"Is sentenced; my lawyer told me so yesterday. I was taken with my hand in the bag, and my knife in the weasand of the stiff'un. I'm a 'return horse,' too; so nothing can be more certain. I'll drop my head into Charlot's (the headsman's) basket, and I shall see if it's true that he does his customers, and puts sawdust into his basket instead of the bran which government allows us."
"True, the guillotine has a right to its bran. Now, I remember my father was robbed in the same way," said Nicholas Martial, with a ferocious grin.
This horrid jest created immense laughter amongst the prisoners. This is fearful, but far from exaggeration; we give but a faint idea of these conversations, so common in prisons. The prisoners were all laughing joyously.
"Thousand thunders!" cried the Skeleton. "I wish they who punish us would come and see how we bear it. If they will come to the Barrière St. Jacques the day of my benefit they will hear me address the audience in a neat and appropriate speech, and say to Charlot, in a gentlemanly tone, 'Père Sampson, the cord if you please.'"[1]
[1] To understand this horrid jest the English reader must know that the doors in France are usually opened by the porter, who sits in his room and pulls a cord to allow the person going out to have free egress; and the blade of the guillotine glides down the grooves of the machine, after a spring has been set in motion, by touching a cord that acts upon it.
Fresh bursts of laughter hailed this jest.
"And then Charlot opens the baker's (the devil's) door," continued the Skeleton, still smoking his pipe.
"Ah, bah! Is there a devil?"
"You fool, I was only joking. There's a sharp blade, and they put a head under it, and that's all. And now that I know my road, and must stay at the abbey of Mont-à-Regret (guillotine), I would rather go there to-day than to-morrow," said the Skeleton, with savage excitement. "I wish I was there now,—my blood comes into my mouth when I think what a crowd there'll be to see me; there'll be, at least, I should say, from four to five thousand who will push and squeeze to get good places, and they'll hire seats and windows, as if for a grand procession. I hear 'em now crying, 'Seats to let! Seats to let!' And then there'll be troops of soldiers, cavalry and infantry, and all for me,—for the Skeleton! That's enough to rouse a man if he was as big a coward as Pique-Vinaigre, that would make you walk like a hero. All eyes on you, and that makes a fellow pluck up; then—'tis but a moment—a fellow dies game, and that annoys the big-wigs and curs, and gives the knowing ones pluck to face the chopper."
"That's true, on Gospel!" added Barbillon, trying to imitate the fearful audacity of the Skeleton; "they think to make us funky when they set Charlot to work to get his shop open at our expense."