A missive of that colour, from a Marion Delorme to a Richelieu, was the request polite for a _lettre de cachet_. Salomon de Caus was invited to call upon the Cardinal. Behind his jealous passion for his mistress, Salomon still cherished his passion for science, and he went hot-foot to Richelieu with his hundred schemes for changing the face of the world, with steam as the motive power. It must have been a curious interview. At the end, Richelieu summoned the captain of his guard. "Take this man away." "Where, your Eminence?" "To what place are we sending our lunatics just now?" "To Bicêtre, your Eminence." "Just so! Ask admission for Monsieur at Bicêtre." So, from the meridian of his glory, Salomon de Caus hastened to his setting, and at this point he vanishes from history. Legend, not altogether legendary, shows him once again. Some eighteen months or two years after he had been carried, "gagged and handcuffed," to Bicêtre, it fell to Marion Delorme (in the absence of her new lover Cinq-Mars) to do the honours of Paris for the Marquis of Worcester. The marquis took a fancy to visit Bicêtre, which had even then an unrighteous celebrity from one end of Europe to the other. As they strolled through the _quartier des fous_ a creature made a spring at the bars of his cell. "Marion—look, Marion! It is I! It is Salomon! I love you! Listen: I have made a discovery which will bring millions and millions to France! Let me out for God's sake! I will give you the moon and all the stars to set me free, Marion!" "Do you know this man?" said Lord Worcester. "I am not at home in bedlam," said Marion, who on principle allowed no corner to her conscience. "What is the discovery he talks of?" asked Lord Worcester of a warder. "He calls it steam, milord. They've all discovered something, milord." Lord Worcester went back to Bicêtre the next morning and was closeted for an hour with the madman. At Marion Delorme's in the afternoon he said: "In England we should not have put that man into a madhouse. Your Bicêtre is not the most useful place. Who invented those cells? They have wasted to madness as fine a genius as the age has known." Salamon de Caus died in Bicêtre in 1626. ------- Earlier than this, Bicêtre the asylum shared the evil renown of Bicêtre the prison. To prisoners and patients alike popular rumour assigned an equal fate. The first, it was said, were assassinated, the second were "disposed of." Now and again the warders and attendants amused themselves by organising a pitched battle between the "mad side" and the "prison side"; the wounded were easily transferred to the infirmary, the dead were as easily packed into the trench beneath the walls.