She is allowed to receive visits, but the visits are rare ones, and she is never alone with her visitor. She may write, but what she writes is always read. She may receive letters but she knows that all her letters pass through other hands and are subject to careful scrutiny before she gets them. She has no privacy at all and knows that she is always under watch and that even when she is alone in her cell there is an eye at the little trapdoor which peeps into it over her bed. The prisoner in the _pistole_ has not even the consolation of company during exercise hours, and she must sometimes envy the women whom she can see from her windows. She can talk to the nuns, but they answer as little as possible. She lives out her life in a whisper. The _soubrette_ is a prisoner. She talks a little sometimes—prison talk. She brings the _pistolière_ her cup of soup at seven in the morning, and tells her all the prison news, but she is not allowed to remain long, for she has other work to do and it is the hour of the canteen. If the _pistolière_ wants coffee she must go to the canteen and buy it. She is allowed a large mugful every morning, for which she pays twopence. She walks down the long dreary corridor with her mug in her hand, and waits in a large hall where the _pistolières_ stand in a row against the wall. Numbers are called in turn, and each woman is given her coffee and the permitted trifles she has ordered the day before, such as butter, milk, white bread (the prison bread is grey), herrings, dried figs or letter paper. Then the long morning drags on until post time. The letters are distributed by Sister Léonide herself, and the letters are always open. The _pistolière_ does not take her exercise in the large courtyard with the trees in it. The yard in which she is allowed to walk, and which Monsieur Moran has drawn for me, is small and has a high wall round it. The windows of cells look down on it, and as the prisoner walks up and down she knows that she is being watched and feels that there are eyes behind the bars of every window. Every now and again a big rat runs across her path. These rats of Saint Lazare are fat and of huge size. They run about quite freely and are almost tame, for no one ever interferes with them. The nuns of Saint Lazare keep cats, but they and the rats made friends long ago, and the cats and rats feed amicably together. At least a hundred rats a day are killed in the kitchens and corridors, but there are so many rats that the others hardly miss them. You hear them at night scampering over the beams of the ceilings, you see them in the corridors, the kitchens, the cells, everywhere. For some reason they are most playful about dusk, and there are stories in the prison of women who have had fits of hysteria and have even gone out of their minds because of sudden fear of these rats of the prison. There is a sickness common to all prisoners in Saint Lazare which is known there as “the six