economists called out for the cellular system,
with all its wretched apparatus of starving,
darkness, strapping, hanging on tiptoes, and
gagging; and with its horrible attendants of
madness and suicide, canting hypocrisy, or
hardened sulkiness. The French government,
which is to the full as puzzled as our own
what to do with its reprobates, suddenly
confounded confusion by breaking up the
Bagnes; and, at the present day, the
untransported public in France are in a state of
dreamy ignorance parallel to our own as to
the whereabouts of convicts; where they go to,
what is actually done with them, and when
they may be expected back. The authorities
are indefinitely known to have invented penal
colonies;—one, the fine feverish settlement of
Cayenne, about which—whether it be in Senegal
or Guiana, or both—the same muddled
ignorance prevails as among well-informed
circles here as to whether Demerara be an
island or a continent, in South America or in
the West Indies, or all four. Another is
Nouka-Hiva, which, when I say that it is in
the South Seas, is saying quite enough for
once, I think. Thither the burglars, forgers,
and, very often, murderers, who are
sentenced by the French Court of Assize to
travaux forcés are sent; but, as it is known
that there are also in those colonies some
thousands of unfortunate men, many of them
educated gentlemen—many shamefully
deluded by now prosperous rogues—almost all
of them guilty of no other crimes than wanting
bread and differing in political opinion from
somebody else, no coherent idea can be
formed of which is transportation, which
deportation, and which travaux forcés. The
widow whose only son was sent to Cayenne
because he happened to be in the National
Guard and in Barbés Legion in June ’forty-
eight, or because he was foolish enough to
walk on the Boulevard des Capucins on the
second of December ’fifty-one, knows not
whether he be chained to a desperado found
guilty of assassination with extenuating
circumstances, and condemned to hard labour for
life, or not, and vice versâ. It is all a muddle.
The few letters that reach France from
Cayenne, or are allowed to be published,
describe settlements as having been made
and abandoned; penitentiaries opened and
closed; tickets-of-leave granted, to the
infinite annoyance of the non-convict inhabitants
of Senegal, and numerous evasions into
the bush. What sort of bush the bush of Senegal
may be I am not aware; but, from the
peppery, tigerish, jungleish nature of the
climate, I imagine that any of the evaded, if
retaken, would be found to have become
spotted—if not brindled, with tails, great
suppleness in the joints, and capacity for
springing from holes in rocks, and an
unquenchable appetite for raw meat and hot
blood.

In a most remarkable converse, the French
are desperately endeavouring to get rid of
the very disease with whose virus we are
as desperately trying to inoculate ourselves.
"No convicts in France!—no liberated
convicts. Break up the Bagnes! " cry the
French. " No transportation to the colonies!
Tickets-of-leave, and build up a Bagne on
Dartmoor! " cry we. And each system seems
to work equally ill. The French judges
go on sentencing, doubting the efficacy of
their sentences; the public go on asking for
security, or at least for information, and don't
get them; and the government goes on
scratching its head (if a government could
perform so undignified an operation), or, like
that man who was so wondrous wise, jumping
backwards and forwards in and out of a
quickset-hedge, not much improving its
vision in the long run thereby.

The curse of French society—the big
plague-spots in all the back streets—were
the liberated and escaped convicts. Strictly
guarded and watched as they were, they
often managed, as we shall afterwards have
occasion to see, to regain their liberty.
Of course, they all flocked to Paris.
The streets were not safe at night;
the bridges were regular places of call for
assassins: and, at every émeute, at every
popular commotion, there were vomited forth
from foul cellars and tapis francs; from the
Rue aux Fèves; the infamous tumours of
streets behind the Louvre; the slums of the
petite Pologne, the Barrière Mont Parnasse;
the Rue Mouffetard and the Faubourg du
Temple, boiling, raving, screeching, ravenous
mobs of escaped convicts, liberated convicts,
coiners, midnight assassins, passport-forgers;
nine-tenths of whom had served at some time
or other their apprenticeship at the Bagnes.
These men, calling themselves republicans,
and fighting at the barricades as a cloak for
murder and plunder, did more harm to honest
republicanism and real liberty than ten
hundred reigns of terror could have done.
These were the men who shot the
Archbishop of Paris, who murdered General de
Brea, who impaled the artilleryman, and cut
off the feet of the dragoon. A large majority
of the prisoners arraigned at the Court of
Assize had been convicts at some time or
other; and a large proportion of the duties
of that peculiarly infamous body, the secret
police (recruited, itself, from the convict
ranks), consisted in hunting out and
recapturing the forçats evadés—the escaped
convicts.

The evaded malefactor—who had thus
provided himself with an unsanctioned "ticket-
of-leave"—did not fail, of course, of becoming
interesting and romantic in France. He was
dramatised immediately with immense
success The escaped forçat, Vautrin, in M. de
Balzac's drama of that name, was elevated by
the accomplished actor, Frederic Lemaître,
into a sort of French Timon—a cynic
philosopher, visiting all the institutions of
society with the most withering scorn. The