1858 the administration of prisons abandoned the popular term and
recognized the institution only under the formula: _Maison d'arret
cellulaire_. All in vain, even though, in 1879, the Boulevard Mazas
became the Boulevard Diderot.

This prison was the first in France in which was adopted solitary
confinement. In a single night, that of the 19-20th of May, 1850, the
eight hundred and forty-one inmates of the Force were transferred to
Mazas,--a much more expeditious operation than that of the
transportation of the prisoners of Mazas to the Sante, in May, 1898,
which took ten days, at the rate of eighty men a day. It appears that
the prisoners from the Force objected strongly to this system of
solitary confinement in their cells; they gave way to such excesses of
fury and despair that the Academie de Medecine was moved in their
behalf, and protested against the _systeme cellulaire_ as conducive to
suicide and insanity. The new prison--as any one might see from the top
of the viaduct of the Vincennes railway--was built in the form of a
great wheel, the spokes represented by six long galleries, eighty metres
in length and twelve and a half in height. The hub of this wheel was a
two-story rotunda, the ground-floor of which was occupied by the central
post of observation, and the upper story by the chapel, which could be
seen from any point in any of the six galleries. At the hour of the
celebration of the mass, on Sundays, the guards set the door of each
cell partly open, so that the prisoner might receive spiritual comfort
if he so pleased,--and if his distance were not too great. Each of the
six galleries was two stories in height, lit by a glass roof. All the
cells received light and air through a grated window, opening on one of
the outside galleries or on one of the interior courts, but placed too
high to afford the inmate any view outside. Each prisoner was entitled
to an hour's exercise in one of the twenty preaux into which the
interior courts were divided. This promenade was always a solitary one,
under the eye of the guardians in the rotunda, and to be deprived of it
was the lightest punishment inflicted. The most severe, in extreme
cases, was imprisonment in the _cachot_, or dungeon.

Saint-Lazare (Maison d'Arret et de Correction), on the Faubourg
Saint-Denis, is at once a hospital, a police station, and a prison for
women, and its methods and regulation have long been the object of
earnest denunciation. As a pr