[Illustration: LA COUR DES FILLES IN SAINT LAZARE It is here that Madame Caillaux is allowed to take daily exercise for three-quarters of an hour. _Drawn specially in St. Lazare Prison by M. Albert Morand_] Curiously little is known by the outside world, though Paris is a gossip-loving and gossipy city, of the real facts of the life inside the house of correction of Saint Lazare. I never realized myself until quite recently the horrors of incarceration there. Chance then threw me into communication with a woman who had shot another woman dead, had spent some months in Saint Lazare, had been acquitted by the jury and is a free woman now. Her crime had been a crime of jealousy. The jury had refused to punish her more than she had been punished, and she got a verdict of “not guilty,” though she shot and killed her rival in the affections of her husband and pleaded guilty to so doing. This woman is a woman with literary tastes, a woman who is in the habit of observing, and who has the gift of describing what she sees. She has told me a great deal about the life in Saint Lazare, but far more eloquent than anything which she has told me is the present condition of the woman herself. We talk about “the prison taint” with very little real knowledge of what it means. Imagine a woman of your own world, a lady of refinement and of education, who waits to be spoken to before she opens her lips, who stands aside to let you pass if you open a door, who, if you beg her to take precedence, walks before you with bowed head and folded hands as though you were her gaoler. Her voice is always subdued, she never contradicts, she gives her opinion only when asked for it, and even then it is an opinion without emphasis. She has forgotten how to hurry. She has forgotten how to lie in bed late in the mornings. She never gives an order. When she wants something from a servant her tone and manner in asking for it are those of supplication. She is resigned—terribly resigned. Her whole attitude is one of resignation so pitiful that, unattractive woman though she is, a man’s heart fairly bleeds for her, and one feels a longing to try and comfort and console her as one would console a child who has been beaten. Morally and mentally the prisoner in Saint Lazare is being beaten all the time that she is in prison. There is no physical punishment, there is no active cruelty, there is only the terrible deadweight of the prison system; but this is quite enough to unsettle and to dull the most active brain. There is no doubt that the active brains suffer the most. The whole atmosphere of the place, as this woman told me, is the atmosphere of a convent from which all love and sympathy are banished. Imagine, if you can, a hospital in which, while everything is done to ease the physical distress of the patients, their moral distress is ignored. Imagine a hospital in which the nurses are stern and unsmiling, in which complaint of mental distress is met with