This destiny of Bicêtre is pretty clear, and as hospital and asylum combined it should, under decent conduct, have played a useful part in the social economy of Paris. But the absolutism of that age had its own notions as to the proper functions of "hospitals," and the too familiar _ordres du roi_, and the not less familiar _lettres de cachet_ (which Mirabeau had not yet come forward to denounce), were presently in hot competition with the charitable _ordonnances_ of the doctors. Madness was a capital new excuse for vengeance in high places, and the cells set apart for cases of mental disease were quickly tenanted by "luckless prisoners whose wrong most usually consisted in being strictly right." Bicêtre, it must be admitted, did the thing conscientiously, and with the best grace in the world. Rational individuals were despatched there whom, according to the authors of _Les Prisons de Paris_, Bicêtre promptly transformed into imbeciles and raging maniacs. Indeed the "philanthropists" and the criminologists of the early part of this century need not have taxed their imaginations for any scheme of cellular imprisonment. The system existed in diabolical perfection at Bicêtre. That much-abused "depôt" of indigent males, "widowers," and young rakes had an assortment of dark cells which realised _à merveille_ the conditions of the vaunted programme of the penitentiary—isolation and the silence of the tomb. Buried in a _cabanon_ or black hole of Bicêtre, the prisoner endured a fate of life in death; he was as one dead, who lived long, _tête-à-tête with God and his conscience_. If a human sound penetrated to him, it was the sobbing moan of some companion in woe. There was a subterranean Bicêtre, of which at this day only the dark memory survives. For a dim idea of this, one has to stoop and peer in fancy into a far-reaching abyss or pit, partitioned into little tunnels: in each little tunnel a chain riven to the wall; at the end of the chain a man. Now there were men in these hellish tunnels who had been guilty of crimes, but far oftener they stifled slowly the lives or the intelligences, or both, of men who had done no crimes at all. Innocent or guilty, Bicêtre in the long run had one way with all its guests; and when the prisoners and their wits had definitely parted company, the governor of the prison effected a transfer with his colleague the administrator of the asylum. It was expeditious and simple, and no one asked questions or called for a report. It is on record, nevertheless, that existence in underground Bicêtre was a degree less insupportable than a sojourn in the _cabanons_. Hear the strenuous greet of Latude, with its wonted vividness of detail: