The green faces of the plague-stricken, the world of lepers, the nocturnal sound of rattles, a voice against the wind, a tomb-like atmosphere, a knocking on the ceiling, do not repel, do not horrify so much as do the few details which make an outcast of the prisoner, the deported convict or the inmate of a reformatory. But within the prison, at its very heart, are solitary confinement and the disciplinary cell from which one emerges purified.

The origin—the roots—of the great social movements cannot possibly lie in goodness, nor can they be accounted for by reasons which are openly avowable. Religions, the Frankish and French royalty, the freemasonries, the Holy Empire, the Church, national-socialism, under which people still die by the axe and whose executioner must be a muscular fellow, have branched out across the globe, and the branches could have been nourished only in the depths. A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. Some men take pleasure in fantasies whose basic contents are not celestial delights. These are less radiant joys, the essence of which is Evil. For these reveries are drownings and concealments, and we can conceal ourselves only in evil or, to be more exact, in sin. And what we see of just and honourable institutions at the surface of the earth is only the projection, necessarily transfigured, of these solitary, secret gratifications. Prisons are places where such reveries take shape. Prisons and their inmates have too real an existence not to have a profound effect on people who remain free. For them, prisons are a pole, and, in prison, the dungeon. I shall therefore tell why I tried to have Bulkaen—for whom my love was so recent—sent to the hole.

But first, here is why I was sent to the punishment cell, where I began to write this account.

Just as when you walk at someone’s side, his elbow and shoulder, despite your trying to walk straight, shift you to the right or left and may make you bump against walls, so a force shifted me, despite myself, in the direction of Harcamone’s cell. The result was that I often found myself in his vicinity and thus rather far from my dormitory and workshop. I would leave with a definite goal, though on the sly, either to bring some bread to a crony, or to get a cigarette in another shop, or for some other practical reason, and most of the time the goal was quite far from the seventh division, where the death-cells are located, but the same force always made me go out of my way, or go too far, and I also noticed that as I approached the secret goal, which was hidden behind the mask of a reasonable decision, my pace grew slower, my gait more supple and lighter. More and more I would hesitate to go farther. I was both pushed forward and held back. Finally I would so lose control of my nerves that if a guard came along I would be unable to dash out of sight, and if he questioned me, I had no explanation to account for my presence in the seventh division. So that the guards imagined God knows what whenever they found me there alone, and one of them, Brulard, once nabbed me.