"The debtors' wing of Sainte-Pélagie, which is intended to accommodate a hundred, has one hundred and twenty and sometimes one hundred and fifty tenants. The building is in three stories, each story consisting of one narrow corridor, the rooms in which receive no light except from loopholes beneath the roof. There are no fire-places in the rooms, some of which are cruelly cold, whilst in others the heat is unbearable. With proper space for three persons at the most, they are generally made to hold from five to six; and the dirt everywhere is revolting. The wretched occupants can only take exercise in a corridor four feet wide, and a courtyard thirty feet square. For years they have asked in vain for some contrivance which would give them a proper current of air; there is not a decent ventilator in the place. In winter they are locked in from eight P.M. until seven A.M.; and, whatever his necessities, not one of the five or six cell-mates can possibly quit his cell between those hours. The dirtiest and worst-kept part of the whole prison is the infirmary. Two or three patients are put into one bed,—an excellent means of spreading the itch, and other maladies."
The reproach of this unseemly state M. de la Borde laid upon the chiefs of the prison service for their indifference, and the subordinates for their wholesale negligence.
To obtain leave to visit a friend on the debtors' side, you climbed the dingy staircase of the Préfecture de Police, to the office marked Bureau des Prisons, where orders were issued for the principal gaols; and you took your place in the waiting-room amongst a very motley crowd whose relatives or acquaintances had been "put away" for murder, arson, forgery, house-breaking, or a simple difficulty with a creditor.
Furnished with the necessary passport, a literary Frenchman made the pilgrimage to Sainte-Pélagie seventy years ago, and wrote a most interesting account of his visit. The authors of Les Prisons de Paris transferred it to their entertaining pages, and I cannot do better than translate from them. It chanced to be pay-day in the prison, that is to say, the day on which the debtors received the stingy pittance which their creditors were compelled to pay them once a month,—an excellent opportunity of observing the stranded victims of the most nonsensical law in the universe. To clap into prison a man who could not satisfy his creditors, and thereby to encourage the indolent debtor in his indolence and to dry up for the industrious debtor all possible sources of industry, was perhaps, in this country as in France, the summit of folly ever attained by legal enactment.
"I found myself in a world of which those who have described it only from the other side of the wall have given us an entirely false notion. Where were all the gaieties which the novelists and the rhymesters have depicted for us? Where were the bevies of fair women who, as we have been assured, flock here by day to scatter the cares of the forlorn imprisoned debtor? I strained my ear in vain for any note of those bacchic concert-parties and mad festivities (ces bruyants éclats de l'orgie) which are to be met with in the novels. I threw a glance into the courtyard, and calculated the amount of space which each man could claim in the only spot in the whole prison where there is any circulation of air; I came to the conclusion that, when the prisoners were assembled here of an evening, after their friends had left, each might possess for himself a fraction of a fraction of a square yard of mother earth."
The debtors trooped down to the office to finger their doles.
"I watched a procession of artisans and labourers, whose speech and costume contrasted oddly with the title of 'merchants' (négociants), under which their creditors had filched them from the workshops and yards to which they belonged; next, some physiognomies of men of the world, some representatives of the middle classes, and a crowd of young bloods (étourneaux).
"One of the first comers was an officer, decorated and seamed with wounds, who had been four times in Sainte-Pélagie to purge the same debt. After five months' captivity he came to an arrangement with his creditor, to whom he owed a couple of thousand francs, agreeing to pay him in ninety days five hundred more. He was let out, failed to redeem the debt, and returned to take up his old quarters in Sainte-Pélagie. At the end of a year, he acknowledged a debt of three thousand francs to the same creditor, and obtained six months' grace. He paid a thousand on account, could not furnish a penny more, and went back to prison for the third time. Thus, after nearly three years in prison, the captain owes one-third more than he did on first coming in, and has paid a thousand francs to boot,—to encourage his creditor.
"The old fellow who followed him was a monument of the speculative spirit of a certain class of creditors. He was half-blind, and had lost his left arm; his whole debt amounted to £20. Eight days before the King's birthday his creditor cast him into Sainte-Pélagie, in the hope that one of the civil-list bonuses would fall to the old man. Unhappily, the hope was not realised, and the creditor is now looking forward to next year's list.