Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 1.djvu/144

 committed suicide. If a prisoner, out of precaution, when going to sleep, placed his clothes under his head, they waited until he was in his first sleep, and then they tied to his foot a stone, which they balanced at the side of his bed; at the least motion the stone fell, and aroused by the noise, the sleeper jumped up, and before he could discover what had occurred, his packet hoisted by a cord, went through the iron bars to the floor above. I have seen, in the depth of winter, these poor devils, having been deprived of their property in this way, remain in the court in their shirts until some one threw them some rags to cover their nakedness. As long as they remained at Bicêtre, by burying themselves, as we may say, in their straw, they could defy the rigour of the weather; but at the departure of the chain, when they had no other covering than the frock and trousers made of packing cloth, they often sunk exhausted and frozen before they reached the first resting place.

It is necessary, by facts of this nature, to explain the rapid depravity of men whom it was easy to excite to honest feelings; but who unable to escape the height of misery but by excess of wickedness, sought an alleviation of their lot in the real or apparent exaggeration of all species of crime. In society, we dread infamy; in the society of prisoners, there is no shame but in not being sufficiently infamous. The condemned prisoners are a dictinctdistinct [sic] people; whoever is cast amongst them, must expect to be treated as an enemy as long as he will not speak their language and will not identify himself with their way of thinking.

The abuses I have mentioned are not the only ones; there are others even more terrible. If a prisoner were marked out as a false brother or as a sneak, he was pitilessly knocked on the head, without any jailor interfering to prevent it. Matters came to such a pitch, that it was necessary to assign a particular division to those individuals, who, giving an account of their own doings had made any mention of their