Archbishop of Paris compelled the new possessors of Saint-Lazare
to continue to receive the lepers of the city and its suburbs. To these
were gradually added those ecclesiastics and laymen who here sought a
voluntary retirement, and certain youth here confined unwillingly by
their parents or guardians that they might recover from the effects of a
life of dissipation. Ten years before the Revolution, before the
expulsion of the Lazaristes in 1792, and the appropriation of their
property by the Revolutionary government, the use of Saint-Lazare as a
temporary prison had become well established; Beaumarchais was confined
here for three days after the first representation of the _Mariage de
Figaro_. On the 13th of July, 1789, the day before the taking of the
Bastille, a band of pillagers invaded the enclosure of the buildings,
destroyed the tomb of Saint Vincent de Paul, and nearly set fire to the
whole quarter by the burning of one of the store-houses of the
establishment. During the Terror, it was crowded with the victims
destined in advance for the scaffold; and under the Consulate it became
definitely a jail, _prison civile_, _prison administrative et maison de
correction_, to which was added a special hospital, as if to preserve
the souvenir of the lazaretto of former times.

Of the buildings still standing, the superstructures mostly date from
the reign of Louis XIII. The remains of the church built by Saint
Vincent de Paul, in which he was buried at the foot of the high altar,
may still be distinguished. The very extensive grounds surrounding the
establishment, divided up and sold during the Revolution as _biens
nationaux_, have now disappeared under the buildings and streets of the
quarter. The chapel constructed by Saint Vincent is now a store-room;
the crypt, with its tombs of bishops, is a bath-house; the low apartment
on the ground-floor was reproduced by the painter Charles Muller in his
_Appel des Condamnes_, formerly so popular at the Luxembourg; in the
_Passage du Massacre_, between two courts, the victims of the Terror, in
1793, found death when they had expected liberty; and the bells which
sound the hours in the clock-tower are the same which rang under Louis
XIII.

Saint-Lazare encloses also the general magazines, the store-houses of
linen, and the central bakery, for all the prisons of the department of
the Seine. It is here that is effected the panification for five
thousand prisoners. In common with t