[Illustration: COURTYARD OF PALAIS DE JUSTICE] If this somewhat dismal catalogue of crimes has not yet fully acquainted you with the state of society with which the "Palais de Justice" was first built to deal, the shortest glance at some of the sentences inflicted upon criminals who were not fortunate enough to bear the Fierte will be sufficient to show that the judges were almost as far behind our modern notions of propriety as were their prisoners. And it must be remembered that the criminals I have just mentioned are far from being the worst of those brought up before the Courts of Rouen; they are indeed those persons picked out by the assembled body of trained ecclesiastics in the Cathedral Chapterhouse as worthy to escape from the horrors which a sentence in the fifteenth or sixteenth century involved. What these sentences were may be gathered from such examples as the following. In 1506 a man surprised picking pockets in the Court-room was taken into the great open space before the entrance and soundly flogged upon the spot. Few men escaped so fortunately. Assassins nearly always suffered the loss of a limb before the final mercy of hanging. In the same year several women, convicted of false testimony and spreading scandals, were stripped naked and beaten with rods in all the squares of Rouen. A thief suffered the same punishment; his ear was then cut off, and he was banished from France with a rope round his neck. On the 19th of March a miserable prisoner was drowned in boiling water by a sentence of the Bailly confirmed in the higher courts. In 1507 a murderer was hanged in front of his victim's house. In 1513 a highway robber had his right arm cut off and placed on a column by the roadside near the scene of his theft, his head was then placed opposite to it, and the mutilated body hung upon a gibbet close by. Forgers had a fleur de lys branded on their foreheads. Sacrilege was punished by burning the criminal in chains over a slow fire. Some burglars, in the same year, had their hands cut off, their arms pulled out with red-hot pincers, and were finally beheaded and cut in pieces. The next year some wretched coiners were boiled alive. Infanticides were burnt. Other crimes were punished by searing the tongue with red-hot iron, or by breaking the prisoner alive upon the wheel, and leaving him to die without food or water. A parricide was condemned to this, with still more hideous tortures added, in 1557. In 1524 a criminal nearly escaped his sentence altogether because his jailor's daughter fell in love with him, and asked the Court to be allowed to marry him. The question of sanctuary came up very often, as may be imagined, and only by very slow degrees were the privileges of the holy places taken from them.