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 passage. 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 passage. The appearance of the prisoners assembled in the visiting room on this day offered numerous contrasts: some were covered with wretched vestments; some seemed to belong to the working class; others, again, to the well-to-do class.
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 passed 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 passage 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 assurance. 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.