MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“Antiquity of prostitution. — The capitularies of Charlemagne.”The Prisons of Europe · Volume VIII
From the medieval sinkhole of Saint-Martin to the leaden dormitories of Saint-Lazare, the night an inmate of the vice squad defied eternal confinement.
Beneath the freezing drizzle of November 1809, the timber galleries of the Palais-Royal exhaled a stench of tallow, adulterated musk, and black mud. Oil lanterns flickered in the drafty air, casting their pallid glow upon the furtive tread of streetwalkers with mud-splattered petticoats and the merciless gaze of the police bailiffs. Since the harsh ordinances of Saint Louis and the forgotten capitularies of Charlemagne, Paris had never ceased to hanker after, corral, and brand these sirens of the pavement; yet in these early days of the Empire, the police machinery, perfected by the secret ledgers of the vice squad, ground through human flesh with clockwork regularity.
Suddenly, a piercing whistle tore through the mist. A battalion of the municipal guard and half a dozen inspectors in plain clothes erupted from beneath the arcades. Among the women driven against the iron grilles stood she whom the turnkey’s ledger called Pauline the Jewess—a pale beauty with slate-coloured eyes, whose gaze burned with a haughty defiance that neither cold nor hunger had ever subdued. In the twinkling of an eye, wrists were seized and shawls torn away. Flung pell-mell with a dozen wretched souls into the worm-eaten boards of the black maria, Pauline rattled off toward the ancient lockup of Saint-Martin.
“Whosoever crosses the threshold of these houses of correction leaves her name carved in letters of infamy upon a ledger whose final page no hand will ever turn.”
There, beneath low vaults dripping with saltpetre where the echoes of centuries of municipal inquisition still seemed to linger, the heavy bolts grated like grinding rusted iron. The women were herded within like cattle for a night in the mire, denied even a bed of straw, awaiting the great winnowing at the Prefecture.
At daybreak, the clerk of the court took inventory of the night’s quarry. In the dusty dossiers whence Jacques Peuchet drew the substance of his shadowy chronicles, every human silhouette was reduced to an inmate number flanked by damning annotations. For the rebellious streetwalkers who held no registry card, no mercy was forthcoming: theirs was indefinite detention, a living burial within the reformatory wards.
Pauline watched the clerk dip his goose quill into violet ink to sign her committal. Transferred first to the Madelonnettes—that grim convent converted into a women’s prison, where the narrow cells reeked of jail fever and disinfecting vinegar—she measured the utter hopelessness of her plight. The massive oak doors, sheathed in sheet iron, opened only onto cramped exercise yards where the recluses circled aimlessly under the sullen, watchful eyes of the matrons. But Pauline was not one to cough out her life with consumption between four whitewashed walls. She had caught the hushed, drunken boasts of a turnkey: the Central Bureau had ordered her immediate removal to the walled precincts of Saint-Lazare—that ultimate fortress, that vast medieval leprosarium refashioned into a sepulchre for unyielding courtesans.
Saint-Lazare reared its grim grey ramparts and dizzying slate roofs above the Faubourg Saint-Denis. It was a city unto itself, governed by an iron rule wherein the deathly silence was broken only by the clinking of keys and the compulsory prayers chanted under the watchful eyes of the sisterhood. Pauline was immured in the Quartier de la Force, beneath the eaves of the third storey, where the windows were mere arrow-slits heavily criss-crossed with iron bars.
For six weeks, the prisoner feigned the most unreserved contrition. She stitched coarse linen shirts sixteen hours a day without uttering a syllable, her eyes demurely downcast, gradually winning the favour of Sister Marthe, the mistress of the linen-room. Yet each night, in the dark common ward where the raspy coughing of the doomed women rose in the gloom, Pauline went to work. With a forged nail scavenged from the foot of a wash-tub, she patiently picked away at the chalky mortar of an unseated doorframe.
Her fingertips bled and the fine dust seared her throat, but beneath the thick crust of century-old plaster, her questing hands had found an empty void: a disused chimney-flue, a remnant of the ancient abbatial lodgings of the Lazarists, which climbed straight toward the jagged rooflines above.
The night of 24 December 1809 brought a providential tempest. Thunder rolled across the Plain of Saint-Denis, drowning out the sentries’ rounds beneath a deluge of rain mingled with sleet. At midnight, as the convent bell summoned the nuns to the office of matins, Pauline wrenched free the loosened bricks. Wrapping her hands in strips of torn bedlinen, she slipped into the greasy, pitch-black maw of the flue.
The ascent was a suffocating torment. Soot choked her nostrils, and jagged stone projections flayed her knees, but her loathing of captivity served her in place of breath. When at last she emerged into the open air, the winter gale lashed her face like a whip. She stood upon the dizzying knife-edge of the roofs of Saint-Lazare, looking down into the yawning, shadowy abyss of Paris.
Crawling across the slick slates like an adder, she gained the far end of the north wing, where a leaden rainwater pipe dropped toward the crest of a party wall bordering the wasteland of the faubourg. Anchoring her cord of plaited linen to the base of a chimney stack, she lowered herself into the void. Ten feet from the ground, the rope snapped cleanly. Pauline struck the sodden cobbles with a dull thud, her ankle twisted, her body battered and bruised.
Yet she was out. Already, in the cour d'honneur, the alarm bell was sounding the call to arms, mingling its frantic tocsin with the howl of the squall. Raising herself from the mire, limping but free, Pauline vanished into the maze of dark, winding alleys of the Saint-Laurent quarter. Come morning, across her registration number in the committal ledger of the Prefecture, the chief inspector could do no more than scrawl in red ink that terrible, triumphant word: Escaped.