The walls of these houses of confinement contained something like a photographic negative of the city of morals that was beginning to haunt the bourgeois consciousness of the seventeenth century; a city for those who had tried to escape from the outset, where the rule of law was kept by force and no appeal was possible, where good was sovereign and threat triumphed, where virtue's only recompense was that it was spared further punishment, so much was it believed to be its own reward.