Théroigne was some beautiful village girl when the echo first reached her of the tocsin of the Revolution. She thought a woman was wanted there, and trudged hot-foot to Paris, perhaps through the self-same quiet lanes that saw the pilgrimage of Charlotte Corday. In Paris she took (for reasons of her own, one must suppose) the calling of "unfortunate female"—the euphemism will be remembered as Carlyle's—and dubbed herself the people's Aspasia—"l'Aspasie du peuple." In "tunic blue," over a "red petticoat," crossed with a tricolour scarf and crowned with the Phrygian cap, she roamed the streets, "_criant_, _jurant_, _blasphémant_," to the tune of the drum of rebellion. One day the women of the town, in a rage of fear or jealousy, fell upon her, stripped her, and beat her through the streets. She went mad, and in the first years of this century she was still an inmate of Bicêtre. When the "women's side" of Bicêtre was closed, in 1803, Théroigne was transferred to the Salpêtrière, where she died. ------- During the hundred years (1748-1852) of the prisons of the Bagnes—those convict establishments at Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort, which took the place of the galleys, and which in their turn gave way to the modern system of transportation,—it was from Bicêtre that the chained cohorts of the _forçats_ were despatched on their weary march through France. The ceremony of the _ferrement_, or putting in irons for the journey, was one of the sights of Paris for those who could gain admission to the great courtyard of the prison. At daybreak of the morning appointed for the start, the long chains and collars of steel were laid out in the yard, and the prison smiths attended with their mallets and portable anvils; the convicts, for whom these preparations were afoot, keeping up a terrific din behind their grated windows. When all was ready for them, they were tumbled out by batches and placed in rows along the wall. Every man had to strip to the skin, let the weather be what it might, and a sort of smock of coarse calico was tossed to him from a pile in the middle of the yard; he did not dress until the toilet of the collar was finished. This, at the rough hands of the smith and his aids, was a sufficiently painful process. The convicts were called up in alphabetical order, and to the neck of each man a heavy collar was adjusted, the triangular bolt of which was hammered to by blows of a wooden mallet. To the padlock was attached a chain which, descending to the prisoner's waistbelt, was taken up thence and riveted to the next man's collar, and in this way some two hundred _forçats_ were tethered like cattle in what was called the _chaine volante_. The satyr-like humours of the gang, singing and capering on the cobbles, shouting to the echo the name of some criminal hero as he stepped out to receive his collar, and sometimes joining hands in a frenzied dance, which was