The position of the untried was in many respects worse than that of the convicted prisoners. The former had the privilege, to be sure, of hiring what was called a private room, but if they went in penniless they were in a bad case indeed. They had no right to the full prison rations, and were fed strictly on bread and water. The convicted prisoners were warmly clad in winter, but the untried were not allowed to add to the clothing they took in with them a wrap or comforter from the prison wardrobe. In hard weather the public women of the poorer class seem to have suffered keenly both from hunger and from cold. Untried, and presumably innocent (and many honest women were sent to Saint-Lazare on the vaguest accusations or suspicions of the police), they were compelled to receive the visits of the doctors, which were not always of the most delicate character. Women awaiting trial sometimes offered money to escape this humiliation, and the case is recorded of a girl who preferred suicide to submission. It was better, in respect of physical comfort, on the penal side of the prison. There the women were clad to the season, fed not meanly, and lodged with a certain decency. The untaught and feckless had opportunity to learn a trade, for the workrooms were now conducted on a much more practical principle, and the small bonuses bestowed on the industrious were to some extent a corrective of the _femme publique's_ inveterate indolence. There was, for the first time in the history of French penal discipline, a clean, more or less wholesome, and well ordered infirmary for the treatment of maladies peculiar to that class. In the material point of view, in a word, the prison of Saint-Lazare was, for convicted prisoners, an infinitely better place than any of its predecessors. But the régime from the standpoint of morals left more than a little to desire. Certainly, it offered none of the grosser features of the old system. The male attendants had disappeared. The principle of work had been established, and discipline was pretty well maintained in the wards, cells, and refectories. When the women had lived together in all but absolute idleness, their prison was always in a state of disorder, and often in a state of uproar. Quarrels were of daily occurrence, and a quarrel usually issued in a fight. Two women, armed with combs or holding copper coins between their fingers, stood up to do battle for an absent lover, whom each claimed for her own; and the other prisoners made a ring around them, not so much in the interests of fair play, as to see that each combatant got her due share of "punishment." If the warders attempted to interfere, they probably retired with broken heads.