Society in Bourail, although in one sense fairly homogeneous, is from another point of view distinctly mixed. Here, for example, are a few personal items which I picked up during our stroll down the main and one street of the village. First we turned into a little saddler’s shop, the owner of which once boasted the privilege of making the harness for Victor Emmanuel’s horses. Unfortunately his exuberant abilities were not content even with such distinction as this, and so he deviated into coining, with the result of hard labour for life. After a few years his good conduct gained him a remission of his sentence, and in due course he became a concessionnaire. His wife, who joined him after his release, is one of the aristocrats of this stratum of Bourailian society.
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Permit to visit a Prison or Penitentiary Camp en détail. This is the ordinary form; but the Author is the only Englishman for whom the words in the left-hand corner were crossed out.
 
There is quite a little romance connected with[178] this estimable family. When Madame came out she brought her two daughters with her. Now the elder of these had been engaged to a young man employed at the Ministry of Colonies, and he entered the colonial service by accepting a clerkship at Noumea. The result was naturally a meeting, and the fulfilment of the proverb which says that an old coal is easily rekindled. The engagement broken off by the conviction was renewed, and the wedding followed in due course. The second daughter married a prosperous concessionnaire, and the ex-coiner, well established, and making plenty of properly minted money, has the satisfaction of seeing the second generation of his blood growing up in peace and plenty about him. Imagine such a story as this being true of an English coiner!
A little further on, on the left hand side, is a little lending library, and cabinet de lecture. This is kept by a very grave and dignified-looking man, clean-shaven, and keen-featured, and with the manners of a French Chesterfield. “That man’s a lawyer,” I said to the Commandant, as we left the library. “What is he doing here?”
“You are right. At least, he was a lawyer once, doing well, and married to a very nice woman;[179] but he chose to make himself a widower, and that’s why he’s here. The old story, you know.”
Next door was a barber’s shop kept by a most gentle-handed housebreaker. He calls himself a “capillary artist,” shaves the officials and gendarmerie, cuts the hair of the concessionnaires, and sells perfumes and soaps to their wives and daughters. He also is doing well.
A few doors away from him a liberé has an establishment which in a way represents the art and literature of Bourail. He began with ten years for forgery and embezzlement. Now he takes photographs and edits, and, I believe, also writes the Bourail Indépendent. As a newspaper for ex-convicts and their keepers, the title struck me as somewhat humorous.
Nearly all branches of trade were represented in that little street. But these may be taken as fairly representative samples of the life-history of those who run them. First, crime at home; then transportation and punishment; and then the effort to redeem, made in perfect good faith by the Government, and, so far as these particular camps and settlements are concerned, with distinct success in the present.
Unhappily, however, the Government is finding[180] out already that free and bond colonists will not mix. They will not even live side by side, wherefore either the whole system of concessions must be given up, or the idea of colonising one of the richest islands in the world with French peasants, artisans, and tradesmen must be abandoned.
Later on in the afternoon we visited the Convent, which is now simply a girls’-school under the charge of the Sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny. A few years ago this convent was perhaps the most extraordinary matrimonial agency that ever existed on the face of the earth. In those days it was officially styled, “House of Correction for Females.” The sisters had charge of between seventy and eighty female convicts, to some of whom I shall be able to introduce you later on in the Isle of Pines, and from among these the bachelor or widower convict, who had obtained his provisional release and a concession, was entitled to choose a bride to be his helpmeet on his new start in life. The method of courtship was not exactly what we are accustomed to consider as the fruition of love’s young or even middle-aged dream.
 
The Kiosk in which the Convict Courtships were conducted at Bourail.
 
After Mass on a particular Sunday the prospective bridegroom was introduced to a selection[181] of marriageable ladies, young and otherwise. Of beauty there was not much, nor did it count for much. What the convict-cultivator wanted, as a rule, was someone who could help him to till his fields, look after live-stock, and get in his harvests.
When he had made his first selection the lady was asked if she was agreeable to make his further acquaintance. As a rule, she consented, because marriage meant release from durance vile. After that came the queerest courtship imaginable.
About fifty feet away from the postern door at the side of the Convent there still stands a little octagonal kiosk of open trellis-work, which is completely overlooked by the window of the Mother Superior’s room. Here each Sunday afternoon the pair met to get acquainted with each other and discuss prospects.
Meanwhile the Mother Superior sat at her window, too far away to be able to hear the soft nothings which might or might not pass between the lovers, but near enough to see that both behaved themselves. Along a path, which cuts the only approach to the kiosk, a surveillant marched, revolver on hip and eye on the kiosk ready to respond to any warning signal from the Mother Superior.
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As a rule three Sundays sufficed to bring matters to a happy consummation. The high contracting parties declared themselves satisfied with each other, and the wedding day was fixed, not by themselves, but by arrangement between those who had charge of them.
Sometimes as many as a dozen couples would be turned off together at the mairie, and then in the little church at the top of the market-place touching homilies would be delivered by the good old curé on the obvious subject of repentance and reform. A sort of general wedding feast was arranged at the expense of the paternal Government, and then the wedded assassins, forgers, coiners, poisoners, and child-murderers went to the homes in which their new life was to begin.
This is perhaps the most daring experiment in criminology that has ever been made. The Administration claimed success for it on the ground that none of the children of such marriages have ever been convicted of an offence against the law. Nevertheless, the Government have most wisely put a stop to this revolting parody on the most sacred of human institutions, and now wife-murderers may no longer marry poisoners or[183] infanticides with full liberty to reproduce their species and have them educated by the State, to afterwards take their place as free citizens of the colony.
The next day we drove out to the College of the Marist Brothers. It is really a sort of agricultural school, in which from seventy to eighty sons of convict parents are taught the rudiments of learning and religion and the elements of agriculture.
During a conversation with the Brother Superior I stumbled upon a very curious and entirely French contradiction. I had noticed that families in New Caledonia were, as a rule, much larger than in France, and I asked if these were all the boys belonging to the concessionnaires of Bourail.
“Oh no!” he replied; “but, then, you see, we have no power to compel their attendance here. We can only persuade the parents to let them come.”
“But,” I said, “I understood that primary education was compulsory here as it is in France.”
“For the children of free people, yes,” he replied regretfully, and with a very soft touch of sarcasm, “but for these, no. The Administration has too much regard for the sanctity of parental authority.”
When the boys were lined up before us in[184] the playground I saw about seventy-six separate and distinct reasons for the abolition of convict marriages. On every face and form were stamped the unmistakable brands of criminality, imbecility, moral crookedness, and general degeneration, not all on each one, but there were none without some.
Later on I started them racing and wrestling, scrambling and tree-climbing for pennies. They behaved just like monkeys with a dash of tiger in them, and I came away more convinced than ever that crime is a hereditary disease which can finally be cured only by the perpetual celibacy of the criminal. Yet in Bourail it is held for a good thing and an example of official wisdom that the children of convicts and of freemen shall sit side by side in the schools and play together in the playgrounds.
 
Berezowski, the Polish Anarchist who attempted to murder Napoleon III. and the Tsar Alexander II. in the Champs Elysées. All Criminals in New Caledonia are photographed in every possible hirsute disguise; and finally cropped and clean shaven.
 
By permission of C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd.
 
On our way home I was introduced to one of the most picturesque and interesting characters that I met in the colony. We pulled up at the top of a hill. On the right hand stood a rude cabin of mud and wattles thatched with palm-leaves, and out of this came to greet us a strange, half-savage figure, long-haired, long-bearded, hairy almost as a monkey on arms and legs and breast, but still with mild and intelligent features, and[185] rather soft brown eyes, in which I soon found the shifting light of insanity.
Acting on a hint the Commandant had already given me, I got out and shook hands with this ragged, shaggy creature, who looked much more like a man who had been marooned for years on a far-away Pacific Island, than an inhabitant of this trim, orderly Penal Settlement. I introduced myself as a messenger from the Queen of England, who had come out for the purpose of presenting............