Up to this date, the principal political prisoners had enjoyed unrestrained communication with their friends outside, and General Dillon had private news twice a day from the tribunal. Two days after the bloody despatch of the Moderates, the prisoners of the Luxembourg were confined to their chambers. Evening receptions and parties of trictrac (in one's sober intervals) were suppressed; communication of every kind was forbidden; and the journals of the day, which had been freely circulated in the prison, were no longer admitted. The prisoners awaited "in silence and fear" the explanation of this rigorous _consigne_. It was the outcome of the first of those rumours of a "plot in the prison." A certain Lafflotte, a suspect of low origin, denounced General Dillon and one Simon (nicknamed in the prison Simon-Limon) as the author of a secret conspiracy. The revolutionary journals were full of the affair, but it was never very clearly explained, nor, for that matter, was any precise explanation ever offered of other prison plots so-called. There were pretended discoveries and expositions of plots in the Luxembourg, Saint-Lazare, Bicêtre, and the Carmes. That the prisoners of the Revolution in all these goals were eager to recover their liberty, is a statement which may pass without dispute; and it is no less natural to suppose that they would have seized upon any means that offered a reasonable hope of escape. But the truth seems to have been, and it is rather curious in the circumstances (though the presence of so many women and children would have multiplied the difficulties) that no concerted efforts to break prison were ever made by the suspects. Statements or rumours to the effect that they were planning a forcible release for themselves, and that, once out of prison, they intended to put Paris to the sword, should have been regarded as quite too silly for credence. Surely those poor aristocrats had given proof enough of their weakness! Of all the enemies of the Republic, they were the least capable of harming it. Dillon and Simon, nevertheless, were delivered over to Samson. The terror had begun for the prisoners of the Luxembourg. An unexpected calamity succeeded. Benoît, most humane and benevolent of concierges, was arrested. It was as if the father had been snatched from his family, and the suspects were inconsolable; they had lost their best friend within the prison. The tribunal acquitted him, but he did not return to his post. Benoît had two successors at the Luxembourg within a space of weeks, the second of whom was a man who would have been regarded with terror in any French prison at that epoch. This was Guiard, who had been fetched expressly from Lyons, where he had acquired a hideous celebrity as gaoler of the "Cellar of the Dead," the name bestowed upon the dungeon or black hole in which the victims of the _commission populaire_ passed their last hours between condemnation and execution.