_First Consul's Advertisement.--Something
ridiculous.--Eggs.--Criminal Military Tribunal.--French Female
Confidence.--Town House.--Convent of
Jesuits.--Guillotine.--Governor W----._
Upon looking up against the corner wall of a street, surrounded by
particoloured advertisements of quack medicines, wonderful cures, new
invented essences, judgments of cassation, rewards for robbers, and
bills of the opera, I beheld Bonaparte's address to the people of
France, to elect him first consul for life. I took it for granted that
the spanish proverb of "tell me with whom you are, and I will tell you
what you are," was not to be applied in this instance, on account of the
company in which the _Consular application_, by a mere fortuitous
coincidence, happened to be placed.
A circumstance occurred at this time, respecting this election, which
was rather ridiculous, and excited considerable mirth at Paris. Upon the
first appearance of the election book of the first consul, in one of the
departments, some wag, instead of subscribing his name, immediately
under the title of the page, "shall Napoleone Bonaparte be first consul
for life?" wrote the following words, "I can't tell."
This trifling affair affords rather a favourable impression of the
mildness of that government, which could inspire sufficient confidence
to hazard such a stroke of pleasantry. It reached Mal Maison with great
speed, but is said to have occasioned no other sensation there, than a
little merriment. Carnot's bold negative was a little talked of, but as
it was solitary, it was considered harmless. To the love of finery which
the french still retain to a certain degree, I could alone attribute the
gay appearance of the eggs in the market, upon which had been bestowed a
very smart stain of lilac colour. The effect was so singular that I
could not help noting it down.
On the third day after our arrival in this city, we attended the trial
of a man who belonged to one of the banditti which infest the country
round this city. The court was held in the hall of the ancient
parliament house, and was composed of three civil judges (one of whom
presided) three military judges, and two citizens. The arrangements of
the court, which was crowded, were excellent, and afforded uninterrupted
accommodations to all its members, by separate doors and passages
allotted to each, and also to the people, who were permitted to occupy
the large area in front, which gradually rose from the last seats of the
persons belonging to the court, and enabled every spectator to have a
perfect view of the whole. Appropriate moral mottoes were inscribed in
characters of gold, upon the walls. The judges wore long laced bands,
and robes of black, lined with light blue silk, with scarfs of blue and
silver fringe, and sat upon an elevated semicircular bench, raised upon
a flight of steps, placed in a large alcove, lined with tapestry. The
secretaries, and subordinate officers were seated below them. On the
left the prisoner was placed, without irons, in the custody of two
gendarmes, formerly called maréchaussées, who had their long swords
drawn. These soldiers have a very military appearance, and are a fine,
and valuable body of men. I fear the respectable impression which I
would wish to convey of them will suffer, when I inform my reader, that
they are servants of the police, and answer to our Bow-street runners.
The swiftness with which they pursue, and apprehend offenders, is
surprising. We were received with politeness, and conducted to a
convenient place for hearing, and seeing all that passed. The accusateur
general who sat on the left, wore a costume similar to that of the
judges, without the scarf. He opened the trial by relating the
circumstances, and declaiming upon the enormity of the offence, by which
it appeared that the prisoner stood charged with robbery, accompanied
with breach of hospitality; which, in that country, be the amount of the
plunder ever so trifling, is at present capital. The address of the
public accuser was very florid, and vehement, and attended by violent
gestures, occasionally graceful. The pleaders of Normandy are considered
as the most eloquent men in France, I have heard several of them, but
they appear to me, to be too impassioned. Their motions in speaking
frequently look like madness. He ransacked his language to furnish
himself with reproachful epithets against the miserable wretch by the
side of him, who with his hands in his bosom appeared to listen to him,
with great sang froid. The witnesses who were kept separate, previous to
their giving their evidence, were numerous, and proved many robberies
against him, attended with aggravated breaches of hospitality. The court
entered into proofs of offences committed by the prisoner at different
times, and upon different persons. The women who gave their testimony,
exhibited a striking distinction between the timidity of english
females, confronting the many eyes of a crowded court of justice, and
the calm self possession with which the french ladies here delivered
their unperturbed testimony. The charges were clearly proved, and the
prisoner was called upon for his defence. Undismayed, and with all the
practised hardihood of an Old Bailey felon, he calmly declared, that he
purchased the pile of booty produced in the court, for sums of money,
the amount of which, he did not then know, of persons he could not name,
and in places which he did not remember. He had no advocate. The subject
was next resumed, and closed by the official orator who opened it. The
court retired, and the criminal was reconducted to the prison behind the
hall. After an absence of about twenty minutes, a bell rang to announce
the return of the judges, the prisoner entered now, escorted by a file
of national guards, to hear his fate. The court then resumed its
sitting. The president addressed the unhappy man, very briefly,
recapitulated his offences, and read the decree of the republic upon
them, by which he doomed him to lose his head at four o'clock that
afternoon.
It was then ten minutes past one!! The face of this wretched being
presented a fine subject for the pencil. His countenance was dark,
marked, and melancholy; over it was spread the sallow tint of long
imprisonment. His beard was unshorn, and he displayed an indifference to
his fate, which not a little surprised me. He immediately retired, and
upon his return to his cell, a priest was sent for to prepare him for
his doom. At present, in the provinces, all criminal offences are tried
before military tribunals, qualified, as I have described this to be, by
a mixture of civil judges and bourgeois.
It is one of the peculiar characteristics of such tribunals, to order
immediate punishment after conviction. In the present instance, the fate
of the offender was well known, for his crimes were many, and manifest,
and as the interval allowed by military courts between the sentence, and
its fulfilment, is so very short, the administrators of the law had
postponed his trial for five months from the period of his commitment,
for the purpose of affording him an indulgent procrastination. This
mode, although arising from merciful motives, is, I am aware, open to
objection; but it would be unfair to comment upon laws, which prevailed
in times of revolution, and are permitted only to operate, until the
fine fabric of french criminal jurisprudence, which is now constructing,
shall be presented to the people. To the honour of our country, and one
of the greatest ornaments of the british bar, the honourable T. Erskine,
in the year 1789, furnished the french, with some of these great
principles of criminal law, which it was impossible to perfect during
the long æra of convulsion, and instability which followed, and which
will constitute a considerable part of that great, and humane code,
which is about to be bestowed upon the nation, and which will, no doubt,
prove to be one of the greatest blessings, which human wisdom can confer
upon human weakness.
Its foundation is nearly similar to that of our own. The great and
enlightened genius whose name I have mentioned, has provided that the
contumacy of _one_ juryman shall not be able to force the opinion of the
rest.
After the court had broken up, I visited the town house, which, before
the revolution, was the monastery of the benedictines, who, from what
appeared of the remains of their establishment, must have been
magnificently lodged, and well deserved during their existence, to bear
the name of the blessed. The two grand staircases are very fine, and
there is a noble garden behind. Upon entering the vestibule of the
council chamber, formerly the refectory, I thought I was going behind
the scenes of a theatre. It was nearly filled with allegorical banners,
pasteboard and canvas arches of triumph, altars, emblems of liberty, and
despotism, and all the scenic decorations suitable to the frenzied
orgies of a republican fête. Thank God! they appeared to be tolerably
well covered with dust and cobwebs. At the end of this noble room,
seated upon a high pedestal, was the goddess of liberty, beautifully
executed in marble. "Look at that sanguinary prostitute," cried Mons.
G----, to me, pointing to the statue, "for years have we had liberty and
bloodshed, _thank Heaven!_ we are now no longer _free_." Upon which, he
wrote his name in the first consul's book, which was here lying open,
upon a table, for the purpose of receiving the suffrages of the
department.
The laconic irony, and manner of the speaker, afforded me a tolerably
good display of the nature of the blessings conferred upon the french,
by their late political philosophy.
From this place I proceeded to the ci-devant convent of the jesuits,
built by one of the munificent dukes de Bourbon. It is a magnificent
oblong stone building. In the centre of the court was a tree of liberty,
which, like almost all the other trees, dedicated to that goddess, which
I saw, looked blighted, and sickly. I mention it as a fact, without
alluding to any political sentiment whatever. It is a remark in frequent
use in France, that the caps of liberty are without heads, and the trees
of liberty without root. The poplar has been selected from all the other
trees of the forest, for this distinguished honour, from a whimsical
synonymy of its name with that of the people. In french, the poplar is
called peuplier, and the word peuple signifies people. This fine
building is now converted into an university of learning, and the fine
arts. From the number of the students, I should suppose the fashionable
fervour of study had not as yet reached Rouen.
The professor of philosophy, with great politeness sent a young man to
show me the museum of pictures, for which purpose the church of the
jesuits, is at present used. There are several paintings in it, the only
fine one, was a dying Jesus by Vandyke, which was exquisite. Upon my
expressing my admiration, a young student near me said "oui monsieur
c'est très jolie." This misapplied remark, from an easy and natural
combination of sound, could not fail of seeming a little singular as
applied to such a subject, but every thing that pleases in France is
très jolie. From this painting, I was, by importunity, led to view the
other parts of the collection, which were composed of large pictures, by
french masters; and so natural is local prejudice, every where, that I
was almost held down, before the works of the _best artists of Rouen_,
upon which, as I am at liberty _here_, I shall beg to make no comment.
In the students' room, below, were some paintings curious, and valuable
only, from their great antiquity, and a few good copies by the pupils. A
picture was pointed out to me as a very fine thing, the subject was a
fat little cherub, with a full flowing wig, fiddling to St. Francis, who
from his gloomy appearance seemed not to possess half the musical genius
of a dancing bear.
Upon my return through the market place, I beheld the miserable wretch,
at whose trial I was present in the morning, led out to execution. He
was seated upon the bottom of a cart, stripped above to his shirt, which
was folded back, his arms were pinioned close behind, and his hair was
closely cropped, to prevent the stroke of the fatal knife from being
impeded. A priest was seated in a chair beside him. As the object of my
excursion was to contemplate the manners of the people, I summoned
resolution to view this gloomy and painful spectacle, which seemed to
excite but little sensation in the market place, where its petty traffic
and concerns proceeded with their accustomed activity, and the women at
their stalls, which extended to the foot of the scaffold, appeared to be
impressed only with the solicitude of selling their vegetables to the
highest bidder. A small body of the national guards, and a few boys and
idlers surrounded the fatal spot. The guillotine, painted red, was
placed upon a scaffold, of about five feet high. As soon as the criminal
ascended the upper step which led to it he mounted, by the direction of
the executioner, a little board, like a shutter, raised upright to
receive him, to which he was strapped, turned down flat, and run into a
small ring of iron half opened and made to admit the neck, the top part
of which was then closed upon it, a black leather curtain was placed
before the head, from which a valve depended, which communicated to a
tub, placed under the scaffold to receive the blood, the executioner
then touched a long thin iron rod, connected with the top of the
instrument, and in a moment the axe descended, which was in the form of
a square, cut diagonally, heavily charged with lead. The executioner and
his assistants placed the body in a shell, half filled with saw dust,
which was almost completely stained over with the brown blood of former
executions; they then picked up the head, from a bag into which it had
fallen, within the curtain, and having placed it in the same gloomy
depository, lowered the whole down to the sextons, who covering it with
a pall bore it off to the place of burial.
The velocity of this mode of execution can alone recommend it. The pangs
of death are passed almost in the same moment, which presents to the
terrified eye of the sufferer the frightful apparatus of his disgraceful
dissolution. It is a dreary subject to discuss; but surely it is a
matter of deep regret, that in England, criminals doomed to die, from
the uncertain and lingering nature of their annihilation, are seen
writhing in the convulsions of death during a period dreadful to think
of. It is said, that at the late memorable execution of an african
governor for murder, the miserable delinquent was beheld for _fifteen
minutes_ struggling with the torments of his untimely fate! The
guillotine is far preferable to the savage mode, formerly used in
France, of breaking the criminal upon the wheel, and leaving him
afterwards to perish in the most poignant agonies.
As I have alluded to the fate of governor W----, I will conclude this
chapter by relating an anecdote of the terror and infatuation of guilt,
displayed in the conduct of this wretched man, in the _presence_ of a
friend of mine, from whom I received it--A few years before he suffered,
fatigued with life, and pursued by poverty, and the frightful
remembrance of his offences, then almost forgotten by the world, he left
the south of France for Calais, with an intention of passing over to
England, to offer himself up to its laws, not without the cherished hope
that a lapse of twenty years had swept away all evidence of his guilt.
At the time of his arrival at this port town, the hotel in which Madame
H---- was waiting for a packet to Dover was very crowded--the landlord
requested of her, that she would be pleased to permit two gentlemen, who
were going to England, to take some refreshment in her room; these
persons proved to be the unfortunate Brooks, a king's messenger, charged
with important dispatches to his court, and governor W----. The latter
was dressed like a decayed gentleman, and bore about him all the
indications of his extreme condition. They had not been seated at the
table long, before the latter informed the former, with evident marks of
perturbation, that his name was W----, that having been charged in
England with offences, which, if true, subjected him to heavy
punishment, he was anxious to place himself at the disposal of its laws,
and requested of him, as he was an english messenger, that he would
consider him as his prisoner, and take charge of him.
The messenger, who was much surprised by the application told him, that
he could not upon such a representation take him into custody, unless he
had an order from the duke of Portland's office to that effect, and that
in order to obtain it, it would be proper for him to write his name,
that it might be compared with his hand writing in the office of the
secretary at war, which he offered to carry over with him. Governor
W---- still pressed him to take him into custody, the messenger more
strongly declined it, by informing him that he was the bearer of
dispatches of great importance to his court, that he must immediately
cross the Channel, and should hazard a passage, although the weather
looked lowering, in an open boat, as no packets had arrived, and that
consequently it was altogether impossible to take him over, but again
requested him to write his name, for the purpose already mentioned; the
governor consented, pens and paper were brought, but the hand of the
murderer shook so dreadfully, that he could _not write it_, and in an
agony of mind, bordering upon frenzy, he rushed out of the room, and
immediately left the town.
The messenger entered the boat, and set sail; a storm quickly followed,
_the boat sunk in sight of the pier_, and all on board but one of the
watermen, perished!!!
The great disposer of human destiny, in vindication of his eternal
justice, rescued the life of this infatuated delinquent from the waves,
and from a sudden death, to resign him to the public and merited doom of
the laws.