Chapter VI: Part 6

By the word _avocat_ is designated those lawyers who, after having obtained the title of Licencié en Droit, have taken the professional oath before a Cour d'Appel. But, in order to be able to plead, they are required, in addition, to be admitted to the bar of the tribunal or the court. The Avocats-Consultants are those who, not having been admitted to the bar, cannot plead in the courts, but give legal consultations in their offices. The _Avoués_, attorneys, are appointed by the court or tribunal to represent the litigants before it. They cannot be avocats, and are obliged to be residents of Paris.

Among the multitude of attendants and habitués of the judicial tribunals are the necessary witnesses and experts, of all kinds in degree,--the _témoin à charge_, important witness, listened to with attention; the _témoin à décharge_, uncertain and ill at ease; the _expert-comptable_, very conscientious; the _expert en écriture_, in handwriting, very positive and authoritative and unreliable, after the manner of his kind; the experts in medicine, in mental ailments, in physics, etc. The various degrees of willingness and unwillingness on the part of those who receive these official _assignations à témoin_ are much as in other climes.

After the summer vacation, the opening of the courts is preceded by an annual divine service, the _messe rouge_ [the red mass], held in the Sainte-Chapelle and attended by all the magistrates in their robes of office, red, black, and ermine. In 1898, this ceremony took place on October 17th, and was presided over by Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris. The mass was celebrated by Canon Pousset, of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. After the service, the magistrates return to their courts in hieratic procession, following each other strictly in the order of their rank, the walls of the passage-ways being hung, for the occasion, with Gobelins tapestry.

A similar ceremony has been introduced in London. For the second time, in this same month of October, 1898, the legal year was inaugurated by a religious service celebrated with great pomp at Westminster. The Lord Chancellor, the judges, the Queen's Counsel, and a great number of representatives of the bar were present at this _messe rouge_ English and Anglican. The Catholic judges and lawyers have long been in the habit of attending a similar service on this occasion in one of their own churches.

CENTENARY MEDAL, ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE.]

By an excellent arrangement, the Palais de Justice is enabled to lodge its criminals in one of its dependencies, the prison of the Conciergerie, whence the guards conduct them directly, by private staircases, to the court-room where they are to be tried,--thus avoiding any unseemly exposure of these unfortunates to the populace. An ingenious supposition as to the origin of the name of this famous prison, a barracks under the old kings of France, is furnished by M. Pottet,--that it was inhabited by a certain captain who provided himself with the title of _Comte des Cierges_ [Count of Candles], concierge, janitor, or house-porter. Those who are confined in the Conciergerie are the criminals who are to appear before the Cour d'Assises; those convicted by the police correctionnelle of the departments, waiting the result of their appeal to a higher court, and those condemned to death during the three days which the law allows them for their appearance _en cassation_.

CENTENARY MEDAL, ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE.]

In the Dépôt are deposited temporarily all the individuals arrested in the department of the Seine, for any crime whatever, and held for justice. This general depository receives on an average a hundred and fifty prisoners a day. Any one arrested by a police agent and conducted to the _poste_, if not delivered by some friend before the arrival of the _panier à salade_, is put into this cheerful vehicle, much like a closed-up omnibus, and carted off to the Dépôt. There, he is interrogated, searched, measured by the _service anthropométrique_ of M. Bertillon, and held for three days. At the end of this period, he is transferred to some other prison,--to Mazas, before it was demolished, or to the Santé. The desperate criminals have the privilege of remaining in the Dépôt under the eye of the agents de la sûreté.

Within the walls of the Palais de Justice is included a third place of detention, the _Souricière_, in which are confined the accused brought from the various prisons of the city,--la Santé, Sainte-Pélagie, la Petite and la Grande-Roquette, Saint-Lazare,--to appear either for their trial or for their examination before the Juge d'Instruction. The Souricière [mouse-trap] is a gloomy and ill-smelling basement, almost without light and air, and frequently crowded to suffocation, situated under the chambers of the police correctionnelle. The prisoners are very often confined here from eleven o'clock in the morning to eight o'clock in the evening, without being given either food or drink. This abuse is of long standing, notwithstanding the many protestations that have been raised against it.

Before 1826, the entrance to the Conciergerie was from the grand court-yard, the Cour du Mai, to the right and at the foot of the grand stairway. This entrance, with its iron railings, still exists, it now gives access to the Tribunal de Simple Police, and through it the multitude of victims, illustrious and obscure, of the Revolution and the Terror, issued to take their places in the cart for the guillotine. This doorway was walled up in 1826, and the entrance to the prison is now on the Quai de l'Horloge, near the tower of Cæsar. It was at this latter date that the Conciergerie was transformed into a modern prison, with the _régime cellulaire_. In the course of this transformation, the ancient dungeons in which had been confined so many eminent historical personages disappeared; to-day there can be seen only the cell of Marie-Antoinette, which now communicates with that of Robespierre, and the latter with the Salle des Girondins. The apartment of the unhappy queen was transformed into a chapel in 1816. Of the original furniture of her cell, there now remains, it is said, the little lamp hanging from the ceiling, and the ivory crucifix which she kissed before mounting the scaffold. As to the arm-chair in which she sat, it was prudently removed some years ago to his office by one of the directors of the Conciergerie, to protect it from the ravages of the tourists of all nations who were gradually carrying it away piecemeal. This apartment of the prison can be visited on Thursdays by securing a permit from the Préfecture de Police. The grande salle which was the prison of the priests and royalists during the Terror, and in which the Girondins passed their last night, is now the chapel of the Conciergerie. Through the little door at the left the latter passed on their way to the scaffold, and in this court-yard took place the massacres of September.

Before its demolition in the summer of 1898, the immense Mazas prison (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction Cellulaire), on the Boulevard Diderot, received the prisoners from the Dépôt. This gloomy institution contained twelve hundred cells, of which eleven hundred and fifteen were occupied, the others being used for the service of the hospital and of the baths. Among the more illustrious prisoners who have been within these walls was Victor Hugo, confined here on the morrow of the _Coup d'État_, and who has left this description of his cell: "Walls whitened with lime and soiled here and there by various emanations; in a corner, a round hole, furnished with iron bars and emitting an infectious odor; in another corner, a shelf hinged to the wall like the _strapontin_, or folding-stool, of the city folks, and which might serve for a table; no bed, a chair stuffed with straw. Under the feet, a brick floor; the first impression was of darkness, the second, of cold." In addition to the hammock and the bedding, the furniture consisted of a table with a drawer, an earthenware vessel, a porringer, a cup in wrought-iron, tinned over, a wooden spoon, a spittoon, called _génieux_, two brooms, three shelves in whitewood, a wardrobe set in the wall. The round hole, to which M. Hugo objected, was used by the prisoners as a means of speech with each other; by conquering their scruples--if they had any--and inserting their heads in this hole, they were able to make their words carry from one cell to another and even the entire length of the gallery, as through a speaking-tube. The authorities were not unaware of this arrangement, and by placing an agent in the basement they could have surprised these confidential communications.

The new arrival from the Dépôt, after being subjected to the usual formalities, after having lost his civil personality and changed his name for an official number, was at first disposed to rejoice in the solitude of his cell after the hideous promiscuousness of the Dépôt, but this solitary confinement would soon have become unendurable, had it not been for the daily labor with which they were all occupied. Their exercise was taken in the _préaux cellulaires_, oblong or converging cells under low sheds, through the iron grating of one side of which they could look out into the narrow space of the court-yard. All the prisons of the department of the Seine are furnished by a contractor, who supplies the provisions for the prisoners at a fixed price plus a percentage of their small earnings.

After a drawing by G. Amato.]

This prison was built between 1845 and 1850 by the architects Gilbert and Lecointe, on the general plans of the English prisons of the same nature, and was considered at the time a model institution. It succeeded the Prison de la Force, in the Rue Pavée-au-Marais, immortalized in a chapter of _Les Misérables_; the new prison was known officially as the Nouvelle-Force. Popular usage, however, gave it the name which it retained, from the Place Mazas, at the end of the Pont d'Austerlitz,--the name of the colonel of the Fourteenth Regiment of the line, killed at Austerlitz. His family protested strongly against this usage, and in 1858 the administration of prisons abandoned the popular term and recognized the institution only under the formula: _Maison d'arrêt cellulaire_. All in vain, even though, in 1879, the Boulevard Mazas became the Boulevard Diderot.

This prison was the first in France in which was adopted solitary confinement. In a single night, that of the 19-20th of May, 1850, the eight hundred and forty-one inmates of the Force were transferred to Mazas,--a much more expeditious operation than that of the transportation of the prisoners of Mazas to the Santé, in May, 1898, which took ten days, at the rate of eighty men a day. It appears that the prisoners from the Force objected strongly to this system of solitary confinement in their cells; they gave way to such excesses of fury and despair that the Académie de Médecine was moved in their behalf, and protested against the _système cellulaire_ as conducive to suicide and insanity. The new prison--as any one might see from the top of the viaduct of the Vincennes railway--was built in the form of a great wheel, the spokes represented by six long galleries, eighty mètres in length and twelve and a half in height. The hub of this wheel was a two-story rotunda, the ground-floor of which was occupied by the central post of observation, and the upper story by the chapel, which could be seen from any point in any of the six galleries. At the hour of the celebration of the mass, on Sundays, the guards set the door of each cell partly open, so that the prisoner might receive spiritual comfort if he so pleased,--and if his distance were not too great. Each of the six galleries was two stories in height, lit by a glass roof. All the cells received light and air through a grated window, opening on one of the outside galleries or on one of the interior courts, but placed too high to afford the inmate any view outside. Each prisoner was entitled to an hour's exercise in one of the twenty préaux into which the interior courts were divided. This promenade was always a solitary one, under the eye of the guardians in the rotunda, and to be deprived of it was the lightest punishment inflicted. The most severe, in extreme cases, was imprisonment in the _cachot_, or dungeon.

Saint-Lazare (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction), on the Faubourg Saint-Denis, is at once a hospital, a police station, and a prison for women, and its methods and regulation have long been the object of earnest denunciation. As a prison for women, it is divided into two sections, for those accused, and for those condemned to less than two months' imprisonment; among the latter are women of the town, who have a special hospital. The only _condamnées_ who remain for any length of time within these walls are the sick, nursing women having a child less than four years of age, and those enceinte. There is a special _crèche_ for the newly-born babies,--for there are no less than fifty or sixty births annually. The nursing mothers, whether convicted or only accused, have special dormitories, and there is a shady garden for the wet-nurses. The prostitutes are provided with a special section. These unfortunates have not passed before any court; they have been condemned without appeal by a Chef de Bureau of the Préfecture de Police to an imprisonment of from three days to two months. During the day, the inmates are assembled in a workroom under the surveillance of one of the Sisters of the Order of Marie-Joseph, to whom is confided a general oversight of the workrooms and the dormitories. These prisoners take their meals in common, take their exercise walking in a long file, and at night sleep in a great chilly and crowded dormitory. Those who have merited it by their conduct are given one of the cells of the _ménagerie_, a double story of grated cells, furnished each with a bed, a stool, a shelf, and an earthenware vessel. The menagerie was formerly devoted to the service of the _correction maternelle_.

Engraved by E. Tilly.]

In the great dormitories, there may be witnessed each morning such a scene as that reproduced in the illustration, the prayer addressed to the image of the Virgin on the wall, decked out with faded artificial flowers and with tapers in front of her; following the example of the Sister, all stoop with more or less reverence before this symbol and utter with more or less sincerity from impure lips the prayer for a pure heart. This grand dormitory is a great hall containing more than eighty beds arranged in four rows. The red tile floor is of irreproachable cleanliness, the eighty beds, with their gray blankets and white bolsters, are arranged with military symmetry. But this cleanliness and this good order, it is claimed, count but for little in the amelioration of these unfortunates, gathering contamination from each other in this indiscriminate herding together.

According to the law, those merely accused, the _prévenues_, and those actually convicted, are kept apart from each other, but in each of these two classes no distinctions are made,--the homeless unfortunate, arrested for _délit de vagabondage_, is associated with the criminal guilty of infanticide or assassination. Even the little girls of ten and twelve years are kept together in the same promiscuousness, those already hardened in criminal ways corrupting the more innocent.

The prévenues enjoy certain privileges; they are not obliged to work, though it is but seldom that they refuse to take up some of the light sewing which occupies their leisure and brings them in small sums of money; they are not obliged, when they take their exercise, to walk round and round in a circle in the préau, forming in line only at the entrance and the exit. The formalities of search and interrogation, upon entering the prison, are the same for all, as are the general regulations and the discipline. All rise at five o'clock in summer, and at six or half-past six the rest of the year, and all go to bed at eight; all receive meat with their bouillon only on Sundays. The children are more favored in this respect, being furnished with eggs, roast meat, etc.

Everywhere are seen in these gloomy and unwholesome halls and corridors "the austere and consoling figures" of the Sisters of Marie-Joseph. They wear a dark robe, sometimes with a white apron, a white _cornette_ under a black veil which has a blue lining, and they supervise all the details of the monotonous life of the prison. Rising in the dawn, a half-hour before any of the prisoners, they perform their devotions, and one of them rings the bell which summons all to leave their beds; they direct the workrooms in which the prisoners sew, a Sister sitting upright in a high chair, like a teacher presiding over her class, and they keep a watchful eye during the night on all the sleepers, in all the dormitories, great and little. Their hours of service as guards are from five or six o'clock in the morning to ten o'clock in the evening. After this hour, until the morning again, two Sisters remain on watch in the first section of the prison and one in the second. Their sole comfort and recompense is found in prayer and meditation in the mortuary chamber of Saint Vincent de Paul, now transformed into an oratory for their use. There is also a chapel for the use of the inmates, as well as a Protestant oratory and a synagogue.

The historical interest attaching to the buildings of this institution is very considerable. As far back as the time of Clovis, there was a hunting-lodge on this site; this was transformed, under the Carlovingians, into a debtors' prison. About the commencement of the twelfth century, this collection of ancient buildings was used as a hospital for lepers, under the appellation of Saint-Ladre [Saint Leper], standing near the road from Paris to Saint-Denis. In the year 1147, Louis VII, setting an example followed nearly a century later by Saint-Louis, visited this lazaretto, before setting out for the Crusades. "This was an action praiseworthy and very little imitated," says the chronicler. The hospital counted among its revenues the profits arising from an annual fair, known as that of Saint-Ladre; Philippe-Auguste, in 1183, annexed the proceeds of this fair to the royal revenues, and transferred it to the interior of Paris, where it became famous under the name of Saint-Laurent. In return, he provided the hospital with an annual revenue. Among the buildings attached to the hospital was one known as the _Logis du Roi_, where the sovereigns were in the habit of halting to receive the oath of fidelity from their good citizens of Paris before making their solemn entry into the capital. This was also the principal halting-place for the royal funeral cortèges on their way from Paris to Saint-Denis; and as late as 1793, when it was demolished by the all-demolishing Revolution, a Gothic tower standing here perpetuated the first rest made by Philippe le Hardi in his pious transportation on his shoulders of his father's coffin to its final resting-place.

In 1515 the canons of Saint-Victor established themselves at Saint-Lazare, and for more than a century here maintained a rich abbey, flourishing at the expense of the hospital. By 1623 their abuses had become too flagrant, and the direction of the institution was confided to Vincent de Paul, already renowned for his virtue. After having re-established order and discipline, he here installed the headquarters of his congregation of the _Missions_, created in 1624, and which became more generally known as the _Congrégation des Lazaristes_. The authority of the Archbishop of Paris compelled the new possessors of Saint-Lazare to continue to receive the lepers of the city and its suburbs. To these were gradually added those ecclesiastics and laymen who here sought a voluntary retirement, and certain youth here confined unwillingly by their parents or guardians that they might recover from the effects of a life of dissipation. Ten years before the Revolution, before the expulsion of the Lazaristes in 1792, and the appropriation of their property by the Revolutionary government, the use of Saint-Lazare as a temporary prison had become well established; Beaumarchais was confined here for three days after the first representation of the _Mariage de Figaro_. On the 13th of July, 1789, the day before the taking of the Bastille, a band of pillagers invaded the enclosure of the buildings, destroyed the tomb of Saint Vincent de Paul, and nearly set fire to the whole quarter by the burning of one of the store-houses of the establishment. During the Terror, it was crowded with the victims destined in advance for the scaffold; and under the Consulate it became definitely a jail, _prison civile_, _prison administrative et maison de correction_, to which was added a special hospital, as if to preserve the souvenir of the lazaretto of former times.

Of the buildings still standing, the superstructures mostly date from the reign of Louis XIII. The remains of the church built by Saint Vincent de Paul, in which he was buried at the foot of the high altar, may still be distinguished. The very extensive grounds surrounding the establishment, divided up and sold during the Revolution as _biens nationaux_, have now disappeared under the buildings and streets of the quarter. The chapel constructed by Saint Vincent is now a store-room; the crypt, with its tombs of bishops, is a bath-house; the low apartment on the ground-floor was reproduced by the painter Charles Muller in his _Appel des Condamnés_, formerly so popular at the Luxembourg; in the _Passage du Massacre_, between two courts, the victims of the Terror, in 1793, found death when they had expected liberty; and the bells which sound the hours in the clock-tower are the same which rang under Louis XIII.

Saint-Lazare encloses also the general magazines, the store-houses of linen, and the central bakery, for all the prisons of the department of the Seine. It is here that is effected the panification for five thousand prisoners. In common with the general victualling of these penal establishments, this bakery is not managed by the State, but by private enterprise. In the prisons of the Seine, with the exception of Saint-Lazare, the food of a prisoner costs the administration daily 59.9 centimes, about twelve cents.

The Prison de la Santé (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction), in the Rue de la Santé, has been devoted to three classes of prisoners,--those condemned to periods of from one day to one year, prévenus whose sentences have been appealed, and convicts and prisoners condemned to solitary confinement. The régime cellulaire adopted is known as the _système de Philadelphie_; this absolute solitary confinement is reserved for convicts awaiting their departure for New Caledonia, for other grave offenders, and also for minor offenders serving short sentences. The prisoner thus isolated leaves his cell only for an hour's exercise in _promenade cellulaire_; he is allowed to see no one and to receive no communication from outside, but the ingenuity of the prisoners contrives to modify these regulations. There is also a section in which the inmates pass the day together, but sleep in solitary cells. This _Quartier Commun_ is to disappear in the reorganized prison which is to take the place of Mazas, and which will be specially devoted to prévenus, to those whose cases have been appealed and to those condemned to death. Among the numerous light industries to which the short-sentence prisoners are compelled to devote their time, that of the manufacture of dolls is one of the most important; designers, painters, and carvers, of sufficient artistic excellence, are all found among the inmates.

This prison was constructed to replace that of the Madelonnettes, destroyed by the opening of the Rue Turbigo. In the Protestant chapel attached to the institution, which serves also as a school for one hour a day, the prisoners accused of various offences appear each morning at ten o'clock--as in all the prisons of the Seine--in the "prætorium," the three judges of which, the director, the comptroller, and the inspector, sit under an immense open Bible displayed on the wall and surmounted by the somewhat incongruous text: "Man may not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God."

After a drawing by G. Amato.]

Sainte-Pélagie (Maison de Correction), in the Rue du Puits-de-l'Ermite, though one of the smallest and worst-conditioned prisons in Paris, is one of the most celebrated, and the only one imprisonment in which is made a subject of jest. This singular reputation it owes to the numerous journalists and men of letters--Béranger, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, Balzac, Eugène Suë, J. Richepin, Henri Rochefort, among others--who have been sent here by a censorious government. These gentry have so exploited the _Pavillon_, the section of the prison devoted to the _politiques_, with its "great and little tomb," "little and great Siberia;" they have so ostentatiously received their friends every afternoon, from one to five, in their cells; they have so proudly worn their beards and their usual garments, as to diffuse a popular impression that imprisonment in this edifice is rather a joke than otherwise. Nevertheless, the _Pavillon_, says M. Paul Strauss, "is only one quarter of the ugliest, the most frightful prison in Paris; fortunately, it is devoted to speedy destruction, and it is by this one that the work of reformation of the penal institutions of the Seine will doubtless be inaugurated; there is no demolition more urgently demanded than this, in the unanimous opinion of all those who have visited it. The extent to which the buildings are falling to decay, the narrowness and lack of cleanliness in the workroom, corridors, and dormitories, are not less offensive than the promiscuousness of the life in common, daily and nightly. Nowhere is the defile of the prisoners at the sound of the workroom bell, or from the sinister court-yard to the chapel refectory, more lamentable; the gray or chestnut-colored garb of the prisoners is more forlorn in its worn shininess than anywhere else, and the canvas sack itself hangs more dismally at the prisoner's back. It is not the fault of the penitentiary administration and the government of the institution; the establishment itself is worthless, the life, moral and material, that is there led is intolerable."

After a drawing by R. de la Nézière.]

The prisoners for debt (to the State) enjoy the same privileges as the politicians. The baser, or more unfortunate, inmates, serving sentences of from one day to one year, are obliged to work in one of the six ateliers and to submit to the usual prison regulations, rising at six o'clock and going to bed at half-past seven. Among the articles produced in the workroom are toy balloons, Venetian lanterns, and, in general, all those materials for the illuminations with which Paris amuses itself on nights of festival. The fine gentlemen in the first and second quarters of the prison, instead of partaking of the meagre prison fare, are nourished at the expense of the State by some restaurant designated by themselves. This prison was erected in 1635 by the Order of the Soeurs Repenties; it was a prison for debt till 1793; until the suppression of the Garde Nationale, it was known familiarly as _Prison des Haricots_ [beans], because those refractory citizens who objected to serving in this corps were here confined on a strictly vegetable diet. In the chapel which serves as the refectory is preserved a relic of Sainte-Pélagie. Madame de Beauharnais, afterward the Empress Josephine, was here imprisoned in a chamber, which is still shown, on the second floor.

In the Grande-Roquette (Dépôt des Condamnés), in the Rue de la Roquette, are confined those condemned to death, or to deportation to some penal colony. As late as the first months of 1899, the executions were public, the guillotine being erected in front of the prison, in the space between it and the Rue de la Roquette; the locality was marked by five large oblong stone slabs in the pavement of the sidewalk. Hereafter the executions will take place in the Place Saint-Jacques; and the prisoners condemned to death will be confined in the Prison de la Santé. The three cells devoted to these unfortunates in the Grande-Roquette were larger than the others, and the condemned man enjoyed certain privileges. He was not compelled to work, he was given meat every day, he could smoke, read and write, and play cards with the two guards who kept him company day and night until the moment when Monsieur de Paris took possession of him. In the chapel, an upper lodge or box was provided for him, where, behind a grating, he could hear the mass without being seen by those below. The library which was at the disposal of these unfortunates, and which was their principal distraction, included some four thousand volumes. The books most read were novels and romances, and of these the works of Dumas père were the favorites. After these came those of Alphonse Karr, Mayne Reid, Eugène Suë, books of travels, and the _Magasin pittoresque_.

For those condemned to lighter penalties, the regulations were more severe;--there was not space in the workroom for all, or there was not work for all, and the greater part of the unhappy prisoners wandered round and round all day in the dreary court-yard, in all the weariness of utter idleness. They were even obliged to eat in this court-yard, having no refectory. This prison, constructed in 1836, was taken possession of by the Commune in 1871, and in May was the scene of a series of massacres. The cell occupied by the most illustrious of these victims, the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy, has not since been occupied by any inmate, and has been preserved in the condition in which he left it at half-past seven on the morning of the 24th of May.

Directly opposite the Grande-Roquette, facing on the same street, is the _Prison des Jeunes Détenus_, the Petite-Roquette, which was devoted to three classes of youthful offenders, those placed here _en correction paternelle_; youths of not less than sixteen, prévenus, and those condemned to various terms of imprisonment and from sixteen to twenty-one years of age. The first class, imprisoned in cells in a separate quarter, were known only by their numbers, their names and stations in life were carefully concealed, and the guards themselves were kept in ignorance concerning them. All the inmates of this prison were isolated in their cells; in them they worked alone, and were visited by the instructor; they took solitary exercise in the préau cellulaire; and in the chapel-school, which occupies the central rotunda, each was imprisoned in a high stall from which he could see and hear but was invisible to all his fellow-prisoners. As he shut himself in his stall, he opened the door of that of his neighbor, who followed him at a distance of twenty paces. In this school he passed two hours a day, and in his _promenoir cellulaire_, one hour. A modification of this system was recently introduced;--the good-behavior inmates, those who were soon to be liberated, were brought together in a common workroom where they were employed in the manufacture of artificial violets. A new annex was recently added to this establishment, the _Infirmerie Centrale des Prisons de la Seine_, formerly installed in the Prison de la Santé. This hospital included three wards which could receive each thirty patients, an operating-room, and extensive bathing-rooms. This portion of the institution was entirely separated from the rest of the prison.

The Petite-Roquette, no longer in its gloomy surroundings, now stands on the banks of the Seine, nearly opposite the Terrace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, from which it is visible, at the end of the road which leads from Montesson to the river. This happy removal marks an equally fortunate transformation in the character of the institution, for the stupefying and demoralizing system of solitary seclusion has been substituted the wholesomer labor in the open air of an agricultural and horticultural colony.

This important reform has been extended to the greater prisons of the capital: those of Mazas, Sainte-Pélagie, and the Grande-Roquette are all to be removed to the new penal institutions at Fresnes-lès-Rungis, in the department of Seine-et-Oise, inaugurated on the 18th of July, 1898. These were solemnly transferred by the Préfet of the Seine and the President of the Conseil Général to the _administration pénitentiaire_, and in the speeches which formed part of this ceremony the principles actuating this departure from ancient principles were duly set forth. M. Thuillier, Président du Conseil Général, after citing the transformation of the Petite-Roquette as the initiatory step in this great movement, declared that "from our profound compassion for the unfortunates who come under the hand of Justice sprang the desire to place the prisoner henceforth in surroundings in which might be born and strengthened the sentiments of self-respect, of bodily cleanliness, of propriety, which will frequently inculcate in him the noblest ideas of repentance and of moral regeneration. Hence those salubrious and almost comfortable arrangements which you have just seen.... Hence our desire to render the stay in the prison as little depressing as possible for the body and the conscience." "Without the _récidive_ [the offender for the second time]," said M. Selves, Préfet de la Seine, "criminality in France would have diminished within the last twenty years. It is, then, the récidive, above all, who is responsible for the augmentation of criminality, and, as it is the prison which makes the récidive, it follows that the amelioration of the penitentiary system should have a greater influence for good than all other methods."

It was accordingly resolved to endeavor to better the condition of the prisoners while at the same time preventing as much as possible their corruption by indiscriminate herding together. As far back as 1849, M. Dufaure advocated the keeping apart of prévenus and of those condemned for minor offences. But it was not till 1875 that a law was passed decreeing the separation of those serving sentences of imprisonment of less than a year. The department of the Seine endeavored to carry out the requirements of this law on as large and complete a scale as possible, and accordingly laid the foundations of these two large penal establishments outside the walls of the city. Those at Fresnes may be considered as model prisons; it has even been suggested that the comfort of the inmates has been almost too closely considered, and that, with the exception of the guards and the jailers, these buildings suggest the model cheap lodgings of modern practical philanthropy. The architect had taken the greatest care to assure the well-being of his involuntary clients, their health and personal cleanliness; their cells--more spacious than usual--have hardwood floors, the walls are painted and varnished, as are the table, the chair, and the iron bedstead provided with softer bedding; the latest mechanical and electrical appliances are to be found in these very modern dungeons. The extent of the mental and moral amelioration of the Parisian criminals that will follow the introduction of this new régime will doubtless be profitable to contemplate.

In addition to its various prisons, the department of the Seine maintains two very large establishments for beggars, paupers, vagabonds, and the wretched of every description, whether they have or have not records approved by the police. The largest of these _Dépôts de Mendicité_, that at Nanterre, is at once a prison and a hospital; it contains three thousand inmates of both sexes, and cost some twelve millions of francs. Of the five sections into which it is divided, the first, reserved for voluntary mendicants, is the only one which contains prisoners, properly speaking, men in one quarter and women in another. The other sections, each divided likewise into male and female quarters, are devoted, the second, to voluntary patients whose antecedents are known; the third, to those whose antecedents are doubtful or unknown; the fourth, to the impotent, infirm, paralytic, and septuagenarians; the fifth is the hospital proper. The inhabitants of these different sections are distinguished from each other, the men by the color of their woollen caps, and the women by the little trimming of imitation lace in theirs. The Dépôt de Villers-Cotterets, which occupies the buildings and dependencies of the celebrated château built by François I, on an admirable site, was at first a prison, devoted to vagabonds and beggars of all ages and conditions; since 1889 it has been a _Maison de Retraite_, an asylum to which are admitted only the aged and infirm indigent whose past has been without reproach. The number of these peaceable inmates is about a thousand men and half as many women.

All this imposing judicial edifice of Dépôts, prisons, magistrates, and high courts of justice is, of course, fed and maintained by the much humbler, almost unknown, and much more troubled service of searching out the criminal and laying hands upon him when found. Without the aid of the "simple police," _serjents de ville_, gendarmes, _brigadiers_, and _agents de la sûreté_, there could be no ermined judges and no _maîtres des hautes-oeuvres_. The general methods employed in this obscure but indispensable preliminary work are much like those made use of elsewhere in civilized countries, but there are many details, not generally published, which are interesting, and we are indebted to a spirited newspaper article, by M. Guy Tomel, for some information concerning the ways and means of the French police in these matters. He begins by putting in a plea for these very useful employés of justice: "Have you ever thought of the very material difficulties which the agents de la sûreté have to encounter in arresting malefactors? These modest defenders of society risk their lives daily that you may sleep in peace, Madame, and earn less at this perilous trade than your coachman or your _valet de chambre_. For their moral recompense, they have the prospect of being treated as '_mouchards_' [police spies], not by the thieves and the assassins, who call them the '_flics_,' but by the respectable tax-payers who are indebted to them for the minimum of security which we possess.

"If, by chance, some of the chiefs of this force, as Houillier, Jaume, and Rossignol, succeed, by dint of acts of bravery, in causing their names to be known to the general public, the private soldiers of this army of real salvation live and die in the most perfect _incognito_, fortunate if they succeed in attaining the age of retirement without being crippled by some malicious stroke! Remember that they are obliged to carry out their task without arms, without any brutality. A bandit injured in a hand-to-hand struggle assumes very quickly the character of an interesting victim, and there are always to be found sensational newspapers that will exploit his woes under flaming head-lines: 'Another Police Outrage!' 'A Brutal Police Agent!' etc.

"The problem that presents itself is, therefore, this one: 'To get in your power, in exposing yourself as little as possible, and without doing him any injury, a blackguard who is armed and who is capable of anything.'"

And he proceeds to explain the very simple tricks and tools by means of which this somewhat difficult task is accomplished. In the first place, he states a curious psychological fact,--that, generally, any criminal, no matter how dangerous or brutal, if suddenly arrested by surprise, is for the moment so stupefied that he does not think of resistance, and in this moment may be secured, by the handcuffs or otherwise. This brief paralysis is apt to be succeeded by a furious outbreak, but in the majority of cases it is then too late. Were it not for this temporary catalepsy, how would it be possible, asks M. Tomel, to effect the arrest of such desperate fellows, dynamiters and anarchists, with no more bloodshed and fracas than if they were girls of the town! This little peculiarity of their clients is well known to the police agents, and they but very seldom fail to take advantage of it.

In the second place, the most dangerous offenders are not, as might be supposed, the hardened criminals, those who have repeatedly fallen into the hands of Justice. For them, a long experience has convinced them that, once caught, there is no escape. Neither are the assassins the most to be feared,--the sudden collaring by the iron hand of the law reduces them to temporary imbecility. Those whose arrest is usually attended with the greatest difficulty are young rascals in their first offence, and those who are accustomed to being rescued by a band of their companions. Bankrupts and ruined financiers are also apt to give trouble,--they take to their revolvers with "deplorable facility, quite ready to lodge the last bullet in their own heads if the others have not cleared the field for them."

It is, therefore, not without a certain amount of information concerning the irascibility and the bodily prowess of their quarry that the agents set out in his pursuit. Usually, they hunt in couples; if the game is reputed unusually dangerous, in larger numbers. For weapons, they carry each two pieces of stout cord,--a small one, fastened to the middle of a wooden handle at each end, this is the _cabriolet_; and a large one, the _ligote_, about two mètres and a half in length. These simple methods of correction have replaced--except in the country districts and where the prisoner has to be conducted a considerable distance--the old-fashioned _poucettes_, or handcuffs. Thus provided, the pursuers endeavor to surprise their prey as it issues from a house or an inn,--they wear no uniform, and they in nowise begin by summoning their victim in the name of the law, so that it is strongly advisable for them to be very sure of his identity ere they fall upon him from behind, exactly in the manner of the highwaymen themselves. With one hand they grasp the collar of his coat, a little below the nape of his neck, and with the other, not his arm, but the sleeve of his coat. An individual thus collared on each side is helpless; if he wish to strike with his fists or his feet, he is obliged to lash out sidewise or obliquely, his arms are held securely; and the _coup de pied de vache_, which he may endeavor to give with his feet, though "it will break a tibia like glass," is easily avoided. Moreover, while he has one foot in the air, his equilibrium is in danger, and he is promptly brought to earth and secured. Usually, however, the cabriolet is round his wrist, and he is _bouclé_ before he can say "Jack Robinson!"

These cord handcuffs are replaced by chain ones in the hands of the Gardes Municipaux in the service of the Palais de Justice, and the method of their application is the same,--once around the wrist of the victim, they can be tightened at pleasure by a simple turn of the handles in the grasp of the captor, and the pain speedily becomes intolerable. Even a slight pressure soon produces a numbness in the muscles of the arm. This simple apparatus--which can be replaced, as in Tunis, by a noose made in a silk handkerchief--is a somewhat brutal one, but it has the advantage of securing the victim absolutely for the time being. For a longer journey, and to avoid the constant personal attention which the cabriolet requires, the ligote is brought into action;--this is arranged in a double running noose in which is enclosed one of the prisoner's wrists, the cord then goes round his waist, passes under the flap of his pantaloons, and returns to be knotted on the opposite side. If the captured offender is not likely to give trouble, one arm is left free, but it is then necessary to watch him;--if both wrists are secured, he is helpless, and could be confided to the care of an invalid. So long as he keeps his hands quiet, carrying them in his pockets, for example, his cord is scarcely felt, but the moment he begins to agitate them with violent movements, it cuts into his flesh much like the cabriolet. He cannot rid himself of it, and, as he cannot swing his arms, he cannot run,--at the end of a hundred yards he is sure to come to the ground. It is related that a disciple of the Davenport brothers recently giving an exhibition of his skill in the Salle des Capucines was brought to confusion by a "flic" who happened to be in the audience and who asked permission to _ligoter_ the magician ere he was enclosed in his cabinet. On this occasion, the spirits were quite unable to liberate him.

This method of securing the prisoner has the disadvantage, if maintained for too long a period, of checking the circulation of the blood, and for longer journeys, by railway or steamboat, its employment is now superseded by that of iron-handcuffs, or _menottes_, of which there is a pleasing and instructive variety in use. The principle is always that of a double bracelet secured by a padlock, which permits the victim to move his arms only in a very restricted manner. For a very objectionable client, two anklets of iron, connected by a chain, are also applied. On those occasions on which one agent finds himself with several prisoners on his hands, or when he comes suddenly upon a sought-for malefactor and is quite unprovided with the tools of his trade, a very ingenious method is employed,--he cuts off all the buttons of his prisoner's trousers. The unhappy offender is thus compelled to hold on to the upper portion of this useful garment with both hands, and is quite incapable of either battle or flight, as at the first manifestation they come down about his heels! Thus is the dignity of Justice maintained, and the interests of society preserved, as may be seen in the illustration on page 235.

Equally formidable, from the point of view of a perfect commonwealth, and, perhaps, even more to be commiserated, the immense army of the helpless and sickly poor,--paupers, paralytics, scrofulous, consumptive, idiotic, cancerous,--demands from the State or the municipal administration a machinery as complex and as extensive as the criminals. For a multitude of these unfortunates the words of Victor Hugo are true: "They begin in the hospital, and end in the hospice." "The child comes into the world in a _Maternité_, and, later, if life has not been generous to him, he finishes his days in one of the asylums for the aged, at Bicêtre, at the Salpêtrière, at Debrousse, at Brévannes, at Ivry, after having more than once paid his tribute to sickness in the wards of some hospital! And still more, at intervals, during certain difficult hours, he has been obliged to ask aid of the Bureau de Bienfaisance, so that, during the whole of his life, this unlucky one has been the pensioner of the _Assistance Publique_."

After a drawing by M. Martin.]

Very fortunate are those who succeed in obtaining a bed at the hospice in which to end their days; the number of applicants each year exceeds by three or four thousand the number of vacancies. The crippled and incurable paupers, for whom all labor is impossible, are admitted without regard to age; the octogenarians, cancerous, blind, and epileptic, and the sick transferred from the hospitals to the hospices, are always eligible; but the slightest misdemeanor recorded on their civil papers, even though atoned for by a long life of honesty, is fatal to the hopes of the unfortunate aged;--for them there is no asylum but the Dépôt de Mendicité. The most celebrated of these hospices of Paris are the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière; the former at Gentilly, about a kilomètre from the southern fortifications, and the latter on the Boulevard d'Hôpital. The Bicêtre especially, under the ancient régime, represented everything that was abhorrent in a mediæval hospital, asylum, and jail combined; it was "at once a prison, a dépôt de mendicité, an asylum for the aged, a special hospital, a lunatic asylum, a political Bastille, an establishment for receiving sick children." It owes its name, it is recorded, to Jean de Pontoise, Bishop of Winchester,--corrupted into Bicêtre!--who built a château here in 1286. The present edifice was constructed largely by order of Richelieu, for invalided soldiers, in 1632; it has been devoted to its present uses as a modern hospital and asylum since 1837.

It is organized in two great divisions,--a hospice for old men, and an asylum for the deranged; but the latter includes an infirmary for idiot, epileptic, and feeble-minded children. The insane and the children are received from the Asile Clinique de la Seine, in the Rue Cabanis, and are maintained by the department of the Seine. The buildings of the hospice proper are arranged around four rectangular courts, planted with trees and gardens, in which the aged inmates sun themselves, and when it rains they take refuge under arcades known as the _Allée des Bronchites_ and the _Rue de Rivoli de Bicêtre_. For a considerable distance around the establishment these pensioners may be seen in fine weather taking the air; they have this privilege for the whole of the day on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and from eleven o'clock in the morning to four in the afternoon on the remaining days of the week.

All the sounder ones, to the number of some four hundred, are obliged to work at one of the many useful trades practised in the various ateliers, and they gain, for their own use, from forty centimes to a franc a day, money which goes to provide them with various small creature comforts. Those who are not strong enough, or capable enough, to work in the ateliers are obliged to pick vegetables for the culinary department, for which they receive no pay;--from this obligation no one is free excepting the octogenarians, the sickly, and the active workers. The administration also encourages the enterprise of those who wish to work on their own account; it provides them with a locality and facilities, for which they pay a monthly rental of from twenty centimes to one franc twenty centimes a month. Some of these petty industries are very curious and ingenious.

At both the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière, the quarters devoted to the children, boys and girls, in which almost every variety of childish affliction, bodily and mental, is under treatment, are the most worthy the visitor's attention, though the inspection is not always a pleasant one. The general method employed is that of Séguin and Delasiauve; by its aid, and that of infinite tact and patience, very many of these helpless unfortunates are provided with faculties and made useful members of their community. At the Bicêtre, this section is visited by foreign physicians as a model institution; the honor of its installation is due entirely to Doctor Bourneville, who was a zealous advocate of its establishment before the Conseil Municipal, and who, as _médecin de service_ at the hospital, has succeeded in obtaining admirable results from the methods employed. The number of his little patients is somewhat under four hundred; some of them are sound bodily and others almost helpless; with the exception of the _gâteux_ [feeble-minded and incontinent], they are divided, according to their age, or their infirmities, into two schools, the "little" and "great," the first under the direction of women, and the second of men. The children of the first are taught to exercise with the gymnastic apparatus of the system Pichery, and their rudimentary senses are cultivated by giving them small objects to see, to touch, to weigh, etc.; in both schools, but principally in that of the older pupils, systematic instruction is imparted in the workrooms of cabinet-making, shoemaking, sewing, locksmithing, basket-making, the plaiting of straw seats for chairs, brushmaking, and printing. The children are gradually accustomed to this labor; the cabinet-makers and locksmiths are selected from among the most intelligent, the makers of baskets and straw seats from among the most feeble, and the tailors from among those paralyzed on one side. "We have in the sewing-room," said Doctor Bourneville, in one of his reports, "twenty-four afflicted with hemiplegia, that is to say, unfortunates condemned, almost certainly, to pass their entire existence in the hospice; five of them are already good tailors, the greater number of the others will be. Formerly, they knew how to do nothing; now, thanks to the instruction which they receive, whether transferred to the epileptic adults if they are still subject to attacks, or to the divisions of the hospice if they are not, they will be able to work in the common atelier of the institution, and their work will compensate in part, and during very many years, for the cost of their maintenance, and, at the same time, will afford them a small pecuniary resource." The little workmen are rewarded with slight payments, of from ten to forty centimes a week, and special efforts are made, as recommended in the system Séguin, to provide them with amusements and variety,--such as walks abroad, visits to their families, games, etc.