This promenade, bounded by fine but formidable blackened walls, by a cloister divided up into cells, by fortifications on the side towards the quay, by the barred cells of the better class on the north, watched by vigilant warders, and filled with a herd of criminals, all meanly suspicious of each other, is depressing enough in itself; and it becomes terrifying when you find yourself the centre of all those eyes full of hatred, curiosity, and despair, face to face with that degraded crew.  Not a gleam of gladness! all is gloom—­the place and the men.  All is speechless—­the walls and men’s consciences.  To these hapless creatures danger lies everywhere; excepting in the case of an alliance as ominous as the prison where it was formed, they dare not trust each other.

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.  The “nark” (in French, le Mouton or le coqueur) is a spy who affects to be sentenced for some serious offence, and whose skill consists in pretending to be a chum.  The “chum,” in thieves’ slang, is a skilled thief, a professional who has cut himself adrift from society, and means to remain a thief all his days, and continues faithful through thick and thin to the laws of the swell-mob.

Crime and madness have a certain resemblance.  To see the prisoners of the Conciergerie in the yard, or the madmen in the garden of an asylum, is much the same thing.  Prisoners and lunatics walk to and fro, avoiding each other, looking up with more or less strange or vicious glances, according to the mood of the moment, but never cheerful, never grave; they know each other, or they dread each other.  The anticipation of their sentence, remorse, and apprehension give all these men exercising, the anxious, furtive look of the insane.  Only the most consummate criminals have the audacity that apes the quietude of respectability, the sincerity of a clear conscience.

As men of the better class are few, and shame keeps the few whose crimes have brought them within doors, the frequenters of the prison-yard are for the most part dressed as workmen.  Blouses, long and short, and velveteen jackets preponderate.  These coarse or dirty garments, harmonizing with the coarse and sinister faces and brutal manner—­somewhat subdued, indeed, by the gloomy reflections that weigh on men in prison—­everything, to the silence that reigns, contributes to strike terror or disgust into the rare visitor who, by high influence, has obtained the privilege, seldom granted, of going over the Conciergerie.

Just as the sight of an anatomical museum, where foul diseases are represented by wax models, makes the youth who may be taken there more chaste and apt for nobler and purer love, so the sight of the Conciergerie and of the prison-yard, filled with men marked for the hulks or the scaffold or some disgraceful punishment, inspires many, who might not fear that Divine Justice whose voice speaks so loudly to the conscience, with a fear of human justice; and they come out honest men for a long time after.