Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

Let us now take a glance at the gardens in which the palace stands. With the parks and gardens of London they will scarcely bear comparison; though a French descriptive writer declares that they combine, with the ordinary attractions of the garden, the beauty of the park and even, in certain solitary corners, the wildness of the forest.

The Luxemburg Gardens are, in any case, adorned by two beautiful fountains. They are enlivened, too, every afternoon by the music of a military band; and they enclose at one end a most interesting museum, the Musée de Minéralogie, forming part of the National School of Mines.

The admirable picture gallery in the Luxemburg Palace is occupied by the works of living masters alone. It is not until an artist is dead that his paintings are held worthy of being transported to that national Walhalla of pictorial heroes, the Louvre.

CHAPTER XX.

THE PRISONS OF PARIS

La Santé – La Roquette – The Conciergerie – The Mazas – Sainte-Pélagie – Saint-Lazare – Prison Regulations

THE Luxemburg, though only from time to time (and usually at intervals of several years) transformed into a High Court of Justice, has a prison permanently attached to it. The apartments reserved for prisoners of state have, however, nothing in common with the ordinary prisons of Paris. These abound on both sides of the Seine. Not far from the end of the Luxemburg Gardens, and close to the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, is the prison of La Santé – built in 1865 at a cost of six millions of francs, for the reception of twelve thousand prisoners: about a ninth part of the total population of the Paris prisons. But before leaving the Boulevard Saint-Jacques and the Place Saint-Jacques, to which the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques directly leads, a word must be said about the open space formerly closed by the ancient Barrière Saint-Jacques. During twenty years, from 1832 to 1851, the Place Saint-Jacques was the scene of public executions. Here, while the scaffold was being erected, the innumerable taverns of the barrier were crowded with revellers, who, after supping all night, remained at the windows of the rooms they had hired at great cost, in order early the next morning to see the guillotine at work. Similar scenes took place in our own capital when murderers were publicly hanged outside Newgate; scenes which have been described in admirable prose and in perfect verse by Thackeray and by Ingoldsby.

The prisons of Paris have played an important part in history, though the most historical of them no longer exist. With the exception of Saint-Lazare and the Conciergerie, which still preserve some vestiges of the past, the prisons that figure so largely in the annals of France have vanished.

Paris has been described by a well-known French writer as a “city of destruction.” Edifices fraught with the memories of ages fall, he complains, under the hand of the municipal destroyer like castles built of cards. If there is a house which dates back even to the seventeenth century it has to be looked for at the end of some court or alley, which has escaped the pickaxe and hammer by sheer insignificance. Even as regards churches, there are few which are more than three or four generations old. When we have counted Notre Dame, the two churches of Saint-Germain, the Sainte-Chapelle, and one or two temples of lesser importance, we have to leap to Saint-Eustache and Saint-Sulpice, and thence take a big bound to the Madeleine. This eternal demolition by architects who wish to outdo their predecessors is a matter of keen lament to archæologists and to writers like M. Jules Simon, who declares that the only pickaxe he can forgive is the one that overthrew the Bastille, and that he forgives it because it, at the same time, “overthrew everything else.”

Of all the historical prisons of Paris one only can be said to exist to-day – the Conciergerie. It preserves an air of the past by virtue of a few antiquities which still belong to it: such as the two big towers on the quay, the large walls inside, the large table in the courtyard, at which Saint Louis is reported to have fed the poor, the room in which Damiens was confined, and the dungeon of Marie Antoinette.

In 1830 Paris could boast – or perhaps one should say blush for – twenty civil prisons. Not a few of these consisted of old convents or other buildings converted into state gaols; and it may well be imagined that such places were neither salubrious nor secure. The prisoners were not even divided into categories. In the present day eight or nine prisons suffice for a much larger number of convicts, and admit of a regular classification.

First, there is a lock-up, or maison de dépôt, at the prefecture of police. Then there are three “preventive” prisons – Mazas and La Santé for men and the Conciergerie for both sexes. One portion of Saint-Lazare is also set apart for the accommodation of the fair sex. Sainte-Pélagie and Saint-Lazare – the first for men and the second for women – are houses of correction for prisoners sentenced to one year or less. It is at Sainte-Pélagie that political prisoners are for the most part confined. In La Roquette are lodged prisoners under sentence of death and offenders condemned to more than one year. Clichy, once the debtors’ prison, has already in these pages been amply described.

Nor should we omit to mention the military prison of the Rue du Cherche-Midi; the prison of the National Guard; the dépôt of Saint-Denis where mendicants are locked up; and La Petite Roquette, where, until 1865, were imprisoned, and subjected to the rigorous régime of cell confinement, children and youths guilty for the most part, as M. Jules Simon well expresses it, of having had unnatural parents.

In taking a leisurely survey of the principal Paris prisons, we may begin with La Roquette as the most formidable in character. Situated in the street and place of the same name, it was built towards 1837, and on such a perfect plan that there has hitherto been no example of any prisoner’s escape or even attempted escape from it. This gaol, therefore, is to criminals one of the most redoubtable. The gloomy impressions, however, which it may well produce on a stranger are somewhat relieved by the fact that the courtyard by which it is approached is adorned with a fountain, and that the prison boasts a well composed library of some two thousand volumes; nor, since crime is so often the outcome of ignorance, could a wiser means of recreation for the convicts be devised. The librarian is usually a convict who has received a certain education, and who has earned this post of confidence by repentance and good behaviour. It has been found, indeed, that the inmates prefer reading to any other diversion, and statistics of the books lent out show that each prisoner gets through nearly one volume a week. The library is divided into various sections; and the books most eagerly read are said to be works of science.

The régime imposed at La Roquette is uniform, and applies without distinction to all classes of offenders. Everyone within the walls rises at 5.0 a.m., does ten hours’ work relieved by intervals for food and recreation, and goes to bed at half-past seven, passing the night in a strongly bolted cell, of which the sole furniture is an iron bedstead. An exception, however, as regards sleeping, is made in the case of prisoners liable to epileptic fits, or who have attempted to commit suicide. These sleep in special dormitories under the careful inspection of warders. One room, moreover, is set apart for fever patients. Another is reserved for those prisoners who have softened the rigour of their confinement by particularly good behaviour or – what some will think less admirable – by informing against their accomplices. It frequently happens that the accomplices so betrayed find their way to the same gaol, and if the informers were not isolated deeds of vengeance might sometimes be committed. The administration of La Roquette consists of a governor, a chaplain, a physician, two clerks (senior and junior), a brigadier, an under-brigadier, fourteen warders, a dispenser, a laundress, and a sutler. Nearly two dozen prisoners, moreover, are employed about the establishment as auxiliaries.

At certain periods gangs of convicts are transferred from La Roquette to provincial state prisons or houses of correction. Before their departure, however, they are most rigorously searched lest they should have upon them any sort of instrument which might assist them to escape from their future residence. One tool in particular, the invention of inveterate criminals, is always an object of apprehension with the authorities on such occasions. This consists of a kind of diminutive fret-saw, which by a miracle of patience can be made out of scraps of metal, and with which thick iron bars can sometimes be cut through. It was a saw of this family that Ainsworth’s prison-hero employed to sever the bar of his Newgate cell.

Since 1851 the Paris executioner has been accustomed to perform his grim functions in front of La Roquette. A number of massive stones which, forming a square, are let into the pavement outside, serve as basis for the temporary erection of the guillotine whenever a head is to fall. The surface of these stones is level with that of the pavement, and many a pedestrian walks over them without dreaming of their sinister utility. The guillotine is usually put up during the night; but despite the early hour at which, thanks to this precaution, executions take place, the spectacle of decapitation always draws a crowd of curious persons, consisting, it is sad to say, largely of women and youths, who will brave all the rigours of a winter’s night in order to witness from the front rank the death of some wretch, notorious or obscure. It was on the Place de la Roquette that Verger (assassin of the Archbishop of Paris), Orsini (the would-be destroyer of Napoleon III.), La Pommerais (the poisoning doctor), and many other criminal celebrities, were executed. “Perhaps,” says a fanciful French writer, “during the fatal night which preceded their last hour they heard the nailing-down of the guillotine planks; for La Roquette is the gaol where those under death-sentence are lodged in a special cell.” This cell is cold and gloomy: a bed and a table constitute its furniture. It is here that the condemned man gets his last snatch of sleep, if indeed he can sleep at all; it is hence that, after a last “toilette,” he steps forth to make his exit by that prison doorway which to him is the threshold of eternity.

The Conciergerie is the gaol of the department of the Seine. It gained a sinister celebrity during some of the most sanguinary periods of French history. This sombre prison abounds in recollections of those strifes and miseries by which royal epochs were too often characterised, and of that vengeance and blind fury which distinguished the Revolution. Every political movement, every religious passion, has contributed to the horrors which mark the annals of this institution.

The Conciergerie is an appendage to the Palais de Justice; and when this palace, which was originally a fortress, became the residence of the French kings, it served as prison. It would appear to have been built about the same time as the palace, though it has undergone sundry alterations and enlargements during successive ages.

Reconstructed by Saint Louis, the Conciergerie, as its name indicates, included the residence of the prison-governor. The “concierge” of the palace was no unimportant personage. He was in a certain way the governor of the royal mansion, and all royal prisoners were under his charge. He could administer petty justice in the palace and its surroundings, and he appointed a bailiff to carry out the law in his name. His privileges were extensive enough. It was he whom merchants had to pay for the right of exposing their wares for sale at the Palais Royal. In 1348 the concierge took the official title of bailiff. More than one person of high distinction has held this office: Philippe de Savoisi, friend of Charles VI., for instance, and Juvenal des Ursins, the historiographer of that monarch’s reign. Louis XI.’s famous physician, Jacques Coictier, was the first who united the functions of bailiff with those of concierge.

The concierge-bailiff of the Palais had on many points a discretionary power over the prisoners of the Conciergerie. He himself taxed the food he supplied to them, and fixed the rate of hire for the furniture they used; and more than one prisoner, released by order of justice, found himself retained at the Conciergerie until he could pay his bill for board and lodging. The post of concierge-bailiff lasted until the Revolution. The cases which came beneath the jurisdiction of this functionary were tried in a large hall of the palace. These were cases of misdoing which had occurred within the palace walls.

One of the most ghastly scenes ever enacted within the walls of the Conciergerie was that in which, during the quarrels between the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons, those ruffian supporters of the latter party, known as the “cabochiens,” invaded the gaol and killed the crowd of prisoners within it, irrespective of age or sex. The court of the palace was inundated with blood and strewn with corpses. The Count d’Armagnac, Constable of France, six bishops, and numerous members of the Paris Parliament expired under the blades of the assassins.

The dungeons of the Conciergerie, built at the level of the Seine, were dark and unhealthy: the light of day could never penetrate to them. During the Middle Ages several pestilences, caused by the filthy condition of the prisoners combined with insufficiency of food, broke out at the Conciergerie and awakened the attention of the authorities. On the 31st June, 1543, beds were for the first time placed in the apartment known as the infirmary; and it was about this period that the gaolers were instructed not to ill-treat the wretches beneath their charge. They were to treat them “gently and humanely, to provide them with water and straw, to procure them the services of priests, etc.” In spite of these reforms, the Conciergerie long remained the most unhealthy prison in Paris.

In 1776, during the fire at the Palais de Justice, a great part of the Conciergerie fell a prey to the flames; nor was the mischief repaired until some years afterwards. The fire had already reached one of the towers occupied by the prisoners, when the officials were for the first time warned of their danger by their cries for help.

During the revolutionary period the number of prisoners shut up in the Conciergerie sometimes rose to 1,200. At the time of the September massacre this prison was the scene of a horrible slaughter. According to documents of indisputable exactness, close on three hundred persons fell, at the Conciergerie, beneath the weapons of the agents of popular vengeance. The “Septembrisseurs,” however, spared all the women, with one exception. A poor wretch, known as the “pretty flower-girl” of the Palais Royal, had, in a moment of furious jealousy, mutilated a French guard, her lover; and she was now put to death with unheard-of cruelty. According to Pelletier’s account she was attached to a stake, naked, her feet nailed to the ground, her breasts were cut off with blows from a sabre, and various other atrocious tortures inflicted upon her before she expired.

Whilst the Revolutionary tribunal was accomplishing its bloody work, the Conciergerie served, so to say, as the antechamber to the scaffold. Most of the proscribed were shut up in this prison, whence they issued only to mount the fatal cart which was to convey them to their slaughter. At this period, the chambers being too small, prisoners were huddled together, to the number of fifty, in a space of twenty feet square, without distinction of social position, age, or sex. Big dogs, let loose at night in the courtyards, completed the system of surveillance; these were the most dreaded gaolers of all. At a time when famine threatened the capital, the prisoners’ rations were reduced. Soon a regulation was made that all meals should be taken in common, at a cost of two francs a head, and that the rich and aristocratic prisoners should pay for the rest. “Drolly enough,” says Mercier, “the estimation in which these gentlemen were held depended on the number of ragged wretches they fed, just as it formerly did in the world on the number of their horses, their mistresses, their dogs, and their lackeys.” Despite the horror of their situation, the prisoners of the Conciergerie preserved the frivolous and licentious habits of the epicurean society of the eighteenth century. They threw away the last hours of their lives on games of all kinds, or on amorous intrigues; they laughed at everything – even the guillotine. Royalists, aristocrats, and popular leaders were carried to the Conciergerie by the flux or reflux of the Revolution, and they lived together in a fatal state of indifference, disdaining to dispute their head with the executioner. Few took the trouble even to curse their judges; many died singing a song. It was in the midst of this general intrepidity that Beauharnais, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Queen Marie Antoinette, Madame Elizabeth, her sister, and a host of other less distinguished victims, passed from the Conciergerie to the scaffold. In this same prison, at a later date, Robespierre and his partisans awaited the hour of their execution. Under the Restoration the chamber in which Marie Antoinette was confined was turned into a chapel; the pavement alone remaining as it was in 1794. Since the Reign of Terror the Conciergerie has received many prisoners who have become historical, with Louvel among them, the assassin of the Duke of Berri.

The torture which many of the wretched prisoners underwent was inflicted for the most part in the famous Bombec Tower, beneath which existed what were called oubliettes, or dungeons in which prisoners were subjected to diabolical cruelty. These dungeons bristled everywhere with sharp sword-blades; they were inhabited by rats and loathsome reptiles; and the wretch who was thrown into them found, amidst other horrors, that the waters of the Seine crept in upon him as the tide rose. One of the cells of this tower, into which no light could penetrate, had been occupied by Ravaillac.

In modern times the Conciergerie has been rendered habitable. The dark and humid cells constructed at the foot of the towers have been either filled up or suppressed. Already some years ago it was boasted that, with one exception, the Conciergerie contained no dungeon into which the light of day could not steal.

The Mazas prison, situated on the boulevard of the same name, dates from 1850. The official name is “The house of cellular arrest.” The administration abandoned in 1858 the original designation of Mazas prison, on the petition of the family of Colonel Mazas, who was killed at Austerlitz. But custom is more powerful than any administration; and to the public this gaol is to-day still known solely by the name of Mazas.

Its construction, commenced in 1845, was not terminated till five years later. The cost of so vast a prison was naturally enormous. It was intended in the first instance to replace the prison of La Force, then situated in the Rue Pavée-aux-Marais and the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The ground on which the first constructions were raised had previously been occupied by market-gardeners and by a mill, which was demolished. The works progressed rapidly under the direction of the architects, Gilbert and Lecointe. Interrupted by the Revolution of 1848, they were resumed shortly afterwards, and on the 19th of May, 1850, took place the inauguration – if this word can be employed in so sinister a sense – of the new prison; the installation, that is to say, of the prisoners. Less than twelve hours sufficed to transfer eight hundred and forty-one convicts in cellular vans, to establish them in their new abode, and inscribe their names, and other particulars concerning them, in the books of the gaol.

At this period the grave inconveniences which have by degrees asserted themselves in France as the result of the cellular system were not yet clearly recognised. Thus it was that the first poor wretches who, after their transfer from La Force, found themselves suddenly immured in the cells of Mazas, were seized with fits of fury and despair which soon took the proportions of a panic and a riot. The whole building resounded with incessant cries and shouts: the condemned, isolated from one another, and exasperated by their solitude, trying to converse by shouts with their old acquaintances lodged in distant cells. Some requested as a favour to be taken back to La Force. At length the administration felt it discreet to order an inquiry into the state of things, and the Academy of Medicine was consulted. M. de Pietra-Santa, an eminent member of that body, wrote, in a report which he laid before his colleagues: “The cellular system employed in prisons plays deadly havoc with the intellectual faculties. It develops scrofulous diseases, and urges its victims to suicide.” Statistics were quoted to show what a formidable proportion of cell-confined prisoners either took or attempted their own lives. In the end the Academy of Medicine denounced the prison-cell in uncompromised terms; and, in consequence, the system of isolation ceased at the Mazas prison to be rigorously enforced. As, however, the edifice had been constructed on a particular plan which did not permit of its conversion into an ordinary prison, its original purposes were modified by the confinement within its walls only of prisoners under short sentences. “In these circumstances,” says a contemporary French writer, “solitary confinement, far from being an inconvenience, presents in general the advantage of not mixing prisoners arrested from very diverse causes, and the moral character of whose offences widely differs. Moreover, the individual who may perhaps be acquitted to-morrow has not to endure a regrettable contact, which is often dangerous.”

The Mazas prison is surrounded by a girdle wall which conceals it from the public gaze; though the curious can easily defeat this difficulty by mounting the viaduct of the railway of Vincennes, which traverses the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. From this elevation a bird’s-eye glance of the whole of the buildings may be obtained.

The sanitation of this prison leaves little to be desired. The cells are spacious, wholesome, and well ventilated. Their furniture consists of a hammock suspended from cramp-irons; of a wooden stool, a water-can, and one or two other articles the reverse of luxurious. The ventilation is managed on scientific principles by means of orifices at different altitudes; and so effectual is it that in an experiment which was once made, with three men smoking tobacco in them incessantly for three hours, it was found that the fumes disappeared as fast as they were produced, and that the atmosphere never once lost its transparency. This circumstance is a great consolation for the Mazas prisoners, who can beguile the time with their pipes.

As to the interior régime of the prison, the spacious courts which separate each gallery of cells are divided into promenades, in which the prisoners are free to exercise themselves for at least one hour a day. A part of these promenades is provided with a shelter in view of wet weather. The prisoners take exercise by turns, and always alone, the warders being able from certain points of observation to follow their movements incessantly. An infirmary is attached to the prison, as well as bath rooms, which are no less commodious than cleanly. Each prisoner is known at Mazas by the number of his cell, inscribed on a plate hung above the door, and which is turned over to indicate that the prisoner is away from his cell taking exercise or receiving instruction. Among the special punishments inflicted on the more serious offenders are: exclusion from outdoor exercise, a diet of bread and water, a bare plank bed, and a dark cell.

The administrative and subordinate staff of the Mazas consists of a director, four registration clerks, a brigadier, four sub-brigadiers, sixty-four warders, a laundress, three chaplains, a doctor, a chemist, a female searcher, two barbers, and four commissioners, not to mention some three dozen prisoners employed as assistants.

What chiefly strikes a visitor to the place is the regular and geometrical plan on which the whole prison is constructed. The arrangements are of the most perfect description, though it was complained some years since that the method of arranging divine service – the door of each cell being kept ajar, so that the prisoner can see the altar and the officiating priest – provided to a large part of the prisoners little more than a curious spectacle.