The applicant underwent a most minute interrogation. She was asked if she were a married woman, a widow, or a spinster; if her parents were living and whether she lived with them, or why she had separated from them. She was asked how long she had inhabited Paris, and whether she had no friends there whose interest the magistrate might evoke for her. She was asked whether she had ever been arrested, how often, and for what causes. She was asked whether she had ever followed the calling of femme publique in any other place, and finally, what were the true motives of her application. Procès-verbal of the examination was drawn up, and the applicant had then to be seen by a medical man attached to the police service. Next, her certificate of birth was asked for, and if she could not produce it, and had been born out of Paris, she must give the name of the mayor of her department. The magistrate wrote forthwith to the mayor, and after setting forth the facts which the applicant had submitted in her examination, requested him to report upon them, asking particularly whether the relatives of the woman could not be moved to induce her to return to them. All this was done in the case where the girl or woman went alone to solicit her enrollment, but it has to be said that not infrequently one or both of the parents of the applicant attended with her at the bureau, to support her request!
When every effort of the magistrate had proved unavailing, a final Procès-verbal was prepared, to the effect that such-and-such a female had requested to be inscribed "comme fille publique," and had been enrolled on the decision of the examining magistrate, "after undertaking to submit to the sanitary and other regulations established by the Prefecture for women of that class." Thus, and in all cases by her own act, was she launched upon those turbid waters.
Of the 3517 women on the Paris police registers in 1831, 931 were from Paris and the department of the Seine, 2170 from the provincial departments, 134 from foreign countries, and the remaining 282 had been unable or unwilling to satisfy the authorities as to their place of birth. There were amongst them seamstresses, modistes, dressmakers, florists, lacemakers, embroiderers, glove-makers, domestic servants, hawkers, milliners, hairdressers, laundresses, silk-workers, jewellers, actresses or figurantes, acrobats, and representatives of many other trades and callings, together with six teachers of music, and one "landscape painter." As regards the education of this army of outcasts, rather more than one-half were unable to sign their names on the cards or badges which they received from the bureau; a somewhat smaller number appended "an almost illegible signature" (fort mal, et d'une manière à peine lisible); whilst a hundred, or thereabouts, wrote "a neat and correct hand."
As for the causes which induced them to cast in their lot with their sister pariahs, they were traceable for the most part to the weaknesses or defects of the social organisation. Thus, a majority of the women pleaded "excess of misery," and the class next in point of numbers were "simples concubines ayant perdu leurs amants, et ne sachant plus que faire." A large proportion had lost both parents, or had been driven from home; many had left the provinces to seek work in Paris; some were widows who could find no other means of supporting their children; and others were daughters looking for bread for aged parents, or for younger sisters and brothers.
And now, standing on the threshold of their prison, we may ask what were the commoner causes which sent these unfortunates to Saint-Lazare. It has been made sufficiently clear that by the act of procuring their licences they sold their liberty to the police. This indeed was the sole condition on which enrolment could be obtained. The femme publique, in becoming such, bought herself an army of masters; the whole force of police were in authority over her, and almost equally so were their agents and spies, and the medical men in their employ. She had subscribed obedience to all the regulations invented by the Préfecture, and she was under perpetual surveillance. The great power of the police over her rested on her submission in writing to the prefect's "règlements sanitaires" and his "mesures exceptionelles de surveillance," and infringement of the most arbitrary enactment brought her within the danger of prison. Failing to render her prescribed visit to the police doctor, she was almost certain to find herself a day or two later in Saint-Lazare. Special rules and regulations apart, the irregularities of life and infractions of common law which at times were almost inevitable in the calling she had entered on, were amongst the causes contributive to her troubles with the powers at whose mercy she had placed herself. On the whole, one gathers that the fille de joie paid at siege rates for that none too felicitous title.
She seems to have found herself often on the less desirable side of the prison door; and as the class of filles publiques in Paris has always included some of the handsomest and some of the most ill-favoured, some of the most elegant and some of the least refined, some of the brightest and some of the most villainous women in the town, it may be supposed that the floating population of Saint-Lazare (which amounted sometimes to fourteen hundred) offered a marvellous variety of types.
It was the place of waiting for women and girls whose applications to be registered had not been disposed of, and for the women who were to be tried on police charges; and it was also the place of punishment for those who had received sentence.
The position of the untried was in many respects worse than that of the convicted prisoners. The former had the privilege, to be sure, of hiring what was called a private room, but if they went in penniless they were in a bad case indeed. They had no right to the full prison rations, and were fed strictly on bread and water. The convicted prisoners were warmly clad in winter, but the untried were not allowed to add to the clothing they took in with them a wrap or comforter from the prison wardrobe. In hard weather the public women of the poorer class seem to have suffered keenly both from hunger and from cold. Untried, and presumably innocent (and many honest women were sent to Saint-Lazare on the vaguest accusations or suspicions of the police), they were compelled to receive the visits of the doctors, which were not always of the most delicate character. Women awaiting trial sometimes offered money to escape this humiliation, and the case is recorded of a girl who preferred suicide to submission.
It was better, in respect of physical comfort, on the penal side of the prison. There the women were clad to the season, fed not meanly, and lodged with a certain decency. The untaught and feckless had opportunity to learn a trade, for the workrooms were now conducted on a much more practical principle, and the small bonuses bestowed on the industrious were to some extent a corrective of the femme publique's inveterate indolence. There was, for the first time in the history of French penal discipline, a clean, more or less wholesome, and well ordered infirmary for the treatment of maladies peculiar to that class.