LA ROQUETTE.
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.
Footnote 26:
_Les Criminels._
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.
THE END.
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Novels by Tighe Hopkins.
----------
="Lady Bonnie's Experiment."=
(Vol. V. of "Cassell's Pocket Library.")
"Its sparkle keeps it alive from cover to cover. The whole thing is a
charming bit of _étourderie_, without a dull line in it."—_Athenæum._
"A delightful fantasy. Woven with a graceful dexterity which ought to be
pondered by 'prentice story-tellers."—_Daily Chronicle._
Nell Haffenden:
A Strictly Conventional Story.
In two volumes.
"The author sculpts at least half-a-dozen strong individualities, and
introduces us to a variety of shifting scenes, from the studios of
artistic Bohemia to mission work in Eastern London. Wherever we are
taken we are impressed with the conviction that the author knows what he
is writing about, and in the description of the Bloomsbury
boarding-house he is humorous enough to remind us of Martin Chuzzlewit's
first experiences in New York."—_Times._
The Nugents of Carriconna:
A Story More or Less Irish.
Fourth edition in one volume.
"For sheer relaxation there is nothing to beat a really good Irish
story, and the reader who fails to enjoy 'The Nugents of Carriconna'
must be a person of very peculiar sensibilities. A promising opening is
a capital thing in a novel, and Mr. Tighe Hopkins opens admirably. The
situation is one which in capable hands might be turned to very good
account, and the reader is not long in discovering that the author's
hands are very capable indeed. The story of the ill-fated telescope,
which is really the pivot upon which the action of the novel revolves,
is not only most delightful and original in itself, but is told with so
much force, freshness, and prevailing humour, not without a few touches
of powerful pathos, that its success may be regarded as
certain."—_Spectator._
"The Incomplete Adventurer."
In one volume.
"Most humorous and delightful."—_Athenæum._
"A very clever tale, brilliantly told."—_Academy._
"A decidedly amusing variation on the old theme of the elixir of
life."—_Saturday Review._
"The hero is a delightful creation."—_Literary World._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRENCH HISTORY.
8°
By FRANCES ELLIOT. Illustrated with portraits and with views of the old
châteaux. 2 vols., 8°, $4.00. Half-calf extra, gilt tops, $8 00
"Mrs. Elliot's is an anecdotal history of the French Court from Francis
I. to Louis XIV. She has conveyed a vivid idea of the personalities
touched upon, and her book contains a great deal of genuine
vitality."—_Detroit Free Press._
"Entitled to rank as one of the notable publications. The author has
been an earnest student of the history of France from her childhood, and
she here embodies the result of researches, for which she seems to have
been peculiarly fitted. The familiarity of this work is one of its chief
charms. The present work is charming in manner and carries with it the
impress of accuracy and careful investigation."—_Chicago Times._
WOMAN IN FRANCE DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
By JULIA KAVANAGH, author of "Madeline," etc. Illustrated with portraits
on steel. 2 vols., 8°, $4.00. Half-calf extra, gilt tops, $8 00
"Miss Kavanagh has studied her material so carefully, and has digested
it so well, that she has been able to tell the story of Court Life in
France, from the beginning of the Regency to the end of the
revolutionary period, with an understanding and a sobriety that make it
practically new to English readers."—_Detroit Free Press._
FRANCE UNDER MAZARIN.
By JAMES BRECK PERKINS. With a Sketch of the Administration of
Richelieu. Portraits of Mazarin, Richelieu, Louis XIII., Anne of
Austria, and Condé. 2 vols., 8° $4 00
"... 'France under Richelieu and Mazarin' will introduce its author into
the ranks of the first living historians of our land. He is never dry,
he never lags, he is never prolix: but from the first to the last, his
narrative is recorded _currente calamo_, as of a man who has a firm
grasp upon his materials."—_N. Y. Christian Union._
"A brilliant and fascinating period that has been skipped, slighted, or
abused by the ignorance, favoritism, or prejudice of other writers is
here subjected to the closest scrutiny of an apparently judicial and
candid student...."—_Boston Literary World._
A FRENCH AMBASSADOR AT THE COURT OF CHARLES II.; LE COMTE DE COMINGES.
From his unpublished correspondence. Edited by J. J. JUSSERAND. With 10
illustrations, 5 being photogravures. 8° $3 50
"M. Jusserand has chosen a topic peculiarly fitted to his genius, and
treated it with all the advantage to be derived, on the one hand, from
his wide knowledge of English literature and English social life, and on
the other, from his diplomatic experience and his freedom of access to
the archives of the French Foreign Office.... We get a new and vivid
picture of his (Cominges') life at the Court of Charles II.... There is
not a dull page in the book."—_London Times._
UNDERCURRENTS OF THE SECOND EMPIRE.
By ALBERT D. VANDAM, author of "An Englishman in Paris," etc. 8° $2 00
"Mr. Vandam is an Englishman, long resident in Paris, and thereby
thoroughly Gallicized in his intellectual atmosphere and style of
thought ... his style is flowing and pleasing, and the work is a
valuable contribution to the history of that time."—_The Churchman._
----------
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, NEW YORK AND LONDON.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber's Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
○ Unbalanced quotation marks were left as the author intended.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Names were corrected according to historial records.
▪ Bérenger should be Béranger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Jean_de_Béranger
▪ Bertandière should be Bertaudière
http://www.emersonkent.com/history_dictionary/bastille.htm
○ Spelling was made consistent when a predominant form was found in
this book; otherwise it was not changed.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Dungeons of Old Paris, by Tighe Hopkins