The women in the Neudorf convent prison were all so kindly in their ways, so peaceful and good-humored, they differed so completely from our preconceived ideas of criminals, that we were puzzled to imagine what could have brought them into prison, says a writer in the Cornhill Magazine. We had never a doubt that their offenses were of the most trivial nature and we said so. The superior gave us one of her odd, humorous smiles.
“Did you notice that woman in the corridor?” said she. “She is Marie Schneider.”
That insignificant-looking little woman who had stood aside with a gentle, deprecative smile to allow us to pass, Marie Schneider? Why, in any other place one would have set her down at once as the hard-working wife of a struggling curate, so throughly respectable did she look. And she is Marie Schneider, a European celebrity with more murders on her conscience than she has fingers on her hands!
“And you let her stay here?”
“We have nowhere else to put her,” the inspector, who had joined us, replied, “and we don’t hang women in Austria.”
Nor is she, as we soon found, the only notoriety in the place. One of the prisoners is a delicate-looking girl, with large brown eyes and golden hair–a type of beauty almost peculiar to Australians. She has a low, cooing voice and a singularly sweet, innocent expression.
“What on earth can that girl have done to be sent here?” I whispered.
“Done,” the inspector replied, grimly, “set a house on fire in the hope of killing a man with his wife and five children.”
The girl must have had extraordinarily sharp ears, for, though we were standing at some distance away, she heard what he said, and she gave him a glance such as I hope never to see again in my life. It was absolutely diabolical; had there been a knife within reach the man would have died on the spot. Yet only a moment before she had been looking up into my face with a smile an angel might have envied.
Several of the prisoners are in the convent for killing their own children; some for killing, or trying to kill, their husbands; others for stealing or embezzling; others, again, for no more serious crime than begging. There are all degrees of guilt there, in fact, and all ages, from girls of 16 to women of nearly 80. And they all live together on terms of perfect equality; for there are no distinctions of rank there–no one is better or worse than her neighbor. When the convent door closed behind them they have done, for the time being, not only with the outside world, but with their own past. They start life afresh, as it were.
According to the Court TV Crime Library, Marie Schneider was 12 years old when she pushed a 3-year-old boy out of a window (in 1886), so she was in her early 20’s when this article was published.1
[tags]Ann Arbor Register, March, 1896[/tags]