He was told that he must die in two hours, which announcement made him tremble in every limb, for he had been forgotten for six months, and had grown to think that he would not have to die. He was shaved, bound, confessed; then they took him in a wheelbarrow between four gendarmes, through the crowd, to the place of execution. Up to this point nothing could have been simpler. It was the usual way of doing such things. When they reached the scaffold, the hangman received him from the priest, led him aside, bound him to the seasaw, put him into the oven, so to speak (here I use the slang expression), then let down the chopper. The heavy iron triangle rose with difficulty, fell with jerks into its grooves, and (here the horrors begin) mangled the man, but did not kill him. The victim gave a fearful shriek. The hangman, disconcerted, raised the chopper and let it fall a second time. Again it cut the victim’s neck, but did not behead him. He gave a fearful groan, and the crowd groaned too. The hangman once more raised the chopper, hoping the third time for success. Not so. The third blow brought out a third river of blood from the victim’s neck, but did not cut off his head. Let us abridge the story. The chopper rose and fell five times; five times it struck the man’s neck, five times he shrieked out beneath the blow, raising his head, and crying for mercy! The indignant populace seized some stones, and began throwing them at the hangman. The latter fled under the guillotine, and crouched down behind the horses of the gendarmes. But this is not all. The victim, seeing that he was alone on the scaffold, rose and stood there, a fearful sight, dripping with blood, trying to hold up his half-severed head, which hung down over his shoulder, and imploring them with feeble moans to untie him. The people, filled with pity, were on the point of calling the gendarmes, and coming to the aid of the unhappy wretch who five times had suffered his death-sentence, when a valet of the hangman, a young man of twenty, mounted the scaffold, told the victim to turn over that he might unbind him, and then, taking advantage of the dying man’s defenceless position, he jumped on his back, and began with difficulty to hack, with a butcher’s knife, at what still remained of his neck. All this happened. All this was seen. It is all true.

According to law, a judge should have been present at the execution. He could have put a stop to it all by a gesture. What was he doing, then, leaning back in his carriage, while a man was being massacred? What was he doing, this punisher of murderers, while in broad daylight, under his very eyes, under his horse’s nostrils, under his carriage-window, a man was being murdered?

And the judge was not put on trial! and the hangman was not put on trial! and no court made inquiries about that monstrous violation of every law on the sacred person of one of God’s creatures!

In the seventeenth century, in the barbarous epoch of the criminal law, under Richelieu, under Christopher Fouquet, when Monsieur de Chalais was put to death before le Bouffay of Nantes by a clumsy soldier,—who, instead of a swordthrust, gave him thirty-four blows4 with a copper’s adze,—at least this appeared irregular to the Parliament of Paris: there was an investigation and a trial; and although Richelieu was not punished, although Christopher Fouquet was not punished, the soldier was. An injustice, no doubt, but underneath everything it was right.

In this case, nothing was done. The thing occurred after July, at a time of peace and great progress, a year after the celebrated lamentation of the Chamber on capital punishment. Well! The fact passed absolutely unobserved. The Paris paper published it as an anecdote. No one troubled himself about it. They merely knew that the guillotine had been purposely put out of order by some one who wished to injure the executor of noble deeds.