the butchers and the bakers for all the inmates of these
various establishments. All mendicants, sick and well, came under the
jurisdiction of the Hopital-General; all were required to labor
according to their strength, and fifty-two skilled workmen were
designated by their corporations or guilds to direct the workrooms
established in the different branches of these institutions. "Prison
labor" was not then the bugaboo it has since become to "organized
labor." The directors had the right to administer justice among all the
inmates of their institutions; the punishments most in vogue were the
whipping-post, the carcan, the prison, and the lower dungeons. The
missionary priests of Saint-Lazare had charge of the spiritual
instruction of the mendicants, under the authority and jurisdiction of
the Archbishop of Paris.

All this being regulated, it was announced in all the pulpits of the
different parishes of Paris that the Hopital-General would be opened the
7th of May, 1657, for all the poor who wished to enter it of their own
free will, while all mendicants were forbidden, by the voice of the
public crier, to ask alms anywhere in the city. On the 13th, a mass of
the Saint-Esprit was celebrated in the church of the Pitie, and the next
day it was announced that five thousand of the poor had been admitted to
the hospitals. It was then proposed to expel from Paris all those who
had not come to constitute themselves inmates, or to imprison them by
force; but this was found to be difficult. A patrol was sent through the
city to gather up all these refractory ones, but the populace rose to
recapture all those who had been arrested,--lackeys, bourgeois,
artisans, soldiers, and especially soldiers of the guards, excited by
the women of the town, gave themselves up to thieving and pillaging in
the vicinity of the Salpetriere and the Bicetre and the other
establishments of the Hopital-General.

The liberality of Mazarin, of the king, and of some of the wealthier
citizens provided the administration of this great institution with its
principal resources; the cardinal gave it at one time a hundred thousand
livres, and left it sixty thousand francs in his will. It was exempted
from numerous taxes and imposts, it was entitled to a third of all the
confiscations awarded the king; to those fines imposed in the city, the
faubourgs, and the jurisdiction of the _prevot_ of Paris which were not
otherwise applied, to the duty on wine entering