The very name of Bicêtre—dungeon, madhouse, and _cloaca_ of obscene infamies—became of dreadful import; not the Conciergerie, the Châtelet, Fort-l'Évêque, Vincennes, nor the Bastille itself inspired the common people and the bourgeoisie with such detestation and panic fear. The general imagination, out-vieing rumour, peopled it with imps, evil genii, sorcerers, and shapeless monsters compounded of men and beasts. Mediæval Paris, at a loss for the origins of things, ascribed them to the Fairies, the Devil, or Julius Cæsar. It was said that the Devil alighted in Paris one night, and brought in chains to the "plateau de Bicêtre" a pauper, a madman, and a prisoner, with which three unfortunates he set agoing the prison on the one side and the asylum on the other, to minister to the _menus plaisirs_ of the denizens of hell. Such grim renown as this was not easily surpassed; but at the end of Louis XIV.'s reign the common legend went a step farther, and said that the Devil had now disowned Bicêtre! Rhymes sincere or satirical gave utterance to the terror and abhorrence of the vulgar mind. ------- Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, up to the time of the Revolution, say MM. Alhoy and Lurine,[16] Bicêtre continued a treatment which in all respects is not easily paralleled: the helot's lot and labour for pauperism; the rod and worse for sickness of body and of mind; the dagger or the ditch, upon occasion, for mere human misfortune. Till the first grey glimmer of the dawn of prison reform, in the days of Louis XVI, Bicêtre offered to "mere prisoners" the "sanctuary of a lion's den," and lent boldly to king, minister, nobles, clergy, police, and all the powers that were, the cells set apart for the mad as convenient places for stifling the wits and consciences of the sane. Footnote 16: _Les Prisons de Paris._ ------- In 1789, Paris had thirty-two State prisons. Four years later, the Terror itself was content with twenty-eight. One of the earliest acts of that vexed body, the National Assembly, was to appoint a commission of four of its members to the decent duty of visiting the prisons. The commissioners chosen were Fréteau, Barrière, De Castellane, and Mirabeau. Count Mirabeau at least—whose hot vagaries and the undying spite of his father had passed him through the hands of nearly every gaoler in France—had qualifications enough for the task!