  Do you know what the Abbaye de Cinq-Pierres is, or rather what it was? Mind, not Saint-Pierre, but Cinq-Pierres (Five Stones). Gavroche,[55] who loves puns and is very fond of slang, gave this nickname to a set of huge stones which stood before the prison of La Roquette, and on which the guillotine used to be erected on the mornings when a capital punishment was to take place. The executioner was the AbbÉ de Cinq-Pierres, for Gavroche is as logical as he is ingenious. Well! the abbey exists no longer, swept clean away from the front of the Roquette prison. This is splendid! and as for the guillotine itself, you know what has been done with that. Oh! we had a narrow escape! Would you believe that that infamous, that abominable Government of Versailles, conceived the idea, at the time it sat in Paris, of having a new and exquisitely improved guillotine, constructed by anonymous carpenters? It is exactly as I have the honour of telling you. You can easily verify the fact by reading the proclamation of the “sous-comitÉ en exercice.” What is the “active under-committee?” I admit that I am in total ignorance on the subject; but, what does it matter! In these times when committees spring up like mushrooms, it would be absurd to allow oneself to be astonished at a committee—and especially a sub-committee—more or less. Here is the proclamation:— “CITIZENS,—Being informed that a guillotine is at this moment in course of construction,...” Dear me, yes, while you were fast asleep and dreaming, with no other apprehension than that of being sent to prison by the members of the Commune, a guillotine was being made. Happily, the sub-committee was not asleep. No, not they! “... a guillotine ordered and paid for ...”. Are you quite sure it was paid for, good sub-committee? For that Government, you know, had such a habit of cheating poor people out of their rights. “... by the late odious government; a portable and rapid guillotine.” Ha! What do you say to that? Does not that make your blood run cold? Rapid, you understand; that is to say, that the guillotining of twelve or fifteen hundred patriots in a morning would have been play to the AbbÉ of Cinq-Pierres. And portable, too! A sort of pocket guillotine. When the members of the Government had a circuit to make in the provinces, they would have carried their guillotine with their seals of office, and if, at Lyons, Marseilles, or any other great town, they had met a certain number of scoundrels—Snip, snap! In the twinkling of an eye, no more scoundrels left. Oh! how cunning! But let us go on reading. “The sub-committee of the eleventh arrondissement ...” Oh! so there is a sub-committee for each arrondisement, is there? “... has had these infamous instruments of monarchical domination ...” One for you, Monsieur Thiers! “... seized, and has voted their destruction for ever.” Very good intentions, sub-committee, but you can’t write grammar. “In consequence, they will be burnt in front of the mairie, for the purification of the arrondissement and the preservation of the new liberties.” And accordingly, a guillotine was burnt on the 7th of April, at ten o’clock in the morning, before the statue of Voltaire. The ceremony was not without a certain weirdness. In the midst of a compact crowd of men, women, and children, who shook their fists at the odious instrument, some National Guards of the 187th Battalion fed the huge flames with broken pieces of the guillotine, which crackled, blistered, and blazed, while the statue of the old philosopher, wrapped in the smoke, must have sniffed the incense with delight. When nothing remained but a heap of glowing ashes, the crowd shouted with joy; and for my own part, I fully approved of what had just been done as well as of the approbation of the spectators. But, between you and me, do you not think that many of the persons there had often stationed themselves around the guillotine with rather different intentions than that of seeing it burnt? And then, if in reducing this instrument of death to ashes, they wished to prove that the time is past when men put men to death, it seems to me that they ought not to stop at this. While we are at it, let us burn the muskets too,—what say you? NOTES: |
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