Marat presented from the outset the first problem to be faced by a people who are testing liberty. He was a journalist and pamphleteer of unbridled license, one of those who cannot find in themselves that control which, when it is absent in public writers, can only be supplanted by the cumbersome, dangerous, and necessary machinery of the Censor. Not for money, of course, nor for any unworthy motive, but for the excellent end of attaining freedom, this morbid mind poured out the wildest, the most sensational, and the most dangerous appeals. Now the courts were in process of transition; rapidly as the reform had marched since the summer, much of the old judicial procedure necessarily remained, and among the rest a body known as the Châtelet, whose removal was already planned, but which had to be maintained until the new system could be put in working order. It was very typical of the old regime. A body of privileged lawyers, many of them young and ignorant, holding their places by inheritance or purchase, and charged with what we may call the police of the capital. They had formerly possessed (and it had not yet been abolished in detail) the power of arbitrary arrest. They drew their name from the heavy fortress which had once defended the Pont au Change when Paris was confined to the island of the Cité; some of its walls dated at latest from the Norman siege of the tenth century, and beneath it were cellars which had for centuries been the prisons of those arrested in Paris by the city guard. It stood gloomy and strong on the site of the modern place that bears its name, dominating the close streets of the Boucherie, and possessing in its associations and its waning power all the qualities that had made the Bastille odious to the people. It may be imagined how the jurisdiction which it contained was bound to attract the chief efforts of the reformers; it could not, however, cease to exercise its functions until there was some more liberal institution to supply its place, and it came of necessity into violent collision with that spirit which was determined to break down by force what the resolutions of the Assembly had abolished in theory, but had not yet supplanted in fact.