Being the Story and Romance
of the most Celebrated Prisons
of the Monarchy and
the Revolution
By Tighe Hopkins
Author of "Lady Bonnie's Experiment," "Nell Haffenden," "The
Nugents of Carriconna," "The Incomplete Adventurer,"
"Kilmainham Memories," etc.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
Triste comme les portes d'une prison—Sad as the gates of Prison, is an old French proverb which must once have had an aching significance. To the citizen of Paris it must have been familiar above most other popular sayings, since he had the menace of a prison door at almost every turn! For the "Dungeons of Old Paris" were well-nigh as thick as its churches or its taverns. Up to the period, or very close upon the period, of the Revolution of 1789, everyone who exercised what was called with quite unconscious irony the "right of justice" (droit de justice), possessed his prison. The King was the great gaoler-in-chief of the State, but there were countless other gaolers. The terrible prisons of State—two of the most renowned of which, the Dungeon of Vincennes and the Bastille, have been partially restored in these pages—are almost hustled out of sight by the towers and ramparts of the host of lesser prisons. To every town in France there was its dungeon, to every puissant noble his dungeon, to every lord of the manor his dungeon, to every bishop and Abbé his dungeon. The dreaded cry of "Laissez passer la justice du Roi!" "Way for the King's justice!" was not oftener heard, nor more unwillingly, than "Way for the Duke's justice!" or "Way for the justice of my lord Bishop!" For indeed the mouldy records of those hidden dungeons and torture rooms of château and monastery, the carceres duri and the vade in pace, into which the hooded victim was lowered by torchlight, and out of which his bones were never raked, might shew us scenes yet more forbidding than the darkest which these chapters unfold. But they have crumbled and passed, and history itself no longer cares to trouble their infected dust.
Scenes harsh enough, though not wholly unrelieved (for romance is of the essence of their story), are at hand within the walls of certain prisons whose names and memories have survived. I have undone the bolts of nearly all the more celebrated prisons of historic Paris, few of which are standing at this day. One or two have been passed by, or but very briefly surveyed, for the reason that to include them would have been to commit myself to a certain amount of not very necessary repetition. I fear that even as the book stands I must have repeated myself more than once, but this has been for the most part in the attempt to enforce points which seemed not to have been brought out or emphasised with sufficient clearness elsewhere. Dealing with prisons which were in existence for centuries, and some of which were associated with almost every great and stirring epoch of French history, selection of periods and events was a paramount necessity. The endeavour has been to give back to each of these cruel old dungeons, Prison d'État, Conciergerie, or Maison de Justice, its special and distinctive character; to shew just what each was like at the most interesting or important dates in its career; and, as far as might be, to find the reason of that dreary proverb, "Sad as the gates of Prison." Light chequers the shades in some of these dim vaults, and the echoes of the dour days they witnessed are not all tears and lamentations. Something is shewn, it is hoped, of every kind of "justice" that was recognised in Paris until the days of '89, when everything that had been, fell with the terrific fall of the monarchy:—feudal justice, the justice of absolute kings and of ministers who were but less absolute, provosts' and bishops' justice, and the justice of prison governors and lieutenants of police. Often it is no more than a glimpse that is afforded; but the picture as a whole is, perhaps, not altogether lacking in completeness. Once inside a prison, the prisoner is the first study; and there are no more moving or pitiful objects in the annals of France than the victims of its criminal justice in every age. Slit the curtain of cobweb that has formed over the narrow grille of the dungeon, put back on their shrill hinges the double and triple doors of the cell, peer into the hole that ventilates the conical oubliette, and one may see once more under what conditions life was possible, and amid what surroundings death was a blessing, in the days when Paris was studded with prisons, when every abbot was free to wall-up his monks alive, and every seigneur to erect his gallows in his own courtyard.
For during all these days, dragging slowly into ages, justice has seldom more than one face to shew us: a face of cruelty and vengeance. The thing which we call the "theory of punishment" had really no existence. Punishment was not to chasten and reform; it was scarcely even to deter; it was mainly and almost solely to revenge. What the notion of prison was, I have tried briefly to explain in the chapters on "The Conciergerie," "The Dungeon of Vincennes," and, I think, elsewhere. We are strictly to remember, however, that the vindictive idea of punishment, and the idea of prison as a place in which (1) to hold and (2) to torment anyone who might be unfortunate enough to get in there, were not at all peculiar to France. The history of punishment in our own country leaves no room for boasting; and France has not more to reproach herself with in the memory of the Bastille, than we have in the actual and visible existence of Newgate. France has Archives de la Bastille; we have Howard's State of Prisons and Griffiths's Chronicles of Newgate. We are not to forget that, in the "age of chivalry" in England, it was unsafe for visitors in London to stroll a hundred yards from their inn after sunset; and that, in the reign of Elizabeth, Shakespeare might have penned his lines on "the quality of mercy" within earshot of the rabble on their way to gloat over the disembowelling of a "traitor," or flocking to surround the stake at which a woman was to die by fire. In a word, the sense of vengeance, and the thirst for vengeance, which underlay the old criminal law of France, and of all Europe, were not less the basis of our own criminal law until well on into the second quarter of this century. But the French, it would seem, have paid the cost of their quick dramatic sense. They have handed down to us, in history, drama, and romance, the picture of Louis XI. arm in arm with his torturer and hangman, Tristan; the spectacle of the noble whose sword was convertible into a headsman's axe; and of the abbot whose girdle was ever ready for use as a halter. Histories akin to these (and, at the root, there is more of history than of legend in all of them) are to be delved out of our own records; but the French have been more candid in the matter, and a good deal more skilled with the pen in chronicles of the sort.
On the other hand, England never had quite such bitter memories of her prisons as France had of hers. The struggle for freedom in England was never a struggle against the prisons; and it was not consciously a struggle against the prisons in France. But the destruction of a prison was the beginning of the French Revolution; and when the Revolution was over, its first historians took the prisons of France as the type and example of the immemorial tyranny of their kings. In one important respect, therefore, the dungeons of old Paris stand apart from the prisons of the rest of Europe.
I had proposed to myself, in beginning this introductory chapter, to attempt a comparison, more or less detailed, between these ruined and obliterated prisons of historic Paris and the French or English prisons of to-day. But a final glance at the chapters as they were going to press counselled me to abstain. There is no point to start from. The old and the new prisons have a space between them wider than divides the poles. The key that turned a lock of the Châtelet, Bicêtre, or the Bastille will open no cell of any modern prison, French or English. Punishment is systematised, and has its basis in two ideas,—the safety of peoples living in communities, and the cure of certain moral obliquities; or, it is quite without system, and means only the vengeance of the strong upon the weak. Between the prison which was intended either as a living tomb, or as a starting-place for the pillory, the whipping-post, or the scaffold; and the prison which proposes to punish, to deter, or to reform the bad, the diseased, the weak, or the luckless members of society, there is not a point at which comparison is possible.
If walls had tongues, those of the Conciergerie might rehearse a wretched story. This is, I believe, the oldest prison in Europe; it would speak with the twofold authority of age and black experience. Give these walls a voice, and they might say:
"Look at the buildings we enclose. There is a little of every style in our architecture, reflecting the many ages we have witnessed. Paris and France, in all the reigns of all the Kings, have been locked in here, starved here, tortured here, and sent from here to die by hanging, by beheading, by dismembering by horses, by fire, and by the guillotine. We have found chains and a bitter portion for the victims of all the tyrannies of France,—those of the Feudal Ages, those of the Absolute Monarchy, those of the Revolution, and those of the Restoration. There is no discord, trouble, passion, or revolution in France which is not recorded in our annals. Politics, religion, feuds of parties and of houses, private rancours and the enmities of queens, the vengeance of kings and the jealousies of their ministers, have filled in turn the vaults of this little city of the dead-in-life. We have seen the killing of the innocent; the torment of a Queen; the tears of a Dubarry and the stoicism of a hideous Cartouche; the collapse of a Marquise de Brinvilliers under torture and the silent heroism of a Charlotte Corday on her way to the guillotine; the bold immodesty of a La Voisin on the rack and the solemn abandon of the 'last supper' of the Girondins. We have seen the worst that France could shew of wickedness and the best that it could shew of patriotism; we have seen the beginning and the end of everything that makes the history of a prison."
Most French writers who have touched upon the Conciergerie seem to have felt the oppression of the place; their recollections or impressions are recorded in a spirit of melancholy or indignation.
"Ah, that Conciergerie!" exclaims Philarète Chasles; "there is a sense of suffocation in its buildings; one thinks of the prisoner, innocent or guilty, crushed beneath the weight of society. Here are the oldest dungeons of France; Paris has scarcely begun to be when those dungeons are opened."
The strain of Dulaure, the historian of Paris, is not less depressing:
"The Conciergerie, the most ancient and the most formidable of all our prisons, which forms a part of the buildings of the Palais de Justice, one time palace of the kings, has preserved to this day the hideous character of the feudal ages. Its towers, its courtyard, and the dim passage by which the prisoners are admitted, have tears in their very aspect. Pity on the wight who, condemned to sojourn there, has not the wherewithal to pay for the hire of a bed! For him a lodging on the straw in some dark and mouldy chamber, cheek by jowl with wretches penniless like himself."[1]
1. Histoire de Paris.
MADAME DUBARRY.
In the days when Paris had not so much as a gate to shut in the face of the invader, the citizen raftsmen of the Seine thought it well to have a prison, and "dug a hole in the middle of their isle." This, it seems, was the sorry beginning of the Conciergerie; but the details of that vanished epoch are scant. Palace and prison are thought to have been constructed at about the same date: the palace, which was principally a fortress, was the residence of the kings; the Conciergerie was their dungeon. Rebuilt by Saint Louis, the Conciergerie became in part—as its name implies—the dwelling of the Concierge of the palace. According to Larousse, the Concierge "was in some sort the governor of the royal house, and had the keeping of the King's prisoners, with the right of low and middle justice" (basse et moyenne justice). In 1348, the Concierge took the official title of bailli; the functions and privileges of the office were enlarged, and it was held by many persons of distinction, amongst whom was Jacques Coictier, the famous doctor of Louis XI. As the practice was, in an age when every gaoler "exploited" his prisoners, the concierge-bailli taxed the victuals he supplied them with, and charged what he pleased for the hire of beds and other cell-equipments; while it happened more than once, says Larousse, "that prisoners who were entitled to be released on a judge's order, were detained until they had paid all prison fees." On such a system were the old French gaols administered. The office of concierge-bailli, with its voluminous powers, and its manifold abuses, was in existence until the era of the Revolution.
Justice under the old régime counted sex as nothing. The physical weakness and finer nervous organisation of woman were allowed no claim upon its mercy. Primary or capital punishment, as to burning and beheading, was the same for women as for men, and the shocking apparatus of the torture chamber served for both sexes. The elaborate rules for the application of the Question published in Louis XIV.'s reign (and abolished only in the reign of Louis XVI.) specified the costume which women and girls should wear in the hands of the torturer.[2]
2. "Si c'est une femme ou fille, lui sera laissé une jupe avec sa chemise et sera sa jupe liée aux genoux."
The black walls of the torture chamber in the Conciergerie, with their ring-bolts and benches of stone, gave back the groans of many thousands of mutilated sufferers. There were the "Question ordinary" and the "Question extraordinary"; and if the first failed to extract a confession, the second seems almost always to have been applied. The extravagant cruelty of the age frequently added sentence of torture to the death sentence; and this was probably done in every case in which the condemned was thought to be withholding the name of an accomplice. Far on into the history of France these sentences were dealt out to, and executed upon, women as well as men; and with as artistic a disregard of human pain or shame in the one sex as in the other.
We are in the presence of a high civilisation, or at least a highly boasted one, in the days of Louis XIV.; but public sentiment is not offended by the knowledge that a woman is being tortured by the questionnaire and his assistants in the Conciergerie; nor are many persons shocked by seeing a woman on the scaffold semi-nude in the coarse hands of the headsman, or struggling amid blazing faggots in a Paris square. Nowadays, whether in France or in England, the mauvais quart d'heure (which, at the guillotine or on the gallows, is usually a half-minute at the utmost) pays the score of the worst of criminals; but in the advanced and cultured France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a Marquise de Brinvilliers must pass through the torture chamber on her way to the block, and a Ravaillac and a Damiens (after a like ordeal) are put to death in a manner which sends a thrill of horror through Europe, and which is not afterwards outdone in any camp of American Red Indians.
The extraordinary criminal drama of the Marquise de Brinvilliers has been vulgarised not a little by legend, by romance, and by the stage; but is there cause for wonder that a series of crimes which made Paris quake from its royal boudoirs to the extremities of its darkest alleys should have inspired writers to the fourth and fifth generations?
In the hands of De Brinvilliers and her lover and accomplice, the Gascon officer Sainte-Croix, poison became a polite art; and the accident of marriage associated the Marchioness with an industrial art which was of great renown in Paris,—I mean, the Gobelin Manufacture, or Royal Manufacture of Crown Tapestries. From the fourteenth century, in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel and on the Bièvre River—the water of which was considered specially good for dyeing purposes,—there were established certain drapers and wool-dyers; and amongst them, in 1450, was a wealthy dyer named Jean Gobelin, who had acquired large possessions on the banks of the river. His business, after his death, was continued by his son Philibert, who made it more than ever profitable, and who on his death-bed bequeathed handsome portions to his sons. The family divided between them, in 1510, ten mansions, gardens, orchards, and lands. Not less fruitful were the labours of their successors, and when the name of Gobelin had grown into celebrity, the popular voice bestowed it, says Dulaure, upon the district in which their establishment was situated.
Immensely enriched, the Gobelins ceased to occupy themselves with business, and took over various employments in the magistracy, army, and finance. Some of them succeeded in obtaining the rank and title of Marquis. From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, the Gobelins held high offices, or married into office; and were notable amongst the merchant princes whose illustrious coffers and power to assert themselves won places for them amid the hereditary aristocracy of France. Into this family entered by marriage, in 1651, Marie Marguerite d'Aubrai, daughter of the Lieutenant Civil, or Civil Magistrate of Paris. Her husband, Antoine Gobelin, was the Marquis de Brinvilliers; a title which she was to cover with an infamy as great and enduring as the fame of the Gobelin Tapestries.
The Marquise's gallantries (a term which in the seventeenth century embraced a greater variety of moral eccentricities than the Decalogue has provided for) were quite eclipsed by her celebrity as a poisoner. With her performances in this art—in which she seems to have been trained by Sainte-Croix—began that incredible series of murders, and attempted murders, known as L'Affaire des Poisons, which both characterised and lent a special character to the morals of the age of the Grand Monarque.
It was the accidental death of her lover, in 1675, which exposed and brought the vengeance of the law on La Brinvilliers. Sainte-Croix was conducting some experiment with poisons in his laboratory, when the glass mask with which he had covered his face suddenly broke, and he fell dead on the spot. Letters of Mme. de Brinvilliers were amongst the suspicious objects found in the laboratory by the police, and she fled to London. One of Sainte-Croix' servants was put to the Question, and his confession did not improve the situation of the Marquise. Leaving London, she hid by turns in Brussels and Liège; and in a convent in the latter town she was discovered by the detective Desgrais, who got her out by a ruse, and brought her back to Paris. Her appearance in the torture chamber of the Conciergerie was not long delayed. All her fascinations failed her with those bloodless cross-examiners, and as she persisted in denying one charge after another, she saw the executioner and his attendants make ready the apparatus for the torture by water. She summoned a little shew of raillery: "Surely, gentlemen, you don't think that with a figure like mine I can swallow those three buckets of water! Do you mean to drown me? I simply cannot drink it." "Madame," replied the examiner-in-chief, "we shall see"; and the Marchioness was bound upon the trestle.
For a time her courage sustained her, but, as the torture grew sharper, avowals came slowly, which must have amazed the hardened ears that received them.
"Who was your first victim?"
"M. d'Aubrai—my father."
"You were very devout at this time, attending church and visiting hospitals?"
"I was testing the powers of our science on the patients. I gave poisoned biscuits to the sick."
"You had two brothers?"
"Yes ... we were two too many in my family. Lachaussée, Sainte-Croix' valet, had instructions to poison my brothers; they died in the country, with some of their friends, after eating a pigeon-pie which Lachaussée used to make to perfection."
"You poisoned one of your children?"
"Sainte-Croix hated it!"
"You wanted to poison your husband?"
"Sainte-Croix for some reason prevented it. After I had administered the poison, he would give my husband an antidote."
Before she was released from the trestle, Madame's confession was complete. Sainte-Croix, imprisoned in the Bastille, on a lettre-de-cachet obtained by M. de Brinvilliers, had there made the acquaintance of an Italian chemist, named Exili, who had taught him the whole art and mystery of poison. Exili's cell in the Bastille was the first laboratory of Sainte-Croix, who proved afterwards so apt a pupil that, as his mistress and accomplice avowed, he could conceal a deadly poison in a flower, an orange, a letter, a glove, "or in nothing at all."
After sentence of death had been passed on this most miserable woman, she was denied the consolations of the Church, but a priest found courage to give her absolution as she was carried to the scaffold. The Marchioness was followed to her death by the husband whom she had tried in vain to send to his death, and who, it is said, wept beside her the whole way from the Conciergerie to the Place de Grève. Conspicuous in the enormous crowd assembled in the square were women of fashion and rank, whom the noble murderess rallied on the spectacle she had provided for them. One of the ladies was that distinguished gossip, Madame de Sévigné, who wrote the whole scene down for her daughter on the following day. De Brinvilliers was beheaded, and her body burnt to ashes.
This signal example—the torture, beheading, and burning of a peeress of France—was signally void of effect.
The secrets of Sainte-Croix and La Brinvilliers had not been buried with the one, nor scattered with the ashes of the other. Four years later, Paris talked of nothing but poison and the revival of the "black art" which was associated with it; and, in 1680, the King established at the Arsenal a court specially charged to try cases of poisoning and magic. The notoriety of the widow Montvoisin, more commonly known as La Voisin, who dealt extensively in both arts, was inferior only to that of the Brinvilliers. Duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, and other high dames of the Court were concerned in this scandal, and Louis himself was active in seeking to bring the culprits of title to justice,—or to get them out of the way. He sent a private message to the Comtesse de Soissons, advising her that if she were innocent she should go to the Bastille for a time, in which case he would stand by her, and that if she were guilty, it would be well for her to quit Paris without delay. The Comtesse, who was "famous at the Court of Louis XIV. for her dissolute habits," fled and was exiled to Brussels; the Marquise d'Alluye or d'Allaye was banished to Amboise, Mme. de Bouillon to Nevers, and M. de Luxembourg was imprisoned for two years in the Bastille. A far more terrible expiation was prepared for La Voisin.
Outwardly, this was a woman of a grosser type than the Marchioness Brinvilliers. The Marchioness, is described as "gracieuse, élégante, spirituelle et polie." La Voisin was a repellent fat creature, as coarse in speech as in appearance. Yet she lived as a woman of society (en femme de qualitè); and composed and sold to the beauties and gallants of the Court, poisons, charms, philters, and secrets to procure lovers or to outwit rivals; she called up spirits for a fee, and would shew the Devil if one paid the tariff for a glimpse of that celebrity.[3]
3. Dulaure.
Her attitude in the Salle de la Question of the Conciergerie became her well. She cursed, flouted the examiners, and "swore that she would keep on swearing" if they racked her to pieces. "Here's your health!" she cried, when the first vessel of water was forced down her throat; and, as they fastened her on the rack,—"That 's right! One should always be growing. I have complained all my life of being too short." It is said that, having been made to drink fourteen pots of water during the water torture, she drank fourteen bottles of wine with the turnkeys in her cell at night. Her sentence was death at the stake, and on her way to the place of execution she jeered at the priest who accompanied her, refused to make the amende honorable at Notre-Dame, and fought like a tigress with the executioners on descending from the cart. Tied and fettered on the pile, she threw off five or six times the straw which was heaped on her. Sévigné, who looked on, detailed the scene with animation, and without a touch of feeling, in a letter to her daughter.
Confounding the real crimes with chimerical ones, the new court continued to prosecute poisoners and "sorcerers" together; and even at that credulous and superstitious date, when judges listened gravely to the most baseless and fantastic accusations, there were persons interrogated on charges of sorcery who had the spirit to laugh both judges and accusers in the face. Mme. de Bouillon said aloud, on the conclusion of her examination, that she had never in her life heard so much nonsense so solemnly spoken (n'avait jamais tant ouïdire de sottises d'un ton si grave); whereat, it is chronicled, his Majesty "was very angry." It was not until the bench itself began to treat as mere charlatans the wizards of both sexes who appeared before it, that trials for sorcery and "black magic" fell away and gradually ceased.
It was the Conciergerie which presided over the examination, torture, and atrocious punishment of Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV., and Damiens, who attempted the life of Louis XV. Ravaillac, the first to occupy it, left his name to a tower of the prison.
"You shiver even now in the Tower of Ravaillac," say MM. Alhoy and Lurine in Les Prisons de Paris,—"that cold and dreadful place. Thought conjures up a multitude of fearful images, and is aghast at all the tragedies and all the dramas which have culminated in the old Conciergerie, between the judge, the victim, and the executioner. What tears and lamentations, what cries and maledictions, what blasphemies and vain threats has it not heard, that pitiless doyenne of the prisons of Paris!"
Ravaillac, most fearless of fanatics and devotees, said, when interrogated before Parliament as to his estate and calling, "I teach children to read, write, and pray to God." At his third examination, he wrote beneath the signature which he had affixed to his testimony the following distich:
"Que toujours, dans mon cœur,
Jésus soit le vainqueur!"
and a member of Parliament exclaimed on reading it, "Where the devil will religion lodge next!"
He was condemned by Parliament on the 2d of May, 1610, to a death so appalling that one wonders how the mere words of the sentence can have been pronounced. Our own ancient penalty for high treason was a mild infliction in comparison with this. Before being led to execution, Ravaillac did penance in the streets of Paris, wearing a shirt only and carrying a lighted torch or candle, two pounds in weight. Taken next to the Place de Grève, he was stripped for execution, and the dagger with which he had twice struck the King was placed in his right hand. He was then put to death in the following manner. His flesh was torn in eight places with red-hot pincers, and molten lead, pitch, brimstone, wax, and boiling oil were poured upon the wounds. This done, his body was torn asunder by four horses; the trunk and limbs were burned to ashes, and the ashes were scattered to the winds.
Eight assassins had preceded Ravaillac in attempts on the life of Henri IV., and six of them had paid this outrageous forfeit. The torments of the Conciergerie and the Place de Grève were bequeathed by these to the regicide of 1610, and Ravaillac left them a legacy to Robert François Damiens.
The Tower of Ravaillac was equally the Tower of Damiens. François Damiens, a bilious and pious creature of the Jesuits, not unfamiliar with crime, pricked Louis, as his Majesty was starting for a drive, with a weapon scarcely more formidable than a penknife. He was seized on the spot, and there were found on him another and a larger knife, thirty-seven louis d'or, some silver, and a book of devotions,—the assassins of the Kings of France were always pious men. "Horribly tortured," he confessed nothing at first, and it is by no means certain what was the nature or importance of his subsequent avowals. But, although there is little question that Damiens was merely the instrument of a conspiracy more or less redoubtable, no effort was made to arraign, arrest, or discover his supposed accomplices. The examination and trial, conducted with none of the publicity which such a crime demanded, were in the hands of persons chosen by the court, "persons suspected of partiality," says Dulaure, "and bidden to condemn the assassin without concerning themselves about those who had set him on—which gives colour to the belief, that they were too high to be touched" (que ces derniers étaient puissans).
One hundred and forty-seven years had passed since the Paris Parliament's inhuman sentence on Ravaillac, but not a detail of it was spared to Damiens on the 28th of March, 1757. Enough of such atrocities.
In the days of the Regency there was in one of the suburbs of Paris a tea-garden which was at once popular and fashionable under the name of La Courtille. In the groves of La Courtille, on summer evenings, amid lights and music, russet-coated burghers might almost touch elbows with "high-rouged dames of the palace"; and here one night Mesdames de Parabère and de Prie brought a party of elegant revellers. As one of the guests strolled apart, humming an air, he was approached softly from behind, and a hand was laid upon his shoulder.
"My gallant mask, I know you! So you have left Normandy, eh? Well, you have made us suffer much, but I fancy it will be our turn now. One of our cells has long been ready for you, and you shall sleep at the Conciergerie to-night. Cartouche!"
Yes, it was indeed the great Cartouche whom a deft detective had trapped on the sward of La Courtille. The capture was a notable one, and the next day and for many days to come Paris could not make enough of it,—Paris which had suffered beatings, plunderings, and assassinations at the hands of Cartouche and his band for ten years past. He lay three months at the Conciergerie, and every day his fame increased. The Regent's finances and the "ministerial rigours" of Dubois were disregarded; Cartouche was a godsend to rhymesters, journalists, wits, and diners-out; pretty lips repeated the dubious history of his amours, and a theatrical gentleman announced a "comedy" named after the distinguished cut-throat. Cartouche awaited stoically enough death by breaking on the wheel. It required a severe application of the Question to bring him to a betrayal of his band, but "his tongue once loosed, he passed an entire night in naming the companions of his crimes." The villain even denounced "three pretty women who had been his mistresses."
He consented one day to the visit of a person whose indiscreet candour was passing cruel. This was the dramatist Legrand who, with his Cartouche comedy in preparation, sought the "local colour" of the condemned cell. Cartouche had the vanity which characterises the great criminal, and willingly allowed himself to be "interviewed"; he answered all Legrand's questions, and then asked one himself: "When is your piece to be represented?" "On the day of your execution, my dear Monsieur Cartouche." "Ah, indeed! Then you had better interview the executioner also; he will come in at the climax, you see."
Having entertained the playwright with his wit, the murderer next essayed the part of patriot, and said to his Jesuit confessor, Guignard, in speaking of the assassination of Henri IV.:
"All the crimes that I have ever committed were the merest peccadilloes (de légères peccadilles) in comparison with those which your Order is stained with. Is there any crime more enormous than to take the life of your King, and such a King as that was? The noblest prince in the universe, the glory of France, the father of his country! I tell you that if a man whom I were pursuing had taken refuge at the foot of the statue of Henri IV., I should not have dared to kill him."
The condition of the Conciergerie at this date was at all events better than it had been two or three centuries earlier. No Mediæval prisons were fit to live in. Sanitation was a science as yet undreamed of in Europe, and even had there been such a science, it is improbable that the inmates of prisons would have tasted its advantages. In the Middle Ages, nothing was more remote from the official mind, from the minds of all judges, magistrates, governors, gaolers, and concierges, than the notion that prisoners should live in wholesome and decent surroundings. Two very definite ideas the Middle Ages had about prisons, and only two: the first was, that they should be impregnable, and the second was, that they should be "gey ill" to live in; and their one idea regarding the lot of all prisoners and captives was, that it should be beyond every other lot wretched and unendurable.
In the age we live in, civilised governments setting about the building of a new prison do not say to their architects, "You must build a fortress which prisoners cannot break, and you must put into it a certain quantity of conical cells below the level of the ground, in which prisoners may be suffocated within a given number of days," but, "You must build a prison of sufficient strength; and in planning your cells you must secure for every prisoner an ample provision of space, air, and light." Those are the supreme differences between ancient and modern gaols. Prison in the old days was of all places the least healthy to live in; nowadays, it is often the most healthy. Good control and strict surveillance confer security upon prisons which are not built as fortresses; but nothing gives such immense distinction to the new system, by contrast with all the earlier ones, as the elaborate and minute regard of everything which may make for the physical well-being of the prisoners.
Then comes the moral question; and from the standpoint of morals the situation tells even more in favour of the modern system. Imprisonment should never be cruel; but, when the prisoner is fairly tried and justly sentenced, it should always be both irksome and disgraceful. The disgrace of prison, however, depends upon the absolute impartiality of the tribunal and the soundness of public sentiment. Nobody is disgraced by being sent into prison in a society in which arrest is arbitrary, and in which arraignment at the bar is not followed by an honest examination of the facts. Princes of the blood, nobles, ministers, and judges and magistrates themselves were equally liable with the commonest offenders against the common law to be spirited into prison, and left there, without accusation and without trial, during many centuries of French history. Most tribunals were corrupt, and during many ages all were at the mercy of the Crown. A Daniel on the bench was rare, and in great danger of being hanged; and public sentiment was not yet articulate.
In such insecurity of justice, imprisonment could carry with it no social stigma, as it carries inevitably in these days. But, where there is no shame in imprisonment, there is no question of the reform of the prisoner, and this—one of the main endeavours of modern penal systems—was not only quite ignored by the old régime, but was an aspect of the matter to which it was entirely indifferent, and which had evidently no place whatever in its conceptions. In the progress of civilisation, no institution has been so completely transformed as the prison. It was an instrument of vengeance; it is seeking, not at present too successfully, to be an instrument of grace.
Prisons neglected or encumbered with filth are natural hotbeds of disease, and epidemic sicknesses were frequent. In 1548, the plague broke out in the Conciergerie, and then for the first time an infirmary was established in the prison, though I cannot find that it made greatly for the comfort of the sick. Doctor's work was grudgingly and carelessly done in the prisons of those days, and there was no great disposition to hinder the sick from yielding up the ghost; the bed or the share of a bed allotted to the patient was always wanted. The Conciergerie was devastated by fire in 1776, and this visitation resulted in a royal command to rehabilitate the whole interior of the prison. In this attempt to realise the generous thought of his minister Turgot, Louis XVI. did not imagine, we may be sure, that he was preparing a last lodging for Marie Antoinette!
Here then we stand on the threshold of the Conciergerie of the Revolution—the ante-chamber of the scaffold, in the fit words of Fouquier-Tinville.
It was at four o'clock on the morning of the 14th of October, 1793, at the close of the sitting of the revolutionary tribunal, that the dethroned and widowed Queen was brought to the Conciergerie. Poor, abandoned, outraged Queen, they thrust her into one of their common cells, and gave her for attendant a galley-slave named Barasin. This must have been a brave, good fellow, with a loyal heart under his galley-slave's vest, for at the risk of his life he waited devoutly and devotedly on the queenly woman, a queen no longer, who could in nothing reward his devotion. One should name also the concierge Richard, who shewed himself not less a man in his care of the "beautiful high-born," and who for his humanity to her was stripped of all his goods.
The gendarmes guarded her last hours, sat there in the cell with her, though republican modesty allowed the intervention of a screen.
It is known what a sublime dignity sustained her to the end; and indeed almost the worst was over when she had quitted Fouquier-Tinville's bar, after the "hideous indictment" and the condemnation. She withdrew to die, and she could die as became a Queen. Louis had gone before her, and all the mother's dying thoughts and prayers must have been for the children who were to live after her—how long, she knew not. She sat in the dingy cell, clasping her crucifix, waiting her call to the tumbril; "dim, dim, as if in disastrous eclipse; like the pale kingdoms of Dis!"
From this time on to the end of the Reign of Terror, the Conciergerie offered such a spectacle as was never seen before within the walls of any prison. The guillotine
"smoked with bloody execution."
The Revolution was eating not her enemies only but her children, and those victims and prospective victims, men and women, old and young, filled the cells of the Conciergerie, the chambers, the corridors, and the yards. They swarmed there in disorder, dirt, and disease, guarded and bullied by drunken turnkeys, who had a pack of savage dogs to assist them. They went out by batches in the tumbrils, to leave their heads in Samson's basket, and ever fresh parties of proscribed ones took the places of the dead. "I remained six months in the Conciergerie," says Nougaret, one of the historians of the period, "and saw there nobles, priests, merchants, bankers, men of letters, artisans, agriculturists, and honest sans-culottes." Often as this population was decimated, Fouquier-Tinville filled up the gap; and throughout the whole of the Terror the condemned and the untried proscribed ones, herded together, seldom had space enough for the common decencies of life.
Then some sort of classification was attempted, and three orders were established in the prison. The Pistoliers were those who could afford to pay for the privilege of sleeping two in a bed. The Pailleux lay huddled in parties, in dens or lairs, on piles of stale straw, "at the risk of being devoured by rats and vermin." Nougaret remarks that in some cells the prisoners on the floor at night had to protect their faces with their hands, and leave the rest of their persons to the rats. The Secrets were the third class of prisoners, who made what shift they could in black and reeking cells beneath the level of the Seine.
And the sick in the infirmary? Listen once more to Nougaret in his Histoire des Prisons de Paris et des Départemens: