Such common gaols as still survived the shock of the Revolution were pressed into service: Bicêtre, St. Pélagie, Saint Lazare, the Conciergerie and La Force. The last named was of more recent date, and really owed its existence to the mild-mannered and unfortunate Louis XVI, who in 1780 desired to construct a prison to separate the purely criminal prisoners from those detained simply for debt. A site was found where the rue St. Antoine ends in the Marais. The ground had been bought thirty years before for the erection of a military school, but nothing had come of the project. New buildings were erected upon the ground formerly occupied by the gardens of the Ducs de la Force, as had been done in the case of the Hotel St. Pol which had belonged to Charles of Naples, brother of the king known as St. Louis in French history. The new prison of La Force was to be established under good auspices. It was to include rooms for habitation, hospital, and yards for the separate exercise of various classes of prisoners, the whole to cover a space ten times as large as the For-l’Évêque and Petit Châtelet combined. It was to be interiorly divided into five sections (afterwards increased to eight), with names describing each section. There was the “Milk Walk,” for those who had failed to pay for the children they put out to nurse; the “Debtors’ Side,” in the centre of the prison, where non-criminals were lodged; the “Lions’ Pit,” described by a contemporary as the most horrible place conceivable, where the worst classes of criminals were herded together. Next came the “Sainte Madeleine,” then the “Quarter of the Niômes,” after that the “Court of Fowls,” again the “Court of Sainte Anne,” for old men and worn-out vagabonds, and lastly, the “Court of Sainte Marie of the Egyptians,” a hateful place, being a deep well between high, damp walls which the sun’s rays never reached, and in which were thrown prisoners whom it was desired to isolate entirely. This prison of La Force, from the first a very ruinous place, was in use down to the middle of the nineteenth century and received in its turn a large proportion of French criminality, criminal convicts being confined with political offenders and persons at variance with the government of the hour. On the same register might be read the names of Papavoine, the child slayer, and the poet, Béranger; Lacenaire, notorious for his bloodthirsty murders, and Paul-Louis Courier, the socialist.