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?