What power indeed, spiritual or temporal, had not the privilege in those days of setting up its pillory, its gallows, its pile of faggots built around a stake! In Paris alone at this date some twenty separate jurisdictions possessed the right to fatten victims for the scaffold, and it might almost be said that the municipal divisions of the capital had gibbets for their boundaries.
In 1674, however, the situation changed somewhat. The authority of the Châtelet was enlarged by royal edict, which gathered to it the rights and privileges of all the lesser corporations, and confiscated the halters and the faggots of private justice. This was a general blow, which none took more to heart than the prior of the Abbaye of Saint-Germain-of-the-Meadows. He had enjoyed the rights of "high," "middle," and "low" justice; he had imprisoned, tortured, and despatched at his holy pleasure. Forthwith, he composed and addressed to Louis XIV. un mémoire éloquent, which touched that pious heart. The Royal will consented to restore to the prior a considerable portion of his ancient jurisdiction. Within the extensive bounds of the monastery and its appanages, the holy father might still consider himself gaoler, tormentor, and executioner.
But his prison was now large beyond his pious needs, and little by little the Abbaye took a more secular character. The cells which the restricted powers of the prior could no longer charge to the full, were set apart for young noblemen and others whose parents or guardians had an interest in narrowing their borders. It was an age when parents and guardians had an almost unlimited authority over sons, daughters, and wards; and when fathers and uncles seldom thought twice about applying for a lettre de cachet. Sometimes young rakes were put into temporary seclusion for quite satisfactory reasons; but very often the legal powers of parents and guardians were used with abominable cruelty; and young men were imprisoned for years, suffering the treatment of criminals, merely to gratify the rancour of a near relative; or were even, where there was a fortune in question, confined expressly with the design that they should be secretly got rid of. A father could or did authorise a gaoler to treat his innocent son with a rigour that goes almost beyond belief; to forbid him to petition anyone for release; to keep him in solitary confinement; to feed him on the most meagre rations. The nephew of a General Wurmser, who had designs upon the young man's fortune, had him imprisoned in the Abbaye on some vague charge of dissipation. The young man was only twenty years of age, but he entered the Abbaye with the fixed conviction that his uncle did not intend ever to release him, and this conviction was confirmed by the hint conveyed to him by a turnkey, that he was to be sent to the fortress of Pierre-Encise, or Ham. Within a week, he had committed suicide in his cell.
Occasionally, young bloods of the period did penance in the Abbaye for practical jokes of a rather questionable morality. A certain D——, a spend-thrift of the first rank (who, however, rose afterwards to great honour in the army), was at the last pinch to settle his gaming debts. An uncle from whom he expected a goodly legacy lay sick unto death in his Hôtel, and D—— gave out that the patient desired the attendance of a notary. The notary arrived, and the uncle dictated a will entirely in his nephew's favour. This being published, loans were forthcoming. But the sequel was less satisfactory; for D—— presently found himself a prisoner in the Abbaye, and his friend, the Chevalier de C——, in a cell of the Bastille; the former for having personated a moribund uncle, and the latter for having aided and abetted him in the swindle.
When Howard was making his memorable progress through the "Lazzarettos of Europe," the Abbaye was amongst the prisons which he visited. He notes that there were "five little cells in which as many as fifty men were sometimes massed together." The Abbaye had undergone yet another transformation, and was now the principal military prison of Paris. It was reserved chiefly for the soldiers, both officers and privates, of the Gardes Françaises; but delinquents of other regiments were sent there also; and a turbulent place the Abbaye seems to have been in the days before the Revolution. For, up to '89, the French army recruited itself as best it could, and principally from amongst the masses of the unemployed and the vagabond classes. They were bought by recruiting sergeants, or swept into the ranks by the press-gangs, and it may be supposed that the stuff out of which the rank-and-file was manufactured was sometimes of the rottenest. Moreover, there was little spirit amongst the officers to induce them to train up into good fighting-men and self-respecting citizens the peasants, beggars, and outcasts of whom they found themselves in command. The swaggering, aristocrat captain, lording it over the colonel, who was perhaps a mere soldier of fortune, scorned the men beneath him. His military rank, added to the colossal difference in social rank between the nobility and the people, gave him a double sense of superiority; there was no esprit de corps, no feeling of comradeship in arms; but, on the one side, a perpetual and galling assertion of authority, and, on the other, a continuous struggle to secure some amount of recognition and freedom.
Insubordinate soldiers were continually being thrust into the Abbaye, and there were strange scenes within those walls.
In the year 1784, say the authors of Les Prisons de l'Europe, two military prisoners were finishing their scanty meal.
"Our last day together, Desforges," said one. "You go to château Trompette, I to Valenciennes. "We're in for twenty years of it!"
"Yes, and for what, Dessaignes?" said the other. "For a quarrel with a clod of an officer risen from the ranks. Twenty years!"
"My dear Desforges," said the young aristocrat. "It is not a cheerful prospect.—Warm here, isn't it? Trees in leaf, and flowers smelling sweet—out there. Out there, where liberty lies, Desforges. Come, shall we be free?"