When the doors of La Roquette are thrown open, the victim, bareheaded and manacled, has but a few paces to shuffle to the spot where old M. Deibler awaits him, with his finger on the button of the knife. Between La Santé and the Place Saint-Jacques there is rather more than the length of a thoroughfare to be traversed, and, as in the old days, some form of tumbril will probably be called for. It is a pity, of course, for it has been proved abundantly that this kind of spectacle is anything but good for the public health. Humane and enlightened opinion on the subject has ceased to be that which Dr. Johnson gave utterance to. "Sir," said the Doctor to Boswell, "executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose. The old method [Tyburn had been abolished] was most satisfactory to all parties: the public was gratified by a procession, the criminal is supported by it; why is all this to be swept away?" The sheriffs of the year 1784 gave the answer in a pamphlet which exposed all the horrors and indecencies of the public progress to the gallows. As for the "support" accorded to the criminal, he might, if he were unpopular, be nearly stoned to death before the hangman could despatch him. Public executions in Paris are not, and have never been, the scandalous exhibitions that they were in London during the whole of the last century, but the scene in the neighbourhood of La Roquette for four or five hours before a guillotining is something less than edifying. In leaving its present site for the Place Saint-Jacques the guillotine will only be returning home. The Place Saint-Jacques was the scene of punishment for nineteen years and a half; it was dispossessed in favour of La Roquette in 1851. The first person to suffer death at the Place Saint-Jacques (the Place de Grève having been abandoned) was an old man named Désandrieux, sixty-eight years of age, condemned for the murder of a man whose age was eighty-four. Owing to the disgraceful neglect of the authorities, Désandrieux lay in prison one hundred and twenty-eight days before he was led to execution. After him came the parricide, Benoît, the atrocious Lecenaire, David, the regicides Fieschi, Morey, and Pepin, and other murderers of greater or less notoriety. The Place Saint-Jacques saw the guillotine erected thirty-five times, and beheld the fall of thirty-nine heads. At this date the _dépôt des Condamnés_ was remote Bicêtre, which, as we have seen, was also the gaol from which the criminals convicted in Paris were despatched on their journey to the _bagne_.