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.