It was a lamentation, a myriology, a concert of lugubrious psalms, a “Super flumina Babylonis,” a Stabat Mater Dolorosa, a great symphony in C, with choruses sung by the entire orchestra of orators who occupied the front row of benches in the chamber, and made such beautiful speeches on great occasions. One came with his bass, another with his falsetto. Nothing was wanting. The affair could not have been more pitiful or pathetic. The night session, in particular, was as tender, paternal, and heartrending as the fifth act of Lachaussée. The kind public, which understood nothing of it, had tears in its eyes.3

What, then, was the question? The abolishment of capital punishment?

Yes and no.

These are the facts.

Four society men, men of good social standing, such as one meets in a drawing-room, and with whom perhaps one exchanges civilities,—four of these men, I say, had attempted, in the high political circles, one of those bold deeds which Bacon calls crimes, and which Machiavelli calls enterprises. But whichever they are, the law, cruel to all, punishes them with death. And the four gentlemen were taken prisoners, captives of the law, and were guarded by three hundred tricolored cockades beneath the beautiful ogives of Vincennes. What was to be done, and how go about it? You can readily see that it was impossible to send to La Grève, in a wagon, ignobly bound with great ropes, and sitting back to back with the officer whose title we must even refrain from mentioning, four men like you or me, four society men. If there were a mahogany guillotine—!

Well! There was nothing to do but to abolish capital punishment!

Thereupon the Chamber set to work to do it.

Note, gentlemen, that even yesterday you discussed abolishing this theoretical, imaginary, foolish, poetical Utopia. Remember that this is not the first time we have tried to call your attention to the prison-wagon, and the thick ropes, and the horrible scarlet machine, and that it is strange that this hideous apparatus all at once springs before your eyes.

Bah! This is indeed the question! It is not on your account, People, that we abolish capital punishment, but on our own account, as deputies, and men who may in time be ministers. We do not want the dreadful guillotine to kill our higher classes. We overthrow it. So much the better, if that accommodates every one; but we have thought only of ourselves. Ucalégon burns. We extinguish the fire. Quick, suppress the hangmen, blot out the law.

Thus it is that an alloy of egoism alters and changes the most beautiful social combinations. It is the black vein in the white marble; it runs everywhere, and suddenly appears every moment beneath the chisel. Your statue must be done over.

Surely it is not necessary for us to state here, that we are not of those who demanded the heads of the four ministers. As soon as these unfortunate men were imprisoned, our indignant anger, roused by their criminal attempts, changed, as did that of the world at large, into a profound pity. We remembered the education of some of them, the slightly developed brain of their leader, a fanatical and obstinate relapser of the conspiracies of 1804, grown gray before his time under the damp shade of the state-prisons; we remembered the fatal necessity of their common position, the impossibility of stopping on that rapid slide upon which the monarchy had thrown itself headlong, the 8th of August, 1829, the influence of the royal person, which we did not, until then, sufficiently realize, and especially the dignity spread by one of them, like a purple cloak, over their misfortune. We are of those who wished most sincerely that their lives might be spared, and who were ready to devote themselves toward this end. If ever, by any impossibility, it should happen that their scaffold was erected some day on the Place de Grève, we will not doubt,—and if it is an illusion, we wish to keep it,—we will not doubt but that there would be a riot to overthrow it, and that he who writes these lines would be in this righteous riot. For, it must be admitted also, that at a time of social crises, of all the scaffolds, the political one is the most abominable, the most wicked, the most harmful, the most necessary to have abolished. This kind of guillotine takes root in the pavement, and in a short time pushes forth its shoots at every point.

At the time of a revolution, look out for the first head that falls. It whets the people’s appetite.

We were then personally in accord with those who wanted to save the four ministers, and for every reason, sentimental as well as political. Only we would have preferred the Chamber to choose another time for proposing the abolishment of capital punishment.

If this longed-for abolishment had been suggested, not on account of the four ministers who had fallen from the Tuileries to Vincennes, but on account of one of the poor fellows whom you hardly notice when they pass you in the street, to whom you do not speak, whose dusty elbow you instinctively avoid,—the poor fellows who in childhood ran ragged and barefooted in the mud of the streets, shivering on the wharves in winter, warming themselves at the vent-holes of the kitchen of Monsieur Véfour with whom you dine, routing out here and there a crust of bread from the ash-heaps, which they have to wipe off before eating, scraping the stream all day long with a nail to find a liard, and with only the free show of the King’s fête and the executions at La Grève, the only other free show, for amusement; poor devils, whom hunger drives to theft, and theft to what comes after; children disinherited by a harsh society, whom the house of correction takes at the age of twelve, the galleys at eighteen, and the scaffold at forty; poor wretches whom you could make good, moral, and useful by means of a school and a workshop, but whom you do not know what to do with, as you turn them over like a useless bundle, now on the red ant-hill of Toulon, now in the still enclosure of Clamart, cutting off life after having taken away their liberty—if it were in regard to one of these men that you had proposed to abolish capital punishment, oh, then your session would indeed have been good and great, holy, majestic, and to be venerated. Since the august fathers of Thirty, who invited the heretics to their council in the name of God’s entrails, per viscera Dei, because they hoped for their conversion, quaniam sancta synodus sperat hœreticorum conversionem, never did an assembly of men present to the world a more sublime, more illustrious, and more pitiful spectacle. It has always belonged to the truly great and strong to care for the weak and feeble. A council of Brahmins would be beautiful taking up the cause of the paria; and in this case the cause of the paria was the cause of the people.