attacking party?-A good three thousand, I should say; but of those not more than about two hundred were active, so to speak.— Did they bring cannon?-It was said they did, but I saw none, though I looked out at the main gate more than once. What were their arms, then ?-Well, a few of them had second-hand muskets (de méchants fusils), others had swords, axes, bludgeons (bûches) and bills (crochets), but there were more pikes than anything else.-Were there any well-dressed people amongst them?-Oh, yes; the 'judges' especially; though the bulk of them were not much to look at.-How many 'judges' were there?—A dozen; but they relieved one another.-If there were judges, there was some sort of formality, I suppose. What was the procedure? How did they judge, acquit and execute?—They sat in the clerk's office, a room down below, near the chapel. They made us fetch out the register; looked down the column of cause of imprisonment,' and then sent for the prisoner. If you were too frightened to feel your legs under you, or couldn't get a word out quick, it was 'guilty' on the spot. And then?—Then the president' said: 'Let the citizen be taken to the Abbaye.' They knew outside what that meant. Two men seized him by the arm and led him out of the room. At the door he was face to face with a double row of cut-throats, a prod in the rear with a pike tossed him amongst them, and then-well there were some that took a good deal of finishing off.-They did not shoot them then?—No, there was no shooting.-And the acquittals?— Well, if it was simply, 'take the citizen to the Abbaye,' they killed him. If it was take him to the Abbaye,' with Vive la nation! he was acquitted. It wasn't over at nightfall. We passed the night of the 3rd with the cut-throats inside the prison walls; they were just worn out. It began again on the morning of the 4th, but not quite with the same spirit. It was mostly the children who suffered on the Tuesday. And the lunatics, and the patients, and the old creatures, did they get their throats cut, too?—No, they were all herded in the dormitories, with the doors locked on them, and sentinels inside to keep them from looking out of window. All the killing was done in the prison.And when did they leave you? At about three on Tuesday afternoon; and then we called the roll of the survivors.-And the dead?-We buried them in quicklime in our own cemetery."

The hideous mise-en-scène of père Richard is, at the worst, a degree less reproachful than that of Prud'homme, Peltier, or M. Thiers.

There was

one worthy man at Bicêtre, Dr. Pinel, whose

devotion to humanitarian science (a form of devotion not overcommon in such places at that day) very nearly cost him his life at the hands of the revolutionary judges. Dr. Pinel, who had the notion that disease of the mind was not best cured by whipping, was accused by the Committee of Public Safety (under whose rule, it may be observed, no public ever went in greater terror) of plotting with medical science for the restoration of the monarchy! It was a charge quite worthy of the wisdom and the tenderness for "public safety" of the Comité de Salut Public. Pinel, disdaining oratory, vouchsafed the simplest explanation of his treatment at Bicêtre-and was permitted to continue it.

Not so charitable were the gods to Théroigne de Mericourt, a woman singular amongst the women of the Revolution. Readers of Carlyle will remember his almost gallant salutations of her (a handsome young woman of the streets, who took a passion for the popular cause, and rode on a gun-carriage in the famous outing to Versailles) as often as she starts upon the scene. When he misses her from the procession, in the fourth book of the first volume, it is: "But where is the brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted Demoiselle Théroigne ? Brown eloquent beauty, who, with thy winged words and glances, shalt thrill rough bosoms-whole steel battalions-and persuade an Austrian Kaiser; pike and helm lie provided for thee in due season, and alas! also strait waistcoat and long lodging in the Salpêtrière."

Théroigne was some beautiful village girl when the echo first reached her of the tocsin of the Revolution. She thought a woman was wanted there, and trudged hot-foot to Paris, perhaps through the self-same quiet lanes that saw the pilgrimage of Charlotte Corday. In Paris she took (for reasons of her own, one must suppose) the calling of "unfortunate female" the euphemism will be remembered as Carlyle's-and dubbed herself the people's Aspasia "l'Aspasie du peuple." In "tunic blue," over a "red petticoat," crossed with a tricolour scarf and crowned with the Phrygian cap, she roamed the streets, "criant, jurant, blasphémant," to the tune of the drum of rebellion. One day the women of the town, in a rage of fear or jealousy, fell upon her, stripped her, and beat her through the streets. She went mad, and in the first years of this century she was still an inmate of Bicêtre. When the "women's side" of Bicêtre was closed, in 1803, Théroigne was transferred to the Salpêtrière, where she died.

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 warders' 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 Miserables,' 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 cellthe "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."

TIGHE HOPKINS.

The Guests of the Wolfmaster.

BY EGERTON CASTLE.

"SUCH a bout as we have just seen," said I to Marshfield, as we emerged from the fencing club, "is all very well, most brilliant and all that—but it is absolutely inconceivable at sharps."

"Ah!" said Marshfield enigmatically.

I noticed that he looked as though he could a tale unfold. I knew then that he had sought me that afternoon in my most likely haunt to pour into my willing ear one of his latest stories.

"You recollect," he went on presently, in his usual complacent, measured manner- you recollect Sholto Cameron-I mean you remember my speaking of him?"

The sound of the name whipped up my attention at once. I had never met the man, but had none the less learned to take a vivid interest in his singular personality. Rapidly, while Marshfield paused, evidently for the purpose of allowing me to do so, I recalled the salient points of what I had heard of this man's career. It was indeed a curious story; that of one who, having been struck to the heart, at the time of life when the heart is virginal as falling snow, by a love which had been snatched away from him, as it seemed, for ever, at the very instant of its revelation, had spent seven years seeking over the face of the world whether that soaring transport, which had been such a glorious initiation to him on the threshold of manhood, was ever to be found again. Startling enough had been some of the incidents of that extraordinary and novel pilgrimage of love (during which Lord Sholto Cameron had acquired, among other cosmopolitan reputations, that of the most unscrupulous libertine and irresistible Lothario of the age), but none more so than the high

Readers of TEMPLE BAR may possibly remember also my version of another of Marshfield's stories, under the title of "The Equilibrium of Mrs. Tollmage."