Before 1826, the entrance to the Conciergerie was from the grand court-yard, the Cour du Mai, to the right and at the foot of the grand stairway. This entrance, with its iron railings, still exists, it now gives access to the Tribunal de Simple Police, and through it the multitude of victims, illustrious and obscure, of the Revolution and the Terror, issued to take their places in the cart for the guillotine. This doorway was walled up in 1826, and the entrance to the prison is now on the Quai de l'Horloge, near the tower of Cæsar. It was at this latter date that the Conciergerie was transformed into a modern prison, with the régime cellulaire. In the course of this transformation, the ancient dungeons in which had been confined so many eminent historical personages disappeared; to-day there can be seen only the cell of Marie-Antoinette, which now communicates with that of Robespierre, and the latter with the Salle des Girondins. The apartment of the unhappy queen was transformed into a chapel in 1816. Of the original furniture of her cell, there now remains, it is said, the little lamp hanging from the ceiling, and the ivory crucifix which she kissed before mounting the scaffold. As to the arm-chair in which she sat, it was prudently removed some years ago to his office by one of the directors of the Conciergerie, to protect it from the ravages of the tourists of all nations who were gradually carrying it away piecemeal. This apartment of the prison can be visited on Thursdays by securing a permit from the Préfecture de Police. The grande salle which was the prison of the priests and royalists during the Terror, and in which the Girondins passed their last night, is now the chapel of the Conciergerie. Through the little door at the left the latter passed on their way to the scaffold, and in this court-yard took place the massacres of September.
Before its demolition in the summer of 1898, the immense Mazas prison (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction Cellulaire), on the Boulevard Diderot, received the prisoners from the Dépôt. This gloomy institution contained twelve hundred cells, of which eleven hundred and fifteen were occupied, the others being used for the service of the hospital and of the baths. Among the more illustrious prisoners who have been within these walls was Victor Hugo, confined here on the morrow of the Coup d'État, and who has left this description of his cell: "Walls whitened with lime and soiled here and there by various emanations; in a corner, a round hole, furnished with iron bars and emitting an infectious odor; in another corner, a shelf hinged to the wall like the strapontin, or folding-stool, of the city folks, and which might serve for a table; no bed, a chair stuffed with straw. Under the feet, a brick floor; the first impression was of darkness, the second, of cold." In addition to the hammock and the bedding, the furniture consisted of a table with a drawer, an earthenware vessel, a porringer, a cup in wrought-iron, tinned over, a wooden spoon, a spittoon, called génieux, two brooms, three shelves in whitewood, a wardrobe set in the wall. The round hole, to which M. Hugo objected, was used by the prisoners as a means of speech with each other; by conquering their scruples—if they had any—and inserting their heads in this hole, they were able to make their words carry from one cell to another and even the entire length of the gallery, as through a speaking-tube. The authorities were not unaware of this arrangement, and by placing an agent in the basement they could have surprised these confidential communications.
The new arrival from the Dépôt, after being subjected to the usual formalities, after having lost his civil personality and changed his name for an official number, was at first disposed to rejoice in the solitude of his cell after the hideous promiscuousness of the Dépôt, but this solitary confinement would soon have become unendurable, had it not been for the daily labor with which they were all occupied. Their exercise was taken in the préaux cellulaires, oblong or converging cells under low sheds, through the iron grating of one side of which they could look out into the narrow space of the court-yard. All the prisons of the department of the Seine are furnished by a contractor, who supplies the provisions for the prisoners at a fixed price plus a percentage of their small earnings.
This prison was built between 1845 and 1850 by the architects Gilbert and Lecointe, on the general plans of the English prisons of the same nature, and was considered at the time a model institution. It succeeded the Prison de la Force, in the Rue Pavée-au-Marais, immortalized in a chapter of Les Misérables; the new prison was known officially as the Nouvelle-Force. Popular usage, however, gave it the name which it retained, from the Place Mazas, at the end of the Pont d'Austerlitz,—the name of the colonel of the Fourteenth Regiment of the line, killed at Austerlitz. His family protested strongly against this usage, and in 1858 the administration of prisons abandoned the popular term and recognized the institution only under the formula: Maison d'arrêt cellulaire. All in vain, even though, in 1879, the Boulevard Mazas became the Boulevard Diderot.
This prison was the first in France in which was adopted solitary confinement. In a single night, that of the 19-20th of May, 1850, the eight hundred and forty-one inmates of the Force were transferred to Mazas,—a much more expeditious operation than that of the transportation of the prisoners of Mazas to the Santé, in May, 1898, which took ten days, at the rate of eighty men a day. It appears that the prisoners from the Force objected strongly to this system of solitary confinement in their cells; they gave way to such excesses of fury and despair that the Académie de Médecine was moved in their behalf, and protested against the système cellulaire as conducive to suicide and insanity. The new prison—as any one might see from the top of the viaduct of the Vincennes railway—was built in the form of a great wheel, the spokes represented by six long galleries, eighty mètres in length and twelve and a half in height. The hub of this wheel was a two-story rotunda, the ground-floor of which was occupied by the central post of observation, and the upper story by the chapel, which could be seen from any point in any of the six galleries. At the hour of the celebration of the mass, on Sundays, the guards set the door of each cell partly open, so that the prisoner might receive spiritual comfort if he so pleased,—and if his distance were not too great. Each of the six galleries was two stories in height, lit by a glass roof. All the cells received light and air through a grated window, opening on one of the outside galleries or on one of the interior courts, but placed too high to afford the inmate any view outside. Each prisoner was entitled to an hour's exercise in one of the twenty préaux into which the interior courts were divided. This promenade was always a solitary one, under the eye of the guardians in the rotunda, and to be deprived of it was the lightest punishment inflicted. The most severe, in extreme cases, was imprisonment in the cachot, or dungeon.
Saint-Lazare (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction), on the Faubourg Saint-Denis, is at once a hospital, a police station, and a prison for women, and its methods and regulation have long been the object of earnest denunciation. As a prison for women, it is divided into two sections, for those accused, and for those condemned to less than two months' imprisonment; among the latter are women of the town, who have a special hospital. The only condamnées who remain for any length of time within these walls are the sick, nursing women having a child less than four years of age, and those enceinte. There is a special crèche for the newly-born babies,—for there are no less than fifty or sixty births annually. The nursing mothers, whether convicted or only accused, have special dormitories, and there is a shady garden for the wet-nurses. The prostitutes are provided with a special section. These unfortunates have not passed before any court; they have been condemned without appeal by a Chef de Bureau of the Préfecture de Police to an imprisonment of from three days to two months. During the day, the inmates are assembled in a workroom under the surveillance of one of the Sisters of the Order of Marie-Joseph, to whom is confided a general oversight of the workrooms and the dormitories. These prisoners take their meals in common, take their exercise walking in a long file, and at night sleep in a great chilly and crowded dormitory. Those who have merited it by their conduct are given one of the cells of the ménagerie, a double story of grated cells, furnished each with a bed, a stool, a shelf, and an earthenware vessel. The menagerie was formerly devoted to the service of the correction maternelle.
In the great dormitories, there may be witnessed each morning such a scene as that reproduced in the illustration, the prayer addressed to the image of the Virgin on the wall, decked out with faded artificial flowers and with tapers in front of her; following the example of the Sister, all stoop with more or less reverence before this symbol and utter with more or less sincerity from impure lips the prayer for a pure heart. This grand dormitory is a great hall containing more than eighty beds arranged in four rows. The red tile floor is of irreproachable cleanliness, the eighty beds, with their gray blankets and white bolsters, are arranged with military symmetry. But this cleanliness and this good order, it is claimed, count but for little in the amelioration of these unfortunates, gathering contamination from each other in this indiscriminate herding together.