“Have you any request to make?” he asked of the culprit.
“Yes,” replied the unfortunate, in a voice sad and low.
“What do you ask?”
“I ask for pardon.”
I do not know if the word “farceur” was invented in those days, but then or never was the time to invent it and to speak it.
The Seigneur of La Piroche shrugged his shoulders and ordered the executioner to do his duty.
The latter made ready to mount the ladder leaning against the gibbet, which, impassive, was about to draw with extended arm the soul out of a body, and he attempted to make the condemned mount in front of him, but it was not an easy thing to do. One does not know, in general, what obstacles those condemned to death will put in the way of their dying.
The hangman and the man there had the air of passing civilities one to another. It was a question of who should go first.
The hangman, to make him mount on his ladder, returned to the method he employed in making him descend from his ass. He seized him around the middle of his body, balanced him on the third rung of the ladder, and began to push him up from beneath.
“Bravo!” cried the crowd.