These idlers, it must be confessed, were, at La Santé, the exception and not the rule. There was no little stir and bustle in the workrooms; the occupations were many and varied; the prisoners were industrious and often exhibited no mean skill. Parisians are naturally a quick-witted and nimble-fingered race, whose talents, when in durance, prison contractors know well how to turn to the best account. At La Santé we found tailors at work upon clothes for the slop shops, shoemakers and cobblers making excellent slippers and shoes. Here a cabinet-maker completed a drawing-room chair; there, by his side, an upholsterer covered another in damask or silk. Long rows of prisoners, seated upon benches, manufactured feather brushes for dusting furniture, or dolls and children’s toys, or paper boxes for bonbons and patent medicines, or frills of the same material for the cooks and confectioners. Some were staining and coloring sheets of paper for the bookbinders, to be subsequently varnished and polished; others, in large numbers, were employed upon the manufacture of papier-mâché boot buttons through all the various stages of inserting the eyelet holes in rows upon the pasteboard, stamping out the buttons, trimming them, hardening them and varnishing them. A certain air of contentment, if not of actual good humor, was visible on every side. Prisoners met my eye, and did not immediately hang their heads and look down. Silence was the general rule, but they talked _sotto voce_ to one another, and to me if I cared to address them. One man, proud of his English, told me of “another English gentleman,” who recently came to La Santé. “As a visitor?” “Oh, no, as a _detenu_ (prisoner).” Others, if I appeared interested in the work in hand, would explain all its intricacies, and return my salutation with the bow of a finished courtier when I took leave. All the while the warders in charge exercised an easy-going surveillance, and were evidently neither hard taskmasters nor severe disciplinarians.