the convicts. As for Petroff, he underwent his punishment quietly. Once the governor had gone his anger abated. Prisoners are submissive and obedient up to a point, but there is a limit which must not be crossed. Nothing is more curious than these strange outbursts of disobedience and rage. Often a man who has for years endured the cruellest punishment will revolt for a trifle, for a mere nothing. He might pass for a madman; that, in fact, is what is said of him.
I have already stated that during many years I never remarked the least sign of repentance nor even the slightest uneasiness in a man with regard to his crime, and that most of the convicts considered neither honour nor conscience, holding that they had a right to art as they thought fit. Certainly vanity, bad example, deceitfulness, and false shame were responsible for much. On the other hand, who can claim to have sounded the depths of those hearts given over to perdition, and to have found them closed to all light? It would seem indeed that during all those years I should have been able to detect some indication, however fugitive, of some regret, of some moral suffering. I positively saw nothing of the kind. One cannot judge of crime with ready-made; opinions: its philosophy is a little more complicated than people think. It is acknowledged that neither convict prisons, nor the hulks, nor any system of hard labour ever reformed a criminal. These forms of chastisement only punish him and reassure society against the offences he might commit. Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop in these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitration. On the other hand I am convinced that the celebrated cellular system gives results which are specious and deceitful. It deprives a criminal of his initiative, of his energy, enervates his soul by weakening and frightening it, and at last exhibits a dried-up mummy as a model of repentance and amendment.
The criminal who has revolted against society hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. In spite of different opinions, everyone will acknowledge that there are acts which everywhere and always, under no matter what legal system, are beyond doubt criminal, and should be regarded as such so long as man is man. It is only in prison that I have heard related with childish, unrestrained laughter the strangest, most atrocious offences. I shall never forget a certain parricide, formerly a nobleman and a public functionary. A true prodigal son, he had caused his father great grief. The old man had tried in vain to restrain him by remonstrance on the fatal slope down which he was sliding. But the son was heavily in debt, and as his father was suspected of having, besides an estate, a sum of ready money, he killed him in order to enter more quickly into the inheritance. This crime was not discovered until a month afterwards, during which time the murderer, who meanwhile had informed the police of his father’s disappearance, continued his debauches. At last, during his absence, the police discovered the old man’s corpse in a drain. The grey head was severed from the trunk, but replaced in its original position. The body was entirely dressed. Beneath, as if in derision, the assassin had placed a cushion.
The young man confessed nothing. He was degraded, deprived of his nobiliary privileges, and condemned to twenty years’ hard labour. As long as I knew him I always found him to be indifferent to his position. He was the most light-minded, inconsiderate man that I ever met, although he was far from being a fool. I never observed in him any strong tendency to cruelty. The other convicts despised him, not on account of his crime, of which there was never any question, but because he was without dignity. He sometimes spoke of his father. One day for instance, boasting of the hereditary good health of his family, he said: ‘My father, for example, until his death was never ill.’
Animal insensibility carried to such a point is most remarkable-it is, indeed, phenomenal. There must have been in this case some organic defect in the man, some physical and moral monstrosity hitherto unknown to science, and not simply crime. Naturally I did not believe so atrocious a crime; but people from the same town as himself, who knew all the details of his history, told me of it. The facts wereso clear that it would have been madness not to accept them. The prisoners once heard him cry out during his sleep: ‘ Hold him! hold him! Cut his head off, his head, his head!’
Nearly all the convicts dreamed aloud, or were delirious in their sleep. Insults, words of slang, knives, hatchets, seemed constantly present in their dreams. ‘ We are crushed!’ they would say; ‘we are without entrails; that is why we shriek at night.’
Hard labour in our fortress was not an occupation, but an obligation. The convicts did their job; they worked the number of hours fixed by law, and then returned to the prison. They hated their free time. If a convict did not do some voluntary work, he could not have endured his con finement. How could these men, all strongly constituted who had lived sumptuously and desired so to live again, who had been brought together against their will after society had cast them off-how could they live in a normal and natural manner? Man cannot exist without work, without legal, natural property. Depart from these conditions, and he becomes perverted and changed into a wild beast. Accordingly, every convict, through natural requirements and by the instinct of self-preservation, had a trade-an occupation of some kind.
The long summer days were occupied almost entirely by hard labour. The night was so short that we had only just time to sleep. It was not the same in winter. According to regulations, prisoners had to be shut up in the barracks at nightfall. What was to be done during these long, sad evenings but work? Consequently each barrack, though locked and bolted, assumed the appearance of a large workshop. That work was not, of course, forbidden in itself; but it was forbidden to have tools, without which work is evidently impossible. But we laboured in secret, and the administration seemed to shut its eyes. Many prisoners arrived without knowing how to make use of their ten fingers; but they learnt a trade from some of their companions, and became excellent workmen.
We had among us cobblers, bootmakers, tailors, masons, locksmiths, and gilders. A Jew named Esau Boumstein was at the same time a jeweller and a usurer. Everyone worked, and so earned a few pence-for many orders came from the town. Money is a kind of freedom that can be felt and heard; it is an inestimable treasure for a man entirely deprived of true liberty. If he feels some money in his pocket, he consoles himself a little, even though he cannot spend it: but one can always and everywhere spend money, the more so as forbidden fruit is doubly sweet. One can often buy spirits in prison. Although pipes are severely forbidden, everyone smokes. Money and tobacco protect the convicts against scurvy, as work protects them from crime; for without work they would mutually have destroyed one another like spiders shut up in a closed bottle. Work and money were nevertheless forbidden. Often during the night strict searches were made, during which everything that was not legally authorized was confiscated. However successfully the little hoards had been concealed, they were sometimes discovered, which was one of the reasons why they were not kept very long. They were exchanged as soon as possible for drink, and that is how it was that spirits penetrated into the prison. The delinquent was not only deprived of his hoard, but was also cruelly flogged.
After every search, however, it was not long before the convicts procured again the objects which had been confiscated, and things returned to normal. The administration knew it; and although the condition of the convicts was a good deal like that of the inhabitants of Vesuvius, they never murmured at the punishment inflicted for these peccadilloes. Those who had no manual skill did business somehow or other. The modes of buying and selling were original enough: things changed hands which no one expected a convict would ever have thought of selling or buying, or even of regarding as of any value whatever. The least rag had its value, and might be turned to account. In consequence, however, of the convicts’ poverty, money acquired in their eyes a superior value to that really belonging to it.
Long and painful tasks, sometimes of a very complicated kind, brought in a few kopecks. Several of the prisoners lent by the week, and did good business that way. The prisoner who was ruined and insolvent carried to the usurer the few things belonging to him and pledged them for some halfpence, which were advanced at a fabulous rate of interest. If he did not redeem them at the fixed time the usurer sold them pitilessly by auction, and without the least delay.
Usury
