I arrived at the prison with my hands and feet chained. I had been prepared by a very long and rough trip in the armoured police-train. There was a hole in the seat, and when my gripes got too violent because of the jolting, I had only to unbutton. It was cold. I rode through a countryside numbed with winter. I imagined the hard fields, the hoar-frost, the impure daylight. My arrest had taken place in mid-summer, and my most haunting memory of Paris is of a city completely empty, abandoned by the population which was fleeing from the invasion, a kind of Pompeii, without policemen at the crossings, a city such as the burglar dares dream of when he is tired of inventing ruses.

Four travelling-guards were playing cards in the corridor of the train. Orléans . . . Blois . . . Tours . . . Saumur. The car was detached and switched to another track, and we were at Fontevrault. There were thirty of us, because the police-car had only thirty cells. Half of the convoy was composed of men of about thirty. The rest ranged from eighteen to sixty.

While the passengers looked on, we were attached in pairs, and with our hands and feet chained we got into the Black Marias that were waiting for us at the station. I had time to note the sadness of the crop-headed young men who watched the girls go by. My chain-mate and I entered one of the narrow cells, a vertical coffin. I noticed that the Black Maria was divested of its charm, that air of haughty misfortune which, the first few times I had taken it, had made it a vehicle of exile, a conveyance fraught with grandeur, slowly fleeing, as it carried me off, between the ranks of a people bowed with respect. It is no longer a vehicle of royal misfortune. I have had a clear vision of it, of a thing which, beyond happiness or unhappiness, is splendid.

It was there, upon entering the prison-wagon, that I felt I had become a true, disenchanted visionary.