At about the end of the eighteenth century (say, towards 1770), the police authorities distinguished two classes of women of the town, the femmes publiques, or authorised women, and a numerous and unlicenced class, of more dissolute habits, officially stigmatised as débauchées. To strengthen the line of demarcation between the two classes, the femmes publiques, or the majority of them, were inscribed on the police registers (paying a fee of twenty sous), and being to a certain extent protégées of the State, the treatment accorded to them was generally of a more lenient character. The terms of their imprisonment (for soliciting in the streets or public places, for brawling and rioting, for signalling from their windows, etc.,) were entirely at the discretion of the lieutenant of police; but it would appear that they were frequently released, at the request or on the bond of a parent, sister, or other relative, after a brief confinement. The houses in which the members of the unlicenced class lived together were continually raided by the police, who descended upon them after dark, "parce que les femmes en étaient arrivées à ce degré de scandale, qu'on ne pouvait plus les arrêter pendant le jour, à cause du désordre qu'elles causaient, et des collisions qu'excitaient leurs amants et autres adhérents."
Eighteenth-century documents concerning these houses are still to be read, and some of them have a curiously modern flavour. There are complaints of householders, and the reports of the police agents whom these complaints set in motion. A certain, M. Ledure, writing under date of the 23d of July, 1785, asks the attention of the police to an unlicensed house of ill-fame adjoining his own, and details his annoyances with a freedom of expression which debars translation. The burden of his protest is, that being a gentleman with a family of daughters, and the holder of a position which obliges him to entertain "des personnes de distinction," his existence is rendered intolerable by the worse than light behaviour of the "females over the way." He can scarcely even get into his own house of an evening.
"To satisfy M. Ledure," runs the police report, "we began by visiting, in Beaubourg Street, the house in which the women complained of were lodging. We arrested there, Marguerite Lefèbvre, the other women having taken themselves off.... In response to the complaints of the residents in Rohan Street, against the women living at No. 63, we forced an entry there, and arrested the woman Rochelet, and the two filles d'amour kept by her. We fetched them out, to take them to Saint-Martin"—a house of detention, from which the women were transferred to the Salpêtrière,—"but, although our guard was composed of five men with fixed bayonets, we were so set upon by the man Rochelet, a hairdresser, and twenty blackguards with him, that we had to let the women go."
The origin of the prison of Saint-Martin, abolished by Louis XVI., is quite unknown. It was a small confined place with a villainous reputation. Regarded by the authorities as a temporary lodging for both classes of public women, a sort of fore-chamber of the Salpêtrière, no attempt was ever made to render it decently habitable. The dark and dirty cells were absolutely destitute of furniture; a truss of straw, thrown from time to time on the stone floor, was both bed and bedding. The food was strictly in keeping; all that the prison gave was a loaf of black bread a day, and whilst prisoners who could afford it were allowed to do a little catering for themselves, the rest soaked their black bread in the soup provided by charitable societies.
Every petition to improve Saint-Martin was answered by the formula that no one stayed there above a few days, which was a callous misstatement of the facts. It is true that the women arrested "by order of the King" were not detained after their lettres de cachet had been obtained; but the women of the other class, who were arrested by simple act of police, and tried at the bar as ordinary offenders, lay for weeks or months at Saint-Martin, awaiting the pleasure of a judge of the Châtelet. When the cases to be disposed of were numerous, a part only were heard, and the women whose fate was still to be pronounced were remanded for a further period of weeks or months to Saint-Martin. It was thus not less a prison in the ordinary meaning of the word than what the French call a dépôt; and when its inconveniences were no longer to be endured, Louis XVI. abolished and demolished it, and constituted by letters-patent the Hôtel de Brienne as a prison des femmes publiques, under the name of La Petite Force. This continued to be the temporary prison until the revolutionary era, and here at least the women had air to breathe and beds to lie on.
The first rules for the conduct of the Salpêtrière were issued from Versailles in April, 1684, over the signatures of Louis XIV. and his minister Colbert.
The women were to hear mass on Sundays and Saints' days; to pray together a quarter of an hour morning and evening, and to submit to readings from "the catechism and pious books" whilst they were at work.
They were to be soberly attired in dark stuff gowns, and shod with sabots; bread and water with soup were to be their portion; and they were to sleep on mattresses with sufficient bed-gear.
The nature of their tasks was left to the discretion of the directors, but the labour was to be "both long and severe." After a period of probation, prisoners of approved behaviour might be employed at lighter occupations, and receive a small percentage of the profits, which they were to be at liberty to spend on the purchase of meat, fruit, "et autres rafraîchissements."
Swearing, idleness, and quarrelling with one another were to be punished by a diminution of rations, the pillory, the dark cell, or such other pains as the directors might think proper to inflict.