This Salle consists of two parallel naves separated by a range of arcades and lighted by two great circular openings with four round-headed windows at either end. Its attributes are practically the same as they were in 1622. The structure, take it as a whole, may be said to date only from the seventeenth century, but certain it is that the old Palais de la Cité is incorporated therein, every stone of it, and if its career was humdrum that was the fault of circumstances rather than from any inherent faults of its own.
The Conciergerie, that inelegant, inconsistent architectural mixture of the ancient and modern, considered apart, though it properly enough is usually considered with the Palais de Justice, was formerly the dwelling or guardhouse of the Concierge of the Palais de la Cité. His post was not merely that of the keeper of the gates; he was a personage at court and was as autocratic as his more plebeian contemporaries of to-day, for the Paris concierge, as we, who have for years lived under their despotism well know, is a very dreadful person.
In addition to being the governor of the royal dwelling this concierge was the guardian of the royal prisoners. In 1348 he was further invested with the official title of Bailli and the post was, at times, occupied by the highest and the most noble in the land, among others Philippe de Savoie, the friend of Charles VI, and Juvenal des Oursins, the historian of this prince. The first to combine the two functions, that of Bailli and Concierge, was Jacques Coictier, the doctor of Louis XI.
As a virtual prison the Conciergerie only came to be transformed when Charles V quitted the residence of the Palais de la Cité, and the Conciergerie, as such, only figures on the Tournelles registers under date of 1391.
The fire of the latter part of the eighteenth century destroyed a large part of the building, but enough remained to patch together the most serviceable of Revolutionary prisons, for at one time it held at least twelve hundred poor souls, of whom two hundred and eighty-eight were killed off at one fell blow.
But one woman among them all actually came to her death within the prison walls. This was La Belle Bouquetière of the Palais Royal who, in an access of jealous furor, horribly mutilated a royal guardsman, and for this met a most cruel death by being transfixed to a post and submitting to a trial of "_le fer et le feu_." In just what manner the punishment was applied one can best imagine for himself.