Astragal
My sticky notes from Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin:
I've flown away my dears! I flew and soared and wheeled around for one second which was long and good, a century.
I was double-locked into my room, curled up around my rage in the armchair, amusing myself by figuring out the details of an insane plan of escape.
The eye of my conscience is the face of a watch.
When will I be able to walk, to get away from these people once and for all?
Since my escape I've only hung around ex-prisoners.
I am still, each day further, escaping madness.
Biographical notes from Patti Smith's introduction:
Sentenced to seven years for armed robbery, Anne, a girl of nineteen, jumps over the prison wall -- a thirty-foot drop.
That's how it goes--her so-called liberation--getting dropped off in a series of hideouts.
At ten she was raped by a member of her stepfather's family. After her attempts to run away, her parents placed her in a girls' reformatory paradoxically named The Good Shepherd [...] she escaped from reform school and into the streets of Paris to eventually live the life of a prostitute and petty theif.