The prison of Sainte-Pélagie, founded in 1665, owes its name to a holy penitent of the fifth century, who was a famous actress at Antioch, when, after hearing a sermon from the bishop of Heliopolis, she became a convert to Christianity, received baptism, liberated her slaves, and made over her property to the bishop that it might be given to the poor. Then, clothing herself in a rough garment, she made her way secretly to Jerusalem, and there built herself a cell on the Mount of Olives, where she led the most austere life. In memory of Sainte Pélagie, Madame Beauharnais de Miramion, who, according to the memoirs of the eighteenth century, had for years led a life of pleasure, built an immense house of refuge for young girls. As the rule of life laid down by the pious founder (though she herself submitted to it) seemed too strict to the young women of the establishment, as well as to their families, they were one by one withdrawn, until at last the mistress of the house found herself alone. Then Madame de Miramion--determined that someone should do penance--addressed herself to women and girls of loose life, when those who were really tired of their wild existence, with others who had lost all personal charms, accepted the hospitality offered to them at Sainte-Pélagie. Gradually the number of repentant Magdalens--thanks not only to goodwill on their part but to the intervention of the police--became so great that many of them had to be moved to the convent of Les Filles de la Mère-Dieu. When in 1789 the Revolution broke out, the gates of Sainte-Pélagie were thrown open like those of the convents; and the repentant girls, equally with the nuns, were at liberty to leave their cells. Two years later the Commune of Paris converted the building into a prison, where men and women were confined for all sorts of offences, political as well as criminal. From 1797 until 1834 Sainte-Pélagie was a debtors’ prison, and it was then changed into a house of correction for juvenile offenders, vagabonds below the age of sixteen, and children found hopeless by their parents. Under the Second Empire, as for a time under the First and during a portion of the Restoration, Sainte-Pélagie was exclusively a state prison. Here it was that the first Napoleon--in the words of an anti-Bonapartist writer--“shut up those citizens who displeased him and failed to manifest for his policy all the enthusiasm he desired.” To this despot is due the introduction at Sainte-Pélagie of special registers, called “registers of persons brought beneath the notice of the administration”--in other words, beneath the notice of the police. The Restoration continued this work--the imprisonment, that is to say, of suspected persons--as practised alike under the Empire, the Republic, and the ancient Monarchy. At the beginning of Louis XVIII.’s reign no less than 135 persons were arrested by the king’s private police, simply as having served under Napoleon in the Imperial Guard.