The Châtelet was "even more horrible and pestilential." The prison buildings, having no external opening, received air only from above; there was thus "no current, but only, as it were, a stationary column of air, which barely allowed the prisoners to breathe." This is far from a realisation of the ordonnance of 1670! Like the Fort-l'Évêque, the Châtelet had its horrors of the pit. Dulaure[[12]] has a curious passage on the subject. It appears, says one of the best of the historians of Paris, that prisoners were let down into a dungeon called la fosse, as a bucket is lowered into a well; here they sat with their feet in water, unable to stand or to lie, "and seldom lived beyond fifteen days." Another of these pits, known as fin d'aise (a name more bodeful than the Little Ease of old Newgate), was "full of filth and reptiles"; and Dulaure adds that the mere names of most of the Châtelet cells were "frightfully significant."
[12]. Histoire de Paris.
The Provost of Paris, rendering justice in the King's name, took cognisance of all ordinary causes, of capital crimes, and of petty offences. His officers arrested and imprisoned "all manner of criminals, vagabonds, and disturbers of the public peace." In the reign of Philippe-Auguste, he was charged with the duty of "bringing to justice the Jews" who at that epoch were "accused of seeking to convert Christians to Judaism, of taking usurious interest, and of profaning the sacred vessels which the churches gave them in pledge." After the King, said Pasquier, the Provost of Paris was the most powerful man in the kingdom.
The headsman of Paris depended on the jurisdiction of the Châtelet. There was a small chamber in the prison called the réduit aux gehennes, where, when an execution was to take place, Monsieur de Paris received the Provost's warrant. In 1418, the headsman Capeluche was himself sentenced to be beheaded, and in the réduit aux gehennes he put the new Monsieur de Paris through his facings with the axe.
THE GREAT CHÂTELET.
An account of the sentences decreed by the Châtelet would be little less than a history of punishment in France. The Châtelet gave reasons for its sentences, a practice not followed by the superior courts. Terrible were the pains and penalties decreed sometimes from beneath the Provost's dais. Torture wrung some avowal from the frothy lips of the accused, and then he was shrived and carried to the place of execution. The fierce canonical law lent its ingenuity in punishment to the judges of the Châtelet; but many of the penalties, such as hanging, beheading, burning, whipping, mutilation, and the pillory, are found on our own criminal registers of the same period. Coiners and forgers were boiled alive; there is an entry of twelve livres for the purchase of a cauldron in which to boil to death a faux monnoyeur. In 1390, a young female servant, convicted of stealing silver spoons from her master, was exposed in the pillory, suffered the loss of an ear, and was banished from Paris and its environs, "not to return under penalty of being buried alive." For the crime of marrying two wives, one Robert Bonneau was sentenced to be "hanged and strangled." Geoffroy Vallée was burned, in 1573, for the publication of a pamphlet entitled The Heavenly Felicity of the Christians, or the Scourge of the Faith; and, in 1645, a bookseller was sent to the galleys "for having printed a libel against the Government."
Some of the old registers of the Châtelet examined by Desmaze showed entries of charges of pocket-picking and card-sharping at public processions, fairs, and spectacles. Little thieves defended themselves before the magistrates in the style familiar at Bow Street to-day,—a lad of fifteen charged with stealing handkerchiefs from pedestrians said he had "picked up one in the street."