During the hundred years (1748-1852) of the prisons of the Bagnes—those convict establishments at Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort, which took the place of the galleys, and which in their turn gave way to the modern system of transportation,—it was from Bicêtre that the chained cohorts of the forçats were despatched on their weary march through France. The ceremony of the ferrement, or putting in irons for the journey, was one of the sights of Paris for those who could gain admission to the great courtyard of the prison. At daybreak of the morning appointed for the start, the long chains and collars of steel were laid out in the yard, and the prison smiths attended with their mallets and portable anvils; the convicts, for whom these preparations were afoot, keeping up a terrific din behind their grated windows. When all was ready for them, they were tumbled out by batches and placed in rows along the wall. Every man had to strip to the skin, let the weather be what it might, and a sort of smock of coarse calico was tossed to him from a pile in the middle of the yard; he did not dress until the toilet of the collar was finished. This, at the rough hands of the smith and his aids, was a sufficiently painful process. The convicts were called up in alphabetical order, and to the neck of each man a heavy collar was adjusted, the triangular bolt of which was hammered to by blows of a wooden mallet. To the padlock was attached a chain which, descending to the prisoner's waistbelt, was taken up thence and riveted to the next man's collar, and in this way some two hundred forçats were tethered like cattle in what was called the chaine volante. The satyr-like humours of the gang, singing and capering on the cobbles, shouting to the echo the name of some criminal hero as he stepped out to receive his collar, and sometimes joining hands in a frenzied dance, which was broken only by the savage use of the warder's bâtons—all this was the sport of the well-dressed crowd of spectators.
As far as the outskirts of Paris, the convicts were carried in chars-à-bancs, an armed escort on either side; and when the prison doors were thrown open to let them out, the whole canaille of the town was waiting to receive them with yells of derision, to which the forçats responded with all the oaths they had. This was one of the most popular spectacles of Paris until the middle of the present century.
An essential sordidness is the character most persistent in the history of Bicêtre—a dull squalor, with perpetual crises of unromantic agony. There is no glamour upon Bicêtre; no silken gown with a domino above it rustles softly by lantern-light through those grimy wickets. It is not here that any gallant prisoner of state comes, bribing the governor to keep his table furnished with the best, receiving his love-letters in baskets of fruit, giving his wine-parties of an evening. In the records of Vincennes and the Bastille the novelist will always feel himself at home, but Bicêtre has daunted him. It is poor Jean Valjean, of Les Misérables, squatting "in the north corner of the courtyard," choked with tears, "while the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted with heavy hammer-blows." This is the solitary figure of interest which Bicêtre has given to fiction.
If a shadowy figure may be added, it is from the same phantasmagoric gallery of Victor Hugo. Bicêtre was the prison of the nameless faint-heart who weeps and moans through the incredible pages of Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné. Then, and until 1836, Bicêtre was the last stage but one (l'avant-dernière étape) on the road to the guillotine. The last was the Conciergerie, close to the Place de Grève. The shadow-murderer of Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné—for there is no real stuff of murder in him, and he is the feeblest and least sympathetic puppet of fiction—is useful only as bringing into relief the old, disused, and forgotten cachot du Condamné, or condemned cell, of Bicêtre. It was a den eight feet square; rough stone walls, moist and sweating, like the flags which made the flooring; the only "window" a grating in the iron door; a truss of straw on a stone couch in a recess; and an arched and blackened ceiling, wreathed with cobwebs.
Starting out of sleep one night, Hugo's condemned man lifts his lamp and sees spectral writings, figures and arabesques in crayons, blood and charcoal dancing over the walls of the cell—the "visitors' book" of generations of Condamnés à mort who have preceded him. Some had blazoned their names in full, with grotesque embellishments of the capital letter and a motto underneath breathing their last defiance to the world; and in one corner, "traced in white outline, a frightful image, the figure of the scaffold, which, at the moment that I write, may be rearing its timbers for me! The lamp all but fell from my hands."
