During the few hours I passed at the Infirmary, I seated myself at a
window in the sunshine (for the afternoon had become fine), and I
enjoyed all the sun which the gratings of the window would allow me.
I sat thus, my heavy and fevered head within my hands, my elbows on my
knees, my feet on the bar of the chair; for dejection had made me stoop,
and sink within myself, as if I had neither bone nor muscular power.
The stifling air of the prison oppressed me more than ever; I still
fancied the noise from the convicts’ chains rung in my ears; I was
almost overcome. I wished that some guardian spirit would take pity on
me, and send even a little bird to sing there, opposite, on the edge of
the roof.
I know not if it were a spirit of good or evil which granted my wish;
but almost at the moment I uttered it, I heard beneath my window a
voice,--not that of a bird, but far better,--the pure, fresh, _velvet_
voice of a young girl of fifteen!
I raised my head with a start; I listened with avidity to the song she
sung. It was a slow and plaintive air,--a sad yet beautiful melody. As I
gathered the sense of the words, I cannot describe my pain and
disappointment, while the following stanzas of prison-dialect marred the
sweet music.[6]
I heard no more. I could listen to no more. The meaning, half-hidden,
half-evident, of this horrible lament,--the struggle between the felon
and the police; the thief he meets and despatches for his wife; his
dreadful explanation to her: “I have sweated an oak” (“I have
assassinated a man”) the wife who goes to Versailles with a petition,
and the King indignantly exclaiming that he “will make the guilty man
dance where there is no floor!”--and all this sung to the sweetest air,
and by the sweetest voice that ever soothed human ear! I was shocked,
disgusted, overcome. It was a repulsive idea that all these monstrous
words proceeded from a fresh rosy mouth: it was like the slime of a
snail over a rosebud!
I cannot express what I felt; I was at once pained and gratified. The
idiom of crime, a language at once sanguinary and grotesque, united to
the voice of a young girl, that graceful transition from the voice of
childhood to the voice of woman,--all these deformities of words
delightfully sung, cadenced, rounded!
Ah, how infamous is a prison! It contains a venom which assails all
within its pestilential reach. Everything withers there, even the song
of a girl of fifteen!
If you find a bird within its courts, it has mud on its wing. If you
gather a beauteous flower there, it exhales poison!