"Do you know this man?" said Lord Worcester.
"I am not at home in bedlam," said Marion, who on principle allowed no corner to her conscience.
"What is the discovery he talks of?" asked Lord Worcester of a warder.
"He calls it steam, milord. They've all discovered something, milord."
Lord Worcester went back to Bicêtre the next morning and was closeted for an hour with the madman. At Marion Delorme's in the afternoon he said:
"In England we should not have put that man into a madhouse. Your Bicêtre is not the most useful place. Who invented those cells? They have wasted to madness as fine a genius as the age has known."
Earlier than this, Bicêtre the asylum shared the evil renown of Bicêtre the prison. To prisoners and patients alike popular rumour assigned an equal fate. The first, it was said, were assassinated, the second were "disposed of." Now and again the warders and attendants amused themselves by organising a pitched battle between the "mad side" and the "prison side"; the wounded were easily transferred to the infirmary, the dead were as easily packed into the trench beneath the walls.
The very name of Bicêtre—dungeon, madhouse, and _cloaca_ of obscene infamies—became of dreadful import; not the Conciergerie, the Châtelet, Fort-l'Évêque, Vincennes, nor the Bastille itself inspired the common people and the bourgeoisie with such detestation and panic fear. The general imagination, out-vieing rumour, peopled it with imps, evil genii, sorcerers, and shapeless monsters compounded of men and beasts. Mediæval Paris, at a loss for the origins of things, ascribed them to the Fairies, the Devil, or Julius Cæsar. It was said that the Devil alighted in Paris one night, and brought in chains to the "plateau de Bicêtre" a pauper, a madman, and a prisoner, with which three unfortunates he set agoing the prison on the one side and the asylum on the other, to minister to the _menus plaisirs_ of the denizens of hell. Such grim renown as this was not easily surpassed; but at the end of Louis XIV.'s reign the common legend went a step farther, and said that the Devil had now disowned Bicêtre! Rhymes sincere or satirical gave utterance to the terror and abhorrence of the vulgar mind.