Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné

A man is imprisoned at Bicêtre. Condemned to death. For five weeks, he has lived with this single thought, this bloody and implacable idea that follows him everywhere—a leaden specter at his side, slipping into every corner of his cell, into the pale rays of his night lamp, into the coarse weave of his clothes, reappearing in his dreams in the shape of a knife. Once—for it seems to him like years ago—he was a free man, a young and rich spirit whose imagination embroidered the fabric of life with inexhaustible arabesques. Now his body is in irons in a dungeon, his mind imprisoned in an idea.

He remembers his trial on a beautiful August morning. The courtroom was as bright as if for a wedding, the cheerful rays of the sun tracing lozenges of golden dust, a pretty little yellow plant playing with the wind in a crevice of the stone by the window. How could a sinister idea have dawned amidst such graceful sensations? His lawyer spoke to him of hope, of life imprisonment with hard labor. And then the clerk read the verdict, a cold sweat broke out across his limbs, and the crowd cried out those two terrible words. As he was led away, everything around him—the luminous windows, the beautiful sun, the pretty flower—had turned pale and white, the color of a shroud. At the foot of the stairs, a black grated carriage awaited him, and a little girl clapped her hands, saying it would be in six weeks.

The black carriage transported him to Bicêtre, this edifice that from afar retains the air of a royal castle, but whose regal facades, seen up close, are plagued by leprosy. They stripped him of his knife and fork, they locked him in a straitjacket, then gradually habit took over and the guards grouped him together with the other prisoners in a shared brutality. He was given ink, paper, and quills. On Sundays, in the courtyard, he converses with the inmates who teach him argot—that language grafted onto the general tongue like a hideous excrescence, like a wart—and who are the only ones to pity him, because the jailers speak of him in his presence as if he were a thing.

He decides to write. Not because he has anything to say, but because there is a storm, a tragedy within him, and depicting his agonies might distract him from them. Besides, these pages may one day bear a lesson: they will teach those who condemn that there is, in the man they cut off, an intellect that had counted on life, a soul that had in no way prepared itself for death.

At night, he passes his lamp over the walls of his cell. They are covered with names, drawings, and notches—Dautun, Poulain, Jean Martin, Castaing, Papavoine—and every name is a murder. It is here, on this very flagstone, that these men thought their final thoughts. They left the spot warm, and it is to him they have left it. In a corner of the wall, sketched in white chalk, is the image of the scaffold: the lamp nearly slipped from his hands.

One morning, the entire prison comes alive: it is the day the convicts are fettered. From a cell with a barred window, he watches the spectacle. The square courtyard fills with faces pressed against the bars, with shouts and grimaces; then the convicts arrive, howling and in rags, and a cold downpour lashes their naked bodies. Iron collars are riveted around their necks with heavy blows of a sledgehammer, each strike making the patient's chin violently rebound. Then a ray of sunlight reappears, and the five chains form a circle around the lantern, singing an argot ballad to a tune at times plaintive, at times furious, with the chains serving as an orchestra. Suddenly, the dance stops, and all eyes turn to his window. 'The condemned man!' they cry, pointing at him. He is their comrade. The Place de Grève is sister to Toulon. He falls into a swoon.

The following day, from the infirmary, he watches the five carts depart in the rain, loaded with those men riveted to their common chain, motionless, most of them half-naked, beginning their twenty-five-day journey. And he tells himself that yes, a thousand times rather death, rather the scaffold than the galleys, rather nothingness than hell.

The days pass. He dreams of escape—a thicket of trees near Arcueil, nightfall, the road to Le Havre, England—but a gendarme would ask for his passport and all would be lost. Under his window, he hears the pure voice of a fifteen-year-old girl singing a slow, languorous melody, yet the lyrics are an argot lament: the story of an arrested assassin, a woman running to Versailles to beg the king, and the king threatening to make the culprit dance the dance where there is no floor. All these monstrous words spilling from such a fresh, ruby mouth: it was like the slime of a slug upon a rose.

And then one morning, the turnkey enters, takes off his cap, and asks what he desires for breakfast. The warden comes to visit, inquiring after his health with interest. They call him 'Monsieur.' It is for today.

A priest enters, a white-haired old man whose half-open frock coat reveals a cassock. A bailiff reads the rejection of the appeal. The sentence will be carried out at the Place de Grève. They leave at half-past seven for the Conciergerie. Four fusiliers in the corridor. He cries out that he must escape—through the doors, the windows, the roof timbers—but he has neither a nail nor an hour.

The transfer in the black carriage, between the bailiff and the priest, through the streets of Paris. The bailiff chatters away, speaks of the National Guard, offers him tobacco, and casually mentions Castaing and Papavoine, whom he escorted before him. The condemned man replies that he is older than the bailiff, for every quarter of an hour that passes ages him by a year. At the Conciergerie, in a holding room, a man in rags bursts out laughing: it is another condemned man, a friauche who recounts his entire life in argot—a childhood in the dust of the roads, theft, the galleys, escape, murder on the highways—and who takes his frock coat in exchange for his own infamous jacket, laughing with joy at the thought of having tobacco for his six weeks.

Alone in his cell at the Conciergerie, he thinks of his little Marie, three years old, sweet, rosy, and frail, with large dark eyes and long chestnut hair. Another six hours and he will be dead, some vile thing dragging across the cold tables of the amphitheaters. He tries to remember how the machine is constructed—there is a tipping board, and they lay you on your stomach—but the image remains vague, indeterminate, and all the more sinister for it. An architect enters to measure the walls for future renovations, and the gendarme on guard tells him one does not speak so loudly in a dead man's room. Another gendarme asks him for three lottery numbers, convinced that the dead can see the future; the condemned man tries to trade the numbers for the uniform, but the man refuses: for the numbers to be good, he must be dead.

He closes his eyes and takes refuge in the past. He sees himself as a child again, a laughing schoolboy in the garden of the Feuillantines, beneath the somber dome of the Val-de-Grâce. And then Pepa, the little Spanish girl with the large eyes and red lips, on a summer evening beneath the chestnut trees. They were reading the Voyages of Spallanzani together; their heads touched, their breaths mingled, and when they wished to resume their reading, the sky was filled with stars. My whole life, he writes. My whole life.

The priest returns. He is an excellent and charitable man, yet his words slide like cold rain across a frosted windowpane. He recites a lesson recited twenty times before; he is jaded, the galleys and the scaffold are an everyday affair for him. The condemned man wishes they would fetch at random some young vicar from the first parish they found, a man who expects nothing, who would shudder from head to foot, who would weep with him. They bring him a delicate meal, a chicken; at the very first bite, it falls from his lips, so bitter and fetid does it taste to him.

They bring him his daughter, his little Marie. But she does not recognize him. She stares at him with large, astonished eyes, and when he takes her in his arms, she cries out that he is not her papa, that her papa is dead. He sets her back on his lap, but she sees only his gray hair and his coarse woolen jacket. Her papa, she says, had a beautiful frock coat. He covers her in kisses and tears, she screams that the man is hurting her, and she is carried away.

Then there is nothing left. He asks for a pardon, he writes to the king, he begs them to spare his life—five years in the galleys, twenty years, the branding iron, anything provided he lives. Three o'clock strikes. They come for him. They cut his hair, they bind his hands. He climbs into the cart with the priest. The crowd howls along the quays; urchins climb the lampposts. At the Place de Grève, he spots the machine, the two red arms of the guillotine. He asks for a few more minutes. They push him. He scribbles his final words on the paper, begging for a pardon, begging for a pardon—and four o'clock is about to strike.