The ordinary inhabitants of Sainte-Pélagie are, in addition to the political and newspaper offenders, juvenile thieves, tradesmen whose scales have not been found sufficiently impartial, with fraudulent bankrupts and debtors to the state--the only ones who, since the abolition of imprisonment for debt in civil and commercial matters, are still liable to confinement. The official staff of Sainte-Pélagie consists of a governor, a physician in chief with two assistants, a dispenser, a Roman Catholic priest, a registrar, a clerk, a brigadier, twelve warders, three commissionaires, a female searcher, a barber (who recruits his auxiliaries from among the prisoners), a sutler, and a sempstress. The prison is guarded by a company of infantry stationed at different posts. [Illustration: WARDERS’ ROOM AND ADJOINING COURTYARD, LA GRANDE ROQUETTE.] A list of the celebrated prisoners who have been confined at Sainte-Pélagie would be a formidable one. Sainte-Pélagie ceased to be a convent in 1790, and was transformed to a prison by order of the Convention. During this period many persons suspected of political intrigue were lodged in this prison previously to appearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Some distinguished offenders quitted Sainte-Pélagie for the scaffold: Madame Roland, for instance, the Comte de Laval Montmorency, and the Marquis de Pons. On the 3rd of August, 1793, in virtue of an edict for the arrest of the actors of the Théâtre de la Nation (afterwards Théâtre Français), Fleury, Lange, Petit, Suin, Joly, Devienne, Lachassaigne, Rancourt, and Mézerai were all incarcerated at Sainte-Pélagie. After the 9th Thermidor it received the victims of the counter-revolution, but ere long the prison was quite empty, and no further political prisoners found their way into it until the Empire, when, although they were by no means few, their numbers cannot be certainly ascertained, as the prison books were not faithfully kept. In 1811, at a time when the Emperor of Russia was in Paris, sixty-eight prisoners were liberated at his request. The Restoration, from the 15th of April, 1814, to the 29th of January, 1815, incarcerated 135 prisoners, nearly all of them old officers of the Imperial Guard. When the allies entered Paris for the second time the Russian Emperor, who the year before had procured the liberation of political prisoners detained by Bonaparte, made use of Sainte-Pélagie for the imprisonment of Russian deserters to the number of 192. Among the latter were several Poles guilty of having fought for their country in the French armies. These so-called deserters found themselves in the same gaol with the victims of the royalist reaction. Under Charles X. Sainte-Pélagie continued to be a state prison, and began to afford accommodation to journalists or authors who had been indiscreet with their pen. Between 1820 and 1830 many a celebrity lodged there, such as Béranger, Paul Louis Courier, Eugène de Pradel, Dubois and Barthélemy--to name no