In the early years of the Restoration, Marie M——, a pretty peasant girl, was sent to Saint-Lazare for stealing roses. She had a passion for the flower, and a thousand mystical notions had woven themselves about it in her mind. She said that rose-trees would detach themselves from their roots, glide after her wherever she went, and tempt her to pluck their blossoms. One in a garden, taller than the rest, had compelled her to climb the wall, and gather as many as she could,—and there the _gendarmes_ found her. She was terrified in prison, believing that when she went out the roses would lure her amongst them again, and that she would be sent back to Saint-Lazare. This poor girl excited the vividest interest amongst the _femmes publiques_ in that sordid place. They plotted to restore her to her reason, christened her Rose, which delighted her, and set themselves to make artificial roses for her of silk and paper. Those fingers, so rebellious at allotted tasks, created roses without number, till the cell of Marie M—— was transformed into a bower. An intelligent director of prison labour seconded these efforts, and opened in Saint-Lazare a workroom for the manufacture of artificial flowers, to which Marie M—— was introduced as an apprentice. Here, making roses from morning till night, and her dread of the future dispelled, the malady of her mind reached its term with the term of her sentence, and she left the prison cured and happy. The authors of _Les Prisons de Paris_, from whose pages her story is borrowed, declare that Marie M—— became one of the most successful florists in Paris. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] CHAPTER XII. LA ROQUETTE. There is to be a flitting of the guillotine. For nearly fifty years executions in Paris, which are not private as with us, have taken place immediately outside the prison of La Roquette, known officially as the _dépôt des Condamnés_. Four slabs of stone sunk in the soil, a few yards beyond the gaol door, mark the spot where, on the fatal morning, at five in summer, and about half-past seven in winter, the red "timbers of justice" are set up by the headsman's assistants. But La Roquette is to be demolished, and the dismal honour of furnishing a last lodging to the condemned will be conferred on La Santé. This change effected, the guillotine will flit to the Place Saint-Jacques. Criminals of a modest habit will not approve the change, but the murderer with a touch of vanity (and vanity is notoriously a weakness of murderers) will doubtless welcome it; for the progress from the prison to the scaffold will be somewhat longer.