At the period arrived at, it was no longer merely a question of irregularities to be repressed, but of the public health to be preserved; and in the new regulations the hospital was named along with the prison. From this time forward, a brief interval under the Consulate excepted, it does not seem to have been questioned in France that women who chose to do so, or who might be driven to do so, were entitled under specified conditions to enter on the calling of _femme publique_. What steps must be taken to secure the dubious privileges of the order, and what dissuasions were employed by the magistrate who dispensed them, will presently be shewn. Up to the reign of Louis XIV., the monarch responsible for the provisions of 1684, there was no special prison for the women of this class, who, when under lock and key, were herded with female offenders of all degrees. The first special prison for the _femmes publiques_ was the Salpêtrière, built by Louis XIV., under the designation of "Hospital General." At this era, the women arrested were not put upon their trial, nor was any formal judgment pronounced against them. They were under the sole jurisdiction of the newly appointed lieutenant of police, who dispatched them to prison on the King's warrant, which took the form of a _lettre de cachet_. Curious, that the _fille de joie_ should be placed in this respect on a footing of equality with the prince of the blood, the nobleman, and the prelate! At about the end of the eighteenth century (say, towards 1770), the police authorities distinguished two classes of women of the town, the _femmes publiques_, or authorised women, and a numerous and unlicenced class, of more dissolute habits, officially stigmatised as _débauchées_. To strengthen the line of demarcation between the two classes, the _femmes publiques_, or the majority of them, were inscribed on the police registers (paying a fee of twenty sous), and being to a certain extent _protégées_ of the State, the treatment accorded to them was generally of a more lenient character. The terms of their imprisonment (for soliciting in the streets or public places, for brawling and rioting, for signalling from their windows, etc.,) were entirely at the discretion of the lieutenant of police; but it would appear that they were frequently released, at the request or on the bond of a parent, sister, or other relative, after a brief confinement. The houses in which the members of the unlicenced class lived together were continually raided by the police, who descended upon them after dark, "_parce que les femmes en étaient arrivées à ce degré de scandale, qu'on ne pouvait plus les arrêter pendant le jour, à cause du désordre qu'elles causaient, et des collisions qu'excitaient leurs amants et autres adhérents_."