This terrible affair had beyond doubt a political effect, from the conviction with which it inspired the French people generally that there existed in France one law for the poor and another for the rich. The Court of Peers did its duty, and, in its desire to show how fully it recognised the principle of equality before the law, it communicated every document connected with the trial to the public press. But the duke, in spite of the crushing evidence against him, had been allowed to remain in his own house, when an ordinary criminal would have been at once taken to prison. No ordinary criminal, again, would have been in a position to obtain poison. The circumstances, moreover, under which the duke had been buried were suspicious; and many believed that he did not die at all of the poison--so slow in its action--but that he was enabled to cross the Channel and reach England, where, at the moment of his death being publicly announced in the Chamber of Peers, he was quietly living. So much for the remarkable trials of which the Luxemburg has been the scene. When, in 1848, the Republic was for the second time established in France, the Chamber of Peers was abolished; and in the spring of the great revolutionary year the members of the commission for the organisation of labour, wearing their blouses, seated themselves on the softly-cushioned benches of what had been formerly known as _la chambre haute_. It was on the recommendation of this commission that “national workshops” were opened, in order to satisfy the claims of the unemployed, who loudly asserted their “right to labour”; and it was on the closing of the national workshops, whose cost the Government was at last unable to meet, that the formidable insurrection of June, 1848, broke out. With the re-establishment of the Senate, under the Second Empire, the Luxemburg Palace became once more its place of meeting. Let us now take a glance at the gardens in which the palace stands. With the parks and gardens of London they will scarcely bear comparison; though a French descriptive writer declares that they combine, with the ordinary attractions of the garden, the beauty of the park and even, in certain solitary corners, the wildness of the forest. The Luxemburg Gardens are, in any case, adorned by two beautiful fountains. They are enlivened, too, every afternoon by the music of a military band; and they enclose at one end a most interesting museum, the Musée de Minéralogie, forming part of the National School of Mines. The admirable picture gallery in the Luxemburg Palace is occupied by the works of living masters alone. It is not until an artist is dead that his paintings are held worthy of being transported to that national Walhalla of pictorial heroes, the Louvre. CHAPTER XX. THE PRISONS OF PARIS. La Santé--La Roquette--The Conciergerie--The Mazas--Sainte-Pélagie--Saint-Lazare--Prison Regulations.