In the Luxembourg as in the other prisons at this epoch there were miserable creatures, also under lock and key, who made a kind of trade of denouncing their fellows. The Luxembourg had seven of these spies, who assisted in preparing the lists, "embellishing" them, as they said, with details which they had scraped together or invented in the prison. These wretches enjoyed and boasted of the terror which they inspired; and the chief of them, Boyaval (a tailor by trade, who had served in and deserted from the Austrian army), used to say that anyone who looked askance at him in the Luxembourg might count on spending the next night in the Conciergerie! Scarcely a suspect whom Boyaval denounced escaped the guillotine, and one night he scandalised the prison by offering love to a young widow of a day, whose husband he had sacrificed. The husband was an artist, who had painted portraits in the Luxembourg of nobles who had reason to suppose that they would leave their families no other legacy. He was accused of assembling the nobles in his room, and plotting with them against the Republic. As lightly as this, during the Terror, were lives devoted to Samson, in every prison in Paris. The "plots" were not credible, and it is impossible at this date to suppose that they were ever credited; but Paris was still obedient to the word of the Danton whom it had guillotined, that "one must strike terror into the aristocrats"; and these "prison plots" served to fill the tumbrils to the last. An epidemic of sickness came to crown the sufferings of the dwindling population of the Luxembourg. They were reduced almost to the last extremity of despair. They had no news from without, except the nightly list of the proscribed, and the nightly journal, with its monotonous tale of executions. Between morning and evening, there was no other event, except the swift good-bye at night to the friends or relatives whose names were mumbled out by Verney. A silence almost unbroken had settled on the prison; parties of ghosts assembled at dinner, and whispered together in the common-room until bedtime. Their misery culminated in the epidemic of sickness. The rations had been cut down to one meal a day, and Guiard was the caterer. The wasted prisoners sent back their rotten meat to the kitchen, and lived on bread and thin soup. Half the prison fell ill; poisoned or underfed. Doctor's aid could be had only on a warrant from the police, and applications remained a week or a fortnight at the bureau. Samson had a rival in diseased or exhausted nature; and Guiard's requiem for the dead was an unvarying formula: "Peste! there's another lost to the guillotine!"