"A, R, ar, R, E, Z; ret, arret"--
I snatched it from her hands. It was my death-sentence that she was reading to me. Her nurse had bought the paper for a sou. It cost me more than that.
Words cannot express what I felt. My violence frightened her. She was almost in tears. All at once she said to me,--
"Give me my paper; it is to play with." I handed her back to her nurse.
"Take her away," I cried.
And I fell back in my chair, sad, lonely, despairing. They may come now; I care for nothing more; the last cord of my heart is broken. I am ready for whatever they want to do with me.
Chapter XLIV
The priest is good, and the jailer also. I think that they dropped a tear when I said that they might take away my child.
They have done so. Now I must harden myself, and think with firmness upon the hangman, the wagon, the gendarmes, the crowd on the bridge, on the wharf, at the windows, and that which is waiting expressly for me on that gloomy Place de Greve, which might well be paved with the heads it has seen fall.
I believe that I still have an hour in which to grow accustomed to all this.
Chapter XLV
All the populace will laugh, and will clap their hands, and shout. And among all these men who are free and unknown to the jailers, who run joyfully to an execution, in this crowd of heads which will cover the Place, there will be more than one which sooner or later will follow mine into the crimson basket. More than one who comes there for me will some day come for himself.
For these fatal beings there is, on a certain spot of La Greve, a fatal place, a centre of attraction, a trap. They turn around until they finally reach it.
Chapter XLVI
My little Marie! They carried her away to play. She watched the crowd from the cab-window, but thought no more of the gentleman.
Perhaps I still have time to write a few pages for her, that some day she may read them, and fifteen years from now, may, perhaps, weep at to-day.
Yes, she must know my story from me, and why the name I leave her is bloody.
Chapter XLVII
My Story
EDITOR'S NOTE.--The pages attached to this cannot be found. Perhaps, as those which follow would indicate, the condemned man did not have the time to write them. It was late when the thought occurred to him.
Chapter XLVIII
A Room in the Hotel de Ville
THE HOTEL DE VILLE! So I am here. The wretched journey is over. The Place is not far away; and under the window the horrible crowd is gathering, the crowd which longs and waits and laughs.
I have hardened myself in vain, I have trembled in vain; it is always the same; my heart still fails me. When, above the heads, I saw those two great crimson arms, with the black triangle at one end, standing between the two lanterns on the quay, my heart failed me. I asked to be allowed to make a final declaration. They brought me here, and they have gone for a public prosecutor. I am now waiting for him. It is so much time gained.
Here he is.
Three o'clock struck, and they came to tell me that it was time. I trembled, as though I had been thinking of anything else for five whole hours, for six weeks, six months. It affected me as though it were something unexpected.
They made me cross corridors and descend stairways. They brought me between two jailers to a gloomy, narrow, arched room on the ground-floor, that would be almost dark on a rainy, foggy day. A chair stood in the centre. They told me to be seated. I obeyed.
Near the door and along the walls several men were standing, besides the priest and the gendarmes, and there were three other men also.
The first, the largest and oldest, was fat, with a red face. He wore a cloak and a three-cornered hat. It was he, the hangman, the valet of the guillotine. The other two were his valets.
Scarcely was I seated, before the other two came up behind me like cats; then all at once I felt a cold steel run through my hair, and scissors touching my ears.
My hair was cut off, and its locks fell on my shoulders. The man with the three-cornered hat touched them gently with his rough hand.
Around me they were all talking in low tones.
Outside there was a great noise, like a mighty roaring. At first I thought it was the river; but from the laughter which burst out, I knew it was the people.
A young man near the window was writing in a copybook, and asked one of the jailers what they called that which they were doing.
"The toilet of the condemned man," the other replied.
I knew that it would all be described in to-morrow's paper.
Then one of the valets removed my jacket, and the other took my two hands, which were hanging down, and tied them behind me with a rope, which they knotted around my wrists. At the same time the other took off my cravat. My cambric shirt, the only article which remained of my former life, made him hesitate a moment; then he began to cut away the collar.
At this dread precaution, at the touch of the steel on my neck, my elbows shook, and I gave a stifled groan. The hand of the executioner trembled.
"Monsieur," said he, "pardon me! Did I hurt you?"
These hangmen are very gentle.
The shouts of the people outside grew louder.
The fat man with the pimpled face handed me a handkerchief to smell of which was saturated with vinegar.
"Thanks, no," I said, in as strong a voice as I could command; "I do not need it; I am very well."
Then one of the men knelt down, and bound my feet by means of a fine, narrow rope, which allowed me to take only short steps. The rope was attached to that which bound my hands.
The fat man threw my jacket over my back, and tied the sleeves under my chin. All that was to be done there was finished.
The priest approached with his crucifix.
"Come, my son," said he.
The valets took hold of my arms. I rose and walked; but my steps were weak and trembling, as though each leg had two knees.
The outside door was now flung open. The furious shouting, the cold air, and the white light fell on me as I stood in the darkness. At the farther end of the dull prison I saw all at once, through the rain, the thousand howling heads of the populace, crowding pellmell upon the wide steps of the Palais; on the right, on a level with the threshold, was a line of horses belonging to the gendarmes, of which only the front feet and the breasts could be seen from the lower door; in front, a company of soldiers was drawn up in line of battle; on the left, I saw the rear of a wagon, against which a steep ladder was leaning. It was a hideous picture, well-framed in the door of a prison.
It was for that awful moment that I had been gathering all my strength. I took three steps, and stood on the threshold of the prison.
"There he is! There he is!" cried the people. "He is coming out at last!"
And those nearest to me began to clap their hands. If they loved the king very much it would be less of a holiday.
It was an ordinary wagon, with a worn-out horse; and the driver wore a blue smock-frock, with red figures on it like those of the gardeners in the suburbs of Bicetre.
The fat man with the three-cornered hat was the first to mount.
"Good-morning, Monsieur Sanson!" cried the children on the railings.
A valet followed him.
"Hurray, Mardi!" cried the children again.
Both sat down on the front bench.
It was my turn next. I stepped up with a firm tread.
"He walks well!" said a woman by the side of the gendarmes.
This cruel praise gave me courage. The priest took a seat opposite me. They had put me on the rear seat, with my back to the horse. I shuddered at this last attention.
After all they have some feeling in them.
I looked around me. Gendarmes before, gendarmes behind; then the people, the people, the people; a sea of heads on the Place.
A picket of mounted gendarmes awaited us at the gate of the Palais.
The officer gave the order. The wagon a
nd its procession began to move, as though pushed forward by a howl from the people.
We passed through the entrance; and as the wagon turned toward the Pont au Change, the Place burst out into a cry which echoed from the pavement to the roofs, and the bridges and the quays answered it with the noise of an earthquake.
At this point the picket joined our escort.
"Hats off! Hats off!" cried a thousand voices together, "as for the king!"
I gave a frightful laugh, and exclaimed to the priest,--"They, their hats; I, my head."
The horses walked.
The quay was sweet with the odor of plants; it was flower-market day, but the women had deserted their posies for me.
Opposite, in front of the square tower which rises at the corner of the Palais, were wine-shops, the doorways of which were filled with spectators, especially women, who were rejoicing over their fine places. The day ought to be a good one for the tavern-keepers.
Theywere renting tables, chairs, scaffolds, wagons. Everything was crowded with spectators. Merchants of human blood were crying out with all their might,--
"Who wants a place?"
I was filled with rage against all these people, and I longed to shout out,--
"Who wants mine?"
The wagon moved on. At every step the crowd surged up after it, and it was with fright that I saw more crowds gathering in the distance at other points of my journey.
As we crossed the Pont au Change, I chanced to look back on my right. My eyes fell on the other quay, above the houses, and on a solitary black tower, covered with carved images, on the top of which I saw two stone monsters sitting sidewise. I do not know why I asked the priest the name of the tower, but I did.
"St. Jacques-la-Boucherie," the hangman answered.
I cannot explain how it was; but nothing escaped me in the mist, in spite of the fine white rain which glistened upon everything like the network of a spider's web. Every detail suggested some horror to me. Words fail me to describe my feelings.
Toward the middle of the wide Pont au Change the crowd grew so dense that we could scarcely pass, and I was seized with a violent terror. I thought, final vanity! that I should faint. Then I strove to become deaf and blind and dead to everything except the priest, whose words I could scarcely hear, owing to the shouts of the people.
I took the crucifix and kissed it.
"Pity me, O my God!" I cried; and I tried to lose myself in this thought.
But every jolt of the hard wagon shook me. Then all at once I became violently cold. The rain had soaked my clothes, and dampened my shaved head.
"You are shaking with the cold, my son," said the priest.
"Yes," I replied.
Alas! alas! it was not only from the cold.
At a turn in the bridge, the women expressed pity at my youth.
When we reached the fatal quay, I was beginning to see and hear nothing. The voices, the heads at the windows, at the doors, at the shop-railings, on the arms of the lanterns; the open-eyed and cruel spectators, the people who knew me, and not one of whom I knew; the paved street lined with human faces--I was unconscious of them all; I was dazed and blind. It is a dreadful thing to have the weight of so many eyes bearing down upon one.
I swayed on my bench, paying no more attention even to the priest or the crucifix.
In the tumult about me, I no longer could distinguish the cries of pity from those of joy, the jeers from the sympathy, the voices from the noise; it was all a roar in my head like an echo striking on brass.
I mechanically spelled out the signs on the shops.
Once a strange curiosity made me turn my head to see what was in front of us. It was a last effort of my mind, but the body refused to obey. My neck was paralyzed as though already dead.
I saw on my left, beyond the river, one of the towers of Notre-Dame, which seen from that point hides the other. It was the one on which floated the flag. There were crowds of people there, and they must have had a good view.
The wagon went on and on, the shops passed by, one sign followed another, written, painted, and gilded, and the people shouted and stamped in the mud, and I let myself be carried on as are those in sleep by their dreams.
Suddenly the line of shops ended in a Place; the shouts of the populace became louder, shriller, more joyful than ever; the wagon stopped, and I almost fell forward on the floor. The priest caught me. "Courage!" he whispered. A ladder was placed at the rear of the wagon; he gave me his arm; I descended, took one step, was about to take a second, when--strength failed me. Between the two lanterns on the quay, I had seen a terrible object.
Oh, it was the real thing!
I stood still, swaying back and forth.
"I have a last declaration to make!" I cried in a weak voice, and they brought me here.
I asked to be allowed to write my last wishes. They unbound my hands; but the rope is here, waiting, and the rest is below.
Chapter XLIX
A judge, a commissary, a magistrate of some kind, has just come in. I implored him with clasped hands to obtain my pardon, dragging myself across the floor on my knees. He asked me with a fatal smile if that was all I had to say to him.
"My pardon! my pardon!" I cried, "or, in mercy, five minutes longer!"
"Who knows? Perhaps it will come! It is so horrible to die thus at my age! One often hears of a pardon coming at the last moment. And whose pardon would it be, sir, except mine?"
The accursed hangman! He approached the judge to tell him that the execution had been arranged for a certain time, that the moment was almost at hand, that he was held responsible; and that, besides this, it was raining, and that the machine ran the risk of becoming rusty.
"Oh, in mercy! Wait one moment for my pardon, or I will defend myself; I'll bite!"
The judge and the hangman went away. I am alone. Alone with two gendarmes.
Oh! the horrible crowd with their hyena-like yells!--Who knows if I may not escape, if I may not yet be saved. If my pardon--it is not possible for them not to pardon me!
Ah! the fiends! I seem to hear them coming up the stairs--
Four o'clock
1881
The original manuscript of the "Last Day of a Condemned Man" bears these words on the margin of the first page: "Tuesday, October 14, 1828," and at the foot of the last page: "Night, December 25--26, 1828,--three o'clock in the morning."
Note on "The Last Day of a Condemned Man"
1829
We give opposite,6 for those interested in this sort of literature, the dialect song, with an accompanying explanation, after a copy found among the condemned man's papers, and which is reproduced in this fac-simile in its original spelling and writing. The meaning of the words is given in the handwriting of the condemned man, and in the last couplet there are two inserted verses which seem to be in his writing also; the remainder is in another hand. Probably, struck with the song, but not remembering it perfectly, he tried to secure a copy, and one was given him by some one in the jail.
The only thing which the fac-simile does not reproduce, is the appearance of the paper copy, which is yellow, soiled, and torn.
1 See the essay "Capital Punishment," in The Works of Victor Hugo (one-volume edition) (Roslyn, NY: Black's Reader Service Co., 1928), and available on the web at (https://www.angelfire.com/mn3/mixed_lit/hugo_cp.htm.
2 Ibid.
3 We do not pretend to look with the same scorn upon all that was said at this time in the Chamber. Now and then, kind and generous words were spoken. We, like every one else, applauded the dignified and simple speech of Monsieur de Lafayette, and at another time the remarkable words of Monsieur Villemain.
4 La Porte says twenty-two, but Aubery thirty-four. De Chalais shrieked until the twentieth.
5 We think that we should reprint here the following preface in dialogue, which accompanied the fourth edition of The Last Day of a Condemned Man. In reading it, one must remember in the midst of what political, moral, and literary troubl
es the first editions of the book were published (edition of 1832).
6 A facsimile of the song's text to which Hugo refers appears on pages 88 and 89. An English translation of the song appears on pages 35 and 36.
Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man
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