WARDERS’ ROOM AND ADJOINING COURTYARD, LA GRANDE ROQUETTE.
A list of the celebrated prisoners who have been confined at Sainte-Pélagie would be a formidable one. Sainte-Pélagie ceased to be a convent in 1790, and was transformed to a prison by order of the Convention. During this period many persons suspected of political intrigue were lodged in this prison previously to appearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Some distinguished offenders quitted Sainte-Pélagie for the scaffold: Madame Roland, for instance, the Comte de Laval Montmorency, and the Marquis de Pons. On the 3rd of August, 1793, in virtue of an edict for the arrest of the actors of the Théâtre de la Nation (afterwards Théâtre Français), Fleury, Lange, Petit, Suin, Joly, Devienne, Lachassaigne, Rancourt, and Mézerai were all incarcerated at Sainte-Pélagie. After the 9th Thermidor it received the victims of the counter-revolution, but ere long the prison was quite empty, and no further political prisoners found their way into it until the Empire, when, although they were by no means few, their numbers cannot be certainly ascertained, as the prison books were not faithfully kept. In 1811, at a time when the Emperor of Russia was in Paris, sixty-eight prisoners were liberated at his request. The Restoration, from the 15th of April, 1814, to the 29th of January, 1815, incarcerated 135 prisoners, nearly all of them old officers of the Imperial Guard. When the allies entered Paris for the second time the Russian Emperor, who the year before had procured the liberation of political prisoners detained by Bonaparte, made use of Sainte-Pélagie for the imprisonment of Russian deserters to the number of 192. Among the latter were several Poles guilty of having fought for their country in the French armies. These so-called deserters found themselves in the same gaol with the victims of the royalist reaction. Under Charles X. Sainte-Pélagie continued to be a state prison, and began to afford accommodation to journalists or authors who had been indiscreet with their pen. Between 1820 and 1830 many a celebrity lodged there, such as Béranger, Paul Louis Courier, Eugène de[{141}] Pradel, Dubois and Barthélemy—to name no others.
From 1830 to 1838 the constitutional monarchy made a sufficiently free use of Sainte-Pélagie. Then the Republic came and set the prisoners loose; though the insurrection of June repeopled Sainte-Pélagie, into which no less than a hundred offenders were summarily thrown.
On the 17th of December, 1851, the man who nineteen years afterwards was to finish his career at Sedan imprisoned thirty-four representatives of the people at Sainte-Pélagie. Nor did Napoleon III. stop here. In the space of a few days he lodged within the gaol some five hundred citizens whom he considered dangerous and capable of interfering with his projects.
It would be impossible within a limited space to adequately trace the subsequent history of Sainte-Pélagie. Before quitting this gaol, however, mention may be made of one or two of the most famous escapes which have been effected from it.
In July, 1835, a certain number of notorious prisoners conspired to dig, at the north-east angle of the building, a subterranean passage, which was at length carried into the garden of a house in the Rue Coupeau. This passage was eighteen metres long. Twenty-eight men thereby regained their liberty, this being the most daring escape which was ever planned and executed at Sainte-Pélagie. Two months afterwards the Comte de Richmond, calling himself the son of Louis XVI., contrived to get away with two of his fellow-prisoners, Duclerc and Rossignol. The count had somehow procured the key of the gridiron gate separating the ground floor of the east pavilion from a courtyard. Then with his hat on, with papers under his arm, and followed by his two companions, he was proceeding to one of the principal exits when a sentinel challenged him. Richmond declared himself the governor, and presented his two friends, one as the registrar, the other as his architect. The sentinel let them pass, and the three prisoners quietly proceeded on their way, ultimately escaping by a final gate, the key of which was in the count’s possession.
THE CHAPEL, LA GRANDE ROQUETTE.