broken only by the savage use of the warder's bâtons—all this was the sport of the well-dressed crowd of spectators. As far as the outskirts of Paris, the convicts were carried in _chars-à-bancs_, an armed escort on either side; and when the prison doors were thrown open to let them out, the whole canaille of the town was waiting to receive them with yells of derision, to which the _forçats_ responded with all the oaths they had. This was one of the most popular spectacles of Paris until the middle of the present century. An essential sordidness is the character most persistent in the history of Bicêtre—a dull squalor, with perpetual crises of unromantic agony. There is no glamour upon Bicêtre; no silken gown with a domino above it rustles softly by lantern-light through those grimy wickets. It is not here that any gallant prisoner of state comes, bribing the governor to keep his table furnished with the best, receiving his love-letters in baskets of fruit, giving his wine-parties of an evening. In the records of Vincennes and the Bastille the novelist will always feel himself at home, but Bicêtre has daunted him. It is poor Jean Valjean, of _Les Misérables_, squatting "in the north corner of the courtyard," choked with tears, "while the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted with heavy hammer-blows." This is the solitary figure of interest which Bicêtre has given to fiction. If a shadowy figure may be added, it is from the same phantasmagoric gallery of Victor Hugo. Bicêtre was the prison of the nameless faint-heart who weeps and moans through the incredible pages of _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné_. Then, and until 1836, Bicêtre was the last stage but one (_l'avant-dernière étape_) on the road to the guillotine. The last was the Conciergerie, close to the Place de Grève. The shadow-murderer of _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné_—for there is no real stuff of murder in him, and he is the feeblest and least sympathetic puppet of fiction—is useful only as bringing into relief the old, disused, and forgotten _cachot du Condamné_, or condemned cell, of Bicêtre. It was a den eight feet square; rough stone walls, moist and sweating, like the flags which made the flooring; the only "window" a grating in the iron door; a truss of straw on a stone couch in a recess; and an arched and blackened ceiling, wreathed with cobwebs. Starting out of sleep one night, Hugo's condemned man lifts his lamp and sees spectral writings, figures and arabesques in crayons, blood and charcoal dancing over the walls of the cell—the "visitors' book" of generations of _Condamnés à mort_ who have preceded him. Some had blazoned their names in full, with grotesque embellishments of the capital letter and a motto underneath breathing their last defiance to the world; and in one corner, "traced in white outline, a frightful image, the figure of the scaffold, which, at the moment that I write, may be rearing its timbers for me! The lamp all but fell from my hands."