The headsman of Paris depended on the jurisdiction of the Châtelet. There was a small chamber in the prison called the _réduit aux gehennes_, where, when an execution was to take place, Monsieur de Paris received the Provost's warrant. In 1418, the headsman Capeluche was himself sentenced to be beheaded, and in the _réduit aux gehennes_ he put the new Monsieur de Paris through his facings with the axe. [Illustration: THE GREAT CHÂTELET.] ------- An account of the sentences decreed by the Châtelet would be little less than a history of punishment in France. The Châtelet gave reasons for its sentences, a practice not followed by the superior courts. Terrible were the pains and penalties decreed sometimes from beneath the Provost's dais. Torture wrung some avowal from the frothy lips of the accused, and then he was shrived and carried to the place of execution. The fierce canonical law lent its ingenuity in punishment to the judges of the Châtelet; but many of the penalties, such as hanging, beheading, burning, whipping, mutilation, and the pillory, are found on our own criminal registers of the same period. Coiners and forgers were boiled alive; there is an entry of twelve livres for the purchase of a cauldron in which to boil to death a _faux monnoyeur_. In 1390, a young female servant, convicted of stealing silver spoons from her master, was exposed in the pillory, suffered the loss of an ear, and was banished from Paris and its environs, "not to return under penalty of being buried alive." For the crime of marrying two wives, one Robert Bonneau was sentenced to be "hanged and strangled." Geoffroy Vallée was burned, in 1573, for the publication of a pamphlet entitled _The Heavenly Felicity of the Christians, or the Scourge of the Faith_; and, in 1645, a bookseller was sent to the galleys "for having printed a libel against the Government." Some of the old registers of the Châtelet examined by Desmaze showed entries of charges of pocket-picking and card-sharping at public processions, fairs, and spectacles. Little thieves defended themselves before the magistrates in the style familiar at Bow Street to-day,—a lad of fifteen charged with stealing handkerchiefs from pedestrians said he had "picked up one in the street." ------- The Châtelet, or rather the Little Châtelet, was the Provost's residence until the end of the sixteenth century. In 1564, the Provost was Hugues de Bourgueil, "distinguished for the possession of a terrific hump and a beautiful wife." One day Parliament consigned to the cells of the Little Châtelet a young Italian, accused of having set up in Paris a "gambling-house and fencing-saloon," where he corrupted the morals of the young nobility, "teaching them a thousand things unworthy of Christians and Frenchmen."