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."