Following six months in prison, Adolphe Nantel recounted life behind bars in 1930s Montreal.
Adolphe Nantel, prisoner under prison number 8540 in Montreal, was a journalist. At the beginning of the 1930s, he was accused of his “vagrancy”. Soon all toothless, he is a slave to alcohol and drugs. This stay behind bars was to take the place of detoxification. It will allow him to better know the life of the unfortunate. “Approach all the great ones of this world, the happy ones of the earth, and dare to claim happiness when you cannot understand this intense joy radiating from the pale and often bearded face of an unfortunate who struggles, struggles to become a good citizen. Unlike the prison story of his predecessor Jules Fournier, that of Nantel has not gone down in history. It is known today only thanks to the traces left in the newspapers of the time. First attached to a far right leaf, The mirror, then to other extreme rightist newspapers, he will sign, often under the pseudonym of Gabadi, legal chronicles. He was known at the courthouse, until his death in 1954, as a kind of poet of the corridors.
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