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.