“Abbasso il direttore delle carcere e il capo-guardia, che sono due
avanzi di galera. A morte le gafe [warders] e tutti le spie, a morte
il capo-guardiano delle carcere, a morte l’Arca che sono la rovina di
tanti giovani.”
“Mia adorata stella, quando potrô ch...?”
“Pensare che in questo stesso luogo vi sono tante bighe [women] che
hanno volontà di farsi infilzare e non possono e tanti p... che
infilzerebbero un cane altro che una f... e non possono farlo.”
“Pare impossible. Che si possa stare tanto tempo senza piantare il
membro in una f... od in un culo. Eppure sono già 22 mesi che me lo
meno due volte ogni quattro giorno e non sono ancora tisico.”
The last I will give was written by a woman in a religious book, and is
translated by Lombroso from the Piedmontese dialect--
“La Marietta del taglio salute le sue amiche che fanno la porca come
lei, e saluta tutti i giovanotti che l’hanno ch... Menatevi una volta
l’uccello al mio gusto, che io me la meno al vostro, e quando sarô
libera venite a trovarmi che ce l’ho sempra calda e stretta tanto che
volete. Allegri!”
§ 9. _Criminal Literature and Art._
M. Joly has made some interesting investigations (which he has recorded
recently in the _Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle_) concerning the
favourite reading of French prisoners. He found that such criminals do not
read either Molière or Voltaire. Nor do they care for the psychological
novel of character and analysis; they have no taste and no capacity for
introspection; they prefer the _rococo_ style, and an old romance in five
or six volumes called _Épreuves du Sentiment_ is a great favourite at La
Grande Roquette. This is what we should expect from that sentimentalism
which has already been noted. But among the favourite prison novelists
Alexandre Dumas is _facile princeps_. We must not seek to explain this by
finding in Dumas a response to specific criminal instincts. In this matter
prisoners are at one with a very large body of non-prisoners, with George
Sand, Tolstoï, and Rossetti at their head. It is the universally human
quality in the prolific novelist, the anodyne of his entrancing and
unflagging interest, the satisfaction which he offers to the love of
adventure, by which Dumas fetters the criminal as well as the man of
genius. The female prisoners at Saint Lazare, unlike the male prisoners,
are constantly asking for Voltaire’s books, which, however, the sisters
are not able to supply. They are very fond of Henri Conscience, the
Flemish Walter Scott, a preference which is also by no means shared by
the men, and they delight in all sorts of innocent and sentimental
love-stories, although their marginal annotations to these do not always
admit of reproduction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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