PLACE DE CONSEIL, SALPÊTRIÈRE.PLACE DE CONSEIL, SALPÊTRIÈRE.enlarge-image
PLACE DE CONSEIL, SALPÊTRIÈRE.
Bicêtre is a little beyond the fortifications on the road to Fontainebleau. An avenue, lined with eating houses and taverns, so plentiful at all the Barriers, leads to the principal entrance, which is surmounted by a royal escutcheon with this inscription, “Hospice de la Vieillesse—Hommes.” It is inhabited by some 3,000 persons, comprising more than four hundred officials and servants, upwards of 1,500 indigent persons, between fifty and sixty convalescents, 1,830 adult lunatics, and 120 epileptic and idiotic children. The annual cost of the establishment amounts to one million and a half francs.
Bicêtre, like the Salpêtrière, is divided into departments: the Hospice on the north, where the aged and infirm of the city of Paris are gratuitously received; and the Asile, on the south, intended for the lunatics of the Department of the Seine. Like the Salpêtrière, it has more the character of a town than of a single building. Without any pretension to architecture, Bicêtre is composed of wings, outgrowths, and “annexes” of various kinds, added and super-added to the original and central structure. The shops attached to the establishment are now limited to a grocer’s and a tobacconist’s. There was formerly a shop for the sale of alcoholic drinks; but the intemperance of the customers caused the administration to banish for ever its estimable proprietor. For similar reasons the strictest regulations have been affixed to the door of the still-existing canteen.
The canteen occupies the superb cellar of the ancient manor house: an immense crypt, admirably constructed and supported by a double rank of robust pilasters. It was formerly the Eldorado of the inhabitants of Bicêtre. Officials, servants, visitors, were in the canteen from morning till night, giving themselves up to libations of Rabelaisian magnitude; so much so that this, pauper-tavern brought in, one year with another, a clear profit of 50,000 francs. To put a stop to these abuses, both in the interest of morality and of health, the administration of La Salpêtrière, instead of letting out the canteen to enterprising speculators, assumed the entire direction of it, and introduced stringent regulations, by which the canteen is only open for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. No{213}one, moreover, must enter it more than once in twenty-four hours, when the order must be limited to thirty centilitres (about ⅓ of a quart) of wine, or five centilitres of brandy. Complaints, threats, and even partial revolt were the consequences of this severe edict; but it had to be observed.
For the rest, the inhabitants of Bicêtre, if they are really thirsty, have excellent water within reach. The great well, said to be the finest in the world, is one of the curiosities of the place. The depth of the well is equal to the height of the towers of Notre Dame. Its walls are faced with masonry to a depth of some 150 feet, and the bottom is reached by a staircase of 220 steps. The mouth is enclosed by an immense cage, intended to preserve the beholder from the vertiginous attractions of its depth. The three pumps connected with the well used formerly to be worked day and night by prisoners, and, when they were tired out, by lunatics. For the last thirty years, however, the pumping has been done by a steam engine. The water is discharged into an immense reservoir, which received the major part of its contents from the well, and the remainder from the Seine.
THE PARK, SALPÊTRIÈRE.THE PARK, SALPÊTRIÈRE.enlarge-image
THE PARK, SALPÊTRIÈRE.
Close to the great well are the workshops, where, among other products, some seven thousand pairs of boots and shoes are turned out every year. All the able-bodied inmates must do work of some kind, for which they are remunerated at the rate of from ten to seventy centimes a day.
The library, founded in 1860, contains 2,500 volumes, and is open twice a day.
The inmates of Bicêtre come from all classes: workmen, soldiers, servants, artists, writers, professors, inventors, shopkeepers, government clerks—whom imprudence, misconduct, or misfortune has reduced to poverty. This mixed population is said to be difficult to rule, and in former days it frequently showed insubordination, and even rose in insurrection against the officials of the place. The rising of 1837 was caused by the limitations in connection with{214}drink, already mentioned; that of 1841 by the suppression of the right to dine alone; that of 1848 by the abolition of liberty to go out every day at any hour without permission. To prevent the return of any such disturbances an administrative order was issued in 1850, instituting the following penalties against particular offences: stoppage of wine, withdrawal of leave to go out, imprisonment and expulsion from the asylum. It may be seen from the above that it is not alone in the mad division of the hospital that lunatics are to be found.
The lunatic department at Bicêtre is divided into three sections; the first and second being assigned to adult lunatics, the third to epileptics and idiots. The study in which peaceable lunatics assemble to read, write, or draw is interesting, if only for the objects of art which adorn it: busts, statues, water-colours, engravings, sepias, and pen-and-ink drawings, some by unknown artists, others by artists of celebrity—many of them inmates, for a while, at least, of the asylum. In the time of Dr. Linas (some twenty years ago) there was a painter in the lunatic wards of Bicêtre, a former priest, known in the house as “Monsieur L’Abbé,” who, if he had not gone mad, would, in the opinion of Dr. Linas, have earned renown. “Nothing,” says the doctor, “is more curious than his symbolical picture of ‘Life’: a vast composition, in which are represented, with wonderful harmony of ensemble, and a prodigious fecundity of detail, all the splendour and all the misery, all the heights and all the depths, all the virtues and all the vices, all the grandeurs and all the infamies, all the beauty and all the turpitude, of human existence from the cradle to the grave.”
The ward for epileptic and idiotic children is the saddest of all, by its arrangement and general exterior, as well as by the condition of the patients. These are well cared for. Unhappy creatures, who were formerly regarded as the dregs of humanity, are now made the object of the most devoted solicitude. Two physicians, of heart as well as of talent, were the first to show that idiocy has its degrees, and is not absolutely refractory to intellectual culture. At their suggestion a school for idiots was instituted at Bicêtre in 1842, and since then untiring endeavour has been made to further their education. They are taught to speak, to read, to sing. Their irregular attitudes and gestures are corrected, and their muscular system is developed by marching, running, dancing, fencing, digging, and gymnastics of every kind. Their senses are directed, their bad instincts reformed, and in time, according to their aptitude, they are made cobblers, carpenters, and so on. Many children admitted as idiots leave the asylum every year to exercise these trades, and live by their work.
Criminal lunatics, condemned by a verdict, or dangerous ones, certified as such, are kept apart in a building called La Sureté. Within this sinister rotunda the patients are kept in cells, and subjected night and day to the strictest surveillance. The ordinary occupation of these dangerous lunatics is the harmless one of cutting out artificial flowers. Their occasional fits of violence are dealt with only by the application of the strait-jacket.
Many of the officials at Bicêtre look upon the place not only as a home, but as a native land. Born at Bicêtre of parents who were preceded at the same institution by their own parents, the functionaries form a sort of official dynasty. Bicêtre has had its celebrities, its dramas, its memorable events. In legendary times the hill-side of Gentilly was haunted by Wehr-wolves, and the wizards of the neighbourhood held sabbath there. Interesting anecdotes have been told about the captivity of Salomon de Caux in the dungeons of Bicêtre, and the visit of Marion Delorme to the inventor, supposed by many of his countrymen to have constructed the first steam engine. At the time, however, of Salomon de Caux (1580-1630) Bicêtre was a magnificent country house, and neither a prison nor an asylum. It is certain, on the other hand, that this establishment has reckoned among its prisoners or its patients Latude, the unhappy victim of the hatred of Mme. de Pompadour, who, after escaping three times from Vincennes and the Bastille, was three times re-arrested, and finally delivered, after thirty-five years of captivity, by the courageous perseverance of Mme. Legros.
The pathetic story of Latude might be told in connection with more than one of the Paris prisons, mixed establishments, and lunatic asylums; for he was confined successively in the Bastille, the Castle of Vincennes, at Charenton, and, finally, at Bicêtre. With a genius for escaping from imprisonment, and an equal aptitude for getting recaptured, this able, energetic, yet light-minded, and, in sum, most unhappy man, provoked his first incarceration by a too ingenious device which he adopted with the view of securing the favour of Mme. de Pompadour, the all-powerful favourite of Louis XV. He was a lieutenant in the army when the idea occurred to him of obtaining promotion by{215}putting himself forward as saviour of Mme. de Pompadour’s life. Sending her a collection of explosive toys, combined so as to form a sham infernal machine, he at the same time warned her not to open any parcel that might be addressed to her, since it had come to his knowledge that a case was being forwarded, which, on removal of the lid, would violently explode. “The gentleman knows too much,” thought Mme. de Pompadour; and she communicated her reflection to the Lieutenant of Police, who, sending for Latude, questioned him, and after convicting him out of his own mouth of the imposition he had practised, sent him to the Bastille.
Transferred a few months later to the Castle of Vincennes, he succeeded on the 25th of June, 1750, in making his escape, and in this very original manner. Watching until he found one of the prison gates open, he ran out and, breathless as he was, asked every sentinel he passed whether he had seen the Abbé de Saint Sauveur, whose ministrations were needed for a dying prisoner. Taking him for one of the officials of the establishment, the sentinels allowed him to hurry on—allowed him, that is to say, to make his escape. Latude was unable to profit by his liberty. Convinced that Mme. de Pompadour would pardon him his thoughtless act, he wrote her a letter of regret and appeal, related to her his escape, and confided to her his place of concealment. But the selfish marchioness could not forget that he had caused her a moment’s fright. She sent his letter to the Lieutenant of Police, and the poor man was once more thrown into the Bastille, with orders that he was to be strictly watched. One day, however, the governor took pity on him, and to render his captivity less rigorous gave him a companion. This companion was another young man who, strangely enough, had himself given offence to the all-powerful marchioness by an epigram of which he had been proved to be the author. His name was D’Aligre; and the two prisoners, both indebted for their captivity to the same tyrannical woman, made common cause and became fast friends. Their first thought was naturally to escape from the Bastille; and the project having once been formed, it was easier for two persons to carry it out than for only one. The preparations for their escape occupied them not less than two years. From time to time they cut off faggots from the blocks of wood furnished to them as fuel, and at the same time tore strips from their shirts and their bed-linen. The linen was tied and twisted into a knotted rope, more than a hundred yards long. With the wood they made a ladder to aid them, when they had descended into the moat, in getting up the parapet on the other side. All the preparations having been finished, the two prisoners chose for their escape a dark wintry night, when there was but little chance of their movements being observed. They began by climbing the chimney, one after the other. Then having fastened the rope, they one after the other slid down, till, excited, exhausted, and with bleeding hands, they reached the moat in safety. The wooden ladder enabled them, as their next step, to get over the parapet, which brought them into the governor’s garden. The wall which surrounded it was too high to climb, and they had no second ladder with which to escalade it. Fortunately, in view of some difficulty of this kind, they had provided themselves with a strong wooden stick, and this they made use of for picking out the mortar, loosening the bricks, and ultimately making a hole sufficiently large for them to crawl through. During this laborious and dangerous work, when the very noise they were making might at any moment cause their discovery, day broke, and they had just time to force themselves through the aperture they had made, when there were already signs of movement within the fortress. Latude and his companion had just taken refuge in one of the narrow streets surrounding the Bastille when the alarm-bell sounded. Their flight had been discovered. D’Aligre, disguised as a peasant, had no difficulty in passing the frontier. He was arrested at Brussels. Latude, informed of the capture of his friend, changed his route, but was equally unfortunate. Just when he was on the point of taking ship for India the police seized him at Amsterdam. He was brought back to the Bastille.
This time he was cast into a dungeon which looked out on to the moat, whose fetid vapours had a very injurious effect upon his health. To occupy his time and divert his thoughts, the unhappy prisoner undertook the taming of rats, and having from the branch of a bulrush made a primitive flute or flageolet, he played tunes upon it, an attention to which the little animals are said to have been by no means insensible. With marvellous patience and ingenuity, Latude now made tablets with the crumb of his bread, and wrote upon them with his blood. He had conceived certain plans of financial reform and of much-needed amelioration in various departments of state, and these{216}he noted down as best he could by the difficult and painful means just mentioned. Finding how he was occupied, the governor was seized with compassion, and in his sympathy supplied the patient, intelligent prisoner with pen, ink, and paper. Latude now wrote day and night on all kinds of political and financial subjects. His suggestions were transmitted to the different ministers, less in the hope that they would be adopted than that their exposure would draw attention to the writer’s wretched state. One day Latude succeeded in getting a letter into the hands of Madame de Pompadour. It was in these words:—“On the 25th of this month of September, 1760, I shall have had 100,000 hours of suffering.” He thought for a moment that this pathetic utterance might restore him to liberty. But he had still 200,000 hours to count.
THE VILLAGE, SALPÊTRIÈRE.THE VILLAGE, SALPÊTRIÈRE.enlarge-image
THE VILLAGE, SALPÊTRIÈRE.
Permission was now given to him to walk on the terrace of the tower. He succeeded in awakening the interest of two young laundresses whose garret-windows looked out upon the walls of the Bastille; and one fine day in April, 1764, these girls, by means of large letters traced on a strip of paper, informed him that the woman who had persecuted him was dead. In his usual impulsive way, Latude now wrote to the Lieutenant of Police, telling him that he had heard of Mme. de Pompadour’s death, and that he trusted there was now some chance, after such prolonged tortures, of his being set at liberty. By way of reply, the lieutenant wished to know how he (Latude), of all the prisoners, was the only one that the news had reached. Determined not to compromise his kind-hearted informants, Latude refused to explain, upon which the lieutenant ordered that he should be watched more closely than ever. He was now put back in the dungeon, but soon afterwards, without any reason being assigned, was transferred to Vincennes. There a certain liberty was allowed him. Among other privileges he was permitted to walk in the garden, by which he soon profited to make his escape. The young laundress gave him asylum, and he now, with his unvarying imprudence, wrote to the Lieutenant of Police to request an audience. M. de Sartines took no notice of the application, except to have his correspondent arrested and taken back to Vincennes.
Latude now passed ten continuous years in prison. He had long been utterly forgotten when the minister Malesherbes, making a scrupulous inspection of the state prisons, saw him, heard the tale of his woes, and promised to do him justice. Circumvented, however, by the Lieutenant of Police, who represented Latude as a dangerous lunatic, he, with the best intentions, ordered the poor wretch to be removed to Charenton. This was still further to aggravate the captive’s condition, for Charenton was by several degrees worse than Vincennes. Madmen were then treated in the cruellest fashion, confined in narrow cells, and fed on a disgusting diet. Allowed a little more freedom than the other inmates, he was shocked to find, in a fetid little dungeon, loaded with chains and mercilessly beaten by the warders, his old companion D’Aligre, whose reason had not been able to survive his misfortunes, who scarcely recognised his friend, and who died shortly afterwards.{217}
The adventures of Latude, however, had now attracted the attention of the outside world. He had been able so far to elude the vigilance of the warders as to get a few letters delivered to influential personages. An order for his liberation, almost immediately revoked, was signed in 1777. The victim had hardly started out for Montagnac, his native place, when he was re-arrested—though here again he probably had his own folly to thank, for he might have got clean away had he not obstinately determined to make a stay at Paris, and delayed his departure with that object. This time he was shut up at Bicêtre with malefactors of the worst class.
The history of Latude is singularly touching when one reflects that it was for a mere piece of boyish stupidity that he suffered a weight of frightful misery, which grew not lighter but heavier as years dragged on. “Each year,” says Michelet, “his sad position was aggravated. At length the crevices of his windows were stopped up and additional bars fitted to his cell. In Latude,” continues this historian, “the imbecile old tyranny had incarcerated the very man who could best denounce it—an ardent and terrible man whom nothing could tame, whose voice shook the walls, and whose wit and audacity were invincible.... His body was made of indestructible iron; for he could live in the Bastille, at Vincennes, at Charenton, and even at the horrible Bicêtre, where anyone else would have perished.
THE LUNATICS’ QUARTER, SALPÊTRIÈRE.THE LUNATICS’ QUARTER, SALPÊTRIÈRE.enlarge-image
THE LUNATICS’ QUARTER, SALPÊTRIÈRE.
“I am unfortunately obliged to say that in this effeminate and decayed society there were not wanting philanthropists, ministers, magistrates, and grand-seigneurs to weep over the affair; but none of them did anything. Malesherbes wept, and Lamoignon and Rohan: everyone wept hot tears.
“He was on his muck-heap at Bicêtre, literally eaten up with vermin, lodged underground, and often howling with hunger. He had again addressed a memoir to some philanthropist, entrusting it to a turnkey: a woman picked it up.
“This woman was a little milliner, Mme. Legros, whose name is now unalienably associated with that of Latude. A high official had come to visit Bicêtre by royal order. He heard the victim’s complaints, which moved his pity, and requested Latude to draw up a statement of his grievances. The document was promptly{218}prepared, but a drunken messenger failed to deliver it, and it was picked up by the young woman in question, who, having read it with deep compassion, saw what others could not see, that Latude was no madman, but a victim of the frightful necessities of a government obliged to put out of the way a man who could expose its vices. That was the obstacle which had frustrated the benevolent desires of Malesherbes, Lemoignon, and Rohan. Latude was to remain in captivity simply because he had already been in captivity too long.”
Mme. Legros, however, courageously undertook the work of justice, and nobly persevered with it in spite of all. During three years she solicited everybody, notwithstanding the misery in which she was herself living—for the police tried to intimidate her, and threatened her with transportation or imprisonment. She persisted all the same; and having lost her little business, she sacrificed her last resources to the cause which she had made her own. By dint of interviewing the valets of ministers and the femmes-de-chambre of ladies of high rank, she at length managed to interest Marie Antoinette herself in the fate of Latude. Louis XVI. promised to look into the matter, and had the police documents brought to him—papers, that is to say, prepared by those who only desired that the prisoner might die on their hands. The decision, therefore, of the monarch was that Latude, as a very dangerous man, must never be released. Even this did not discourage Mme. Legros, who, indeed, had public opinion on her side. The popular wave was already mounting high; it submerged the inflexible Sartines, and, after him, Lenoir. The Academy gave it a further impulse by awarding to Mme. Legros, in 1783, the prize of virtue as recompense for her heroic perseverance in the cause she had espoused. All that the minister Breteuil could obtain from this independent body was that the grounds on which the prize was awarded should not be proclaimed. The blow directed against the police and the court was a heavy one, and early the next year Latude was finally set free. He was then on the verge of his sixtieth year; he had passed thirty-five years in prison. As sole indemnity after so much suffering, he was granted a pension of 400 francs “in consideration of his lost patrimony,” as the official order phrased it; and even this was conditional upon his quitting Paris to live in his native province. Mme. Legros, by dint of tact and of petitions, got this sentence of exile revoked, and Latude came to live in her house at Paris. When the Revolution broke out he ardently embraced its principles, and in 1793, attacking the heirs of Mme. de Pompadour, he obtained against them from the Commune a condemnation to pay him an indemnity of 60,000 francs, though he never touched more than a sixth of this sum. A public subscription had, moreover, placed him beyond the danger of want. He died in obscurity in 1805.
“Mme. Legros,” says Michelet, “did not see the destruction of the Bastille. She died a little before. But it was she, none the less, who had the glory of destroying it. It was she who filled the popular mind with hatred and horror of this arbitrary prison which had received so many martyrs of Faith and Thought. The weak hand of a poor woman pulled down, in reality, that high fortress, threw to the ground its massive stones, tore down its iron gratings, and razed its towers.”
So much, then, for the celebrated Latude and his heroic deliverer. Among other notable inmates of Bicêtre may be mentioned the accomplice and denouncer of Cartouche, who lived forty-three years in a dungeon; the author of “Justine”—the Marquis de Sade—a perfect example of erotic madness; and the four sergeants of La Rochelle, those heroic champions of liberty whom the devotion of two of the house-surgeons would have saved but for the treachery of the chaplain.
The story of the four sergeants of La Rochelle, so well known in France, and so often referred to by contemporary French writers, is so little known in England that it may here with propriety be told; for it was at La Salpêtrière that the last act, or last but one, of this tragedy was played.
In the year 1821, under the Restoration, John François Louis Leclerc Bories, sergeant-major in the 45th regiment of the line, was in garrison at Paris when he was initiated into the society of the Charbonniers, corresponding to that of the Carbonari in Italy. The association was a formidable conspiracy of Liberals and Bonapartists against the monarchy of the Bourbons, and it was largely recruited from the ranks. Bories undertook to gain adherents among his comrades, and he initiated successively a number of non-commissioned officers and soldiers. In January, 1822, the 45th regiment was moved from Paris to La Rochelle. Before quitting the capital Bories was placed in relations with{219}La Fayette, and received from him the halves of several cards, the missing portions to be presented to him on the line of march by members of the secret society, who would at the same time communicate to him the orders of the directing committee. Movements were being prepared at Nantes and at Saumur, and the chiefs of the Charbonniers wished, if necessary, to utilise the passage of the regiment through the departments which were ready to rise. Bories had several interviews along the line of march, and some imprudent words were spoken. But no order to take up arms was transmitted, and the 45th arrived at La Rochelle on the 14th of February without any incident of importance having taken place. By a strange fatality Bories had been placed under escort at Orleans for having replied to the provocations of the Swiss soldiers stationed in this town; and on reaching La Rochelle he was confined in the guard-house, and afterwards, in consequence of some suspicious circumstances, transferred to the prison of Nantes. The post of Bories in connection with the secret society was now filled by a less capable man, Sergeant-Major Pomier; and at this very moment an unsuccessful attempt was made against Saumur, under the direction of General Berton. Pursued from all sides, Berton made his way stealthily to La Rochelle, determined to try his fortune once more from what he considered a more favourable point. He placed himself in communication with Pomier and other chiefs. But nothing was decided, except that they must all hold themselves in readiness for action. A few days afterwards all the members of the society serving in the 45th regiment were, one after another, arrested. The authorities had got wind of what was going on, and Goubin, Pomier, Goupillon, and a few others, interrogated and pressed by General Despinois, made complete revelations, Bories meanwhile remaining firm and impenetrable.
Five months afterwards the accused were brought before the tribunal of the Seine. There were twenty-five of them, some in the civil, some in the military service; and they were charged either with belonging to the conspiracy or with not revealing what they knew about it. No conspiracy, in the strict legal sense of the word, existed; though the undetermined aim of the association was sooner or later to take up arms. The only offence of which the prisoners could be justly accused was that of belonging to a secret society. The Government prosecutor demanded, however, sentence of death against twelve of the accused. Among the advocates for the defence were men, with Chaix-d’Est-Anges, Mocquart, and others of the same mark, who afterwards reached the highest positions, and who were all at this time Carbonari and sworn enemies of the Bourbons. At the end of a trial which had lasted a fortnight the president of the court asked each of the accused if he had anything to add to his defence. Bories, whose self-possession had never for one moment left him, rose and said with much dignity:
“Gentlemen of the jury, the Advocate-General, while declaring that the most eloquent oratory in the world would be powerless to save me from public vengeance, has pointed to me as the chief criminal. Well, I accept this position, and shall deem myself happy if by bringing my head to the scaffold I can obtain the acquittal of all my comrades.”
He was condemned to death, together with three other sergeants—Goubin, Raoulx, and Pomier. Goupillon was let off as informer. Seven others were condemned to imprisonment for different periods, while thirteen more were acquitted. There were groans and sobs in court when the capital sentence was pronounced, and public opinion pronounced itself in the strongest manner in favour of the unfortunate young men, against neither of whom any overt act was charged. But the Government of Louis XVIII. was implacable; and on the 21st of September, 1822, the scaffold was erected on the Place de Grève. The four sergeants submitted to their fate with heroic calmness, and bent their heads beneath the knife of the guillotine amid cries of “Vive la Liberté!”
The same evening, to the disgust of everyone, there was a grand party at the Tuileries.
Serious attempts had been made by the Carbonari to save the unhappy victims. Through the intermediary of two famous painters—Ary Scheffer and Horace Vernet, assisted by Colonel Fauvier and other leaders of the party, the director of Bicêtre had been gained over. He consented to aid the escape of the four sergeants who were confined in his establishment—at that time half prison, half asylum—on consideration of receiving 70,000 francs, estimated as the capitalised value of his appointment. Unfortunately, however, he confided the affair to the chaplain of the prison, whom he wished, through friendship and affection, to take with his own family to foreign parts. The priest rightly or wrongly felt it to be his duty to give notice to the Prefect of Police, and just as the projected{220}escape was on the point of being effected a number of police agents appeared. They began by arresting M. Margue, one of the surgeons at Bicêtre, and they at the same time seized 10,000 francs in gold. But an energetic man, the house-surgeon, Guillié-Latouche, managed to get away with the rest of the sum—60,000 francs—in bank notes, and entering Paris at daybreak, placed the money in the hands of the members of the committee.
THE CHAPEL, SALPÊTRIERE.THE CHAPEL, SALPÊTRIERE.enlarge-image
THE CHAPEL, SALPÊTRIERE.
Other attempts were not more successful, and on the day fixed for the execution a number of Carbonari, with arms concealed beneath their clothes, stationed themselves at different points, ready to attack the prisoner’s escort. Meanwhile the central committee, doubting the success of the enterprise so boldly conceived, could not decide to order an attack on the forces drawn up by the military authorities. Nothing could be done. The execution was allowed to take place in the midst of general indignation.
One of the members of the central committee, Dr. Ulysse Trélat, afterwards minister and representative of the people, has traced the{221}following portrait of Bories in his “Esquisse de la Charbonnerie”:—
“Bories was a young man of twenty-six, who, beneath an exterior full of softness and grace, concealed the noblest and firmest heart. He had nothing of the soldier but his frankness and his courage, without any of the faults generally produced by the idleness of barrack life. His morals were pure, his tastes simple, and his life retired. He gave up the greater part of his time to reading. Exempt from ambition, his most ardent wish was to die at the moment of the victory of the people; and one day he was quite annoyed at someone’s proposing to take him to General La Fayette. It seemed to him that this offer implied some doubt as to his sincerity, as well as an intention to stimulate his ardour by the authority of a great name.”
At Villefranche, Bories’s birthplace, there was a general understanding among the inhabitants to conceal his tragic end from his old parents. On their expressing astonishment at not receiving news from their son, they were informed that his regiment had gone to the colonies.
THE BICETRE, 1710. (After Gueroult.)THE BICETRE, 1710. (After Gueroult.)enlarge-image
THE BICETRE, 1710. (After Gueroult.)
Another touching story, which has all the character of a legend, is told in connection with the unfortunate Bories. Until the year 1864 a broken-down old woman, supporting herself with a stick and carrying a bunch of faded flowers, was a familiar figure on the left bank of the Seine. For forty years she had been grieving for the loss of Bories, to whom in his youth she was engaged to be married. From the cart in which, with his three comrades, he was driven to the scaffold, he had sought to console the young girl in her despair by throwing her a bouquet, which she kept for ever afterwards. She was frequently seen at the tomb of the four sergeants in the cemetery of Montparnasse; and she was at last buried near the grave of her lover towards the end of 1864, when the legendary bouquet was placed with her in the coffin.
It has been said that Bicêtre has, during the present century, been the scene of several disturbances, In the last century it witnessed serious insurrections. In 1756 the prisoners rose against the soldiers of the guard, when two archers and fourteen insurgents were killed. In 1774 a spy found among the prisoners was crucified. In September, 1792, Bicêtre made a determined resistance to the bands of slaughterers who arrived to massacre the inmates. Officials, prisoners, lunatics, all defended themselves with wonderful courage. Each building was made the object of a separate siege. Once masters of the place the assassins spared no one. There was for three nights and three days a frightful carnage, which even the intervention of Péthion could not stop.
The apologists—not merely of the Revolution, which, as a whole, brought immeasurable benefit to the French people, but even of the{222}crimes which accompanied it—have tried to justify the massacres committed in the prisons of Paris by bands of fanatical ruffians, who had somehow persuaded themselves that the persons confined were all aristocrats or priests, and that in slaughtering these enemies of society it mattered but little if a few inoffensive persons were also put to death. The allied German powers who were marching upon Paris, and whose outposts were gradually approaching the capital, had already taken the fortress of Verdun, and were prepared, if they continued their successful campaign, to inflict terrible vengeance on the Revolutionists and on the French nation generally. A counter-revolutionary movement had suddenly set in among the Royalist proprietors and the loyal, if superstitious, peasants of Brittany and La Vendée. With the exaggeration sure to manifest itself at moments of great popular excitement, it was declared that the enemy was at the gates of Paris; and it was proclaimed among the fanatics of the Revolution that in a few hours the nobles and ecclesiastics thrown into prison, in some cases with a view to trial, in others only as a precautionary measure, would soon be at liberty and ready to take part, in the slaughter of the Republicans. The people had been summoned by Danton to the Champ de Mars in order to be enrolled for service against the enemy. Alarm-bells were sounded, cannons were fired, and a general war-cry resounded through Paris. “The tocsin,” says a journal of the period, “was heard on all sides. Everyone ran to take up arms. Everyone cried out, ‘To the enemy!’ But the enemy is not in the field alone. The enemy is at Paris, as well as around Verdun. Our foes are in the Paris prisons. Shall we leave our women, our children, our aged persons, to the mercy of these wretches? Let us hurry to the prisons. Let us exterminate these monsters, who will profit by our absence with the army to murder our wives and our children, to liberate Louis XVI. from his tower, and to rally the Royalist battalions.” This terrible cry was at once taken up in a unanimous, universal manner throughout the streets and public places, at all public meetings, and finally in the National Assembly itself.
Apart from the purely spontaneous, impulsive movement, meetings were held after formal deliberations, and it was decided by a resolution that the aristocrats and priests confined in the prisons must be put to death.
To return, however, to Bicêtre, which is associated in more than one way with the Revolution and with the Reign of Terror. In a little courtyard adjoining the amphitheatre of Bicêtre, on the 15th of April, 1792, was tried for the first time on a corpse (previous experiments had been made with live animals) the “decapitating machine,” whose invention, wrongly attributed to Dr. Guillotin, belongs really to Dr. Louis, perpetual secretary of the Royal Society of Surgery: whence the name of “Louisette” given in the first instance to the guillotine.
Some time afterwards, towards the end of 1792, Bicêtre, which had just been the theatre of such tragic scenes, had the glory of seeing accomplished within its walls the reforms in the treatment of lunacy introduced by Pinel. This excellent man, chief physician at Bicêtre, had begged the Commune of Paris for authority to unchain the violent lunatics. The next day the fanatical Couthon went to Bicêtre to make sure that Pinel was “not concealing the enemies of the people among his madmen.” Astounded and somewhat frightened by the confused shrieking and howling of the maniacs, and by the rattling of their chains, the surly Jacobin turned to Pinel and said to him “Why, you must be mad yourself, citizen, to think of unchaining such animals.”
“I am convinced,” replied Pinel, “that these lunatics are only so intractable because they are deprived of air and liberty.”
“Well, do what you like,” cried Couthon, as he went away; “do what you like: I abandon them to you.”
Pinel at once entered the cage of the most terrible of his madmen: an English captain who had been shut up for forty years, and who, a few days previously, had killed one of the keepers with a blow from his fetters. Full of faith, the physician unlocked his irons; and the madman becoming at once gentle and calm, was, during the two years he had still to live, Pinel’s most useful assistant. Pinel restored successively to liberty an old officer who, in a moment of frenzy, had stabbed one of his own children; a young poet mad from love, who, after leaving Bicêtre, perished on the scaffold; a soldier formerly in the Royal Guard; Chevingé, an athlete, the terror of his keepers, who soon afterwards gave his liberator a striking proof of gratitude by snatching him from a band of fanatics at the very moment when they were about to hang him; and fifty others, of all conditions and all countries, who, as soon as they were treated with humanity, gave up their habits of violence.{223}
Finally, it may be mentioned that in the old dungeons of Bicêtre Victor Hugo lays the scene of his “Dernier Jour d’un Condamné.”
It has been seen that neither at Bicêtre nor at La Salpêtrière are lunatics alone confined. The one recognised madhouse in or near Paris, to which those whose ideas or actions excite the disapproval of their friends are told familiarly to go—as, in England, they would be sent to Hanwell—is Charenton. The Maison de Charenton, situated at about four miles south-east of Paris, on the road to Lyons, close to the confluence of the Seine and the Marne, dates from the year 1641, when Sebastien Leblanc, counsellor of the king and minister of war, presented it ready furnished to the brothers of La Charité, or of St. Jean de Dieu. A few years after their installation in the house presented to them, the brothers of La Charité arranged to receive madmen and epileptic patients; when, like all the madhouses of the time, Charenton became a house of detention, where were confined bylettres de cachetprisoners of state, prodigals, libertines, and others who were thought worthy of a milder treatment than they would receive in the Bastille or at Vincennes. In the eighteenth century, and up to the time of the Revolution, Charenton had accommodation for nearly 100 lunatics, each of whom had his separate room. The attendance was in the hands of ten religious persons and fifty-two servants. A few years after the Revolution, both monastery and hospital were suppressed, and the monks, together with the lunatics under their charge, dispersed. Soon afterwards, however, the Directory issued a decree, which forms the legal basis of the hospital of Charenton as it now exists. “Refuge for the Mad” was the title given to it; and it was now placed under the immediate direction of the Minister of the Interior. Insane persons of both sexes were to be admitted; the indigent ones gratuitously, and others at a fixed rate of payment. The Abbé de Coulmier, a former member of the Constituent Assembly, was named director of the establishment; and, as if in compensation for the injury done to the establishment by its sudden dispersion, it had additional land assigned to it. The building could now be enlarged, and a special division was erected for the women.
M. de Coulmier conducted the house in the most despotic manner; and on the death of the principal surgeon, M. Gastaldi, in 1805, he assumed such powers in the medical department that the School of Medicine was obliged to intervene, when the medical direction was placed in the hands of Dr. Royer-Collard, brother of the celebrated orator of the same name. With all his tyranny, M. de Coulmier had many agreeable ways. Remembering the fury of Saul, calmed by the harp of the youthful David, and the quieting of savage animals by the lyre of Orpheus, the director, carried away by his artistic feeling, determined to apply a similar treatment to the demented ones of Charenton. To carry out his idea he introduced dancing, dramatic performances, fireworks, and even ballets, with the assistance of some of the choregraphic celebrities of the epoch. The imprisoned Marquis de Sade, known by books that no decent person can read, was the organiser of these entertainments, which were attended by all Paris.
To the joyous reign of M. de Coulmier succeeded, in 1814, the severe administration of Roulhac du Maupas. No more singing and dancing now! Comedies and ballets gave place to useful reforms, and the substitution of a new medical organisation for the former choregraphic system. Royer-Collard had suppressed the iron girdles, the fetters, the handcuffs, and the collars, by which the ungovernable madmen used to be restrained, and the melancholy ones driven to suicide. Esquirol did away with the human figures in wicker-work, in which violent maniacs used sometimes to be enclosed. The new programme met with the full approbation of the Government. A credit of 2,720,000 francs was voted by the Chamber of Deputies in July, 1838; and soon afterwards M. de Montalivet, then Minister of the Interior, laid with due solemnity the first stone of the new edifice. The memory of this important ceremony is consecrated by an inscription placed beneath the vestibule of the principal building.
At the back of the building is the wood of Vincennes, from which it is separated only by a wall, with a gate for the inmates of the asylum. In front the landscape comprises the immense and fertile plain of Maisons Alfort, Ivry, and Choisy-le-Roi. The panorama is one of the finest offered by the environs of Paris. The capricious meanderings of the Marne, with its green banks and its flower-clad islands, the picturesque hill of Alfort, the interesting domain of Charentonneau; villages sparkling beneath the sun in the midst of fields and meadows: on the horizon the smiling slopes of Saint-Maur, Créteil, Champigny, Chenevières, and{224}Boissy-Saint-Lèger; the forest of Sénart, Villeneuve-St.-Georges—which, deserted by its inhabitants, was occupied, during the last war, in every house and every room by German troops, who left behind them sad proofs of their destructiveness; and, finally, the majestic course of the Seine, and its union with the Marne. The new establishment has been so built that from nearly every room the patients can gladden their eyes and refresh their minds by contemplating the enchanting scenery.
The patients are grouped together, not with reference to their social rank, but according to the medical peculiarities of each particular case. In the first division are patients who have reached the convalescent stage, and who are quiet. In the second are the lunatics who know how to behave themselves, but are still subject to fits of insanity. The third class consists of incurable lunatics, who are nevertheless capable of obeying orders. The fourth is reserved for incurable lunatics, difficult to govern; the fifth for paralytic lunatics; the sixth for lunatics who have been attacked by some ordinary malady; the seventh for epileptic patients; and the eighth for violent uncontrolable maniacs.
DINNER TIME AT BICÊTRE.ENTRANCE TO BICÊTRE.enlarge-image
DINNER TIME AT BICÊTRE.ENTRANCE TO BICÊTRE.
DINNER TIME AT BICÊTRE.
ENTRANCE TO BICÊTRE.
During the last twenty or thirty years a hydropathic establishment has been added to the asylum, together with workshops for the occupation and amusement of the convalescent.
On the 2nd of February, 1866, the Empress paid a visit to Charenton, and took the institution under her special patronage. She began by proposing the construction of a department for women on the same system and the same scale as the well-organised department for men; and, adopting the Empress’s idea, the legislative body voted an important sum towards carrying it out.
Charenton receives about 600 patients, 300 men and 300 women; but the number would be much larger were there sufficient accommodation. The terms for the paying patients are 1,500 francs for the first class, 1,200 for the second, and 900 for the third, while for those who have a separate room 900 francs extra, as the wages of a servant, are charged. Needless to add that the patients, paying or non-paying, are all on an equality as regards medical treatment. The quality and variety of the cooking vary with the different classes. The chief elements of the population of Charenton are furnished by officials and clerks, artists and men of letters, merchants, dealers in wine and spirits, officers and soldiers. Every type of madness may there be studied, from dementia and melancholia to mania. Many of the patients owe their malady to hereditary{225}predisposition, alcoholic excesses, and other abuses, domestic calamities, reverses of fortune, and intellectual labour unduly prolonged.