Chapter 22. Prison

There’s no party without a morning after. Two years ago on July 14, I was taken to the Centrale Prison at Clermont. Women’s prisons are less harsh than men’s. I did not suffer from cold or hunger or any of the vexations our male friends underwent.

As far as I am concerned, my stay in prison was as easy as it would be for any other schoolmistress. Solitude is restful, especially for a person who has spent a great part of her life always needing an hour of silence and never finding it, except at night. That is the case with a great number of schoolmistresses.

In those silent hours of the night, she hurries to think, to feel alive, to read, to write, to be just a little free. At the end of the day, at the last lesson, she feels herself becoming an overworked beast of the fields, but a beast that is still proud, still lifting its head to go to the end of the hour without breaking down. When the hour is ended, silence surrounds her, fatigue has disappeared, and she lives and thinks and is free. In prison, I found those few hours of rest laboriously paid for over long years.

I’m going to write a book on prisons. I have a lot of pages for it already, and all I have to do is gather them up. The first pages will be dedicated to the poor gallant ambulance attendants of the Commune, the women condemned to death who instead were sent to Cayenne, where the climate is the murderer. They were convicted because they had cared for the wounded of the Commune and, in passing, for wounded men of the Versailles forces. Wounded men belonged to neither side, and those brave women dressed the wounds of anyone they found, whereas the leaders of the Versailles forces often opportunistically abandoned their wounded soldiers so they could snipe at us better.

Victor Hugo got pardons for those unpretentious and gallant women, Retif and Marchais. Following them were Su£tens, Papavoine, and Lachaise, who had been condemned to forced labor for the same deeds.

After my first pages on the ambulance attendants, the chapters that followed would belong to the friends met in prison. I would begin with my own. At Satory the wives of my prisoner friends were not afraid to embrace me, although I warned them that the authorities were going to “treat me as I deserved.” By embracing me they risked their lives. At Chantiers in the great morgue of the living, it was the same, under the rags hung at night along the walls. I must thank those brave souls for their friendship.

Many, alas, are now dead. The first to die was Mme Dereure; already ill, she could not survive the harsh ordeals to which she had to submit. In the full view of conquered Paris, the colors of the Commune followed her coffin. Without doubt, others are dead; we have not seen them again.

How many prisons! Have I said that already? Yes, how many prisons. From Bastion 37 to New Caledonia, stopping at Satory, Chantiers, la Rochelle, Clermont, Saint-Lazare...

When my book on prisons appears, grass will have grown up over still more unknown corpses, but the idea will remain the same. It will still be on the same subject: that human beings suffering through destitution, poverty, and ignorance are not responsible for acts against each other. The old nations are the murderers, the old nations, where the struggle for existence is so terrible that people turn on each other incessantly, clamoring for their prey. The only noise that can be heard is the cries of crows and the flapping of their wings above people who have been beaten to the earth.

A trap is set all around us, and poor, wretched women get caught in it. Is it the fault of those poor women that there is a place for some of them only in the streets or on display? Is it their fault if they have stolen a few sous to live on or to keep their children alive? Rich people can spend millions of francs and thousands of living beings on their whims. I can’t stop myself from speaking about those things with such bitterness.

Everything weighs so heavily on women. I’m well placed to judge that here at Saint-Lazare prison, this general warehouse from which women leave in all directions—even to liberty. Someone who stays here only a few days cannot see things clearly, but after being here for a long time, a person can sense how many generous hearts beat under the shame that stifles them.

You know the lines from Hugo:

Lazarus, Lazarus, Lazarus Rise up.

Yes, like Lazarus, rise up, you poor women. You have fought so long and you are crying over your shame, and it isn’t you who are guilty. Was it you who gave the fat, scrofulous, swollen bourgeois their hunger for fresh flesh? Was it you who gave pretty girls, who owned nothing, the idea of making themselves into merchandise?

And the others, the female thieves, how guilty are they? When women are thrown into the street, it is certain that they will go wherever the man they call their pimp sends them, because he beats them and exploits them. They will also go into the streets alone. People keep walking when they are lost. There are also seamstresses who steal. They have kept little remnants of the cloth they were stitching. Do the great dress designers carry those remnants home? Other women deceive their husbands. Haven’t their husbands ever deceived them? If only we let people choose each other instead of making marriages by matching up fortunes, that would happen less often.

Still other people, old women most often, when they are dying of hunger and want to live a little longer, insult a policeman to get some bread in prison. I saw one old woman who had eaten nothing for such a long time that after she had a little soup she sank down as if she were drunk. A few days later she died. Her stomach could no longer accustom itself to receiving nourishment.

When I was in my cell at Clermont, I was unable to see anybody, but I heard some scraps of conversations. From a cell you can understand everything best. Every cell looks out on some kind of courtyard and voices rise up to it. All you have to do is follow a few of the parts of this horrible choir of misery. Here are some fragments. I am choosing ones that tell the sadness at the bottom of misery. Listen to them.

“You’re getting out tomorrow. You’re lucky.”

“Hell, no. It’s too cold and hungry outside.”

“But your mother has a nice place.”

“She was thrown out because I was in prison.”

“Where is she?”

“In the street.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“Big Chiffe made me ask to go back to tricking on the streets. I’ll give my mother however much the prison sends me out with, and I’ll go back to Big Chiffe.”

“You’ll be back here again, I bet.”

“What could I do so I wouldn’t be? There’s no work for girls who have worn-out work permits. People with prison numbers can’t get one.”

Here are some others.

“Where are you from?”

“From Saint-Lazare, naturally, because I’m from Paris.”

“What did you do?”

“How should I know? My pimp stole somebody’s stash, and it looked like I was his partner.”

“You didn’t know anything about it?”

“Do you think he tells me where he’s going to work his fingers to the bone?”

“Maybe he gives you something.”

“Him? Give to me? He takes my stuff. He has to get fifteen francs a day off me.”

“What does he do with it?”

“Lady, he isn’t rich. He’s got to pay off a buddy who knows what he does. If he doesn’t pay him off, his buddy will split on him to the cops.”

“What do you do to make him his fifteen francs?”

“I did the window bit. That’s better than tricking on the streets. You’ve got to live. When I went looking for real work, I got sent away from the stores because I wasn’t dressed well enough. One time somebody lent me a dress, and then it was the other side: I was too well dressed. Then this john picked me up, and that was that. I had to get a card, and on top of that, a pimp.”

“Where’d you do the window?”

“At Relingue’s place—you know her, the one that gets herself arrested so she can recruit for her crib in the prison.”

“That Relingue woman! If you ask me, I’ll take this crib over hers. She makes too many francs out of our poor carcasses.”

“So where else would I go? Prison grain takes root only on sidewalks.”

And here are some others.

“Hey, you look sad, snub-nose.”

“That’s because I’m just going out to meet up with my bad luck.”

“What’s your bad luck?”

“He’s the father of my children.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you leave him?”

“Because he’s the father of my children. The poor dog got upset about the first ones, but men stand pain less easily than women. When ill winds blow, they have to lie down.”

And after women prisoners are released, there isn’t any place for them to seek refuge. There are some asylums for women who get out of prison, but they don’t have room for everybody. It’s only holding out a cup to catch a waterfall.

If the women in prisons horrify you, it is society that disgusts me. Let’s take away the sewer first. When the place is clean with the sunlight shining on it, then nobody will have to roll around in the sewer any more. You young girls with sweet, pure voices, here are some girls your own age with rough, broken voices. Your voices are clear because you do not live the way they do, drinking to divert your mind, drinking to forget that you’re alive.

Saint-Lazare. Listen, you young girls who have never left your mothers, there are some children here like you, children sixteen years old. But the ones here either don’t have mothers, or their mothers didn’t have the spare time to watch over them. The poor cannot watch over their little ones; they cannot even take the time to watch over their dead.

The young girls in Saint-Lazare are pale and blighted. Idiots claim it has to be that way to protect you nice girls from men hungering for fresh flesh. If they weren’t able to glut themselves on the daughters of the people, they would attack you. We no longer eat each other’s flesh the way our cave-dwelling ancestors did—we aren’t strong enough—but we eat each other’s lives.

That is equality and justice.

Let’s glance at one of the most terrible human misfortunes. I want the reader to revolt against the crimes of society instead of only having him lament the woes of one person.

Bordello-keepers trade women with each other, just as farmers trade horses or cattle. Women are just herds of livestock, and this human livestock makes more profit.

When the johns of some city in the provinces decide that some weak woman is too worn out or they get tired of her, the bordello-keeper arranges it so the girl owes the house a sum she can never pay off. That makes her a slave. Then she can be swapped in any horse-trade possible. The animal has to go into whatever stable will make the most profit for the swappers.

For other girls it is an enlistment. They come from their provinces too naive to know any better, or if they are Parisians and aware that there are ogres for fresh flesh and appetites to feed, poverty makes them tractable. Then, too, there is false finery to lure them; when they are once in the lion’s den, they will be charged six times its worth to get them in debt.

There is also recruiting. Despicable old women find ways to get themselves imprisoned for a few months, and then they recruit and entice all the pretty girls who are stranded in prison. They tell the girls they don’t have to fear being hungry. When they leave there will be a drinking spree—enough of a spree for the girls to die from it. Their voices will get hoarse, and their bodies will fall to pieces. It’ll be a spree—a spree for the hungry bourgeois.

The women on the street are still the least unhappy; those in closed houses have a life so horrible that it would surprise people who no longer feel surprise. What I know about it I will write sometime, because it is so terrible, so shameful, that people must learn about it.

But for the moment I’ll stay with the pathetic stories of the street¬ walkers. Won’t anyone ever understand that to allow prostitution is to support every crime? Once a woman becomes a prostitute, she becomes numb while she obtains money from idiots; and men thereby become murderers. Everybody should know that, so why does prostitution continue to exist?

If the great merchants of the trade in women who crisscross Europe canvasing orders for their business were each hanging on the end of a hangman’s rope, I wouldn’t go cut it.

And when a poor girl who believes she has entered an honest house (there are some) realizes where she is and finds it impossible to leave, and then with her own hands she strangles one of the despicable persons who keeps her there, or she sets the cursed place on fire, I believe it is better to do those things than to wait for court action. So long as circumstances are as they are, there will be no change.

Will the owls who bite the paws off mice to keep them in their nests ever stop acting so cruelly? If the captive mouse, instead of uttering his little plaintive cry from the owl’s nest between earth and heaven, which are equally deaf, tried to gnaw the throat of the owl that was eating him, the first mouse to do so would certainly die. But eventually the owl would become fearful, and as every being wishes to continue living, the owl would end up keeping itself alive on grain rather than risking death.

That’s the way the poor human livestock must proceed. A woman should not waste her time demanding illusory rights. The people who promise them to her have no such rights themselves. She ought to take her place at the head of the group which is struggling and at the same time free herself from prostitution. No other person can free her from it. When she no longer wants to be the prey of appetites and lusts, she will know that death is preferable to that life, and she will not be so stupid as to die uselessly.

Here is what I am hearing while I am writing this. It is the story of a sale.

“There was a fellow who made me sell it on the boul’ de Batignolles. He wanted to give me only twenty sous, but I was hungry, and then I had a pimp who had a deal with the cops. I had to pay him or he would have beaten me up, and I sure didn’t want that.”

“What did you do with the forty sous from the old goat who was so drunk?”

“I gave twenty to my pimp and twenty to a poor little kid.”

“Why didn’t you try to get away when the cops grabbed you?”

“Because, I told you, I had nothing to drink. Might as well be in prison. Shit, might as well be dead.”

Yes, those poor girls speaking from the bottom of the pit are right. It would be better to die than to continue a life where you have to drink so as not to feel being alive.

I don’t want to believe that a man has to feed himself by gorging himself with all sorts of orgies. Even if he does, however, a woman, whoever she is, must not be dirtied by these indecent brutalities.

But let’s look forward, because in the midst of these tortures, the new humanity will be born. Ferr£ at the execution post at Satory, the nihilists from the czar’s gallows, the German socialists with their heads under the ax salute that newborn humanity as I salute it while I look at life, which now is more horrible than death.