I was quite astonished to discover that the central prison of Clairvaux had all the aspects of a small manufacturing town, surrounded by orchards and cornfields, all encircled by an outer wall. The fact is, that if in a French central prison the inmates are perhaps more dependent upon the fancies and caprices of the governor and the warders than they seem to be in English prisons, the treatment of the prisoners is far more humane than it is in the corresponding institutions on the other side of the Channel. The medieval revengeful system which still prevails in English prisons has been given up long since in France. The imprisoned man is not compelled to sleep on planks, or to have a mattress on alternate days only; the day he comes to prison he gets a decent bed, and retains it. He is not compelled, either, to degrading work, such as to climb a wheel, or to pick oakum; he is employed, on the contrary, in useful work, and this is why the Clairvaux prison has the aspect of a manufacturing town, iron furniture, picture frames, looking-glasses, metric measures, velvet, linen, ladies’ stays, small things in mother of pearl, wooden shoes, and so on, being made by the nearly sixteen hundred men who are kept there.
Moreover, if the punishment for insubordination is very cruel, there is, at least, none of the flogging which goes on still in English prisons. Such a punishment would be absolutely impossible in France. Altogether, the central prison at Clairvaux may be described as one of the best penal institutions in Europe. And, with all that, the results obtained at Clairvaux are as bad as in any of the prisons of the old type. “The watchword nowadays is that convicts are reformed in our prisons,” one of the members of the prison administration once said to me. “This is all nonsense, and I shall never be induced to tell such a lie.”
The pharmacy at Clairvaux was underneath the rooms which we occupied, and we occasionally had some contact with the prisoners who were employed in it. One of them was a gray-haired man in his fifties, who ended his term while we were there. It was touching to learn how he parted with the prison. He knew that in a few months or weeks he would be back, and begged the doctor to keep the place at the pharmacy open for him. This was not his first visit to Clairvaux, and he knew it would not be the last. When he was set free he had not a soul in the world to whom he might go to spend his old age. “Who will care to employ me?” he said. “And what trade have I? None! When I am out I must go to my old comrades; they, at least, will surely receive me as an old friend.” Then would come a glass too much of drink in their company, excited talk about some capital fun—some “new stroke” to be made in the way of theft—and, partly from weakness of will, partly to oblige his only friends, he would join in it, and would be locked up once more. So it had been several times before in his life. Two months passed, however, after his release, and he had not yet returned to Clairvaux. Then the prisoners, and the warders too, began to feel uneasy about him. “Has he had time to move to another judicial district, that he is not yet back?” “One can only hope that he has not been involved in some bad affair,” they would say, meaning something worse than theft. “That would be a pity: he was such a nice, quiet man.” But it soon appeared that the first supposition was the right one. Word came from another prison that the old man was locked up there, and was now endeavoring to be transferred to Clairvaux.
The old men were the most pitiful sight. Many of them had begun their prison experience in childhood or early youth; others at a riper age. But “once in prison, always in prison;” such is the saying derived from experience. And now, having reached or passed beyond the age of sixty, they knew that they must end their lives in prison. To quicken their departure from life the prison administration used to send them to the workshops where felt socks were made out of all sorts of woolen refuse. The dust in the workshop soon induced the consumption which released them. Then, four fellow prisoners would carry the old man to the common grave, the graveyard warder and his black dog being the only two beings to follow him; and while the prison priest marched in front of the procession mechanically reciting his prayer and looking at the chestnut or fir trees along the road, and the comrades carrying the coffin were enjoying the momentary freedom from confinement, the black dog would be the only being affected by the solemnity of the ceremony.
When the reformed
