Children and women went to the Salpêtrière; at Bicêtre were placed men with no visible means of subsistence, "widowers," beggars, feeble or sturdy, and "young men worn out by debauchery." Before taking these last in hand, the doctors "were accustomed to order them a whipping."
This destiny of Bicêtre is pretty clear, and as hospital and asylum combined it should, under decent conduct, have played a useful part in the social economy of Paris. But the absolutism of that age had its own notions as to the proper functions of "hospitals," and the too familiar ordres du roi, and the not less familiar lettres de cachet (which Mirabeau had not yet come forward to denounce), were presently in hot competition with the charitable ordonnances of the doctors. Madness was a capital new excuse for vengeance in high places, and the cells set apart for cases of mental disease were quickly tenanted by "luckless prisoners whose wrong most usually consisted in being strictly right." Bicêtre, it must be admitted, did the thing conscientiously, and with the best grace in the world. Rational individuals were despatched there whom, according to the authors of Les Prisons de Paris, Bicêtre promptly transformed into imbeciles and raging maniacs.
Indeed the "philanthropists" and the criminologists of the early part of this century need not have taxed their imaginations for any scheme of cellular imprisonment. The system existed in diabolical perfection at Bicêtre. That much-abused "depôt" of indigent males, "widowers," and young rakes had an assortment of dark cells which realised à merveille the conditions of the vaunted programme of the penitentiary—isolation and the silence of the tomb. Buried in a cabanon or black hole of Bicêtre, the prisoner endured a fate of life in death; he was as one dead, who lived long, tête-à-tête with God and his conscience. If a human sound penetrated to him, it was the sobbing moan of some companion in woe.
There was a subterranean Bicêtre, of which at this day only the dark memory survives. For a dim idea of this, one has to stoop and peer in fancy into a far-reaching abyss or pit, partitioned into little tunnels: in each little tunnel a chain riven to the wall; at the end of the chain a man. Now there were men in these hellish tunnels who had been guilty of crimes, but far oftener they stifled slowly the lives or the intelligences, or both, of men who had done no crimes at all. Innocent or guilty, Bicêtre in the long run had one way with all its guests; and when the prisoners and their wits had definitely parted company, the governor of the prison effected a transfer with his colleague the administrator of the asylum. It was expeditious and simple, and no one asked questions or called for a report.
It is on record, nevertheless, that existence in underground Bicêtre was a degree less insupportable than a sojourn in the cabanons. Hear the strenuous greet of Latude, with its wonted vividness of detail:
"When the wet weather began, or when it thawed in the winter, water streamed from all parts of my cell. I was crippled with rheumatism, and the pains I had from it were such that I was sometimes whole weeks without getting up.... In cold weather it was even worse. The 'window' of the cell, protected by an iron grating, gave on the corridor, the wall of which was pierced exactly opposite at the height of ten feet. Through this aperture (garnished, like my own window, with iron bars), I received a little air and a glimmer of light, but the same aperture let in both snow and rain. I had neither fire nor artificial light, and the rags of the prison were my only clothing. I had to break with my wooden shoe the ice in my pail, and then to suck morsels of ice to quench my thirst. I stopped up the window, but the stench from the sewers and the tunnels came nigh to choke me; I was stung in the eyes, and had a loathsome savour in the mouth, and was horribly oppressed in the lungs. The eight and thirty months they kept me in that noisome cell, I endured the miseries of hunger, cold, and damp.... The scurvy that had attacked me showed itself in a lassitude which spread through all my members; I was presently unable either to sit or to rise. In ten days my legs and thighs were twice their proper size; my body was black; my teeth, loosened in their sockets, were no longer able to masticate. Three full days I fasted; they saw me dying, and cared not a jot. Neighbours in the prison did this and that to have me speak to them; I could not utter a word. At length they thought me dead, and called out that I should be removed. I was in sooth at death's gate when the surgeon looked in on me and had me fetched to the infirmary."[[15]]
[15]. Mémoires.
Whether Masers de Latude existed, or was but a creature projected on paper by some able enemy of La Pompadour, those famous and titillating Mémoires are excellent documents—all but unique of their kind—of the prisons of bygone France. If the question be of the Bastille, of the Dungeon of Vincennes, of Charenton, or of Bicêtre, these pungent pages, with a luxuriance and colour of realistic detail not so well nor so plausibly sustained by any other pen, are always pat and complete to the purpose. To compare great things with small, it is as unimportant to inquire who wrote Shakespeare as to seek to know who was the author of the Mémoires of Latude. It is necessary only to feel certain that the writer of this extraordinary volume was as intimately acquainted with the prisons he describes as Mirabeau was with the Dungeon of Vincennes, or Cardinal de Retz with the château de Nantes. His book (an epitome of what men might and could and did endure under the absolute monarchy, when his rights as an individual were the least secure of a citizen's possessions) is the main thing, and the sole thing; the name and identity of the author are not now, if they ever were, of the most infinitesimal consequence.
A fine sample of the work of Bicêtre, considered as a machine for the manufacture of lunatics, is offered in the person of that interesting, unhappy genius, Salomon de Caus. A Protestant Frenchman, he lived much in England and Germany, and at the age of twenty he was already a skilled architect, a painter of distinction, and an engineer with ideas in advance of his time. He was in the service of the Prince of Wales in 1612, and of the Elector Palatine, at Heidelberg, 1614-20. In 1623 he returned to live and work in France, dans sa patrie et pour sa patrie. He became engineer and architect to the King.