."

ThÉroigne was some beautiful village girl when the echo first reached her of the tocsin of the Revolution. She thought a woman was wanted there, and trudged hot-foot to Paris, perhaps through the self-same quiet lanes that saw the pilgrimage of Charlotte Corday. In Paris she took (for reasons of her own, one must suppose) the calling of "unfortunate female"—the euphemism will be remembered as Carlyle's—and dubbed herself the people's Aspasia—"l'Aspasie du peuple." In "tunic blue," over a "red petticoat," crossed with a tricolour scarf and crowned with the Phrygian cap, she roamed the streets, "criant, jurant, blasphÉmant," to the tune of the drum of rebellion. One day the women of the town, in a rage of fear or jealousy, fell upon her, stripped her, and beat her through the streets. She went mad, and in the first years of this century she was still an inmate of BicÊtre. When the "women's side" of BicÊtre was closed, in 1803, ThÉroigne was transferred to the SalpÊtriÈre, where she died.

During the hundred years (1748-1852) of the prisons of the Bagnes—those convict establishments at Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort, which took the place of the galleys, and which in their turn gave way to the modern system of transportation,—it was from BicÊtre that the chained cohorts of the forÇats were despatched on their weary march through France. The ceremony of the ferrement, or putting in irons for the journey, was one of the sights of Paris for those who could gain admission to the great courtyard of the prison. At daybreak of the morning appointed for the start, the long chains and collars of steel were laid out in the yard, and the prison smiths attended with their mallets and portable anvils; the convicts, for whom these preparations were afoot, keeping up a terrific din behind their grated windows. When all was ready for them, they were tumbled out by batches and placed in rows along the wall. Every man had to strip to the skin, let the weather be what it might, and a sort of smock of coarse calico was tossed to him from a pile in the middle of the yard; he did not dress until the toilet of the collar was finished. This, at the rough hands of the smith and his aids, was a sufficiently painful process. The convicts were called up in alphabetical order, and to the neck of each man a heavy collar was adjusted, the triangular bolt of which was hammered to by blows of a wooden mallet. To the padlock was attached a chain which, descending to the prisoner's waistbelt, was taken up thence and riveted to the next man's collar, and in this way some two hundred forÇats were tethered like cattle in what was called the chaine volante. The satyr-like humours of the gang, singing and capering on the cobbles, shouting to the echo the name of some criminal hero as he stepped out to receive his collar, and sometimes joining hands in a frenzied dance, which was broken only by the savage use of the warder's bÂtons—all this was the sport of the well-dressed crowd of spectators.

As far as the outskirts of Paris, the convicts were carried in chars-À-bancs, an armed escort on either side; and when the prison doors were thrown open to let them out, the whole canaille of the town was waiting to receive them with yells of derision, to which the forÇats responded with all the oaths they had. This was one of the most popular spectacles of Paris until the middle of the present century.

An essential sordidness is the character most persistent in the history of BicÊtre—a dull squalor, with perpetual crises of unromantic agony. There is no glamour upon BicÊtre; no silken gown with a domino above it rustles softly by lantern-light through those grimy wickets. It is not here that any gallant prisoner of state comes, bribing the governor to keep his table furnished with the best, receiving his love-letters in baskets of fruit, giving his wine-parties of an evening. In the records of Vincennes and the Bastille the novelist will always feel himself at home, but BicÊtre has daunted him. It is poor Jean Valjean, of Les MisÉrables, squatting "in the north corner of the courtyard," choked with tears, "while the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted with heavy hammer-blows." This is the solitary figure of interest which BicÊtre has given to fiction.

If a shadowy figure may be added, it is from the same phantasmagoric gallery of Victor Hugo. BicÊtre was the prison of the nameless faint-heart who weeps and moans through the incredible pages of Le Dernier Jour d'un CondamnÉ. Then, and until 1836, BicÊtre was the last stage but one (l'avant-derniÈre Étape) on the road to the guillotine. The last was the Conciergerie, close to the Place de GrÈve. The shadow-murderer of Le Dernier Jour d'un CondamnÉ—for there is no real stuff of murder in him, and he is the feeblest and least sympathetic puppet of fiction—is useful only as bringing into relief the old, disused, and forgotten cachot du CondamnÉ, or condemned cell, of BicÊtre. It was a den eight feet square; rough stone walls, moist and sweating, like the flags which made the flooring; the only "window" a grating in the iron door; a truss of straw on a stone couch in a recess; and an arched and blackened ceiling, wreathed with cobwebs.

Starting out of sleep one night, Hugo's condemned man lifts his lamp and sees spectral writings, figures and arabesques in crayons, blood and charcoal dancing over the walls of the cell—the "visitors' book" of generations of CondamnÉs À mort who have preceded him. Some had blazoned their names in full, with grotesque embellishments of the capital letter and a motto underneath breathing their last defiance to the world; and in one corner, "traced in white outline, a frightful image, the figure of the scaffold, which, at the moment that I write, may be rearing its timbers for me! The lamp all but fell from my hands."