Few loafers in Paris can have failed to meet this prison cell on wheels; still, though most stories are written for Parisian readers, strangers will no doubt be satisfied to have a description of this formidable machine.  Who knows?  A police of Russia, Germany, or Austria, the legal body of countries to whom the “Salad-basket” is an unknown machine, may profit by it; and in several foreign countries there can be no doubt that an imitation of this vehicle would be a boon to prisoners.

This ignominious conveyance, yellow-bodied, on high wheels, and lined with sheet-iron, is divided into two compartments.  In front is a box-seat, with leather cushions and an apron.  This is the free seat of the van, and accommodates a sheriff’s officer and a gendarme.  A strong iron trellis, reaching to the top, separates this sort of cab-front from the back division, in which there are two wooden seats placed sideways, as in an omnibus, on which the prisoners sit.  They get in by a step behind and a door, with no window.  The nickname of Salad-basket arose from the fact that the vehicle was originally made entirely of lattice, and the prisoners were shaken in it just as a salad is shaken to dry it.

For further security, in case of accident, a mounted gendarme follows the machine, especially when it conveys criminals condemned to death to the place of execution.  Thus escape is impossible.  The vehicle, lined with sheet-iron, is impervious to any tool.  The prisoners, carefully searched when they are arrested or locked up, can have nothing but watch-springs, perhaps, to file through bars, and useless on a smooth surface.

So the panier a salade, improved by the genius of the Paris police, became the model for the prison omnibus (known in London as “Black Maria”) in which convicts are transported to the hulks, instead of the horrible tumbril which formerly disgraced civilization, though Manon Lescaut had made it famous.

The accused are, in the first instance, despatched in the prison van from the various prisons in Paris to the Palais de Justice, to be questioned by the examining judge.  This, in prison slang, is called “going up for examination.”  Then the accused are again conveyed from prison to the Court to be sentenced when their case is only a misdemeanor; or if, in legal parlance, the case is one for the Upper Court, they are transferred from the house of detention to the Conciergerie, the “Newgate” of the Department of the Seine.

Finally, the prison van carries the criminal condemned to death from Bicetre to the Barriere Saint-Jacques, where executions are carried out, and have been ever since the Revolution of July.  Thanks to philanthropic interference, the poor wretches no longer have to face the horrors of the drive from the Conciergerie to the Place de Greve in a cart exactly like that used by wood merchants.  This cart is no longer used but to bring the body back from the scaffold.