- Beaulieu, "Essais," V., 290: "The conciergerie was
still full of wretches held for robbery and assassination, poverty-
stricken and repulsive. - It was with these that counts, marquises,
voluptuous financiers, elegant dandies, and more than one wretched
philosopher, were shut up, pell-mell, in the foulest cells, waiting
until the guillotine could make room in the chambers filled with camp-
bedsteads. They were generally put with those on the straw, on
entering, where they sometimes remained a fortnight... It was
necessary to drink brandy with these persons; in the evening, after
having dropped their excrement near their straw, they went to sleep in
their filth. . . . I passed those three nights half-sitting, half-
stretched out on a bench, one leg on the ground and leaning against
the wall." - Wallon, "La Terreur," II., 87. (Report of Grandpr? on
the Conciergerie, March 17, 1793. "Twenty-six men collected into one
room, sleeping on twenty-one mattresses, breathing the foulest air and
covered with half-rotten rags." In another room forty-five men and ten
straw-beds; in a third, thirty-nine poor creatures dying in nine
bunks; in three other rooms, eighty miserable creatures on sixteen
mattresses filled with vermin, and, as to the women, fifty-four having
nine mattresses and standing up alternately.
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