"Les pommiers sont pleins de pommes;
Allons au verger, Simone...."
A description of the _cour_ would be incomplete without an enumeration of
the manifold duties of the _planton_ in charge, which were as follows: to
prevent the men from using the horizontal bar, except for chinning, since
if you swung yourself upon it you could look over the wall into the
women's _cour_; to see that no one threw anything over the wall into said
_cour_; to dodge the cannon-ball which had a mysterious habit of taking
advantage of the slope of the ground and bounding along at a prodigious
rate of speed straight for the sentry-box; to watch closely anyone who
inhabited the _cabinet d'aisance_, lest he should make use of it to vault
over the wall; to see that no one stood on the girders, for a similar
reason; to keep watch over anyone who entered the shed; to see that
everyone urinated properly against the wall in the general vicinity of
the cabinet; to protect the apple-trees into which well-aimed pieces of
wood and stone were continually flying and dislodging the sacred fruit;
to mind that no one entered or exited by the gate in the upper fence
without authority; to report any signs, words, tokens, or other
immoralities exchanged by prisoners with girls sitting in the windows of
the women's wing (it was from one of these windows that I had recently
received my salutation), also names of said girls, it being forbidden to
exhibit any part of the female person at a window while the males were on
promenade; to quell all fights and especially to prevent people from
using the wagon axle as a weapon of defense or offense; and last, to keep
an eye on the sweeper when he and his wheelbarrow made use of a secondary
gate situated in the fence at the further end, not far from the
sentry-box, to dump themselves.
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