The commissioners found within the black walls of _ce hideux Bicêtre_ a population of close upon three thousand creatures, including "paupers, children, paralytics, imbeciles and lunatics." The administrative staff of all degrees numbered just three hundred. The governor, knowing his inferno, was not too willing to accord a free pass to the explorers, and Mirabeau and his colleagues had to give him a taste of their authority before he could be induced to slip the bolts of subterranean cells, whose inmates "had been expiating twenty years the double crime of poverty and courage," against whom no decree had been pronounced but that of a _lettre de cachet_, or who had been involved, like the Prévôt de Beaumont, in the crime of exposing some plot against the people's welfare. Children were found in these cells chained to criminals and idiots. ------- In April, 1792, Bicêtre gave admission to another set of commissioners. This second was a visit of some mystery, not greatly noised, and under cover of the night. It was not now a question of diving into moist and sunless caverns for living proofs (in fetters and stinking rags) of the hidden abuses of regal justice. The new commissioners came, quietly and almost by stealth, to make the first official trial of the Guillotine. The invention of Dr. Guillotin (touching which he had first addressed the Constituent Assembly in December, 1789: "With this machine of mine, gentlemen, I shall shave off your heads in a twinkling, and you will not feel the slightest pain") does not date in France as an instrument of capital punishment until 1792; but under other names, and with other accessories, Scotland, Germany, and Italy had known a similar contrivance in the sixteenth century. In Paris, where sooner or later everything finishes with a couplet, the newspapers and broadsheets, not long after that midnight _essai_ at Bicêtre, began to overflow gaily enough with topical songs (_couplets de circonstance_) in praise of the Doctor and his "razor." Two fragmentary samples will serve:— Air—"Quand la Mer Rouge apparut." "C'est un coup que l'on reçoit Avant qu'on s'en doute; A peine on s'en aperçoit, Car on n'y voit goutte. Un certain ressort caché, Tout à coup étant laché, Fait tomber, ber, ber, Fait sauter, ter, ter, Fait tomber, Fait sauter, Fait voler la tête ... C'est bien plus honnête." II. "Sur l'inimitable machine du Mèdecin Guillotin, propere à couper les têtes, et dite de son nom Guillotine." Air—"Du Menuet d'Exaudet."