This kind of removal, still known at La Grande Roquette, is horrible, because it is final and irretrievable, and the journey is to that unknown bourne from which no traveller returns. The French system of dealing with condemned prisoners cannot be commended. It is cruel in the extreme, from the long uncertainty in which the individual is left as to his ultimate fate. He has made his last petition, the final appeal from the legal tribunal to the possibly more merciful Chief of the State, and he awaits the decision for weeks and weeks in the condemned cell. The delay is sometimes horribly prolonged. One man waited forty days, and was a prey the whole time to painful visions at night. He dreamed of the guillotine and saw his head rolling in the sawdust. He awoke with screams of terror and cried out perpetually, “The knife! The scaffold! I see nothing else!” The agony of the delay is intensified from the well-known fact that the dénouement, when it comes, will be abrupt and with the briefest possible notice. Only on the very morning of execution is the prisoner roused, generally from profound slumber, and warned suddenly to prepare for immediate death. All this time, since his sentence and reception at La Roquette, he has occupied the condemned cell, one of three rather large chambers near the hospital at the back of the prison. He has never been left for one instant unattended. Two warders have been with him, and have watched him closely day and night. Time was when, to render assurance doubly sure, the convict was kept continually in a strait-jacket or _camisole de force_. The priest of the prison has also been his constant companion. From the condemned cell the prisoner is taken by a rather long and circuitous route to the outer office, near the inner gate of the prison. Here the executioner and his assistants receive him and commence the “toilette of death.” The man is pinioned and bound by a variety of intricate straps. Thence, when he is ready, the procession passes across the courtyard to the outer prison gates. It is but a step. Once through them, the scaffold is immediately reached, the last act commences, is soon played, and the curtain promptly falls. Barely fourteen seconds elapse, it is said, from the time the convict steps on the scaffold to the moment when decapitation is effected. There is but a short fruition, therefore, for the sightseers whom morbid curiosity has attracted to the spot, even if they see anything at all, which is doubtful, as the guillotine is placed on the ground level, and is surrounded by a double line of mounted gensdarmes. On the very night that the guillotine was being erected in the Place de la Roquette for the execution of the poisoner La Pommerais, a marvellous escape was effected by a child prisoner from the reformatory prison opposite, the little Roquette.