There is to be a flitting of the guillotine. For nearly fifty years executions in Paris, which are not private as with us, have taken place immediately outside the prison of La Roquette, known officially as the dÉpÔt des CondamnÉs.

Four slabs of stone sunk in the soil, a few yards beyond the gaol door, mark the spot where, on the fatal morning, at five in summer, and about half-past seven in winter, the red "timbers of justice" are set up by the headsman's assistants.

But La Roquette is to be demolished, and the dismal honour of furnishing a last lodging to the condemned will be conferred on La SantÉ. This change effected, the guillotine will flit to the Place Saint-Jacques. Criminals of a modest habit will not approve the change, but the murderer with a touch of vanity (and vanity is notoriously a weakness of murderers) will doubtless welcome it; for the progress from the prison to the scaffold will be somewhat longer.

When the doors of La Roquette are thrown open, the victim, bareheaded and manacled, has but a few paces to shuffle to the spot where old M. Deibler awaits him, with his finger on the button of the knife. Between La SantÉ and the Place Saint-Jacques there is rather more than the length of a thoroughfare to be traversed, and, as in the old days, some form of tumbril will probably be called for.

It is a pity, of course, for it has been proved abundantly that this kind of spectacle is anything but good for the public health. Humane and enlightened opinion on the subject has ceased to be that which Dr. Johnson gave utterance to. "Sir," said the Doctor to Boswell, "executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose. The old method [Tyburn had been abolished] was most satisfactory to all parties: the public was gratified by a procession, the criminal is supported by it; why is all this to be swept away?"

The sheriffs of the year 1784 gave the answer in a pamphlet which exposed all the horrors and indecencies of the public progress to the gallows. As for the "support" accorded to the criminal, he might, if he were unpopular, be nearly stoned to death before the hangman could despatch him.

Public executions in Paris are not, and have never been, the scandalous exhibitions that they were in London during the whole of the last century, but the scene in the neighbourhood of La Roquette for four or five hours before a guillotining is something less than edifying.

In leaving its present site for the Place Saint-Jacques the guillotine will only be returning home. The Place Saint-Jacques was the scene of punishment for nineteen years and a half; it was dispossessed in favour of La Roquette in 1851. The first person to suffer death at the Place Saint-Jacques (the Place de GrÈve having been abandoned) was an old man named DÉsandrieux, sixty-eight years of age, condemned for the murder of a man whose age was eighty-four. Owing to the disgraceful neglect of the authorities, DÉsandrieux lay in prison one hundred and twenty-eight days before he was led to execution. After him came the parricide, BenoÎt, the atrocious Lecenaire, David, the regicides Fieschi, Morey, and Pepin, and other murderers of greater or less notoriety. The Place Saint-Jacques saw the guillotine erected thirty-five times, and beheld the fall of thirty-nine heads.

At this date the dÉpÔt des CondamnÉs was remote BicÊtre, which, as we have seen, was also the gaol from which the criminals convicted in Paris were despatched on their journey to the bagne.

A vivid picture of the condemned cell, or cachot du CondamnÉ, very painful in its blending of the imaginative with the realistic, is given in Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d'un CondamnÉ. It was a day when that veil of decent mystery which our age casts over the last torturing hours of the condemned had not been woven; and callous curiosity could, for a trifling bribe to the turnkey, uncover the grating behind which the criminal in his strait waistcoat was couched on mouldy straw.

It was a veritable journey from BicÊtre to the Place Saint-Jacques, by way of the Avenue d'Italie and the outer boulevards; midway along the Boulevard d'Italie the guillotine came in sight, and for five and twenty minutes before he reached it, the miserable victim had the death-machine for his horizon, the huge blade gripped between the blood-red arms gleaming deadlier moment by moment.

The progress was even longer and more wretched when La Grande Roquette was substituted for BicÊtre as the prison of the CondamnÉ À mort. On a day in mid-December, 1838, a certain Perrin was carried to death from La Roquette to the barriÈre Saint-Jacques. An icy rain was falling, and the streets beyond the Seine were so choked with mud that at certain points the vehicle became almost embedded in it, and had to be hauled along by the crowd. Think of riding to one's death in that fashion! The AbbÉ MontÈs, riding beside the young assassin, saw him shivering, and insisted on covering him with his own hat. At the scaffold, Perrin was lifted from the cart almost dead from cold and exhaustion.

From that date there began to be a talk of changing the place of execution, but the proposals had no result, and during the next thirteen years five and twenty murderers traversed the whole length of Paris in their passage to the guillotine. Amongst them may be named the regicide DarmÉs, the terrible and dreaded Poulmann, Fourier, chief of the famous band of the Escarpes, the garde GÉnÉral Lecompte, who fired on Louis-Philippe at Fontainebleau, and Daix and Lahr, the assassins of General BrÉar. At length, in 1851, the Place Saint-Jacques ceded its dubious honours to the Place de la Roquette,—which is now about to restore them.

As La Roquette (or properly La Grande Roquette, to distinguish it from La Petite Roquette, the prison for juvenile offenders, which stands opposite) is to be abolished, it will be interesting to make a brief survey of the place in which some of the most celebrated French criminals of modern times have awaited the visit of M. Deibler, with his scissors and pinioning straps.

Here the "toilet of the guillotine" has been performed on Orsini, PiÉri, Verger, La Pommerais, Troppmann, Moreau, Billoir, PrÉvost, BarrÉ and Lebiez, Campi, Pranzini, and so many others, down to Vaillant and Emile Henry.

It would be impossible even to summarise all that has been said and written in France in favour of abolishing the guillotine. It was vigorously advocated during the Revolution itself, while the scaffold was flowing with blood.

Under the Convention, Taillefer rose one day with the demand: "Let our guillotines be broken and burned!" At the sitting of the of "9th VendÉmiaire, year iv," Languinais exclaimed: "Should we not be happy if, having begun our session by establishing the Republic, we were able to end it by pronouncing once for all against capital punishment!"

At the last siting of the Convention, ChÉnier in energetic terms denounced the guillotine. A voice called out: "What o'clock is it?" A voice responded: "The hour of justice." A moment later this vote was proclaimed: "Dating from the publication of the general peace, the punishment of death shall be abolished throughout the French Republic."

That vote has not yet become effective!

After a long sleep the question re-awoke on the lips of M. de Tracy, son of the orator who had been amongst the first to entreat that the code of France might be cleansed of blood. In the same historic mention we must gather in the names of the Duc de Broglie, the Marquis de Lally-Tallendal, the Marquis de Pastoret ("A man attacks me; I can defend myself only by killing him: I kill him. For society to do the same thing, it must find itself in precisely the same situation.") de BÉrenger, Lafayette, Glais-Bizoin, Taschereau, Appert, LÈon Fancher, and Guizot the historian.

"If," added the authors of Les Prisons de Paris, "all these enlightened publicists and statesmen, with M. Guizot amongst them, did not succeed in pulling down the scaffold, at an epoch when, to quote M. de BÉrenger, the very executioners were weary, it must be concluded, we suppose, that it is necessary to proceed with prudent hesitation, and, by a gradual abolition, to convince the most timid and incredulous that society has nothing to dread from this reform."

This was written fifty years ago, and as "prudent hesitation" has not yet attained its goal it is still possible to penetrate within the condemned hold of La Roquette.

The prison is chiefly interesting in this day as the fore-scene of the scaffold. It is built with a wealth of precautions; and escape, if not impossible by ordinary means, is exceptionally difficult to compass. No successful flight from La Roquette has been recorded in modern times.

Three iron grilles and four doors of massive oak conduct to the great courtyard. The foundations of the prison are in layers of freestone; the two walls which enclose the buildings are of a thickness proportionate to their elevation, and the builder took care to efface the angles by rounded stonework. Buildings surround the courtyard on the north, east, and west, and the prison chapel occupies the south.

For the ordinary prisoner (convicts awaiting shipment to the penal colonies, or undergoing short sentences of hard labour), the day at La Roquette begins early. The warders are at their posts soon after light, and the second bell summons the prisoners half an hour later. Thirty minutes are allowed for dressing, bed-making, and cell-cleaning, and at the third bell there is a general descent to the yard, each prisoner receiving his first allowance of bread as he goes down. After half an hour's exercise the regular labour of the day begins, and at nine o'clock there is a distribution of soup. Between nine-thirty and ten the prisoners take another turn in the yard, and the second period of work lasts till three in the afternoon. At three is served another allowance of bread, with vegetables or meat according to the day; and from half-past three to four the courtyard echoes again the monotonous tramp of hundreds of pairs of sabots. The last sortie—there are four in all—varies with the seasons; and after supper the prisoners are locked in for the night.

Fifty years ago, there was here and there in the bagnes, and the general prisons of France, a priest of exalted ideals, and such unwearied patience as the task demands, toiling to reclaim the CondamnÉs who were his spiritual charge. One such was the AbbÉ TouzÈ, chaplain of La Roquette at about the middle period of our century. The AbbÉ set himself to inquire what causes sent men to prison at that day, what might be done or attempted to prevent them from returning there; and knowing that the part which thinks may be reached through the part which feels, it was in the sanctuary of the heart that he began his experiments on a population whose emotions are none too easily turned to moral or religious profit. To a TouzÈ in France, a Horsley in England, prison is not all the barren vineyard which a lazy chaplain finds it; and the aumÔnier of La Roquette did not labour in vain. He has been mentioned here as a herald of the philanthropic scientist of later days, who has occasionally done for the prison world what genius alone—with religious fervour for its basis—can accomplish there.

When the secret history of the condemned cell comes to be written, the material will be furnished for a new and important chapter in the history of criminal psychology; but it must not be a patchwork of lurid gossip on a background of stale religious sophisms, such as Newgate chaplains of the last century were not above compiling and selling for their profit in the crowd on a hanging Monday; nor a mere spicy morsel for the sensation-hunter, such as, for example, the copious gutter-stuff printed and circulated about Lacenaire, who drew the gaze of Paris to the condemned cell of La Roquette some half-century ago.

Thief, blackmailer, and assassin, this was a wretch whose blood defiled the scaffold itself, yet his position in the condemned cell was made little less than heroic. A loathsome murderer, he was for weeks the fashion in Paris. His portrait was hawked about the quays and boulevards;

"from all sides exquisite meats and delicate wines reached his cell; every day some man of letters visited him, carefully noting his sarcasms, his phrases composed in drunkenness or studiously calculated for effect; women, young, beautiful, and elegantly attired, solicited the honour of being presented to him, and were in despair at his refusal."

Criminals as indifferent as, but less notorious or less popular than Lacenaire, idling the weeks while their appeal was under consideration, were chiefly anxious as to whether the charity of the curious would keep them in tobacco until their fate was decided.

If the tobacco ran out, and the supply seemed not likely to be renewed, the prisoner sometimes met that and all other unpleasantnesses, immediate and prospective, by taking his own life—not because he feared the guillotine, but because suicide (which, with the limited means at his disposal, was probably far the worse death of the two) offered the shortest cut to nothingness.

Lesage, calculating that his pourvoi or appeal would run just forty days, summed up without a tremor the days that remained to him. "Thirty-two days I've been here; eight to follow. If I don't get a sou or two, je manquerai de tabac. Five sous a day to smoke, and ten to drink,—that's not much for a poor chap to ask, the last eight days of his life!" Seemingly, this modest address to charitable Paris was coldly answered, for a day or two later Lesage was found dead in his bed. The companion of his guilt, Soufflard, in the adjoining cell, had already taken poison.

In all condemned cells there is a considerable proportion of criminals for whom the prospect of a violent and shameful death seems to hold no terrors whatever. The chief warder of Wandsworth prison, an experienced observer of death on the gallows, assured me that he remembered no instance in which the victim had needed support under the beam, and he cited the case of Kate Webster, who, with the halter about her neck, put up her pinioned hands to adjust it more comfortably. Dr. Corre^[26] found that out of 88 criminals condemned to death, of whom 64 were men and 24 women, about two-fifths of the men "died in a cowardly manner," whilst only about one-fifth of the women showed a lack of self-possession.

Let us pass into the cachot du CondamnÉ À mort, the condemned cell of La Roquette.

Three types are found in the condemned cell: the indifferent, the penitent, and the impenitent. The indifferent is a lymphatic creature (there have been several female prisoners of this type), scarcely susceptible of any normal emotion, and—of whichever sex—as cold in repentance as in crime.

The second category includes offenders quite removed from the ordinary criminal classes. Several of these, impulsive murderers, reprieved from the gallows, were pointed out to me at Portland last summer, and one I remembered in particular—a handsome, well-set man, not yet middle-aged, trudging along under a warder's eye round and round the infirmary yard, who had been seventeen years in confinement. The impenitent of this order is such an egoistic maniac as Wainwright, who, the night before his death, paced the yard of Newgate with the governor, smoking a cigar, and recounting his successes with women; or he is a criminal of the great sort, strong in mind as in body, the fearless disciple of a dreadful philosophy of his own, which lets him face death as boldly as he inflicts it, and which, at the last, inspires him only with a hatred of the law that has vanquished him.

Poulmann was a criminal of this type; an ultra-sanguine temperament, an athletic form, a constitution physically and morally energetic, an Herculean force of body, and a pride which the cachot du CondamnÉ could not reduce. "It shall never be said that Poulmann changed!" was his first and last confession. A "monstrous atheist," he admitted that he had prayed for the woman who was condemned with him: "But there can be no God, since Louise also is to die." AbbÉ TouzÈ suggested that the last days of Louise might be embittered by his impenitence. This shook him for a moment, but he returned to himself: "No! Poulmann will never change."

But, alike for the weak-hearted, the indifferent, and the valiant, the way to the scaffold is rendered in these days as easy as may be. Victor Hugo's condemned man in the old, abhorred BicÊtre was turned out by day among the forÇats awaiting their despatch to the bagne; they made sport of him, and ghastly jokes about the "widow" or guillotine—time-honoured amongst the criminal classes—were pointed afresh for his benefit.

His treatment at the hands of the prison officers was scarcely less callous; no one had a thought or cared that this poor wight was biding the morning when he should be rudely severed from all the living.

The position of convicts cast for death in the Newgate of the early years of this century was every jot as cruel.

It was thus under the old order; it is more commendable to-day. The tenant of the condemned cell, withdrawn from the stare of the world, is surrounded by people who have no desire but to soften the few days or weeks that remain to him. He is no longer on view at a price. He has not, like Lacenaire, the privilege of refusing the visits of duchesses, nor the indignity to endure of being exposed at a few francs per head to the indecent gaze of sensation-mongers.

In La Roquette nowadays no one can admire or contemn him until he shuffles out to meet his fate just beyond the prison door.

The condemned cell is, as in most modern prisons, both in France and England, the most comfortable quarters in the building. There are actually three cachots des CondamnÉs, as there are two in Newgate, and those in the Paris gaol are better lighted and rather more spacious.

The last scene of all, though it is a public execution, is no longer a feast for the ghouls. Justice is done swiftly, and the crowd sees little more than the preparation in the grey morning hours. The preparations, however, are sufficiently enticing to draw to the Place de la Roquette the riff-raff of Paris, the frequenters of the night-houses, of the boulevards, the women of the town, and some foreign amateurs of the scaffold who, like George Selwyn, would "go anywhere to see an execution."

Selwyn, by the way, would find the spectacle in the Place de la Roquette tame enough after some that he had witnessed. He went to Paris on purpose to be present at the torture of the wretched Damiens, who, after suffering unheard-of pains, was torn asunder by four horses. A French nobleman, observing the Englishman's interest in the savage scene, concluded that he must be a hangman taking a lesson abroad, and said: "Eh bien, monsieur, Êtes vous arrivÉ pour voir ce spectacle?"—"Oui, monsieur."—"Vous Êtes bourreau?" "Non, monsieur," replied Selwyn, "je n'ai pas l'honneur; je ne suis qu'un amateur."

It is after midnight that the rush begins to the spot where the scaffold is raised, and for hours the throng continues to increase in numbers and variety. All night there is feeding and drinking in the public-houses around, and, as it used to be in the Old Bailey, windows commanding a view of the scene are hired at any price.

A swarm of pressmen wait through the night just outside the prison gate. At this time the victim himself is probably unaware that his last hour is at hand.

When day has dawned, two carts come out from a street adjoining the prison, bearing the disjointed pieces of the guillotine. The headsman's five brawny assistants (one of whom is his son and probable successor) set up the machine, and the knife falls three or four times to test the spring.

Then the guard arrives; and when the city police, the Gardes de la RÉpublique, and the mounted gendarmes are marshalled, the crowd behind can see only the top of the guillotine. A place within the cordon is reserved for the press.

The genius-in-chief of the ceremony does not appear until the doors of the prison are thrown open. He is within, preparing the victim, and coaxing him, when the toilet is finished, to take a cigarette and a little glass of rum.

Louis Stanislas Deibler, the Monsieur de Paris, came to Paris in 1871, as assistant headsman to Roch. He had been a provincial executioner, but, in 1871, a new law ordered that all criminals condemned in France should be despatched by Monsieur de Paris.

Deibler, who was born in Dijon in 1823, is a joiner by trade. His first head (as chief executioner) was Laprade's, in 1879, and the case was one of his worst. Laprade, who had murdered his father, mother, and grandmother, felt a natural disinclination to join them on the other side, and struggled so desperately on the scaffold that Deibler had to thrust his head by main force into the lunette.

M. Deibler is lame, and usually carries a very old umbrella. "Scenes" on the scaffold are rare. The victim may struggle for a moment, but it is only for a moment that, in the practised hands of the assistants, he can postpone the inevitable. In general, the whole affair lasts but a few seconds.

There is no such thing as a "last dying speech" from the guillotine. Even if the man were not too dazed to speak, time would not be allowed him. There is time only for the last ministrations of the Church, which are almost always rejected.

The instant the criminal is secured on the bascule, M. Deibler touches the spring, the knife shears through the uncovered neck, there is a spurt of blood in the air, and all is over.

The head and body are enclosed at once in a rough coffin, and trundled off with a guard of mounted gendarmes (officials and priest following in a cab) to the Champ des Navets, or Turnip Field, at Ivry Cemetery, where a burial service is read. The remains are then handed over to one of the medical schools for dissection, and what is left is interred.