A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  Great criminals are often found in this state by their confessors and examining magistrates. The dreadful sensations involved in facing a Court of Assize and even more acutely in being trimmed up for the scaffold almost invariably bring about in the strongest natures a depression of the nervous system. Confessions are heard upon lips till then tightly sealed; the hardest hearts break; and, strangely, it happens when confession can serve no purpose, except to reassure the men of law, who do not like to see a condemned man die without admitting his guilt and who had been worried by his mask of innocence till that moment.

  Napoleon knew just such a dissolution of all his human powers on the battlefield at Waterloo!

  The prison yard at the Conciergerie

  AT eight o’clock in the morning, when the supervisor of the pistole entered the room in which Jacques Collin was, he found the man pale and calm, like one who has recovered strength by a violent effort of will.

  ‘Time to go out into the prison yard,’ said the turnkey, ‘you’ve been shut up three days, if you want to stretch your legs and take a breath of air, you can!’

  Jacques Collin, wholly absorbed in his thoughts, taking no interest in himself, seeing himself as a cast-off garment, a rag, did not suspect the trap which had been laid for him by Bibi-Lupin, nor the importance of his entry into the prison yard. The unlucky fellow, going out mechanically, followed the corridor past cells set into what had been cornices in the splendid arcades of the Palace of the Kings of France, supporting what is known as the Galerie Saint Louis, along which the outbuildings of the Central Court of Criminal Appeal may now be reached. This corridor meets the one by the privilege cells or pistoles; and, a circumstance worth mentioning, the room in which Louvel, the famous regicide, was confined, is that situated at the right angle formed by the two corridors. Beneath the prettily appointed chambers which occupy the Tour Bonbec lies a winding staircase upon which the gloomy passage opens, and by way of which the prisoners lodged in both classes of cell come and go to or from the prison yard.

  All the prisoners, those to appear on indictment before the Court of Assize and those whose cases have already been heard, those newly committed but not in the cells, in fact everybody detained in the Conciergerie walks about this paved, confined space, at certain times of the day, but above all early in the morning in summer. This yard, ante-room to the scaffold or the penitentiary, ends there in one direction, but in the other abuts on society by way of the police station, the examining magistrate’s office or the Assize Court. Its appearance is thus more chilling than that of the scaffold. The scaffold may serve as a pedestal for mounting to heaven; but in the prison yard, all the infamies of the world are met together without issue.

  Whether it is that of La Force, or that of Poissy, of Melun or Sainte Pélagie, a prison yard is a prison yard. The same features appear identically in each, with little variation even in the colour of the walls, their height or their extent. Our study would be incomplete if it did not closely describe this Parisian pandemonium.

  Beneath the massive arches which support the audience chamber of the Appeal Court, there stands (it is under the fourth arch) a stone which, it is said, Saint Louis used for the distribution of alms, and which, nowadays, serves as a table at which a certain number of comestibles are sold to the prisoners. Thus, as soon as the prison yard opens to the inmates, they all group themselves about this display of prisoners’ delicacies brandy, rum etc.

  The first two arches on that side of the yard, facing the magnificent Byzantine gallery, sole vestige of the Palace of Saint Louis’s former elegance, are reserved for consultation between those on indictment and their lawyers, the area being closed to the prisoners by a formidable wicket, its ways in and out constituted by high bars, set within the space of the third arch. These parallel means of access are like those set up with barriers at theatre doors when seats are in great demand and queues form. In effect a parlour, contiguous with the huge new wicket hall of the Conciergerie, formerly lighted from the prison yard by hooded openings, was later to be given glazed lights on to the wicket, from which the lawyers in consultation with their clients could be observed. This innovation was necessitated by the excessive influence pretty women could formerly exercise upon their defenders. Where is morality to stop?… Such precautions are like those readymade examinations of conscience which deprave the pure imagination by suggesting to it monstrosities of which it had never heard. In the same parlour or consultation space, friends and relations are sometimes allowed by the Police to interview selected prisoners.

  What the prison yard means to the two hundred prisoners in the Conciergerie may now be understood; it is their garden, a garden without trees, or soil, or flowers, a yard in fact! Its extensions, the parlour and Saint Louis’s stone, constitute its sole channels of communication with the outside world.

  The moments spent in the yard are the only ones during which the prisoner is in the open air or in company; true, in other prisons there are the workrooms, where the inmates are together; but at the Conciergerie there is no occupation for anyone, unless he is a first-class misdemeanant in the pistole. There, everyone is preoccupied with the drama of the Assize Court, since nobody is in the Concergerie except for interrogation or trial. The spectacle in the prison yard is appalling; it is not to be conceived by the imagination, it must be seen, or have been seen.

  First, the meeting, in a space less than fifty yards by forty, of a hundred indicted or convicted persons, hardly constitutes a select social gathering. These wretches who, for the most part, belong to the lowest classes, are poorly clad; their physiognomies are ignoble, if not downright horrible; for a criminal who comes from more elevated social spheres is fortunately quite a rare exception. Peculation, forgery and fraudulent bankruptcy, the only crimes which bring respectable people to such a place, in any case carry with them the privilege of being installed in the first-class misdemeanants’ cells of the pistole, which the occupants then scarcely ever leave.

  This place of exercise, surrounded by fine, massive blackened walls, by a colonnade divided into cells, by fortifications on the side towards the river, by the pistole window-gratings to the north, guarded by attentive warders, occupied by a herd of low criminals who distrust each other, is sad enough in its bare physical aspect; it is terrifying to anyone who finds himself the cynosure of all those eyes full of hatred, curiosity, despair, face to face with these fallen creatures. No sign of pleasure! all is gloomy, the place and the men. All is mute, walls and consciences alike. To these wretches, everything represents a danger; unless there already lies between them the kind of sinister friendship which a convict station may engender, they dare not trust each other. The Police, watching their every movement, poisons the atmosphere for them and corrupts all, down to the handshake of two guilty men who know each other well, perhaps with a shared guilt. A criminal who meets his closest friend there cannot know that the latter has not repented, has not made avowals to save his life. This lack of trust, this fear of the stool-pigeon ruins the already deceptive freedom of the prison yard. In prison jargon, he is an informer, who appears to be in serious trouble himself, and whose proverbial skill it is to persuade the other that he is a chum, a chum being an experienced, a consummate thief, who long ago broke with society, who intends to remain a thief all his life, and whose nevertheless strict code of law is that of the swell mob.

  Crime and madness are not without their resemblances. To see the prisoners of the Conciergerie in the prison yard, or to see lunatics assembled in the garden of an asylum, is much the same thing. Both walk up and down avoiding each other, dart glances at each other at best strange, at worst atrocious, according to their mood and thoughts of the moment, but neither gay nor serious; for they either know or fear each other. The waiting to be sentenced, remorse, anxiety give the walkers in the prison yard the restless, haggard air of madmen. Only the most accomplished criminals display an assurance of manner which suggests the tranquillity of an easy conscience, the sincerity approp
riate to a pure life.

  The man of the middle class being exceptional there, and shame keeping the few exceptional cases in their cells, those commonly seen in the prison yard are dressed like workmen. The blouse, the overall, the velvet waistcoat predominate. The vulgar and frequently dirty clothes, harmonizing with the vicious or merely common faces, the oafish manners, a little subdued by the prisoners’ sad thoughts, everything, not least the remarkable silence of the place, contributes to the impression of terror or disgust produced upon the occasional visitor, to whom highly placed connections have accorded the far from common privilege of studying the Conciergerie.

  Just as the sight of an anatomy collection, in which foul diseases are represented in wax, may inspire chastity or pure and noble love in a young man who is taken to see it; so the sight of the Conciergerie and its prison yard, stocked with guests destined for the penitentiary, the scaffold or some other dishonouring penalty, impresses a fear of human justice upon those who feel none of divine justice, loudly as it speaks to the conscience; and they go away honest for a long time.

  Philosophical, linguistic and literary essay on slang, prostitution and thieves

  SINCE the walkers in the prison yard when Jacques Collin went down were destined to play their parts in an important scene in the life of Dodgedeath, it may not be out of place to portray one or two of the principal figures in that august assembly.

  There, as wherever men are gathered together and, indeed, already at school, physical strength and moral force are both at a premium. At school as at the convict stations, aristocracy and criminality mean the same thing. The man whose head is in peril takes precedence over anybody else. The prison yard, as various authors have said, is a School of Criminal Law, taught more effectively there than in the Place du Panthéon. One of its regular games is to act the proceedings in the Assize Court, to appoint a presiding judge, a jury, a representative of the ministry, a defence lawyer, and to judge the trial. This dreadful farce is almost invariably enacted when some important criminal case is in the courts. At that period, the sensation of the day was the frightful murder of the Crottats, husband and wife, retired farmers, the notary’s parents, who, as the unfortunate case had proved, kept eight hundred thousand gold francs at home. One of the authors of this double murder was the celebrated Dannepont, known as La Pouraille, a discharged convict, who, for the past five years, had evaded the active pursuit of the Police under seven or eight different names. This rogue’s disguises were so perfect, that he had served two years in prison under the name of Delsouq, one of his pupils, a well-known thief, whose own recognized offences had never taken him beyond the jurisdiction of ordinary magistrates’ courts. Since his initial discharge from the penitentiary, La Pouraille had scored up three murders. The certainty of a death sentence, as well as the amount he was understood to have salted away, made this prisoner an object of admiration and terror to his fellows; for not a bawbee of all that stolen money had been recovered. Despite the imminence of the events of July 1830, that bold stroke, which caused as much commotion in Paris at the time as the following year’s theft of medals from the Mint’s own collection, is still recalled by many; for the unfortunate tendency of our time to think of everything in terms of the figures involved causes any murder to appear more striking if a large sum of money is stolen at the same time.

  La Pouraille, a short, thin, wiry man, weasel-faced, aged forty-five, one of the celebrities of the three convict stations which he had inhabited successively from the age of nineteen, knew Jacques Collin intimately, as we shall see. Transferred within the past twenty-four hours from La Force to the Conciergerie with La Pouraille, two other convicts had at once acknowledged and imposed recognition of the sinister royalty conferred on this chum by his certainty of the scaffold. One of these two, an old lag called Sélérier, variously nicknamed l’Auvergnat, Father Ralleau, the Roller and known, in the society which the underworld calls the swell mob, as Hair’s Breadth, a cognomen due to the skill with which he evaded the dangers of his profession, had been a confederate of Dodgedeath’s long ago.

  Dodgedeath had long suspected Hair’s Breadth of playing a double part, of being at one and the same time admitted to the counsels of the swell mob and in the pay of the Police, and it was to this man he had attributed his arrest at Ma Vauquer’s in 1819. Sélérier, whom we shall now refer to as Hair’s Breadth, just as Dannepont will be called La Pouraille, already convicted of breaking his ticket-of-leave, was also involved in a number of aggravated thefts which, though without a drop of blood spilt, would send him back to the penitentiary for at least twenty years. The third convict, called Riganson, formed with his concubine, known as la Biffe, one of the most formidable combinations in the swell mob. In trouble with the Law from his tenderest years, Riganson was nicknamed le Biffon. Biffon was the masculine of Biffe, for nothing is sacred to those boys. The swell mob are savages who respect neither law nor religion, nothing, not even natural history, whose sanctified nomenclature they parody, as we have seen.

  Here a digression is necessary; for Jacques Collin’s entry into the prison yard, his appearance in the midst of his enemies, so carefully engineered by Bibi-Lupin and the examining magistrate, the curious scenes which must ensue, would be inadmissible and incomprehensible without some explanation of the world of thieves and convict prisons, its laws, its customs, and especially its way of speaking, the dreadful poetry of which becomes indispensable at this point in the narrative. First, then, a word about the language of these Greeks, swindlers, thieves and murderers, their lingo, cant, jargon, slang or argot, which literature has, recently, employed with so much success, that more than one word from that strange vocabulary may now be heard on the rosy lips of young ladies, spoken in marble halls, used to amuse princes, more than one of whom has been heard to describe himself as having been fleeced, bilked, fobbed, prigged or floué! Whatever people may think, there is no more energetic or colourful language than that of this subterranean world which, ever since the first empires and their capital cities were founded, has been tossed about in cellars, in ships’ holds, in ‘sinks of iniquity’, in ‘dives’, in the below-stage, the trapdoor area of the theatre of society, where the machinery is kept and the footlights are fed and from which, at the Opera itself, blue flames are belched and magicians emerge.

  Each word of this language is a brutal, ingenious or fearful image. Breeches do, indeed, go up and down. Sleep is a gentle thing, kipping and dossing are not, they suggest the hunted animal, the Thief, flinging himself down, exhausted, to a deep and necessary oblivion, while the powerful wings of Suspicion plane overhead. The animal may snore, but his ears, nevertheless, remain pricked, anxious.

  Everything is savage in this idiom. The prefixes and suffixes, the words themselves, shock, they are rough and rasping. From a moppet or a popsie or a doll, by way of a mere skirt, to a mab or an old bag, a woman may be almost anything and in Paris is a largue. And what poetry! Straw is a swede-basher’s feathers. Midnight is rendered by the periphrase: knocking twelve, where a plombe is certainly a leaden hour. Doesn’t one shudder? When you ransack a room, you ‘rinse’ it. One of the words for sleeping means changing your skin. What vivacity in these images! Eating is playing dominoes; how else do hunted men eat?

  Slang goes everywhere, all the time! it follows civilization, it treads on its heels, it is enriched with new expressions at every discovery or new invention. The potato, brought into France by Louis XVI and Parmentier, becomes in thieves’ cant a pig’s orange. Bank-notes are invented, the criminal world at once calls them garatted flimsies, from the name of Garat, whose signature appeared on them. ‘Flimsy!’ don’t you hear the rustle of tissue paper? The thousand-franc note was a male flimsy, the five-hundred a female. Presently, you will see, convicts will invent baptismal names for hundred-and two-hundred franc notes.

  In 1790, in the interest of humanity, Guillotin invented the expediting machine which solves all the problems to which capital punishment gives rise. At once, the co
nvicts, the former galley-slaves, took a look at the new machine, bridging a gap between the old monarchical and the new republican systems, and immediately they called it Mount Unwilling or Mount Against-the-Grain Abbey! They observed the angle at which the steel blade fell, saw that it was like the action of a scythe, and called it just that! When you think that the main convict settlements are called meadows, truly those who concern themselves with linguistics must admire the creation of such appalling vocables, as Charles Nodier would have called them.

  Let us further acknowledge the high antiquity of slang! It consists one tenth of words from the Romanic language, another tenth of the old Gaulish tongue of Rabelais. Effondrer (to break in), otolondrer (to annoy), cambrioler (all that is done in a private room), aubert (money), gironde (beautiful), the word for a river in Languedocian, fouillousse (pocket) belong to the speech of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Affe, for life, is very old indeed. To upset affe gives us affres, whence the word affreux, which we must translate as all that upsets life etc.

  At least a hundred words of slang belong to the language of Panurge, who, in the work of Rabelais, symbolizes the people, for his name is made up of two Greek words meaning: He who does all. The advance of knowledge changes the face of civilization with the railway; slang has already called it the iron horse.

  The word for the head, when it is still on their shoulders, la sorbonne, indicates the ancient source of this language, but let us not forget that the name of the seat of the University of Paris is also, in chemistry, that of a fume-cupboard or fume-chamber, and that it is feminine. From remotest times, as in Cervantes, in the Italian writers of novelle, in Aretino as in early romance, in Rabelais, the daughter of joy, the harlot, has always been the protectress, the companion, the consolation of thief, Greek, coat-snatcher, confidence trickster, pickpocket.