CHAPTER XII.
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.