[8] The Hôtel des Invalides, residence of pensioned soldiers, &c. still a well-known building of Paris.—T.
[9] A château, four miles east of Paris, notable as the place where St. Louis, the royal lawgiver of France, dispensed justice. The donjon still exists, serving now as a soldier’s barracks.—T.
[10] One of the first prisons on the system of solitary confinement in cells erected in Paris. It dates from 1850.—T.
[11] The Abbé de Buquoy (1653-1740) owed his imprisonment originally to having been found in company with dealers in contraband salt when the gabelle, or salt-tax, compelled the French people to buy salt, whether they wanted it or not, at a price two thousand times its true value. He was a man of very eccentric views, one of which was that woman was man’s chief evil, and that was why, when the patriarch Job was stripped of children, flocks, herds, &c., his wife was left to him!—T.
[12] The madhouse, eight miles east of Paris.—T.
[13] A château originally outside Paris, now included in the city itself, once used as a hospital and jail, now a hospital for aged and indigent poor and for lunatics. The first experiments with the guillotine were tried there.—T.
[14] See infra, p. 83.
[15] The title rôle in a comedy by Henri Mounier, entitled Grandeur et décadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme (1852). He is a writing-master, very vain, given (like Mr. Micawber) to tall talk and long-winded periods. He has become typical of “much cry and little wool.” As an officer of the National Guard he says, “This sabre constitutes the finest day in my life! I accept it, and if ever I find myself at the head of your phalanxes, I shall know how to use it in defence of our institutions—and, if need arise, to fight for them!”—T.
[16] In the early days of the Revolution, Paris was divided into sections or wards, and as the pike had played a great part in the recent disturbances, one of the wards was known as the “Pike” section.—T.
[17] A disciple of the Marquis de Sade (see p. 35), a notorious debauchee, whose book Justine was a disgusting mixture of brutality and obscenity.—T.