Their blood flows more quickly, their eyes light up, they live from
one day to the next on a memory and a hope. No punishment can be invented
so terrible as the deprivation of the sight of their friends on the
visiting-day. Men who are obstinate and immovable before any sort or
amount of physical torture are subdued by mere threat of this.
A friend who told me of a visit he paid to the Prison Mazas, on one of the
days, said, with tears in his eyes, "It was almost more than I could bear
to see these poor souls reaching out toward each other from either side of
the iron railings. Here a poor, old woman, tottering and weak, bringing a
little fruit in a basket for her son; here a wife, holding up a baby to
look through the gratings at its father, and the father trying in an agony
of earnestness to be sure that the baby knew him; here a little girl,
looking half reproachfully at her brother, terror struggling with
tenderness in her young face; on the side of the friends, love and
yearning and pity beyond all words to describe; on the side of the
prisoners, love and yearning just as great, but with a misery of shame
added, which gave to many faces a look of attempt at dogged indifference
on the surface, constantly betrayed and contradicted, however, by the
flashing of the eyes and the red of the cheeks.
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