Instances of Wallerand’s barbarous treatment may be quoted. A prisoner named Thomas was employed by him as a groom, and escaped through an unbarred window in the stable, but was recaptured. Wallerand, furiously angry, threw him into a cell, and ordered that he should be flogged three times a day. Death would probably have been his portion, had not two other prisoners informed an inspector of police, who was visiting the prison and who saved the victim from his keeper’s rage. Wallerand avenged himself by lodging the two informers in the cell just vacated. An ancient priest, after much cruel suffering, fell ill and begged hard that he might be attended by another doctor than the medical attendant of the prison. Wallerand obstinately refused to give his consent, and the old man died. He got into trouble once by entertaining a great party of some hundred and fifty friends in the prison on his fête day. The largest hall in the prison was splendidly decorated and lighted by five hundred candles. The entertainment consisted of the performance of an opera and a grand display of fireworks in the prison court, a great ball and a splendid supper. The police authorities, although well disposed to Wallerand, could not tolerate this impudence, and he was suspended for a time, but received no other punishment. Among the many foul prisons of the Capital Bicêtre was quite the worst of all, and it was said of it that nowhere else could such horrors be witnessed. At once a prison, a madhouse and refuge for paupers, wretchedness and insanity existed along with vice and crime. John Howard, the English philanthropist, who visited it in 1775, draws a terrible picture of it, which will best be realised by transcribing his own words: “Bicêtre is upon a small eminence about two miles from Paris; if it were only a prison, I should call it an enormous one. But this for men, like the ‘Hopital General’ for women, is indeed a kind of general hospital. Of about four thousand men within its walls, not one-half are prisoners. The majority are the poor, who wear a coarse brown uniform, and seem as miserable as the poor in some of our own country workhouses; the insane; and men that have foul diseases. Each sort is in a court and apartments totally separate from the other and from criminals. These last are confined, some in little rooms about eight feet square, windows three and one-half feet by two, with a grate, but not many glazed. By counting the windows on one side of the house I reckoned there must be five hundred of those rooms. There is but one prisoner in each. These pay two hundred livres a year for their board. There are others in two large rooms called La Force, on the other side of the courtyard, La Cour Royale, which are crowded with prisoners. Over these two rooms is a general infirmary; and over that an infirmary for the scurvy, a distemper very common and fatal among them.