The Belly of Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

to five years; if they were serving a life sentence, the penalty was two to five years with double chains.
    But most prisoners tried to escape because the alternative was to labor in such misery that half would die of either fever or suicide. The prison system never was able to operate in the interior. The center of the prison was at the mouth of the Maroni River, and the rest of the prisoners were held in either Cayenne or the Iles du Salut. There were a few jungle camps where convicts were forced to work naked, their bodies eaten by insects and slashed by razor grass and thorny bushes. Only the convicts singled out for the harshest treatment, or those most likely to attempt escape, were sent to the islands. Florent, being a political prisoner, was one of them.
    Zola, as always, did careful homework and seemed to understand much about the penal colonies. But his story of Florent escaping and returning to France was extremely improbable. Of the 70,000 men and women sent to Guiana between 1851 and 1947,only a handful finished their sentences and returned to France. Almost no escapees made it back. Only 18,000 prisoners survived their sentences. Some did not even survive the initial voyage from France. There were many escape attempts, and some escapees succeeded and lived in South America, where they were called “Maroni boys” by those who knew. But there were no Cayenne boys in Paris.
    In
The Belly of Paris
the gabby Les Halles shopkeepers who would have Florent and other characters sent to Guiana were thoughtlessly delivering them to a life sentence that many regarded as worse than death.
    Cayenne was a growing French human rights scandal. Numerous exposés were written about it, and by 1939 the French government had banned the release in France of Hollywood movies on the subject. During World War II, France was unable to feed its Guiana prisoners, and an estimated two thousand died. Finally the prisons were closed in 1947, the prisoners released to sleep on the streets of the few coastal towns of French Guiana. For decades they remained, slowly dying off, lost and broken men with blank stares, “convict eyes,” as one woman said of Florent.
    The interior to this day is inhabited only by the descendants of runaway slaves and indigenous tribes. For outsiders it is almost impossible to survive in this dense jungle that the French have named
l'enfer vert
, the green hell. The prisons are slowly being reclaimed by jungle growth and humidity. The only use France has found for French Guiana is for the European Space Agency's Europe's Spaceport, from which a handful of technicians and a great many military guards send rockets to outer space because Guiana has the logistical advantage of being near the equator.
    It seems fated that Zola wrote about Guiana early in his career, because it turned up again toward the end of his life at the center of the Dreyfus Affair. Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island, making it famous, so that many Americans referred to the whole penal colony as Devil's Island, just as the French, with equal inaccuracy, called it Cayenne. Devil's Island is a tiny island that can be crossed from shore to shore on foot in a matter of minutes. There werenever more than thirty convicts on the island at a time. Fewer than a hundred prisoners ever served on Devil's Island, so named because the waters around it are so wild and forbidding that it was said that the Devil lived there. Food and supplies were sent over in a basket by a cable from the mainland when the seas were too rough for boats.
    Devil's Island was a place where political prisoners were sent, not to work but simply to be abandoned. In Zola's novel, it was where Florent was sent. In 1895, some thirteen years after Zola wrote about Florent, a real-life political prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was sent there. A twelve-square-yard stone house was built for him, where he was constantly watched by guards who were under orders not to talk to him. But