Juliette read consternation on my face, but went on: "I assure you, Madame, I am not a bad woman.... And think of the awful risks I have to take! I have been caught. I am away from those I love, and I shall be here for years!"
Sister Léonide was right when she said Juliette would prove a most devoted companion. The Instruction had worn me out, and the prison doctor was seriously alarmed about my health.... Juliette saw at once that I was in a bad way, and when, the next morning, I started washing our cell, she snatched the cloth from my hand, carried me bodily to my bed, rolled up her sleeves over her mighty arms and, without a word, started scrubbing the tiles. Then she scrubbed the tables and cleaned the shelves on the wall. Afterwards, she carried me to another bed, looked at my sheets, and said: "You can't sleep in these!"
"There are no others in the prison, Juliette."
"Oh! yes there are! Just let me arrange things. I have been here so often.... I know the place only too well, unfortunately!"
At Sister Léonide's next visit, Juliette asked if she might change my sheets in the linen-room.
"But all the prison sheets are alike!" said the Sister.
"I know that, ma sœur. Only some are new and some are old. I want to find the oldest pair there is. The older sheets are the thinner and the smoother they are." And she added mischievously: "I know all about sheets, I have stolen so many in my life!"...
Juliette soon returned with a pair of sheets that were full of holes. She mended them, and when I went to bed, later on, she said triumphantly: "Well, what does it feel like now, Madame?"
The change was indeed wonderful; I told Juliette so, and she clapped her hands with delight.
Juliette was intelligent, but by living in contact with somewhat suspicious characters she had acquired a strange personality: she sometimes spoke like a lady of high intellectual attainments, but as a rule her remarks were those of a woman without much education or instruction. She would read aloud a chapter from some book—yellow and grimy with the marks of hundreds of hands, for it was borrowed from the prison library—Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame," for instance, and express original views on life in the Middle Ages; then, for the rest of the day, she would tell fortunes by cards. She raved about cards, and was amazingly superstitious.... With bits of paper and a pencil she had made for herself a pack of "cards," and would spend hours reading her fortune in them! She grew so feverish over those cards that I smiled sometimes.