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.
[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.