Part 13

This prison was built between 1845 and 1850 by the architects Gilbert and Lecointe, on the general plans of the English prisons of the same nature, and was considered at the time a model institution. It succeeded the Prison de la Force, in the Rue Pavée-au-Marais, immortalized in a chapter of _Les Misérables_; the new prison was known officially as the Nouvelle-Force. Popular usage, however, gave it the name which it retained, from the Place Mazas, at the end of the Pont d'Austerlitz,--the name of the colonel of the Fourteenth Regiment of the line, killed at Austerlitz. His family protested strongly against this usage, and in 1858 the administration of prisons abandoned the popular term and recognized the institution only under the formula: _Maison d'arrêt cellulaire_. All in vain, even though, in 1879, the Boulevard Mazas became the Boulevard Diderot.

This prison was the first in France in which was adopted solitary confinement. In a single night, that of the 19-20th of May, 1850, the eight hundred and forty-one inmates of the Force were transferred to Mazas,--a much more expeditious operation than that of the transportation of the prisoners of Mazas to the Santé, in May, 1898, which took ten days, at the rate of eighty men a day. It appears that the prisoners from the Force objected strongly to this system of solitary confinement in their cells; they gave way to such excesses of fury and despair that the Académie de Médecine was moved in their behalf, and protested against the _système cellulaire_ as conducive to suicide and insanity. The new prison--as any one might see from the top of the viaduct of the Vincennes railway--was built in the form of a great wheel, the spokes represented by six long galleries, eighty mètres in length and twelve and a half in height. The hub of this wheel was a two-story rotunda, the ground-floor of which was occupied by the central post of observation, and the upper story by the chapel, which could be seen from any point in any of the six galleries. At the hour of the celebration of the mass, on Sundays, the guards set the door of each cell partly open, so that the prisoner might receive spiritual comfort if he so pleased,--and if his distance were not too great. Each of the six galleries was two stories in height, lit by a glass roof. All the cells received light and air through a grated window, opening on one of the outside galleries or on one of the interior courts, but placed too high to afford the inmate any view outside. Each prisoner was entitled to an hour's exercise in one of the twenty préaux into which the interior courts were divided. This promenade was always a solitary one, under the eye of the guardians in the rotunda, and to be deprived of it was the lightest punishment inflicted. The most severe, in extreme cases, was imprisonment in the _cachot_, or dungeon.

Saint-Lazare (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction), on the Faubourg Saint-Denis, is at once a hospital, a police station, and a prison for women, and its methods and regulation have long been the object of earnest denunciation. As a prison for women, it is divided into two sections, for those accused, and for those condemned to less than two months' imprisonment; among the latter are women of the town, who have a special hospital. The only _condamnées_ who remain for any length of time within these walls are the sick, nursing women having a child less than four years of age, and those enceinte. There is a special _crèche_ for the newly-born babies,--for there are no less than fifty or sixty births annually. The nursing mothers, whether convicted or only accused, have special dormitories, and there is a shady garden for the wet-nurses. The prostitutes are provided with a special section. These unfortunates have not passed before any court; they have been condemned without appeal by a Chef de Bureau of the Préfecture de Police to an imprisonment of from three days to two months. During the day, the inmates are assembled in a workroom under the surveillance of one of the Sisters of the Order of Marie-Joseph, to whom is confided a general oversight of the workrooms and the dormitories. These prisoners take their meals in common, take their exercise walking in a long file, and at night sleep in a great chilly and crowded dormitory. Those who have merited it by their conduct are given one of the cells of the _ménagerie_, a double story of grated cells, furnished each with a bed, a stool, a shelf, and an earthenware vessel. The menagerie was formerly devoted to the service of the _correction maternelle_.

[Illustration: RECORD-OFFICE OF THE ROTUNDA OF THE DEPARTMENTAL PRISON OF MAZAS. ABOVE IS THE PULPIT FROM WHICH MASS IS SAID EACH SUNDAY.

Engraved by E. Tilly.]

In the great dormitories, there may be witnessed each morning such a scene as that reproduced in the illustration, the prayer addressed to the image of the Virgin on the wall, decked out with faded artificial flowers and with tapers in front of her; following the example of the Sister, all stoop with more or less reverence before this symbol and utter with more or less sincerity from impure lips the prayer for a pure heart. This grand dormitory is a great hall containing more than eighty beds arranged in four rows. The red tile floor is of irreproachable cleanliness, the eighty beds, with their gray blankets and white bolsters, are arranged with military symmetry. But this cleanliness and this good order, it is claimed, count but for little in the amelioration of these unfortunates, gathering contamination from each other in this indiscriminate herding together.

According to the law, those merely accused, the _prévenues_, and those actually convicted, are kept apart from each other, but in each of these two classes no distinctions are made,--the homeless unfortunate, arrested for _délit de vagabondage_, is associated with the criminal guilty of infanticide or assassination. Even the little girls of ten and twelve years are kept together in the same promiscuousness, those already hardened in criminal ways corrupting the more innocent.

The prévenues enjoy certain privileges; they are not obliged to work, though it is but seldom that they refuse to take up some of the light sewing which occupies their leisure and brings them in small sums of money; they are not obliged, when they take their exercise, to walk round and round in a circle in the préau, forming in line only at the entrance and the exit. The formalities of search and interrogation, upon entering the prison, are the same for all, as are the general regulations and the discipline. All rise at five o'clock in summer, and at six or half-past six the rest of the year, and all go to bed at eight; all receive meat with their bouillon only on Sundays. The children are more favored in this respect, being furnished with eggs, roast meat, etc.

[Illustration: SAINT-LAZARE: MORNING PRAYER IN THE SECTION DE FEMMES DE MAUVAISE VIE. After a drawing by G. Amato.]

Everywhere are seen in these gloomy and unwholesome halls and corridors "the austere and consoling figures" of the Sisters of Marie-Joseph. They wear a dark robe, sometimes with a white apron, a white _cornette_ under a black veil which has a blue lining, and they supervise all the details of the monotonous life of the prison. Rising in the dawn, a half-hour before any of the prisoners, they perform their devotions, and one of them rings the bell which summons all to leave their beds; they direct the workrooms in which the prisoners sew, a Sister sitting upright in a high chair, like a teacher presiding over her class, and they keep a watchful eye during the night on all the sleepers, in all the dormitories, great and little. Their hours of service as guards are from five or six o'clock in the morning to ten o'clock in the evening. After this hour, until the morning again, two Sisters remain on watch in the first section of the prison and one in the second. Their sole comfort and recompense is found in prayer and meditation in the mortuary chamber of Saint Vincent de Paul, now transformed into an oratory for their use. There is also a chapel for the use of the inmates, as well as a Protestant oratory and a synagogue.

The historical interest attaching to the buildings of this institution is very considerable. As far back as the time of Clovis, there was a hunting-lodge on this site; this was transformed, under the Carlovingians, into a debtors' prison. About the commencement of the twelfth century, this collection of ancient buildings was used as a hospital for lepers, under the appellation of Saint-Ladre [Saint Leper], standing near the road from Paris to Saint-Denis. In the year 1147, Louis VII, setting an example followed nearly a century later by Saint-Louis, visited this lazaretto, before setting out for the Crusades. "This was an action praiseworthy and very little imitated," says the chronicler. The hospital counted among its revenues the profits arising from an annual fair, known as that of Saint-Ladre; Philippe-Auguste, in 1183, annexed the proceeds of this fair to the royal revenues, and transferred it to the interior of Paris, where it became famous under the name of Saint-Laurent. In return, he provided the hospital with an annual revenue. Among the buildings attached to the hospital was one known as the _Logis du Roi_, where the sovereigns were in the habit of halting to receive the oath of fidelity from their good citizens of Paris before making their solemn entry into the capital. This was also the principal halting-place for the royal funeral cortèges on their way from Paris to Saint-Denis; and as late as 1793, when it was demolished by the all-demolishing Revolution, a Gothic tower standing here perpetuated the first rest made by Philippe le Hardi in his pious transportation on his shoulders of his father's coffin to its final resting-place.

In 1515 the canons of Saint-Victor established themselves at Saint-Lazare, and for more than a century here maintained a rich abbey, flourishing at the expense of the hospital. By 1623 their abuses had become too flagrant, and the direction of the institution was confided to Vincent de Paul, already renowned for his virtue. After having re-established order and discipline, he here installed the headquarters of his congregation of the _Missions_, created in 1624, and which became more generally known as the _Congrégation des Lazaristes_. The authority of the 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 Condamnés_, 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 the general victualling of these penal establishments, this bakery is not managed by the State, but by private enterprise. In the prisons of the Seine, with the exception of Saint-Lazare, the food of a prisoner costs the administration daily 59.9 centimes, about twelve cents.

The Prison de la Santé (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction), in the Rue de la Santé, has been devoted to three classes of prisoners,--those condemned to periods of from one day to one year, prévenus whose sentences have been appealed, and convicts and prisoners condemned to solitary confinement. The régime cellulaire adopted is known as the _système de Philadelphie_; this absolute solitary confinement is reserved for convicts awaiting their departure for New Caledonia, for other grave offenders, and also for minor offenders serving short sentences. The prisoner thus isolated leaves his cell only for an hour's exercise in _promenade cellulaire_; he is allowed to see no one and to receive no communication from outside, but the ingenuity of the prisoners contrives to modify these regulations. There is also a section in which the inmates pass the day together, but sleep in solitary cells. This _Quartier Commun_ is to disappear in the reorganized prison which is to take the place of Mazas, and which will be specially devoted to prévenus, to those whose cases have been appealed and to those condemned to death. Among the numerous light industries to which the short-sentence prisoners are compelled to devote their time, that of the manufacture of dolls is one of the most important; designers, painters, and carvers, of sufficient artistic excellence, are all found among the inmates.

This prison was constructed to replace that of the Madelonnettes, destroyed by the opening of the Rue Turbigo. In the Protestant chapel attached to the institution, which serves also as a school for one hour a day, the prisoners accused of various offences appear each morning at ten o'clock--as in all the prisons of the Seine--in the "prætorium," the three judges of which, the director, the comptroller, and the inspector, sit under an immense open Bible displayed on the wall and surmounted by the somewhat incongruous text: "Man may not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God."

[Illustration: SAINT-LAZARE: SECTION DE FEMMES DE MAUVAISE VIE, UNDER SURVEILLANCE OF A SISTER.

After a drawing by G. Amato.]

Sainte-Pélagie (Maison de Correction), in the Rue du Puits-de-l'Ermite, though one of the smallest and worst-conditioned prisons in Paris, is one of the most celebrated, and the only one imprisonment in which is made a subject of jest. This singular reputation it owes to the numerous journalists and men of letters--Béranger, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, Balzac, Eugène Suë, J. Richepin, Henri Rochefort, among others--who have been sent here by a censorious government. These gentry have so exploited the _Pavillon_, the section of the prison devoted to the _politiques_, with its "great and little tomb," "little and great Siberia;" they have so ostentatiously received their friends every afternoon, from one to five, in their cells; they have so proudly worn their beards and their usual garments, as to diffuse a popular impression that imprisonment in this edifice is rather a joke than otherwise. Nevertheless, the _Pavillon_, says M. Paul Strauss, "is only one quarter of the ugliest, the most frightful prison in Paris; fortunately, it is devoted to speedy destruction, and it is by this one that the work of reformation of the penal institutions of the Seine will doubtless be inaugurated; there is no demolition more urgently demanded than this, in the unanimous opinion of all those who have visited it. The extent to which the buildings are falling to decay, the narrowness and lack of cleanliness in the workroom, corridors, and dormitories, are not less offensive than the promiscuousness of the life in common, daily and nightly. Nowhere is the defile of the prisoners at the sound of the workroom bell, or from the sinister court-yard to the chapel refectory, more lamentable; the gray or chestnut-colored garb of the prisoners is more forlorn in its worn shininess than anywhere else, and the canvas sack itself hangs more dismally at the prisoner's back. It is not the fault of the penitentiary administration and the government of the institution; the establishment itself is worthless, the life, moral and material, that is there led is intolerable."

[Illustration: INTERROGATORIES BEFORE A "JUGE D'INSTRUCTION."

After a drawing by R. de la Nézière.]

The prisoners for debt (to the State) enjoy the same privileges as the politicians. The baser, or more unfortunate, inmates, serving sentences of from one day to one year, are obliged to work in one of the six ateliers and to submit to the usual prison regulations, rising at six o'clock and going to bed at half-past seven. Among the articles produced in the workroom are toy balloons, Venetian lanterns, and, in general, all those materials for the illuminations with which Paris amuses itself on nights of festival. The fine gentlemen in the first and second quarters of the prison, instead of partaking of the meagre prison fare, are nourished at the expense of the State by some restaurant designated by themselves. This prison was erected in 1635 by the Order of the Soeurs Repenties; it was a prison for debt till 1793; until the suppression of the Garde Nationale, it was known familiarly as _Prison des Haricots_ [beans], because those refractory citizens who objected to serving in this corps were here confined on a strictly vegetable diet. In the chapel which serves as the refectory is preserved a relic of Sainte-Pélagie. Madame de Beauharnais, afterward the Empress Josephine, was here imprisoned in a chamber, which is still shown, on the second floor.

In the Grande-Roquette (Dépôt des Condamnés), in the Rue de la Roquette, are confined those condemned to death, or to deportation to some penal colony. As late as the first months of 1899, the executions were public, the guillotine being erected in front of the prison, in the space between it and the Rue de la Roquette; the locality was marked by five large oblong stone slabs in the pavement of the sidewalk. Hereafter the executions will take place in the Place Saint-Jacques; and the prisoners condemned to death will be confined in the Prison de la Santé. The three cells devoted to these unfortunates in the Grande-Roquette were larger than the others, and the condemned man enjoyed certain privileges. He was not compelled to work, he was given meat every day, he could smoke, read and write, and play cards with the two guards who kept him company day and night until the moment when Monsieur de Paris took possession of him. In the chapel, an upper lodge or box was provided for him, where, behind a grating, he could hear the mass without being seen by those below. The library which was at the disposal of these unfortunates, and which was their principal distraction, included some four thousand volumes. The books most read were novels and romances, and of these the works of Dumas père were the favorites. After these came those of Alphonse Karr, Mayne Reid, Eugène Suë, books of travels, and the _Magasin pittoresque_.

For those condemned to lighter penalties, the regulations were more severe;--there was not space in the workroom for all, or there was not work for all, and the greater part of the unhappy prisoners wandered round and round all day in the dreary court-yard, in all the weariness of utter idleness. They were even obliged to eat in this court-yard, having no refectory. This prison, constructed in 1836, was taken possession of by the Commune in 1871, and in May was the scene of a series of massacres. The cell occupied by the most illustrious of these victims, the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy, has not since been occupied by any inmate, and has been preserved in the condition in which he left it at half-past seven on the morning of the 24th of May.

Directly opposite the Grande-Roquette, facing on the same street, is the _Prison des Jeunes Détenus_, the Petite-Roquette, which was devoted to three classes of youthful offenders, those placed here _en correction paternelle_; youths of not less than sixteen, prévenus, and those condemned to various terms of imprisonment and from sixteen to twenty-one years of age. The first class, imprisoned in cells in a separate quarter, were known only by their numbers, their names and stations in life were carefully concealed, and the guards themselves were kept in ignorance concerning them. All the inmates of this prison were isolated in their cells; in them they worked alone, and were visited by the instructor; they took solitary exercise in the préau cellulaire; and in the chapel-school, which occupies the central rotunda, each was imprisoned in a high stall from which he could see and hear but was invisible to all his fellow-prisoners. As he shut himself in his stall, he opened the door of that of his neighbor, who followed him at a distance of twenty paces. In this school he passed two hours a day, and in his _promenoir cellulaire_, one hour. A modification of this system was recently introduced;--the good-behavior inmates, those who were soon to be liberated, were brought together in a common workroom where they were employed in the manufacture of artificial violets. A new annex was recently added to this establishment, the _Infirmerie Centrale des Prisons de la Seine_, formerly installed in the Prison de la Santé. This hospital included three wards which could receive each thirty patients, an operating-room, and extensive bathing-rooms. This portion of the institution was entirely separated from the rest of the prison.

The Petite-Roquette, no longer in its gloomy surroundings, now stands on the banks of the Seine, nearly opposite the Terrace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, from which it is visible, at the end of the road which leads from Montesson to the river. This happy removal marks an equally fortunate transformation in the character of the institution, for the stupefying and demoralizing system of solitary seclusion has been substituted the wholesomer labor in the open air of an agricultural and horticultural colony.

[Illustration: THE END OF AN AFFAIRE. After a drawing by Émile Bayard.]