Its merits are certainly not ill set off by the two shorter pieces, both of fairly early date, but the one a little before and the other a little after _Notre-Dame de Paris_, which usually accompany it in the collected editions. Of these _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne_ is, with its tedious preface, almost two-thirds as long as _Bug-Jargal_ itself; the other, _Claude Gueux_, contents itself with thirty pages. Both are pieces with a purpose--manifestos of one of Hugo's most consistent and most irrational crazes--the objection to capital punishment.[95] There is no need to argue against this, the immortal "Que MM. les assassins," etc., being, though in fact the weakest of a thousand refutations, sufficient, once for all, to explode it. But it is not irrelevant to point out that the two pieces themselves are very battering-rams against their own theory. We are not told--the objection to this omission was made at the time, of course, and Hugo's would-be lofty waving-off of this is one of the earliest of many such--what the condemned person's crime was. But the upshot of his lucubrations during these latest hours of his is this, that such hours are almost more uncomfortable than the minutes of the actual execution can possibly be. As this is exactly one of the points on which the advocates of the punishment, whether from the point of view of deterrence or from that of retribution, chiefly rely, it seems something of a blunder to bring it out with all the power of a poet and a rhetorician. We _want_ "M. l'Assassin," in fact, to be made very uncomfortable--as uncomfortable as possible--and we want M. l'Assassin, in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he will be so made. "Serve him right" sums up the one view, "De te fabula" the other. In fact cheap copies of _Le Dernier Jour_, supplied to all about to commit murder, would be highly valuable. Putting aside its purpose, the mere literary power is of course considerable if not consummate; it hardly pretends to be a "furnished" _story_. [Sidenote: _Claude Gueux._]