One of the scandals of the period was the venality of responsible offices, even those in the Bastille. From that of the governor down to the office of turnkey, all were articles of traffic; De Launay sold the latter situation at an annual rent of nine hundred francs. M. de Launay was installed in his government of the Bastille in October, 1776. He had promised the ministers and the lieutenant of police passive obedience to their orders, their fancies, and their caprices, and he kept religiously to his engagement. Never was there a more cringing, obsequious officer. But, as is always the case with such persons, they revenge themselves for the degradation their servility brings, by severity towards those subject to them. From the moment of his entry into office, the most severe and tyrannical despotism was enthroned in the Bastille; proud and rough towards the subalterns, he was brutal, arbitrary, and odious to the prisoners; and under the excuse of precaution for their safe durance, he surrounded their captivity with a thousand vexations, cruelties, and privations. His favourite virtue was parsimony. To recoup a hundredfold the price of the charge he had bought, he himself measured out the water, the bread, the fuel, and the clothes. When he had not enough prisoners, and the revenues diminished, he complained, and asked for more. Those under his care, he retained under a thousand pretexts, or made against them reports which retarded their release. The old bastions had been laid out in gardens full of flowers and fruit-trees and fountains, and in these gardens the prisoners had been allowed to take the air. But the Marquis de Launay had turned this ground into fruit and vegetable gardens, which he let; and thus the unhappy captives were reduced to taking the air on the top of the towers of the fortress. This, however, was found to demand too close a watch, and M. de Launay suppressed this privilege also, and those in custody were reduced to the use of the great court. The court, of which a description has been already given, was two hundred feet long by seventy-two feet wide. The walls enclosing it on all sides were a hundred feet high, so that it was little better than a huge well, where in winter the cold was insupportable, and in summer the heat was intense, and was unrelieved by a breath of air. The prisoners took their turns to walk in this court. Whenever any one crossed the court (and this was happening continually, as the kitchens and the lodgings of the officers were in the new buildings erected by M. de Sartines), a signal was made, and the prisoner was required to dive out of sight into a cabinet, without light or air, and remain concealed till notice was given him to come out.