a small fountain in its centre. Here the female prisoners were permitted to take exer cise, wash their clothes, and not infrequently in fine weather spend the whole day. This courtyard was separated by an iron railing from a similar one used by the men, who were free to talk with the women, and even to play cards with them, through the rails. On the right hand side was a series of rooms known as Chambres dc Pistole. This con sisted of what had originally been one vast
here were popularly known as pailleurs and paiileuses. In the last years of the tyranny of Robespierre, when the tribunal was send ing its daily cartloads of victims to the guillo tine, from forty to fifty beds were used every night by fresh victims, who paid each fifteen livres for their sleeping accommodation. This system brought in a profitable revenue of about one thousand livres a month. A little beyond the Chambres de Pistole a narrow passage led into the apartment known as
THE CORRIDOR CALLED THE RUE DE PARIS. vaulted hall, but was now converted into a sort of dormitory containing as many as fifty beds. They were called pistole because here people who wished to have a bed could do so by paying from twenty-seven to thirty livres a month; but it very often happened that the same bed was let three or four times over, owing to the fact that its latest occu pant had been sent to the guillotine. There was another set of cheaper lodgings, with a litter of straw thrown on the ground, and used by those who could not pay for more luxurious accommodation. Those who slept
that of Heloise and Abelard, which had a very fine vaulted ceiling, and was situated directly under the hall of the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the prisoners were judged, and served as a general passage to and from that hall. Externally the Conciergerie was appar ently modern, having been white-washed, and the Gothic arches of the windows bricked up, and furnished with the usual green blinds, so that little or nothing of its original archi tecture appeared. But internally the ceilings throughout were vaulted, the doors Gothic,
