Mysteries of Paris Volume III Part 10

In the middle of one of the first courts are to be seen some mounds of earth, planted with shrubbery, at the foot of which are already shooting forth some precocious cowslips and snowdrops; a trellised doorway leads to one of the seven or eight exercise-grounds destined for the prisoners.

The vast buildings surrounding this court resemble much a barrack or manufactory, kept with extreme neatness. They are built of limestone, with lofty windows, in order to allow a free circulation of air. The steps and pavement of the yard are of scrupulous cleanliness. On the ground-floor, vast halls, heated during winter, and well aired during summer, serve during the day as a place for conversation, workshops, or refectories. The upper stories are used as immense sleeping apartments, ten or twelve feet in height, with shining floors; they are furnished with two rows of iron bedsteads, excellent beds, composed of a soft thick mattress, a bolster, sheets of white linen, and a warm woolen covering.

At the sight of these accommodations, uniting all the requisites of comfort and salubrity, a stranger is much surprised, accustomed as he is to suppose all prisons as sorrowful, dirty, unhealthy, and gloomy. He is mistaken.

Sad, dirty, and gloomy are the holes where so many poor and honest workmen languish exhausted, forced to abandon their beds to their infirm wives, and to leave with powerless despair their half-starving, naked children, struggling with the cold, in the infectious straw.

There is some contrast between the physiognomies of the inhabitants of these two dwellings. Incessantly occupied with the wants of his family, to whom the day is hardly long enough, seeing a mad perversity reducing his salary, the artisan will be cast down and worn out; the hour of repose will not be sound to him; a kind of sleep like la.s.situde alone interrupts his daily toil. Then, on awaking from this mournful drowsiness, he will find himself overwhelmed with the same racking thoughts of the present, with the same inquietudes for the morrow.

But if, hardened by vice, indifferent to the past, happy with the present, certain of the future (he can a.s.sure himself of it by an offense or crime), regretting his liberty without doubt, but finding large compensation in the personal well-being he enjoys, certain to carry away with him on his release a good sum of money, gained by moderate and easy labor, esteemed, or, may be, feared by his companions, either for his impudence or perversity, the convict, on the contrary, will be almost always careless and gay. Once more; what does he want?

Does he not find in prison good shelter, good bed, good food, good pay, easy labor, and above all and before all, _a society to his taste_, a society, let us repeat, which measures his merit by the magnitude of his offenses?

A hardened criminal, then, knows neither poverty, hunger, nor cold. What matters to him the horror he inspires in honest men? He does not see them--he knows none.

His crimes are his glory, influence, and strength with the bandits among whom he will henceforth pa.s.s his life. How can he fear shame?

Instead of grave and charitable remonstrances, which might force him to blush and to repent, he hears savage plaudits, which encourage him to robbery and murder, Scarcely imprisoned, he meditates new misdeeds. What is more logical?

If he is discovered, arrested anew, he will find repose, the personal care of the prison, and his joyous and bold companions in crime and debauchery.

Is his corruption less great than that of the others? does he manifest, on the contrary, the slightest remorse that he is exposed to atrocious railings, infernal shouts, terrible threats?

In fine--a thing so rare that it has become an exception to the rule--should a condemned man come out of this frightful pandemonium with a firm resolution to reform by prodigies of labor, courage, patience, and honesty, and be able to conceal his past offenses, a meeting with one of his old prison companions would be sufficient to overturn his plan of reformation so carefully designed. In this way:

A hardened ticket-of-leave proposes a job to a repentant one; the latter, in spite of dangerous threats, refuses the criminal a.s.sociation; immediately an anonymous communication strips the veil from the past life of this unfortunate, who wishes, at any sacrifice, to conceal and expiate a first fault by honorable conduct.

Then, exposed to the contempt, or, at least, the suspicion of those whose interest he had obtained by force of industry and probity, reduced to distress, soured by injustice, carried away by want, yielding, in fine, to these fatal derelictions, this man, almost restored, falls back again, and forever, to the bottom of the abyss from whence he had with so much difficulty escaped.

In the following scenes we shall endeavor, then, to show the monstrous and inevitable consequences of promiscuous confinement.

After ages of barbarous proofs and pernicious doubts, it begins to be understood how unreasonable it is to plunge into an atmosphere abominably vitiated, people whom a pure and salubrious air might have saved.

How much time shall be required to find out that, to a.s.sociate gangrened beings is to redouble the intensity of their corruption, which thus becomes incurable?

How long to find out that there is but one remedy to this growing leprosy, which threatens the body social, Solitary confinement?

We should esteem ourselves happy if our feeble voice could be, if not counted, at least heard, among all those which, more imposing, more eloquent than ours, demand, with so just and so impatient an importunity, the complete, absolute adoption of the _solitary system_.

Some day, also, perhaps, society will know that evil is an accidental, not organic malady; that criminals are almost always good in substance, but false and wicked through ignorance, selfishness, or negligence of those governing; and that the health of the soul, like that of the body, is invincibly subordinate to the laws of a "hygiene" at once salubrious and preservative.

G.o.d gives to all, along with healthy organs, energetic appet.i.tes, and the desire of comfort; it is for society to modify and satisfy these wants.

The man who only has as his share strength, good-will, and health, has the _right_, sovereign _right_ to a labor justly remunerated, which will a.s.sure him, not the superfluities, but the necessaries of life, the means to be healthy and robust, active and industrious, therefore honest and virtuous, because his condition will be happy.

The dismal regions of misery and ignorance are peopled with beings of sorrowful hearts. Cleanse these sewers, spread there the inclination to labor, equitable salaries, just rewards, and soon these sickly faces, these broken hearts, will be brought back to virtue, which is the life and health of the soul.

We will conduct the reader to the visitors' room of the prison. It is an obscure apartment, separated down its whole length into two equal parts by a narrow, railed pa.s.sage. One part communicates with the interior, destined for the prisoners.

The other communicates with the office, destined for strangers admitted to visit the prisoners.

These interviews and conversations take place through the double grating of iron, in presence of a warder, who remains inside, at the extremity of the pa.s.sage. The appearance of the prisoners a.s.sembled in the visiting room on this day offered numerous contrasts: some were covered with wretched vestments; some seemed to belong to the working cla.s.s; others, again, to the well-to-do cla.s.s.

The same contrast of condition was observable among the persons who came to see the prisoners; they were almost all of them women. Generally the prisoners appear less sad than the visitors; for, strange as it may appear, it is proved by experience, there are few sorrows and little shame which resist three or four days of imprisonment pa.s.sed in company.

Those who are most alarmed at this hideous communion are soon habituated; the contagion reaches them; surrounded by degraded beings, hearing only infamous words, a kind of ferocious emulation drags them on, and either to impose upon their companions by rivaling their obduracy or to stupefy themselves by this moral intoxication, almost always the newly-arrived show as much depravity and insolent gayety as the old hands. Let us return to the visitors' room.

Notwithstanding the humming noise of a great number of conversations carried on in a low tone, from one side of the pa.s.sage to the other, prisoners and visitors succeeded, after some practice, in being able to converse among themselves--on the absolute condition not to allow themselves, for a moment, to be distracted or occupied with the conversation of their neighbors, which created a kind of secret in the midst of all this noisy exchange of words, each one being forced to hear, but not to listen, to a word of that which was spoken around him.

Among the prisoners summoned to the visitors' room, and the furthest from the place where the guardian was seated, was one whom we still particularize.

To the sad state of dejection he was in on his arrest had succeeded impudent a.s.surance. Already the contagious and detestable influence of imprisonment _in common_ bore its fruits. Without doubt, if he had been immediately transferred to a solitary cell, this wretch, still under the blow of his first detection, the thought of his crimes constantly before him, alarmed at the punishment which awaited him, might have experienced, if not repentance, at least a salutary alarm, from which nothing might have distracted him. And who knows what effect may be produced on a criminal by an incessant, forced meditation on the crimes which he had committed, and their punishment? Far from this, thrown into the midst of a ruffianly crowd in whose eyes the least sign of repentance is cowardice, or, rather, _treachery_, which they dearly expiate, for, in their savage obduracy and in senseless distrust, they look upon as a spy every man (if there should be such a one) who, sad and mournful, regretting his fault, does not partake of their audacious thoughtlessness, and shudders at their contact.

Thrown among the bandits, this man, knowing, for a long time and by tradition, the manners and ways of prisons, overcame his weakness, and wished to appear worthy of a name already celebrated in the annals of robbery and murder.

For it had been to him, Nicholas Martial, that Ferrand had applied when the idea struck him to be rid of his housekeeper and Fleur-de-Marie at a blow.

His family were what are called ravageurs, that is dredgers, living on what they could pick up out of the mud of the Seine. At least they were openly these, but, secretly, they were river pirates, "lumpers," "light hors.e.m.e.n,"

housebreakers, and bravoes. The father had perished on the scaffold. His widow, forty-five years old, was confirmed in crime, stern, hard, coldly cruel, and bent on training all her children up into the life which would most revenge on society the slaying of her husband. One son, Ambrose, had been sold by Bras-Rouge (Red-Arm), a tavern keeper and fence, and now languished in the Rochefort hulks. The eldest son, known as Martial, being head of the family, was a poacher, a fisherman at unlawful seasons, but not irreclaimably bad. The youngest children, Francois and Amandine, were not yet spoiled by evil surroundings.

To this family, who added to their evil income by keeping a thieves' resort in their house on Ravageur's Island, La Chouette had applied for the murdering of Fleur-de-Marie. Nicholas and his sister, known as Calabash (from her yellow complexion) had succeeded in drowning Ferrand's housekeeper only. But, believing they had fulfilled the twofold bargain, they had gone off rejoicing with their mother, to meet La Chouette, report their success, and join in a fresh atrocity. This new crime, the robbery and murder of a diamond-dealer in Red-Arm's public-house, was frustrated by the landlord's secret connection with the police. They had made their descent just as the jewel-broker was in the villains' hands, and arrested the whole gang. Bras-Rouge (taken to prevent his fellows suspecting his treachery), Nicholas Martial, and a scamp named Barbillon, were put in La Force, widow Martial and Calabash in Saint Lazare. Another capture, a ruffian called the Maitre d'ecole (Schoolmaster), from his caligraphic abilities, who had killed La Chouette in a fit of madness, was put in the Conciergerie Prison, in a cell for the insane.

To return to Nicholas Martial in La Force. Some veteran gallows-birds had known his executed father, others, his brother, the galley-slave; he was received and immediately patronized by these revelers in crime with savage interest.

This paternal reception from murderer to murderer exhilarated the widow's son, these praises bestowed on the hereditary perversity of his family intoxicated him. Soon forgetting, in this hideous thoughtlessness, the future which menaced him, he only remembered his past misdeeds but to exaggerate them and glorify himself in the eyes of his companions. The expression, then, of his face, was as impudent as his visitor's was uneasy and concerned. This individual was one Micou, a receiver, dwelling in the Pa.s.sage de la Bra.s.serie, to whose house Madame de Fermont and her daughter, victims of the cupidity of Jacques Ferrand, had been obliged to retire.

Micou knew to what punishment he was subject, for having several times acquired, at a miserable price, the fruits of Nicholas's robberies, and of several others.

He being arrested, the receiver found himself almost at the discretion of the bandit, who could point him out as his habitual fence. Although this accusation might not be sustained by flagrant proofs, it was not the less very dangerous for Micou: so he had immediately executed the orders which Nicholas had sent him by a prisoner whose time had expired.

"Well! how do you get on, Daddy Micou?" said the thief.

"To serve you, sir," answered the receiver, eagerly. "As soon as I saw the person you sent me, right away I--"

"Stop! why do you speak so loftily, Micou?" said Nicholas, interrupting him, with a sardonic air. "Do you not despise me because I am in quod?"

"No, I despise no one," said the receiver, who did not care to make public his past familiarity with this wretch.

"Well, then, speak as usual, or I shall believe you have no friendship for me, and that would break my heart."

"As you like," said Micou, sighing. "I have busied myself with all your little commissions."

"Well spoken, Micou. I knew well that you would not forget friends. The weed?"

"I have left two pounds at the office, my lad."

"Is it good?"

"None better."