Eighteenth-century documents concerning these houses are still to be read, and some of them have a curiously modern flavour. There are complaints of householders, and the reports of the police agents whom these complaints set in motion. A certain, M. Ledure, writing under date of the 23d of July, 1785, asks the attention of the police to an unlicensed house of ill-fame adjoining his own, and details his annoyances with a freedom of expression which debars translation. The burden of his protest is, that being a gentleman with a family of daughters, and the holder of a position which obliges him to entertain "des personnes de distinction," his existence is rendered intolerable by the worse than light behaviour of the "females over the way." He can scarcely even get into his own house of an evening. "To satisfy M. Ledure," runs the police report, "we began by visiting, in Beaubourg Street, the house in which the women complained of were lodging. We arrested there, Marguerite Lefèbvre, the other women having taken themselves off.... In response to the complaints of the residents in Rohan Street, against the women living at No. 63, we forced an entry there, and arrested the woman Rochelet, and the two _filles d'amour_ kept by her. We fetched them out, to take them to Saint-Martin"—a house of detention, from which the women were transferred to the Salpêtrière,—"but, although our guard was composed of five men with fixed bayonets, we were so set upon by the man Rochelet, a hairdresser, and twenty blackguards with him, that we had to let the women go." The origin of the prison of Saint-Martin, abolished by Louis XVI., is quite unknown. It was a small confined place with a villainous reputation. Regarded by the authorities as a temporary lodging for both classes of public women, a sort of fore-chamber of the Salpêtrière, no attempt was ever made to render it decently habitable. The dark and dirty cells were absolutely destitute of furniture; a truss of straw, thrown from time to time on the stone floor, was both bed and bedding. The food was strictly in keeping; all that the prison gave was a loaf of black bread a day, and whilst prisoners who could afford it were allowed to do a little catering for themselves, the rest soaked their black bread in the soup provided by charitable societies.