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Updated: May 31, 2025
He had heard a bird sing in the branches of a tree whose roots were in the prison-yard, now he could see her nest; he had heard the dismal pattering of the rain, and now beheld it, and the clouds from which it fell; he saw the glimpses of the blue beyond, where the clouds were breaking; he saw the fort, the cannon mounted on the walls, the flag that fluttered from the tower, the barracks, the parade-ground, and the surrounding sea, whose boundaries he knew not; he saw the trees, he saw the garden-ground.
For four hard years he had been denied the free air of free men. Even when walking in the prison-yard, on cold or fair days, when the air was like a knife or when it had the sun of summer in it, it still had seemed to choke him. In prison he had read, thought, and worked much. They had at least done that for him.
He made the round of the cells to announce, with sonorous blasts, the arrival of the worthy director, or a visit from the authorities; from the progress of the sun along the white walls of the prison-yard he could tell the approach of the visiting hours, the best part of the day, and with his tongue stuck between his lips he would await orders impatiently, ready to burst into the joyous signal that sent the flock of prisoners scampering over the stairways in an anxious run toward the locutories, where a wretched crowd of women and children buzzed in conversation; his insatiable hunger kept him pacing back and forth in the vicinity of the old kitchen, in which the enormous stews filled the atmosphere with a nauseating odor, and he bemoaned the indifference of the chef, who was always late in giving the order for the mess-call.
This recreation ground, the ante-room to the scaffold or the hulks on one side, on the other still clings to the world through the gendarme, the examining judge, and the Assize Court. It strikes a greater chill perhaps than even the scaffold. The scaffold may be a pedestal to soar to heaven from; but the prison-yard is every infamy on earth concentrated and unavoidable.
Monsieur de Granville bowed his head. "I went down into the prison-yard, and there I found the persons guilty of the Nanterre crime, as well as my little chain companion within an inch of the chopper as an involuntary accessory after the fact," Jacques Collin went on. "I discovered that Bibi-Lupin is cheating the authorities, that one of his men murdered the Crottats.
Then on the north side there came out the sharp, high-pitched, tiled roof of the corps du logis; on the south, another roof, surmounted by a cross at the gable, and evidently belonging to the chapel; on the other two sides lay courts that to the east, a stable-yard; that to the west, a small narrow, chilly-looking, paved inclosure, with enormously-massive walls, the doorway walled up, and looking like a true prison-yard.
The governor of the Conciergerie, informed of the Spanish priest's weak state, came himself to the prison-yard to observe him; he made him sit down on a chair in the sun, studying him with the keen acumen which increases day by day in the practise of such functions, though hidden under an appearance of indifference. "Oh! Heaven!" cried Jacques Collin.
One day while he was walking in the prison-yard, pacing backwards and forwards, up and down the narrow space which was allowed him, he noticed something green at his feet, and stooping down to see what it could be, found that a busy little plant was bravely pushing its way up between the crevices of the paving stones, to reach such light and air as could be found in a prison-yard.
The rigours and horrors of prison life were more than his failing constitution could long endure; and but a few months from the date of his conviction elapsed when his countrymen were pained by the intelligence that the faithful-hearted John Lynch filled a nameless grave in an English prison-yard. He died in the hospital of Woking prison on the 2nd day of June, 1866. Both were found guilty.
The police, all-pervading, poisons the atmosphere and taints everything, even the hand-grasp of two criminals who have been intimate. A convict who meets his most familiar comrade does not know that he may not have repented and have made a confession to save his life. This absence of confidence, this dread of the nark, marks the liberty, already so illusory, of the prison-yard.
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