BICÊTRE.
"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]
Footnote 15:
_Mémoires._
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
cœur 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.
Footnote 16:
_Les Prisons de Paris._
-------
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."
"C'est un coup que l'on reçoit
Avant qu'on s'en doute;
A peine on s'en aperçoit,
Car on n'y voit goutte.
Un certain ressort caché,
Tout à coup étant laché,
Fait tomber, ber, ber,
Fait sauter, ter, ter,
Fait tomber,
Fait sauter,
Fait voler la tête ...
C'est bien plus honnête."
II.
"Sur l'inimitable machine du Mèdecin Guillotin, propere à couper les
têtes, et dite de son nom Guillotine."
Air—"Du Menuet d'Exaudet."
"Guillotin,
Médecin
Politique,
Imagine un beau matin
Que pendre est inhumain
Et peu patriotique;
Aussitôt,
Il lui faut
Un supplice
Que, sans corde ni poteau,
Supprime du bourreau
L'office," etc.
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.
Footnote 17:
_Histoire de la Révolution._
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."
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]