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 was established the court of municipal justice, and here the Provost of Paris had his residence. The prison of the Châtelet became one of the most celebrated in Paris, and prison and fortress were not completely demolished until 1802.

The functions of the Châtelet—cette justice royale ordinaire à Paris—were great and various. It was charged in effect, says Desmaze,^[11] with the maintenance of public safety in the capital, with the settlement of divers causes, with the repression of popular agitations, with the ordering of corporations and trades, with the verification of weights and measures. It punished commercial frauds, defended "minors and married women," and kept in check the turbulent scholars of the University. Its magistrates were fifty-six in number; it had its four King's Counsel and its King's Procurator; its clerk-in-chief and his host of subordinates; its receivers, bailiffs, and ushers; its gaolers and its sworn tormentor; its "sixty special experts"; its surgeon and his assistants, including a sage-femme or mid-wife; and its two hundred and twenty sergents à cheval.

All in all, the Châtelet was one of the most formidable powers in Paris. The court of the Châtelet comprised four divisions, administered by councillors who sat in rotation. The four sections were distinguished as the parc civil, the présidial, the chambre du conseil, and the chambre criminelle.

But the Prison of the Châtelet is our principal concern. Although, says Desmaze, the prison was instituted for the safe-keeping and not for the maltreatment of the accused, the law's design was too often eluded or ignored. Much the same might be said in respect of any other prison in Europe at that epoch. Antique papers cited by Desmaze show, nevertheless, that Parliaments of Paris sought by successive decrees to modify the rigour of the prisoner's lot, to restrain the cupidity of his gaolers, and to maintain decent order within the prison. There were provisions against gambling with dice, rules for the distribution of alms amongst the prisoners, and penalties for those who absented themselves from chapel. In 1425, a new ordonnance fixed the scale of fees (geôlage) which prisoners were to pay to the governor or head gaoler on reception. (This ironic jest of compelling persons to pay for the privilege of going to prison obtained for centuries in Newgate.) A count or countess was charged ten livres, a knight banneret (chevalier banneret) passed in for ten sols, a Jew or a Jewess for half that sum; and so on to the end of the scale. There were particular injunctions as to the registering of prisoners, and as to the mode of keeping the prison books. The bread served out was ordered to be de bonne qualitè, and not less than a pound and a half a day for each prisoner: in 1739, the baker who supplied the Châtelet was condemned to a fine of 2000 livres for adulterating the prisoners' bread. A special ration of bread and meat was distributed at the Châtelet on the day of the annual feast of the confraternity of drapers, and the goldsmiths of Paris gave a dinner on Easter Day to such of the prisoners as would accept their bounty.

The deputies of the Procureur Général were instructed to visit the prison once a week, to examine and receive in private the requests and complaints of the prisoners, and to see that the doctors did their duty by the sick. The first Presidents of the Paris Parliament seem to have visited the Châtelet frequently from the end of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century.

But there was one circumstance which, in Mediæval Paris and in the Paris of a much later date, must have gone far to nullify all good intentions and humane precautions of kings and parliaments alike. Under an ordonnance of July, 1319, Philippe le Long decreed that the governorships of gaols should be sold at auction. The purchasers were, of course, to be "respectable persons" (bonnes gens), who should pledge their word to deal humanely by (de bien traiter) the prisoners; but of what use were such provisos? In no circumstances, indeed, could a saving clause of any description ensure the proper administration of a prison the governor of which had bought the right to make private gain out of his prisoners. For this was what the selling of gaolerships came to. Having paid for his office (having bought it, moreover, over the heads of other bidders), the governor recouped himself by fleecing his wealthy prisoners and by stinting or starving his poorer ones. It was no worse in France than elsewhere; until Howard demanded reform, prisoners in Newgate were plundered right and left under a similar system, and those who could not pay the illegal fees of the governor and his subordinates were lodged in stinking holds, and fed themselves as they could.

We shall see what the prisons of the Châtelet and the Fort-l'Évêque were like amid the luxuries and refinements which surrounded them in the eighteenth century. An ordonnance of 1670 had enjoined that the prisons should be kept in a wholesome state, and so administered that the prisoners should suffer nothing in their health. Never, says Desmaze, was a decree so miserably neglected.

What are the facts? He quotes from an "anonymous eighteenth-century manuscript" ("by a magistrate") entitled: Projet concernant l'établissement de nouvelles Prisons dans la Capitale. The Fort-l'Évêque and the Châtelet are turned inside out for such an inspection as Howard would have made with a gust.

In the court or principal yard of Fort-l'Évêque, thirty feet long by eighteen wide, from four to five hundred prisoners were confined. The prison walls were so high that no air could circulate in the yard; the prisoners were "choked by their own miasma." The cells "were more like holes than lodgings"; and there were some under the steps of the staircase, six feet square, into which five prisoners were thrust. Other cells, in which it was barely possible to stand upright, received no light but from the general yard. The cells in which certain prisoners were kept at their private charge were scarcely better. Worst of all were the dens belowground. These were on a level with the river, water filtered in through the arches the whole year round, and even in the height of summer the sole means of ventilation was a slit above the door three inches in width. Passing before one of the subterranean cells, it was as though one were smitten by fire (on est frappé comme d'un coup de feu). They gave only on to the dark and narrow galleries which surrounded them. The whole prison was in a state of dilapidation, threatening an immediate ruin.

The Châtelet was "even more horrible and pestilential." The prison buildings, having no external opening, received air only from above; there was thus "no current, but only, as it were, a stationary column of air, which barely allowed the prisoners to breathe." This is far from a realisation of the ordonnance of 1670! Like the Fort-l'Évêque, the Châtelet had its horrors of the pit. Dulaure^[12] has a curious passage on the subject. It appears, says one of the best of the historians of Paris, that prisoners were let down into a dungeon called la fosse, as a bucket is lowered into a well; here they sat with their feet in water, unable to stand or to lie, "and seldom lived beyond fifteen days." Another of these pits, known as fin d'aise (a name more bodeful than the Little Ease of old Newgate), was "full of filth and reptiles"; and Dulaure adds that the mere names of most of the Châtelet cells were "frightfully significant."

The Provost of Paris, rendering justice in the King's name, took cognisance of all ordinary causes, of capital crimes, and of petty offences. His officers arrested and imprisoned "all manner of criminals, vagabonds, and disturbers of the public peace." In the reign of Philippe-Auguste, he was charged with the duty of "bringing to justice the Jews" who at that epoch were "accused of seeking to convert Christians to Judaism, of taking usurious interest, and of profaning the sacred vessels which the churches gave them in pledge." After the King, said Pasquier, the Provost of Paris was the most powerful man in the kingdom.

The headsman of Paris depended on the jurisdiction of the Châtelet. There was a small chamber in the prison called the réduit aux gehennes, where, when an execution was to take place, Monsieur de Paris received the Provost's warrant. In 1418, the headsman Capeluche was himself sentenced to be beheaded, and in the réduit aux gehennes he put the new Monsieur de Paris through his facings with the axe.

An account of the sentences decreed by the Châtelet would be little less than a history of punishment in France. The Châtelet gave reasons for its sentences, a practice not followed by the superior courts. Terrible were the pains and penalties decreed sometimes from beneath the Provost's dais. Torture wrung some avowal from the frothy lips of the accused, and then he was shrived and carried to the place of execution. The fierce canonical law lent its ingenuity in punishment to the judges of the Châtelet; but many of the penalties, such as hanging, beheading, burning, whipping, mutilation, and the pillory, are found on our own criminal registers of the same period. Coiners and forgers were boiled alive; there is an entry of twelve livres for the purchase of a cauldron in which to boil to death a faux monnoyeur. In 1390, a young female servant, convicted of stealing silver spoons from her master, was exposed in the pillory, suffered the loss of an ear, and was banished from Paris and its environs, "not to return under penalty of being buried alive." For the crime of marrying two wives, one Robert Bonneau was sentenced to be "hanged and strangled." Geoffroy Vallée was burned, in 1573, for the publication of a pamphlet entitled The Heavenly Felicity of the Christians, or the Scourge of the Faith; and, in 1645, a bookseller was sent to the galleys "for having printed a libel against the Government."

Some of the old registers of the Châtelet examined by Desmaze showed entries of charges of pocket-picking and card-sharping at public processions, fairs, and spectacles. Little thieves defended themselves before the magistrates in the style familiar at Bow Street to-day,—a lad of fifteen charged with stealing handkerchiefs from pedestrians said he had "picked up one in the street."

The Châtelet, or rather the Little Châtelet, was the Provost's residence until the end of the sixteenth century. In 1564, the Provost was Hugues de Bourgueil, "distinguished for the possession of a terrific hump and a beautiful wife." One day Parliament consigned to the cells of the Little Châtelet a young Italian, accused of having set up in Paris a "gambling-house and fencing-saloon," where he corrupted the morals of the young nobility, "teaching them a thousand things unworthy of Christians and Frenchmen."

In his quality of Italian, the prisoner, Gonsalvi by name, invoked the protection of Catherine de Médicis. The Queen-Mother, while respecting the decree of Parliament, recommended the young compatriot to the Provost's particular care. De Bourgueil accordingly lodged him in his own house, where Gonsalvi was soon on intimate terms with the family. One night he eloped with the Provost's wife. Madame had contrived to possess herself of the keys of the prison, thinking that if she let loose the whole three hundred prisoners, M. le Prévôt would have a good night's work on hand, and the course would be clear for her lover and herself. And so it resulted; for the Provost, faithful to his duty, despatched horse and foot after his three hundred fugitives, and let Madame and Gonsalvi take their way.

The next day, an errant wife was missing from the Little Châtelet, but at night the keys were turned as usual on the full contingent of three hundred prisoners. It was the scandal of this affair, say MM. Alhoy and Lurine, which decided the King to shift the Provost's residence from the Châtelet to the Hôtel d'Hercule, wherein was presently installed Nantouillet, "successeur de ce pauvre diable de Bourgueil."

Nantouillet was not too well off, it would seem, in the Hôtel d'Hercule. No sooner was he established there than he was bidden to prepare for the visit of three Kings,—France, Poland, and Navarre,—who would do themselves the pleasure of lunching with him. Nantouillet, who had just declined to marry a cast-off mistress of the King of Poland, suspected some scheme of vengeance on their Majesties' part; he could not, however, refuse to spread his board for them. He spread it, and the Kings came down and swept it bare. They swooped upon Nantouillet's silver plate and sacked his coffers of fifty thousand francs. There was a fierce fight in the Hôtel, but the Kings got away with the plunder. On the following day, the First President of Parliament waited upon Charles IX. and said that all Paris was shocked; and his Majesty in reply bade him "not trouble himself about that." This tableau moral of the period is presented by several historians.

With such examples in the seats of Royalty, one can feel little surprise at the charges of venality, and worse, which were brought from time to time against the Provosts. In the reign of Philippe le Long, a certain wealthy citizen lay under sentence of death in the Châtelet. The Provost Henri Caperel made him a private proposal of ransom, a bargain was struck. Dives was set free, and the Provost hanged some obscure prisoner in his stead. Provost Hugues de Cruzy is said to have trafficked openly at the Châtelet in much the same way, Royalty itself sharing the booty with him. Now and again, justice took her revenge; and both Henri Caperel and Hugues de Cruzy finished on the gallows. The noble brigand, highwayman, and cut-throat, Jourdain de Lisle, who led a numerous band in the fourteenth century, bought the interest of the Provost of Paris; and the Châtelet "refused to take cognisance of his eighteen crimes, the least of which would have brought to an ignominious death any other criminal." A new Provost had to be appointed before Jourdain de Lisle, tied to the tail of a horse, could be dragged through the streets of Paris to the public gallows. He had married a niece of Pope Jean XXII., and when justice had been done, the curé of the church of Saint-Merri wrote to Rome: "Scarcely had your Holiness's nephew been hanged, when, with much pomp, we fetched him from the gibbet to our church, and there buried him honorablement et gratis."

Ordinarily, the Châtelet relied for its defence upon the archers of the Provost's guard, a reedy support when the mob turned out in force. It was seized in 1320 by the Pastoureaux, a swarm of peasants who had united themselves under two apostate priests, and who said they were "going across the sea to combat the enemies of the faith and conquer the Holy Land." To rescue some of their number who had been arrested and thrown into the Châtelet, they marched on that place, broke open the gaol, and effected a general delivery of the prisoners, as Madame de Bourgueil was to do some two centuries later.

Between the conflicting powers of the Châtelet, as represented by the Provost of Paris, and the University, which was accountable only to the ecclesiastical tribunals, and intensely jealous of any interference by the secular arm, a long and bitter struggle was sustained. In 1308, Provost Pierre Jumel hanged a young man for theft on the highway. Unfortunately for Jumel, this was a scholar of the University, and the clergy of Paris went in procession to the Châtelet and briefly harangued the Provost: "Come out of that, Satan, accursed one! Acknowledge thy sin, and seek pardon at the holy altar, or expect the fate of Dathan and Abiram, whom the earth swallowed." While they were thus engaged, a messenger came from the Louvre with the announcement that the King had sacrificed his chief magistrate to the wrathful demands of the clergy and University. For a like encroachment on the sacred privileges of the University, Guillaume de Thignonville was degraded from his office of Provost, led to the gallows, and there compelled to take down and kiss the corpses of two students whom he had hanged for robbery.

In 1330, Hugues Aubriot, in his capacity of Provost, lent the shelter of the Châtelet to a party of Jews flying for their lives before the mob. This service to the causes of humanity and public order renewed against the Provost an ancient enmity of the clerics and University, by whom, in the words of MM. Alhoy and Lurine, "it was determined that Aubriot should be ruined." Condemned by the ecclesiastical tribunal "for the crime of impiety and heresy," he was ordered to be "preached against and publicly mitred in front of Notre-Dame." On his knees, he demanded absolution of the bishop, and promised an offering of candles for his iniquity in befriending the Jews. "His crimes were read aloud by the Inquisitor of the Faith, and the bishop consigned him to perpetual imprisonment, with the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction, as an abettor of the Jewish infidelity, and a contemner of the Christian faith." From that, the Provost descended to an oubliette of the Fort-l'Évêque.

The Fort-l'Évêque, in the Rue Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, was one of the two prisons of the Bishop of Paris. Its oubliettes were subterranean dungeons, separated from one another by stout timbers. The prisoners, attached to a common chain, were fastened to the wall by iron rings, in such a manner that they could not approach one another. They never saw their gaolers, and their meagre rations were handed in through a narrow wicket in the door. Hugues Aubriot occupied his oubliette for many years. In the insurrection of the Maillotins he was discovered by the rioters and set free. In 1674, the Bishop's jurisdiction was reunited with that of the Châtelet, but the prison of the Fort-l'Évêque was in existence until 1780.

Dulaure says that the penalties imposed by the episcopal court were inflicted in various places, according to the gravity of the offence. Sentences of hanging or burning were carried out beyond the precincts of Paris; but if it were "a mere bagatelle of cutting off the culprit's ears," justice was done at the Place du Trahoir.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Fort-l'Évêque was the prison for "debtors and refractory comedians"; and about a hundred years later, in 1765, it received the entire company of the Comédie-Française. The episode is one of the oddest in the history of the House of Molière. A second-rate member of the famous troupe, named Dubois, who had been under medical treatment for some malady, refused to pay the doctor's bill. Mademoiselle Clairon, the tragic actress, delicate on the point of honour, summoned the rest of the company, and it was resolved to appeal to M. de Richelieu, gentilhomme de la chambre. This functionary treated it as "an affair of vagabonds," and told the company to settle it amongst themselves. Dubois, accordingly, was put out of the troupe. His daughter carried her father's grievance and her own charms (elle met en œuvre tous ses charmes) to the Duc de Fronsac, through whose intervention she succeeded in forcing for Dubois the doors of the Comédie-Française. But the company were resolved not to act with him again, and put a sudden stop to the performances of that very successful piece, the Siège de Calais. De Sartines, of the police, now came forward in the pretended interests of the public, and ordered the arrest of Dauberval, Lekain, Molé, Brisard, Mademoiselle Clairon, and others of the company. The public, however, were on the side of the players, and Mademoiselle Clairon and her fellows had a semi-royal progress to the Fort-l'Évêque; roses and rhetoric were showered on them, and les plus nobles dames de Paris disputed the honour of attending the tragédienne to the threshold of the prison. Their captivity lasted, nevertheless, for five and twenty days; but the final victory was with the players, for Dubois was dismissed with a pension, and appeared no more on the stage of the Théâtre Français.

Fêted every day in her chamber in the ecclesiastical prison—for there was scarcely question of an oubliette in her case,—receiving the visits of noblemen and dames of fashion, artists, wits, and poets, Mademoiselle Clairon had small leisure to bethink her that, under the litter of flowers pressed by her dainty feet, lay the bones of whole generations of victims of the church's tyranny; victims of those too familiar charges of magic, heresy, and sacrilege.

Yet (I quote again from MM. Alhoy and Lurine) had she in the still night lent a listening ear to those grey walls, the wailing murmurs of the phantoms of Fort-l'Évêque might have chilled her heart:—

"We expiated in the oubliettes of the Fort-l'Évêque, under the reign of Francis I., the wrong of believing in God without believing also in the infallibility of the Pope. Look ... there is blood on our shrouds!"

"We are two poor Augustine monks. They accused us, in Charles VI.'s time, of being idolaters, invokers of evil spirits, utterers of profane words. They accused us of making a pact with the powers below; our only crime was believing that our science might heal the madness of the King. Look ... there is blood on our shrouds!"

"I am the sorcerer of the château of Landon. I promised an Abbé of Citeaux to find, by magic, a sum of money that had been stolen from him. Alas! it was a dear jest for me; torture, and death on the Place de Grève. Look ... there is blood upon my shroud!"

"I am a poor madman. I thought that heaven had given me the glorious mission of sustaining on earth the servants of Jesus Christ. I went humbly to the bishop and said: The envoy of God salutes you! They brought me here to an oubliette, and I left it only with the headsman. Look ... there is blood on my shroud!"

The factions of the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons cost Paris a river of blood in the early years of the fifteenth century, and the massacre of the Armagnacs in May-August, 1418, was a terrible affair. On the first day, five hundred and twenty-two were put to the sword by the Bourguignons in the streets of the capital. Every Armagnac, or suspected Armagnac, was laid hold of, and the prisons overflowed with the captives. The Bourguignons assailed the Châtelet, "and the threshold of the prison became the scaffold of fifteen hundred unfortunates." The attack upon the Châtelet was renewed by the Bourguignons in August; and the Provost of Paris, powerless to check or even to stem their fury, bade them at length "Do what they would": Mes amis, faites ce qu'il vous plaira. This time the prisoners organised a defence, and a regular siege began. On the north side of the fortress was a lofty terrace, crowning the wall, so to say, and running the length of the prison. Here the imprisoned Armagnacs threw up barricades, but the Bourguignons reared scaling-ladders, and made light of climbing the walls, sixty feet in height. The attack on the one side and the defence on the other were long, bloody, and desperate; but the advantage was with the assailants. Foiled at this point and that, they fired the prison; and where the flames did not penetrate, they hacked their way in, and drove their game to take refuge on the heights. As the fire soared upwards, the Armagnacs flung themselves over the walls, and were caught upon the pikes of the Burgundians, "who finished them with axe and sword."

The name of Louis XI., which is writ large in the histories of the Bastille and the Dungeon of Vincennes, attaches to one curious episode in the history of the Châtelet. In 1477, on the day of the festival of Saint Denis, Louis "took the singular fancy of giving their liberty" to the prisoners of the Great and Little Châtelet. A chronicler of this fact, evidently puzzled, "hastens to add" that at that epoch the two Châtelets "held merely robbers, assassins, and vagabonds. Not even to honour the memory of Saint Denis could Louis bring himself to liberate his political prisoners in Vincennes and the Bastille." It was in Louis XI.'s reign that one Chariot Tonnelier, a hosier turned brigand, lying in the Châtelet on a score of charges, and dreading lest the Question should weaken him into betrayal of his companions, snatched a knife from a guard at the door of the torture chamber, and deliberately cut his tongue out.

The Fort-l'Évêque and the Little Châtelet were suppressed in 1780, in virtue of an ordonnance of Louis XVI., countersigned by Necker; and the prisoners were transferred to La Force. The buildings, which were even then in a state of ruin, were thrown down two years later. The Great Châtelet existed as a prison for another decade, and the fortress itself was not demolished until 1802-4. A triumphal column replaced the ancient dungeon of the Provosts of Paris.