"Ah! Madame," she exclaimed: "Don't laugh! Cards know everything and tell everything.... You look! I'll start over again. Just now they said there is a fair woman near my husband and that he is going to travel.... Well, watch.... You see, this is my husband.... Now, there is that fair woman again, with him!... I wonder who the wretch is!"...
She disliked going to mass on Sundays, but loved to listen to Pastor Arboux when he visited me in my cell.
She talked to me about her daughter, and I told her about my own Marthe, whom I saw twice a week. I taught Juliette all kinds of needlework, so that, later on, she might spoil her daughter with pretty things without stealing them. She was quick and clever, and soon learned not only to do nice work, but to do it rapidly.
Meanwhile I did "tatting," or painted. The Sisters had supplied me with some colours and brushes, and I painted for them flowers and landscapes on scores of handkerchief-cases, cushions, glove-cases, and lamp-shades.... This was far less of a strain to my eyes, but it seemed strange to paint flowers in prison, where I never saw any.
The chaplain (Catholic) of the prison came often to see Juliette, whom he, too, had known for many years. I had seen him before, on one or two occasions when he had visited Firmin.
He was a man of about seventy-five, tall and handsome, still erect, and he spoke in a soft, kind voice. "It is not so much what he says that I like," Juliette once remarked, "as the way he says it." But what the chaplain, M. Doumergue, said was well worth hearing.
He had travelled in the Near East, and knew Palestine well. Sometimes after telling Juliette—and me, for I eagerly listened—one of the parables, he would describe the place where the Son of Man had probably spoken it.
I talked of music with him, for he had told me that he loved sacred and classic music. He called J. S. Bach the "father of music," and seemed to know every oratorio worthy of the name. I told him how much I loved the singing of the Sisters, and once paid him quite unconsciously a compliment: I remarked that the organ music on Sunday mornings in the large Catholic chapel of the prison, though pleasant, was quite different from the splendid, inspiring music I heard every Sunday afternoon after vespers. Surely it could not be the same organist.
The old chaplain replied very simply. "The organist, Madame, is the Sister of the guichet (wicket). She plays while I say Mass, but at the close of the afternoon I go to the chapel, and all alone there I play, improvising and letting myself go at the organ."
From that day the kind old chaplain played in the chapel whenever he could spare a moment, and thus gave me back one, at least, of the joys I was deprived of in prison—the intense joy of hearing good music.