[14] - These prisoners of State were
treated, almost everywhere, worse than robbers and assassins under the
ancient r?gime. They began by subjecting them to rapiotage, that is
to say, stripping them naked or, at best, feeling their bodies under
their shirts; women and young girls fainted away under this
examination, formerly confined to convicts on entering the bagnio.[15]
- Frequently, before consigning them to their dungeons or shutting
them up in their cells, they would be left two or three nights pell-
mell in a lower hall on benches, or in the court on the pavement,
"without beds or straw." "The feelings are wounded in all directions,
every point of sensibility, so to say, being played upon. They are
deprived one after the other of their property, assignats, furniture,
and food, of daylight and lamp-light, of the assistance which their
wants and infirmities demand, of a knowledge of public events, of all
communication, either immediate or written, with fathers, sons and
husbands."[16] They are obliged to pay for their lodgings, their
keepers, and for what they eat; they are robbed at their very doors of
the supplies they send for outside; they are compelled to eat at a
mess-table; they are furnished with scant and nauseous food, "spoilt
codfish, putrid herrings and meat, rotten vegetables, all this
accompanied with a mug of Seine water colored red with some drug or
other.
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