o departments alone of Bouches du-Rhone and Vaucluse, Representative
Maignet, who is on the spot, reports from 12,000 to 15,000
arrests.[4112] "A little before Thermidor," says Representative
Beaulieu, "the number of incarcerated arose to nearly 400,000, as is
apparent on the lists and registers then before the Committee of General
Security."[4113]--Among these poor creatures, there are children, and
not alone in the prisons of Nantes where the revolutionary searches have
collected the whole of the rural population; in the prisons of Arras,
among twenty similar cases, I find a coal-dealer and his wife with their
seven sons and daughters, from seventeen down to six years of age; a
widow with her four children from nineteen down to twelve years of age;
another noble widow with her nine children, from seventeen down to
three years of age, and six children, without father or mother, from
twenty-three down to nine years of age.[4114]--These prisoners of State
were treated, almost everywhere, worse than robbers and assassins under
the ancient regime. 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.[4115]--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."[4116] 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."[4117] They starve them, bully them, and vex
them purposely as if they meant to exhaust their patience and drive
them into a r