[Illustration:  Fig. 352.—­Empalement.—­Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Cosmographie Universelle” of Munster:  in folio, Basle, 1552.]

Paris alone contained twenty-five or thirty special prisons, without counting the vade in pace of the various religious communities.  The most important were the Grand Chatelet, the Petit Chatelet, the Bastille, the Conciergerie, and the For-l’Eveque, the ancient seat of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishop of Paris.  Nearly all these places of confinement contained subterranean cells, which were almost entirely deprived of air and light.  As examples of these may be mentioned the Chartres basses of the Petit Chatelet, where, under the reign of Charles VI., it was proved that no man could pass an entire day without being suffocated; and the fearful cells excavated thirty feet below the surface of the earth, in the gaol of the Abbey of Saint Germain des Pres, the roof of which was so low that a man of middle height could not stand up in them, and where the straw of the prisoners’ beds floated upon the stagnant water which had oozed through the walls.

[Illustration:  Fig. 353.—­The Provost’s Prison.—­Fac-simile of a Woodcut in J. Damhoudere’s “Praxis Rerum Civilium.”]

The Grand Chatelet was one of the most ancient prisons of Paris, and probably the one which held the greatest number of prisoners.  By a curious and arbitrary custom, prisoners were compelled to pay a gaol fee on entering and going out of this prison, which varied according to their rank, and which was established by a law of the year 1425.  We learn from this enactment the names by which the various places of confinement composing this spacious municipal prison were known.  A prisoner who was confined in the Beauvoir, La Mate or La Salle, had the right of “having a bed brought from his own house,” and only had to pay the droit de place to the gaoler; any one who was placed in the Boucherie, in the Beaumont, or in the Griseche, “which are closed prisons,” had to pay four deniers “pour place;” any one who was confined in the Beauvais, “lies on mats or on layers of rushes or straw” (gist sur nates ou sur couche de feurre ou de paille); if he preferred, he might be placed au Puis, in the Gourdaine, in the Bercueil, or in the Oubliette, where he did not pay more than in the Fosse.  For this, no doubt, the smallest charge was made.  Sometimes, however, the prisoner was left between two doors ("entre deux huis"), and he then paid much less than he would in the Barbarie or in the Gloriette.  The exact meaning of these curious names is no longer intelligible to us, notwithstanding the terror which they formerly created, but their very strangeness gives us reason to suppose that the prison system was at that time subjected to the most odious refinement of the basest cruelty.