They conducted him to the side of the scaffold, and a moving picture hardly pleasant for him began to silhouette itself against the blue sky. The hangman set his ladder against the scaffold, and the chaplain of the Seigneur of La Piroche, mounted on a prepared platform, delivered the sentence of justice. The condemned man did not move. One might have said that he had given the spectators the slip by dying before he was hanged. They called to him to descend from his ass and deliver himself to the hangman. He did not move. We understand his hesitation. Then the hangman took him by the elbows, lifted him off the ass, and set him upright on the ground. Fine fellow, that hangman! When we say that he set him upright, we do not lie. But we would lie in saying that he remained as they placed him. He had in two minutes jumped two-thirds of the alphabet; that is to say, in vulgar parlance, that instead of standing straight like an I, he became zigzag like a Z. During this time the chaplain finished reading the sentence. “Have you any request to make?” he asked of the culprit. “Yes,” replied the unfortunate, in a voice sad and low. “What do you ask?” “I ask for pardon.” I do not know if the word “farceur” was invented in those days, but then or never was the time to invent it and to speak it. The Seigneur of La Piroche shrugged his shoulders and ordered the executioner to do his duty. The latter made ready to mount the ladder leaning against the gibbet, which, impassive, was about to draw with extended arm the soul out of a body, and he attempted to make the condemned mount in front of him, but it was not an easy thing to do. One does not know, in general, what obstacles those condemned to death will put in the way of their dying. The hangman and the man there had the air of passing civilities one to another. It was a question of who should go first. The hangman, to make him mount on his ladder, returned to the method he employed in making him descend from his ass. He seized him around the middle of his body, balanced him on the third rung of the ladder, and began to push him up from beneath. “Bravo!” cried the crowd. He ought to have mounted well. Then the executioner adroitly slipped the running noose, which adorned the end of the rope, around the neck of the culprit, and, giving the latter a vigorous kick in the back, he flung him out into space, which strongly resembled Eternity. An immense clamor greeted this looked-for dénouement, and a shudder passed through the crowd. Whatever may be the crime he has committed, the man who dies is always at the moment greater than those who watch him die. The hanged man swung for three or four minutes at the end of his rope, as he had a right to do, danced, wriggled, then hung motionless and rigid. The Z had become an I again.