Charenton, though placed under the direction of the Ministry of the Interior, has its own particular administration, in which a clerk may in due time, after successive promotions, rise to be a functionary of almost the first rank. No one voluntarily quits the establishment; and the servants, like the officials, remain there until they are compelled by old age to resign. Charenton, like other madhouses, has had celebrities among its inmates, including the Marquis de Sade, who, after sending one of his infamous books to Napoleon, was at once ordered to be arrested and placed in a lunatic asylum; the same punishment which, at a later date, was inflicted by the Emperor Nicholas on a writer, blameless in his morality, who had attacked the existing order of things in Russia. CHAPTER XXX. THE RIVER BIÈVRE AND THE MANUFACTORY OF THE GOBELINS. The Brothers Gobelin--Lebrun--The Gobelins under Louis XIV.--At the Time of the Revolution--The Manufactory of Sèvres. The Bièvre is a stream which, many years ago, behaved so badly in the matter of inundations that it was put under ground. Canalised subterraneously, it runs beneath or by the side of the Horse Market, passes near the Salpêtrière, and enters the Seine close to the Orleans Railway terminus. It is between the Bièvre and the Rue Mouffetard that the buildings of the Gobelins manufactory, so famed for its tapestry and dyes, are situated. The superiority of the products of this factory is by some attributed to peculiar saline properties in the stream. Of these Rabelais speaks in thoroughly Rabelaisian style; and it was doubtless in consequence of the tinctorial qualities of the river that the brothers Gobelin established on its banks their famous manufactory. It is to these brothers that the name of the establishment is due. They were famous dyers in Normandy, or, as is also said, at Rheims, in Champagne; and, whatever their origin, they came to Paris in the middle of the fifteenth century, and took up their position on the banks of the river above mentioned. The water of the Bièvre, while helping the development of Gobelin dyes, is injured by them. Like all the streams which flow past dye works, the Bièvre is perpetually stained; and in the present day there are many scientific men who venture to affirm that the brilliant colours of the Gobelin tapestry are in no way due to water of any kind, but to artistic secrets belonging to the Gobelin brothers, and handed down by them to their descendants or successors. Under the reign of Louis XIV. the Gobelins was a sort of school of furniture, in which not only tapestry but cabinet work of every kind was cultivated. “Here,” writes a chronicler of the time, “two hundred and fifty master weavers produced the richest tapestries, after the works of our best painters. The school was extended in order to include sculptors in metal and goldsmiths.”