He consented one day to the visit of a person whose indiscreet candour was passing cruel. This was the dramatist Legrand who, with his Cartouche comedy in preparation, sought the "local colour" of the condemned cell. Cartouche had the vanity which characterises the great criminal, and willingly allowed himself to be "interviewed"; he answered all Legrand's questions, and then asked one himself: "When is your piece to be represented?" "On the day of your execution, my dear Monsieur Cartouche." "Ah, indeed! Then you had better interview the executioner also; he will come in at the climax, you see."
Having entertained the playwright with his wit, the murderer next essayed the part of patriot, and said to his Jesuit confessor, Guignard, in speaking of the assassination of Henri IV.:
"All the crimes that I have ever committed were the merest peccadilloes (de légères peccadilles) in comparison with those which your Order is stained with. Is there any crime more enormous than to take the life of your King, and such a King as that was? The noblest prince in the universe, the glory of France, the father of his country! I tell you that if a man whom I were pursuing had taken refuge at the foot of the statue of Henri IV., I should not have dared to kill him."
The condition of the Conciergerie at this date was at all events better than it had been two or three centuries earlier. No Mediæval prisons were fit to live in. Sanitation was a science as yet undreamed of in Europe, and even had there been such a science, it is improbable that the inmates of prisons would have tasted its advantages. In the Middle Ages, nothing was more remote from the official mind, from the minds of all judges, magistrates, governors, gaolers, and concierges, than the notion that prisoners should live in wholesome and decent surroundings. Two very definite ideas the Middle Ages had about prisons, and only two: the first was, that they should be impregnable, and the second was, that they should be "gey ill" to live in; and their one idea regarding the lot of all prisoners and captives was, that it should be beyond every other lot wretched and unendurable.
In the age we live in, civilised governments setting about the building of a new prison do not say to their architects, "You must build a fortress which prisoners cannot break, and you must put into it a certain quantity of conical cells below the level of the ground, in which prisoners may be suffocated within a given number of days," but, "You must build a prison of sufficient strength; and in planning your cells you must secure for every prisoner an ample provision of space, air, and light." Those are the supreme differences between ancient and modern gaols. Prison in the old days was of all places the least healthy to live in; nowadays, it is often the most healthy. Good control and strict surveillance confer security upon prisons which are not built as fortresses; but nothing gives such immense distinction to the new system, by contrast with all the earlier ones, as the elaborate and minute regard of everything which may make for the physical well-being of the prisoners.
Then comes the moral question; and from the standpoint of morals the situation tells even more in favour of the modern system. Imprisonment should never be cruel; but, when the prisoner is fairly tried and justly sentenced, it should always be both irksome and disgraceful. The disgrace of prison, however, depends upon the absolute impartiality of the tribunal and the soundness of public sentiment. Nobody is disgraced by being sent into prison in a society in which arrest is arbitrary, and in which arraignment at the bar is not followed by an honest examination of the facts. Princes of the blood, nobles, ministers, and judges and magistrates themselves were equally liable with the commonest offenders against the common law to be spirited into prison, and left there, without accusation and without trial, during many centuries of French history. Most tribunals were corrupt, and during many ages all were at the mercy of the Crown. A Daniel on the bench was rare, and in great danger of being hanged; and public sentiment was not yet articulate.
In such insecurity of justice, imprisonment could carry with it no social stigma, as it carries inevitably in these days. But, where there is no shame in imprisonment, there is no question of the reform of the prisoner, and this—one of the main endeavours of modern penal systems—was not only quite ignored by the old régime, but was an aspect of the matter to which it was entirely indifferent, and which had evidently no place whatever in its conceptions. In the progress of civilisation, no institution has been so completely transformed as the prison. It was an instrument of vengeance; it is seeking, not at present too successfully, to be an instrument of grace.
Prisons neglected or encumbered with filth are natural hotbeds of disease, and epidemic sicknesses were frequent. In 1548, the plague broke out in the Conciergerie, and then for the first time an infirmary was established in the prison, though I cannot find that it made greatly for the comfort of the sick. Doctor's work was grudgingly and carelessly done in the prisons of those days, and there was no great disposition to hinder the sick from yielding up the ghost; the bed or the share of a bed allotted to the patient was always wanted. The Conciergerie was devastated by fire in 1776, and this visitation resulted in a royal command to rehabilitate the whole interior of the prison. In this attempt to realise the generous thought of his minister Turgot, Louis XVI. did not imagine, we may be sure, that he was preparing a last lodging for Marie Antoinette!
Here then we stand on the threshold of the Conciergerie of the Revolution—the ante-chamber of the scaffold, in the fit words of Fouquier-Tinville.
It was at four o'clock on the morning of the 14th of October, 1793, at the close of the sitting of the revolutionary tribunal, that the dethroned and widowed Queen was brought to the Conciergerie. Poor, abandoned, outraged Queen, they thrust her into one of their common cells, and gave her for attendant a galley-slave named Barasin. This must have been a brave, good fellow, with a loyal heart under his galley-slave's vest, for at the risk of his life he waited devoutly and devotedly on the queenly woman, a queen no longer, who could in nothing reward his devotion. One should name also the concierge Richard, who shewed himself not less a man in his care of the "beautiful high-born," and who for his humanity to her was stripped of all his goods.