We had been told that the famous pétroleuse, charged with the murder of Monseigneur Surat, was still there, and we could not resist the opportunity offered us by a friend of going to see this extraordinary type of female ferocity—the woman who put a pistol to the prelate’s head, and, when he mildly asked her what he had done to her that she should hate him so, replied: “You are a priest!” and shot him on the spot. On arriving, however, we found that she had left for Versailles the night before. There were still fourteen of her terrible compeers remaining out of the four hundred and thirty that had been taken on the barricades and in the general saturnalia of the Commune and locked up in St. Lazare.
We visited the prison from beginning to end. Nothing surprised us so much as the gentleness of the régime, and the absence of all mystery or personal restraint in the management of the prisoners. The jail had nothing of the repulsive paraphernalia of a prison about it, and but for its massive walls, its vast proportions, and a certain indescribable gloom in the atmosphere, inseparable, we suppose, from the mere presence of such a population, one might very well
have mistaken it for an orphanage or any ordinary asylum conducted by a religious community.
The salles are magnificently spacious and lofty, with broad, high windows opening on courts; there are four courts—préaux they are called—one after another, within the precincts of the prison; the beds are like hospital beds; and there was nothing in the dress of the women, or the manner of the nuns toward them, to tell an uninitiated visitor that they were not patients rather than prisoners and malefactors of the worst kind. There was the same silence brooding over the place, the same quiet regularity in all the arrangements, the same supernatural sort of cleanliness that one never sees anywhere but in convents. The population of the prison varies from 1,200 to 1,800, and the government of these dangerous and desperate subjects is committed to the sole charge of a community of religious called Sœurs de Marie-Joseph. They are fifty in all. Their dress is black serge, with a black veil lined with a light-blue one. They were founded at the close of the last century by a Lyonnese lady, whose name the superioress told us, but we forgot it.
It was just two o’clock when we arrived, and the superioress and another nun gave up assisting at vespers in order to show us over the house, which from its immense size takes two hours to visit in detail. The prisoners are divided into several categories, and are kept distinctly separate from each other. There are first the Prévenues, who are put in
on an accusation which has not been investigated; then the Détenues, against whom proof is forthcoming, and who are awaiting their trial; then there are the Jugées, of whom the categories are various, as will be seen. These classes are never allowed to come in contact, even accidentally, with each other; they do not even meet at meals. Those who are condemned to one year’s imprisonment remain at St. Lazare, but if the sentence extends to a year and a day, they are sent off to one of the Succursales. When their term is expired (those who are sentenced to a year only), they may continue at St. Lazare if they choose. Many of them, touched with grace, and sincerely converted from their evil courses, dread going back to old scenes and temptations that have proved so fatal to them, and beg to be kept as filles de service for the work of the house, or in the workshops, etc., and they are never refused. The superioress said they made very active official servants, and it is very seldom they fall away from their good resolves, and have to be expelled or punished. We were passing through one of the passages when a sudden noise of voices from the court made us go to the window and look out. We saw a troop of prisoners pouring out into the yard; they were running about, laughing and chatting, and apparently enjoying their momentary liberty with the zest of school-boys.
“Who are these, ma mère?” we inquired.
“Hélas!” The exclamation was accompanied by a sufficiently expressive gesture.
“They are generally a very numerous class here,” she explained; “but just now there are but some two hundred of them; the pétroleuses were largely recruited from their
ranks, and great numbers of them have been sent on to Versailles.”