Even the very imperfect sanitary science of the Middle Ages recognized this cemetery as a centre of infection, and innumerable complaints were addressed to the civic authorities from reign to reign. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, these protestations became more frequent, and various reports were made upon the subject. In 1737, the Parlement, by a decree dated July 9th, appointed a committee of experts, consisting of MM. Lemery and Hunault, physicians of the Hôtel-Dieu, and Geoffroy, _médécin chimiste_, all three of them members of the Académie des Sciences, to report "upon the grounds for the complaints which have been made for more than forty years, perhaps for more than a century, upon the infection caused by the Cimetière des Innocents." The report of this commission, dated May 22, 1738, gives some lively details concerning the manners and customs of the times that may be sought for in vain in other and less candid records. "Two causes of these evil odors may be observed,--the fecal matter which the inhabitants of the neighboring houses throw into the cemetery, partly in a trench that has been made along the sides of the houses that are on the Rue de la Ferronnerie, and the infection from the graves during the time that they are open and being refilled. The first cause is the most obvious; the second does not seem to exercise any injurious effect on the health of the neighborhood.... Do the exhalations from the cemetery augment in time of epidemics?... The experience of the past does not seem to furnish any grounds for these slight suspicions.... The soil is not exhausted, but it is less fit to bring about the dissolution of the dead bodies." Various remedies were proposed in the conclusion of the report: "Prevent the lodgers in the neighboring houses from throwing their water, urine, and filth into the cemetery, and, to this end, increase the number of _lunettes_ in the closets and close the windows up with gratings." This particularly concerned the row of houses along the Rue de la Ferronnerie, which formed one of the long sides of the cemetery; they were five stories in height, and had been reconstructed under Louis XIV, eighty years before. A typical detail of the period may be found in the fact that there were "lunettes" only on the first floor; the dwellers in the upper stories found it more convenient to throw their refuse out of the windows than to carry it down-stairs. In fact,--says MM. Firmin-Didot's editor, from whom we gather these details,--had the private individuals any right to complain when, in building the palace of Versailles, only one thing had been forgotten,--the closets? "And yet these were the good old times, and Monsieur _Purgon_ [of Molière's _Malade Imaginaire_] was then held in great honor!"