Because it was sensitive

In a prison cell, a young woman is shown seated on the rungs of a ladder with her hands clasped on her knees. Next to her are an earthenware vessel and the silhouette of a rat, alluding to the gloomy atmosphere and conditions in prisons at the time. The scene is illuminated by a lantern hanging overhead, slightly offset to the left.

In this print Goya demonstrates his mastery of the aquatint technique, as he uses it for the whole of the engraving, without the support of the lines of the etching. He used two types of aquatint over light strokes of drypoint. He also used some varnish reserves to achieve vibrant whites on the face and the continuous line of the woman's body.

It is likely that this engraving is a continuation of the previous one, no. 31, Pray for her. The celestina's prayers have not been heard and the prostitute who accompanied her has been imprisoned. This can be deduced from what the manuscript in the Prado Museum notes about this engraving: "As it must be! This world has its ups and downs. The life she brought with her could not stop at anything else". Furthermore, understanding of this image would be completed by the information provided by the Ayala manuscript, which indicates that it is Castillo's wife and that the young woman may have been pregnant.

Francisco del Castillo's wife was María Vicenta Mendieta, aged 32, who helped her lover, a younger cousin, Santiago San Juan, to kill her husband. Goya must have been close to the trial, held in February 1798, as his friend Juan Meléndez Valdés (Ribera del Fresno, Badajoz, 1754-Montpellier, 1817) was appointed prosecutor in the case precisely during the period when Jovellanos was Minister of Grace and Justice. María Vicenta Mendieta and her lover were executed on 23 April 1798 in the Madrid Main Square, as reported in El diario de Madrid. This event was dealt with by Goya in his works The Visit of a Friar and Interior of a Prison, in which he was more eloquent and focused not so much on the murder as on the death sentence handed down to the woman.