Nevertheless, in its moral debasement hitherto, France had made profligacy a privilege and not _a right_. If the nobles had freed themselves from the curb, if the middle class was irritated by it, the lower orders still endured it, and, up to the Revolution, the prison of St. Lazare tried to reform immoral men, over whom the Government reserved a discretionary power. Young people of dissolute morals, under 25, picked up by the police, were confined at La Salpétrière, and at Bicêtre; severe penalties were also attached to the prostituting of modest girls. In order the better to appreciate our decline since that period, let us recall the enactment of 6th November, 1778, which prohibits provoking to debauchery in the public street,[21] and enjoins upon tavern and lodging-house proprietors, under the penalty of a fine of 200 to 500 livres, to keep a register of the names of all the persons they admit. The police, who made a strict inspection of these houses, brought into court the tavern and the lodging-house keepers guilty of harbouring women of doubtful character, and, in the event of their transgressing a second time, had their houses closed. When the Revolution abolished the old regulations, and expressed a formal purpose of establishing fresh ones, the lower orders, in their _saturnalia_, again became violators of women—a crime which, after having destroyed the aristocracy, was ruining the middle class. The Convention, alarmed at excesses which were threatening the very foundations of social order, thought to nip the evil in the bud, by enacting the distant deportation of abandoned women; but the instability of its short-lived powers did not admit the application of this measure.