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 quit

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 fr

Louis XI. strolled one day in the precincts of Vincennes, wrapped in his threadbare surtout edged with rusty fur, and plucking at the queer little peaked cap with the leaden image of the Virgin stuck in the band. There was a smile on the sallow and saturnine face. At his Majesty's right walked a thick-set, squab man of scurvy countenance, wearing a close-fitting doublet, and armed like a hangman. On the King's left went a showy person, vulgar and mean of face, whose gait was a ridiculous strut.

Louis VI., called le Gros, whose reign was from 1108 to 1137, did much to enlarge and to embellish the mean and narrow Paris of his day. He built churches and schools both in the Cité and beyond the river, and thanks to the lectures of Abelard his schools were famous. He built a wall around the suburbs, and for the further defence of the Cité he set up the two fortresses called Le Grand and Le Petit Châtelet, "at the extremities of the bridge which united the Cité with the opposite bank." Here w

When they came to Paris in the twelfth century, the Templars obtained leave to settle in the Marshes, whose baleful exhalations cost the town a plague or two every year. In no long time they had completely transformed that dismal and pestilential swamp. Herculean labours witnessed as their outcome oaks, elms, and beeches growing where the rotten ooze had bred but reeds and osiers. Vast buildings, too, arose as if by magic, with towers and turrets protecting them, drawbridges, battlemented walls,

"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—

The prison of Sainte-Pélagie owed its name to a frail beauty whom play-goers in Antioch knew in the fifth century of this era. Embracing Christianity, she forsook the stage, and built herself a cell on the Mount of Olives. The Church bestowed on her the honours of the Calendar. Twelve centuries later, in the reign of Louis XIV., a Madame de Miramion, inspired by the memory, not of Pélagie the comédienne , but of Sainte-Pélagie the recluse, built in Paris a substantial Refuge for young women whos

It was the monks, as tradition wills it, who hollowed out the cruel cells of the Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Près. The architect Gomard, insisting that cells were not included in the bond, withdrew when he had put his last touches to the cloisters. But in 1630, or thereabouts, no monastery was complete without its oubliettes , and the prior commanded his brethren to finish the work of the too-scrupulous Gomard. Thus was the Abbaye equipped as an abbaye should be. What power indeed, spiritual or

This was, above all others, the aristocratic prison of the Revolution. It was fitly chosen for the reception of that brilliant contingent of nobles, just ready to fly the country, whom the famous Law of the Suspects had routed from their hôtels in Paris. To confine them in the Luxembourg, converting that ancient and renowned palace into a dungeon of aristocrats, was in itself an apt stroke of vengeance on the part of the people. Few indeed of the historic dwellings of Paris could have put them m

"... if once it were left in the power of any, the highest, magistrate to imprison arbitrarily whomever he or his officers thought proper (as in France is daily practised by the Crown), there would soon be an end of all other rights and immunities."— Blackstone. After enduring for centuries an oppression as rigorous and as cruel as any nation had ever been subjected to, this idea dawned, almost in an hour, upon the mind of France. It did not matter that the King who occupied the throne at this t

It is not easy, in telling the story of the prisons of old Paris, to avoid mention of the subject with which this chapter is concerned. That subject is not, however, an attractive one, and readers whom it repels are invited to let the chapter go. According to the authors of Les Prisons de l'Europe , Charlemagne was the first monarch of France who "formally punished" the calling of the femme publique . His edict swept the field, so to speak; the femme publique (known then, however, as the femme d

There is to be a flitting of the guillotine. For nearly fifty years executions in Paris, which are not private as with us, have taken place immediately outside the prison of La Roquette, known officially as the dépôt des Condamnés . Four slabs of stone sunk in the soil, a few yards beyond the gaol door, mark the spot where, on the fatal morning, at five in summer, and about half-past seven in winter, the red "timbers of justice" are set up by the headsman's assistants. But La Roquette is to be d