This was, above all others, the aristocratic prison of the Revolution. It was fitly chosen for the reception of that brilliant contingent of nobles, just ready to fly the country, whom the famous Law of the Suspects had routed from their hôtels in Paris. To confine them in the Luxembourg, converting that ancient and renowned palace into a dungeon of aristocrats, was in itself an apt stroke of vengeance on the part of the people. Few indeed of the historic dwellings of Paris could have put them more forcibly in mind of the tyrannies of kings and regents, of the splendid and licentious fêtes and orgies of princes and princesses of the blood, the cost of which was wrung from the lean pockets of those who were told to eat cake when there was no bread in the cupboard! Had not Marie de Médicis passed here, and Gaston de France, and Duchesse de Montpensier, and Elizabeth d'Orléans, who gave it to Louis XIV., and Louis XVI., who gave it, in 1779, to Monsieur his brother, who after the days of storm and terror was to reign, not too satisfactorily, as Louis XVIII.? Was it not here that Duchesse de Berri, in the early years of the eighteenth century, held those surprising revels the details of which may be read only in secret and unpublished memoirs? Sedate historians merely hint at them.[20] And, palace though it was, the revolutionary judges might have found ready to their hands at the Luxembourg, bars, bolts, fetters and dungeons enow. For that "symbolic hierarchy" of palace, cloister, and prison, proper to all princely and noble dwellings of the old régime, had existed at the Luxembourg; and during long years the penal justice of priest and monk had passed that way. Footnote 20: "Dans son Palais-Royal, au Palais de Luxembourg où demeurait la duchesse de B——, se célébraient le plus ordinairement ces parties de débauche. L'on y voyait les acteurs figurer quelquefois avec un costume qui consistait à n'en point avoir; et les princes, les princesses, se livrer sans pudeur aux désordres les plus dégoûtans."—Dulaure, vol. viii., p. 187. This was the place to which the noble and courtly suspects were conveyed by hundreds in August, 1793. One can imagine, though but very faintly, with what feelings they resigned themselves into the hands of concierge Benoît. Their King had been decapitated; their Queen, a prisoner elsewhere, was expecting her husband's fate. They knew how little their sovereign's life had weighed in the people's balance; was it likely that theirs would be of greater weight? Judgment and death disquieted them.