Time after time, during the twelve months I spent at Saint-Lazare, I revolted against such half-hearted, unsatisfactory and even compromising methods which made it possible for the prosecution to say that my evidence was incomplete, not clear, that I kept back too much... But Maître Aubin remained obdurate, and I feel sure that he meant well, and did the right thing.
Thanks to his all-conquering logic and fiery eloquence, the jury realised that I had done nothing to deserve being charged with a ghastly double murder, and I was acquitted. I thank him and his two secretaries—M. Steinhardt and M. Landowsky—with all my heart for their splendid devotion, but I know they will forgive me if I say that I regret that the whole truth did not come out at my trial.
Besides, Maître Aubin himself, time after time, told me: "I'll see that you are acquitted, Madame. Afterwards, you can and you should, tell the whole world all that I thought wiser not to reveal at the trial, for your own sake!"
I have followed Maître Aubin's advice: I am doing so now.
Saint-Lazare! How many times have I been asked, since I left that prison, to describe it, to describe the life I led there!
It was atrocious for a poor young woman "of the people" like Firmin, for instance, to live in a cell, but my fellow-prisoner would perhaps agree herself, that for a leader of society, for a woman of the world, it was almost worse. She had been used to a small shabby room or even a garret, to misery... and I to a vast house, servants, comfort, luxury even. Intellectual and artistic joys were unknown to her, but they had been the best part of my life. She was used to insults and vulgar language; they made me ill. She did not mind very much what she ate... nor did I, if only it were clean, but food was not, could not, be clean at Saint-Lazare, where elementary cleanliness and hygiene were quite unknown.
It would be difficult to conceive a prison more hopelessly dilapidated and insanitary than Saint-Lazare. The walls are cracked; the passages and staircases are evil-smelling; vermin abounds everywhere; light and air are worse than scant; the stoves of the cells are inefficient and even dangerous, as I learned at my own expense, for twice I nearly lost my life owing to escaping fumes. All the walls are damp and clammy; saltpetre oozes from them; they are hastily covered with a coat of black paint, but the saltpetre comes through again and they look as if they had been stuck over with some repulsive, viscous substance; the ceilings are low, except on the ground floor, where are situated the Director's apartments and various offices. It is cold everywhere.... The steps of the staircase are mostly broken; each step has a rotten, crumbling wooden edge, and there is filth in every corner. I could supply other—and worse—details, but will merely mention the baths. They are in the vaults of the prison, and on the way to them, one passes along the awe-inspiring dungeons where State-prisoners were kept in ancient days. Water runs down the rough-hewn walls. The atmosphere in that cave is icy cold all the year round. It is only lit by small air-holes. Each "bath room" is separated from the other by low walls, and one gains admittance to those "stalls"—for that is what they remind one of—by lifting a curtain. There are about ten of these stalls, and when I bathed, Firmin used to stand before the curtain to prevent the other women from coming to see—and insult—me. The baths were so unspeakably filthy that I was allowed to place a thick sheet inside and round the bath, so as to avoid contagion....
The prison is in such a state that for years there have been rumours that it would be pulled down. It will tumble down, in a few years' time. It is a place of dirt and sloth, of abject misery and ignoble and degrading atmosphere, a hotbed of infection for the body, as well as for the mind.... Such is Saint-Lazare, where I spent one whole year—waiting for an ever-postponed trial!—Saint-Lazare, the woman's prison in the very heart of Paris, the City of Light!
Firmin worked, in order to earn a few pence. I did like her, in order to be occupied, to kill time, and also to live like Firmin and the other prisoners. We made sheets, towels, pillow-slips, napkins.... A part of this was for use in the prison itself, the other—the finer work—was sold to large Parisian stores. The days were short, and it was never very light in the cells with the ground-glass windows, the iron-bars and the wire-trellis. Besides the windows overlooked a yard, with high walls all round it and we were in winter.... So we worked mostly by the light of a candle stuck in the neck of a bottle. It was most trying to the eyes. The tiles were so cold that we always sat with our feet on the bars of our chairs, and our knees necessarily high up. Several times a day, we tried, with an old rag, to get rid of some of the water which accumulated in the crevices between the broken tiles and in all the places where the tiles had been. On rainy days, water somehow dropped through the rotten ceiling, and trickled down the walls, and there were small pools of water here and there around us. The walls, painted black except for a narrow band immediately below the ceiling, were so damp that after a few nights in prison, I felt such pains in the side of my body nearest the wall when I lay down that I applied for permission to pull my pallet a short distance from the wall.... I thus avoided the dampness of the wall and... the vermin which crawled on it. Mice were scarce, but ugh! the cockroaches!... One evening, I and Firmin, with hands trembling with disgust, killed over a hundred each in a very short time. At night, they ran about everywhere, climbing on our table, on our beds.... When one crawled on my skin I had nervous fits and screamed.... I wrapped my head up in a towel, and drew the sheet and blanket up over it, but I could still hear the cockroaches and feel them crawl over me.... "This woman will go mad," said the prison doctor one day, and I obtained permission to drag my bed, at night, into the very centre of the cell. Every day, I rubbed the legs and frame of my wretched bed with paraffin, and then I could rest in comparative peace... especially as Sister Léonide, by order of the doctor, gave me every night—and until the last day of my imprisonment—a sleeping draught, thanks to which I generally slept two or three hours.... But when one got up during the night, it was dreadful. One literally walked on cockroaches, and the horrible, crackling noise as their bodies were crushed underfoot, was enough to jar any one's nerves....
I can fancy some reader saying: "Pools of water in a cell, broken tiles, mice, cockroaches by the hundred!... She exaggerates.... She is describing a cell in some prison of another century...." I am not exaggerating; "Saint-Lazare" does not belong to another century. It is so old and tumble-down that, more than once, when looking into some dark room on my way to the parlour or the Director's office, I almost expected to see the heavy chains, the thumb-screws, the rack, the bilboes and other instruments of a torture-chamber!