Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

Let us now take a glance at the gardens in which the palace stands. With the parks and gardens of London they will scarcely bear comparison; though a French descriptive writer declares that they combine, with the ordinary attractions of the garden, the beauty of the park and even, in certain solitary corners, the wildness of the forest.

The Luxemburg Gardens are, in any case, adorned by two beautiful fountains. They are enlivened, too, every afternoon by the music of a military band; and they enclose at one end a most interesting museum, the Musée de Minéralogie, forming part of the National School of Mines.

The admirable picture gallery in the Luxemburg Palace is occupied by the works of living masters alone. It is not until an artist is dead that his paintings are held worthy of being transported to that national Walhalla of pictorial heroes, the Louvre.[{131}]

CHAPTER XX.
THE PRISONS OF PARIS.

La Santé—La Roquette—The Conciergerie—The Mazas—Sainte-Pélagie—Saint-Lazare—Prison Regulations.

THE Luxemburg, though only from time to time (and usually at intervals of several years) transformed into a High Court of Justice, has a prison permanently attached to it. The apartments reserved for prisoners of state have, however, nothing in common with the ordinary prisons of Paris. These abound on both sides of the Seine. Not far from the end of the Luxemburg Gardens, and close to the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, is the prison of La Santé—built in 1865 at a cost of six millions of francs, for the reception of twelve thousand prisoners: about a ninth part of the total population of the Paris prisons. But before leaving the Boulevard Saint-Jacques and the Place Saint-Jacques, to which the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques directly leads, a word must be said about the open space formerly closed by the ancient Barrière Saint-Jacques. During twenty years, from 1832 to 1851, the Place Saint-Jacques was the scene of public executions. Here, while the scaffold was being erected, the innumerable taverns of the barrier were crowded with revellers, who, after supping all night, remained at the windows of the rooms they had hired at great cost, in order early the next morning to see the guillotine at work. Similar scenes took place in our own capital when murderers were publicly hanged outside Newgate; scenes which have been described in admirable prose and in perfect verse by Thackeray and by Ingoldsby.

The prisons of Paris have played an important part in history, though the most historical of them no longer exist. With the exception of Saint-Lazare and the Conciergerie, which still preserve some vestiges of the past, the prisons that figure so largely in the annals of France have vanished.

Paris has been described by a well-known French writer as a “city of destruction.” Edifices fraught with the memories of ages fall, he complains, under the hand of the municipal destroyer like castles built of cards. If there is a house which dates back even to the seventeenth century it has to be looked for at the end of some court or alley, which has escaped the pickaxe and hammer by sheer insignificance. Even as regards churches, there are few which are more than three or four generations old. When we have counted Notre Dame, the two churches of Saint-Germain, the Sainte-Chapelle, and one or two temples of lesser importance, we have to leap to Saint-Eustache and Saint-Sulpice, and thence take a big bound to the Madeleine. This eternal demolition by architects who wish to outdo their predecessors is a matter of keen lament to archæologists and to writers like M. Jules Simon, who declares that the only pickaxe he can forgive is the one that overthrew the Bastille, and that he forgives it because it, at the same time, “overthrew everything else.”

Of all the historical prisons of Paris one only can be said to exist to-day—the Conciergerie. It preserves an air of the past by virtue of a few antiquities which still belong to it: such as the two big towers on the quay, the large walls inside, the large table in the courtyard, at which Saint Louis is reported to have fed the poor, the room in which Damiens was confined, and the dungeon of Marie Antoinette.

In 1830 Paris could boast—or perhaps one should say blush for—twenty civil prisons. Not a few of these consisted of old convents or other buildings converted into state gaols; and it may well be imagined that such places were neither salubrious nor secure. The prisoners were not even divided into categories. In the present day eight or nine prisons suffice for a much larger number of convicts, and admit of a regular classification.