Palace of Justice

“ Men, women, and even children swarmed round the principal entrances of the Palais de Justice, along the bank of the river as far as the Pont au Change, and up towards the Luxembourg Palace, now transformed into the prison, to which the condemned would no doubt be conveyed. ”

“ It is difficult to form an idea of the enormous throng that blocked all the approaches to the Palace of Justice the day the trial opened, and continued to crowd them during the twelve days that the trial lasted, which was as interesting to Royalists as to Republicans. The most fashionable people of Paris made a point of being present. ”

“ The thing that most surprises the visitor who goes over the prison is that, at every moment, he will meet prisoners without a guard of any kind, who seem to move about as though they were absolutely free. In reality, in order to go from one point to another — for instance, from their cell to the van waiting in the yard to take them to the Palais de Justice for the magistrate's examination — they pass along straight lines each of which ends in a door that is opened to them by a warder. ”

“ Municipal Council (to you I speak) , if you bestow millions, get a poet or two to assist your architects if you wish to save the cradle of Paris, the cradle of kings, while endeavoring to endow Paris and the Supreme Court with a palace worthy of France. It is a matter for study for some years before beginning the work. Another new prison or two like that of La Roquette, and the palace of Saint-Louis will be safe.
In these days many grievances afflict this vast mass of buildings, buried under the Palais de Justice and the quay, like some antediluvian creature in the soil of Montmartre ”

“ Philip’s reign is remarkable for the establishment of the Parlement and the first convocation of the States-General in Paris. From earliest times of the Monarchy, the kings had dispensed justice, surrounded by the chief Churchmen and nobles of the land, thus constituting an ambulatory tribunal, which was held wherever the sovereign might happen to be. In 1302 Philip fixed the tribunal at Paris, restricted it to judicial functions, and housed it in his palace of the Cité, which, in 1431, when the kings ceased to dwell there, became the Palais de Justice. The palace was rebuilt by Philip. ”

“ By an excellent arrangement, the Palais de Justice is enabled to lodge its criminals in one of its dependencies, the prison of the Conciergerie, whence the guards conduct them directly, by private staircases, to the court-room where they are to be tried,—thus avoiding any unseemly exposure of these unfortunates to the populace. ”

“ It is certain that the Court is plunged in shame and mortification at the exposure, that the Palace is full of bickerings and heart-burning, while the whole proceeding is looked upon by society at large as to the last degree disgusting and disgraceful. ”

“ The Palais de Justice, which is an ancient building, has a fine old gothic arcade, and on the other side, directly upon the city-wall, a picturesque, irregular rear, with a row of painted windows, through which, from the salle d'audience, the judge on the bench and the prisoner in the dock may enjoy a prospect, admonitory, inspiring, or depressing, as the case may be, of the expanded country. ”

“ CHARLES DICKENS Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of which one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy barrack: while gloomy suites of apartments, shut up and deserted, mock their own old state and glory, like the embalmed bodies of kings. But we neither went there to see state-rooms, nor soldiers’ quarters, nor a common jail, though we dropped some money into a prisoners’ box outside, whilst the prisoners themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up, and watched us eagerly. ”

“ If you ask me, you'll both see the inside of one of His Majesty's prisons."
"It's all the hospitality he provides," the crone raved, "ain't it? It's fine to be a king! Lives on the people, sucks the life out of 'em. And a palace for him, and for them—His Majesty's prisons! ”

“ A royal palace formed the center of a court such as other sovereigns maintained, and David's court and even his family were exposed to the same corrupting influences as power, wealth, jealousy, and faction have everywhere introduced. ”

“ If architecture at all, an Oriental fantasia, utterly unreal! the splendour of the Hall of Justice, of the Abencerrages, which follows on either side, with long vistas of many-domed halls opening into other patios, where violets, roses, and orange-trees blaze in the light, entered by portals glowing with brilliant mosaics, a low arch, specially pointed out to him by a noble Moor, more courteous than the rest, in the Hall of Justice, as leading to the place of execution. ”

“ Nay, happy and glorious Monarch! The prison is become a palace. Where formerly reigned perpetual darkness, incessant wax tapers burn; in what was a sewer of filth and dung, one breathes now only amber, musk, aloe-wood, otto of roses, and every perfume; where men perished of hunger now obtains every luxury; the crumbs of Sabbataï's table suffice for all his fellow-prisoners. ”

“ Close by are the public prosecutor's offices, the attorney's room and library, the chambers of the attorney-general, and those of the public prosecutor's deputies. All these purlieus, to use a generic term, communicate by narrow spiral stairs and the dark passages, which are a disgrace to the architecture not of Paris only, but of all France. The interior arrangement of the sovereign court of justice outdoes our prisons in all that is most hideous. ”

“ In every office of the palaces is a Bible, or book of acts of the church, or chronicle, for the use of whoever comes in, so that the court looks more like a university than a palace. Would to God the houses of the nobles were ruled like the queen's! The nobility are followed by great troops of serving-men in showy liveries; and it is a goodly sight to see them muster at court, which, being filled with them, “is made like to the show of a peacock's tail in the full beauty, or of some meadow garnished with infinite kinds and diversity of pleasant flowers.” ”

“ Long, narrow, and low of ceiling, having on the one side a row of windows looking on to a small courtyard, and on the other a range of doors, each with a number on its central panel, thus reminding one of some corridor in a second-rate hotel, such is the Galerie d’Instruction at the Palais de Justice whereby admittance is gained into the various rooms occupied by the investigating magistrates. Even in the daytime, when it is thronged with prisoners, witnesses, and guards, it is a sad and gloomy place. ”

“ When threatened by foreign invaders or by popular uprisings and official rebellion at home, the Court—a motley crowd or mob, of King, palace officials, eunuchs, concubines, blind men, sorceresses, and other similar retainers of the palace—has, as a rule, precipitately fled to some place of refuge, deserted by efficient military escort and in most miserable plight. ”

“ The taper in which he had burned the note was still alight, and he used it to seal up the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse's notes to Lucien—about thirty in all—and Madame de Serizy's somewhat voluminous correspondence.
Then he waited on the public prosecutor.
The Palais de Justice is a perplexing maze of buildings piled one above another, some fine and dignified, others very mean, the whole disfigured by its lack of unity. The Salle des Pas-Perdus is the largest known hall, but its nakedness is hideous, and distresses the eye. This vast Cathedral of the Law crushes the Supreme Court. ”

“ Thousands of young men, with compressed lip and moistened eye, lean against those marble pillars, lost in thought, and almost excuse even the demoniac and blood-thirsty mercilessness of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. These palaces are a perpetual stimulus and provocative to governmental aggression. There they stand, in all their gorgeousness, empty, swept, and garnished. They are resplendently beautiful. They are supplied with every convenience, every luxury. King and Emperor dwelt there. Why should not the President? Hence the palace becomes the home of the Republican President. ”

“ This was, above all others, the aristocratic prison of the Revolution. It was fitly chosen for the reception of that brilliant contingent of nobles, just ready to fly the country, whom the famous Law of the Suspects had routed from their hôtels in Paris. To confine them in the Luxembourg, converting that ancient and renowned palace into a dungeon of aristocrats, was in itself an apt stroke of vengeance on the part of the people. ”

“ There was no Court in Europe at which strangers were more welcome than at that of the noble Duke of X—-; none where pleasure was more eagerly sought after, and more splendidly enjoyed. The Prince did not inhabit his capital of S—-, but, imitating in every respect the ceremonial of the Court of Versailles, built himself a magnificent palace at a few leagues from his chief city, and round about his palace a superb aristocratic town, inhabited entirely by his nobles, and the officers of his sumptuous Court. ”

“ There is but one drawback to the pleasure of having met such a man—and this is the fear that in losing sight of Paris we may lose sight of him also.
The Palais de Justice is from its extent alone a very noble building; but its high antiquity, and 107 its connexion with so many points and periods of history, render it one of the most interesting buildings imaginable. We entered all the courts, some of which appeared to be in full activity. They are in general large and handsome. ”

“ They build their great law court building (the architecture ecclesiastical) so as to provide an entrance hall of imposing proportions which they use once a year; and to get this fine hall they have to make their court rooms, which they must use all the time, dark and small and inaccessible. They think as much of that once-a-year ceremony of opening their courts as they think of the even justice that they dispense; somehow they feel that the justice depends on the ceremony. ”

“ What a word to be spoken in the Palais de Justice! Old D'Ormesson (the Ex-Controller's uncle) shakes his judicious head; far enough from laughing. But the outer courts, and Paris and France, catch the glad sound, and repeat it; shall repeat it, and re-echo and reverberate it, till it grow a deafening peal. Clearly enough here is no registering to be thought of.
The pious Proverb says, 'There are remedies for all things but death.' When a Parlement refuses registering, the remedy, by long practice, has become familiar to the simplest: a Bed of Justice. ”

“ This famous old building was not only a palace, or a strictly religious institution, but it was at once a palace and a prison. Many a poor soul is said to have endured within its walls the agony of a trial and the still greater one of torture for opinion's sake. ”

“ The name of fortress would be more appropriate than any other, for the Old Palace; it is a great mass of stone, without columns, without frontal, without order of architecture. Time has gilded the walls with beautiful vermilion tints which the pure blue of the sky sets off marvelously, and the whole structure has that haughty and romantic aspect which accords well with the idea that one forms for oneself of that old Palace of the Seigneurie, the witness, since the date of its erection in the thirteenth century, of so many intrigues, tumults, violent acts, and crimes. ”

“ The parliament considered Law to be the author of all the evil, and some of the councillors, in the virulence of their enmity, proposed that he should be brought to trial, and, if found guilty, be hung at the gates of the Palais de Justice. ”

“ The white marble palaces of the higher courts wherein broad stairways, paneled mahogany, stained glass, and soft noiseless carpets giving an air of repose and refined culture, are not altogether consistent with the modern spirit. The man on the street does not understand whether the marble statues on the roof are symbols of justice or late presidents of the United States. ”

“ This insidious influence of the camarilla was daily becoming more dangerous. Presumptuous and illegal, it held its sway over all that was prudent and constitutional, and thus the intrigues of the palace came between the Cortes and the throne, and the country and the Queen, exercising power to the detriment of the national representation, the throne, the nation, and the Sovereign. “The royal palace,” says Don Antonio Bermejo, “was a gilded cage where men were slaves to envy and idleness.” ”

“ He has hung fire; it is the nation's turn to shoot now." Another: "Law! Law!" It was within these walls that the Convention judged Louis XVI.
At the Tuilleries, where the Convention began to sit on the tenth of May, 1793, and which was called the National Palace, the place of assembly occupied the entire space between the Pavilion de l'Horloge, called Pavilion of Unity, and the Pavilion Marsan, called Pavilion of Liberty. The Pavilion de Flore was called the Pavilion of Equality. The assembly hall was reached by the grand staircase of Jean Bullant. ”

“ The city overflows with public buildings of rare interest, both intrinsically and for association's sake. The National Palace contains among its treasures the portraits of the earlier patriots, and the State apartments of Maximilian and Carlotta. Republican and Imperialist alike fell before the fortunes of war, and it is fitting that their relics should be preserved together. An attempt at a practical illustration of liberty is made by allowing every one to enter certain rooms freely. ”

“ In the garden, surrounded by book and coffee shops, which was attached to the Palais Royal, a palace belonging to the Duke of Orleans—who, although distantly related to the King, had taken the popular side—agitators, mounted on chairs and tables, discoursed to excited throngs on the sovereignty of the people, and denounced the opponents of a single chamber to popular wrath. ”