St. Lazare

Most Famous of the Old Prisons For Women In Paris.

If the walls of St. Lazare could speak, they would tell a tale of misery, of cruelty, oppression and discomfort undergone by the wretched female convicts there which would make a dog rejoice that he did not wear the human shape. Victor Hugo has told what it was to be a galley slave in France in a time not so long ago. Where is the feminine Victor Hugo who will dare write of what her own sex endured from the prison guards of those dens of horror in which helpless women prisoners were formerly caged in France?

But there are French ladies who know these horrors to the full. Some twenty years ago they set themselves to have them mitigated. They have worked as only women full of a holy enthusiasm can work, and their efforts have been crowned partly with success. One branch of their enterprise is to receive on release form a Paris prison young women not yet hardened criminals and procure employment for them that they may not of necessity sink back into the black pools in iniquity that lie only beneath the surface crust of the brilliant city.

St. Lazare is the principal women's prison of Paris, to which are sent those arrested and sentenced for short terms as well as those held for trial or other detention. It gets its name because it was formerly the home of the members of the church order of St. Lazare. When they removed from the building, it was turned into a house of detention for arrested women. Convent cell was merely turned into prison cell, and the change does not seem so great after all. Still, however, there is a conventional air about the grim old building, for gentle blue veiled nuns guard and minister to the prisoners. Women arrested and detained in Paris are usually turned over to the Sisters of Maria Joseph, and these have charge of the prisons for their own sex. Thither female criminals are conveyed from the various police stations.

St. Lazare is situated at the corner of Boulevard Magenta and Rue de Faubourg St. Denis. Like nearly every building in Paris on the left bank of the Seine, it is old and huge and gray and frowning. In the unspeakable old days when men jailers kept it its other terrors were added to by vile uncleanliness and lack of sanitation. The gentle yet strong Sisters of Maria Joseph have cleansed it to the utmost, so far as may be. Yet there are insects in its walls, there are hauntings of old tragedies, of the groans of the helpless, the prayers of the dying, if not the ghosts of the dead themselves, in the grim, dark old compartments, things that no brush, soap and water, no disinfectant or wash, may ever clear out. Old prisons, old hospitals and insane asylums, old tenement houses inhabited by the dirty, the sick, the wicked and the forlorn ought to be burned to the ground like pesthouses, at least so soon as they are a century old. The despairing, stifling atmosphere of the interior of St. Lazare sickens the free visitor from outside to this day.

St. Lazare has accommodations, if one might call them so, for 2,000 inmates. French prisons have hospitals connected with them; often, too, departments that serve as almhouses to shelter the homeless. St. Lazare is provided with these branches of administration. It is the custom, too, in France, humane or otherwise as one looks at it, to let the children of convict women remain with the mothers till they are four years old. Mothers arrested go to St. Lazare with their little ones, and there, mingling among thieves, drunkards, the lowest outcasts, some no doubt with murder on their souls, the children run about. Not infrequently an infant is born to a prisoner mother in the gloomy walls of St. Lazare. It, too, the sisters care for.

Women sentenced for a longer term than two months are sent to the new prison at Nanterre, in the country a short distance from Paris. The new prison at Nanterre, to which such convicts are conveyed from St. Lazare, is a modern structure, with new walls, with light and air, and it has something which some of the most splendid of the old time French palaces lack, a bathroom with hot and cold water. Here, too, are many cells for solitary confinement, and the punishment most dreaded by a Frenchwoman is to be put away alone where she can neither see nor speak to any human being.

ALEXANDRA COSMO.

illustration caption: ENTRANCE TO ST. LAZARE.