A vivid picture of the condemned cell, or _cachot du Condamné_, very painful in its blending of the imaginative with the realistic, is given in Victor Hugo's _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné_. It was a day when that veil of decent mystery which our age casts over the last torturing hours of the condemned had not been woven; and callous curiosity could, for a trifling bribe to the turnkey, uncover the grating behind which the criminal in his strait waistcoat was couched on mouldy straw. It was a veritable journey from Bicêtre to the Place Saint-Jacques, by way of the Avenue d'Italie and the outer boulevards; midway along the Boulevard d'Italie the guillotine came in sight, and for five and twenty minutes before he reached it, the miserable victim had the death-machine for his horizon, the huge blade gripped between the blood-red arms gleaming deadlier moment by moment. The progress was even longer and more wretched when La Grande Roquette was substituted for Bicêtre as the prison of the _Condamné à mort_. On a day in mid-December, 1838, a certain Perrin was carried to death from La Roquette to the barrière Saint-Jacques. An icy rain was falling, and the streets beyond the Seine were so choked with mud that at certain points the vehicle became almost embedded in it, and had to be hauled along by the crowd. Think of riding to one's death in that fashion! The Abbé Montès, riding beside the young assassin, saw him shivering, and insisted on covering him with his own hat. At the scaffold, Perrin was lifted from the cart almost dead from cold and exhaustion. From that date there began to be a talk of changing the place of execution, but the proposals had no result, and during the next thirteen years five and twenty murderers traversed the whole length of Paris in their passage to the guillotine. Amongst them may be named the regicide Darmés, the terrible and dreaded Poulmann, Fourier, chief of the famous band of the _Escarpes_, the _garde Général_ Lecompte, who fired on Louis-Philippe at Fontainebleau, and Daix and Lahr, the assassins of General Bréar. At length, in 1851, the Place Saint-Jacques ceded its dubious honours to the Place de la Roquette,—which is now about to restore them. As La Roquette (or properly La Grande Roquette, to distinguish it from La Petite Roquette, the prison for juvenile offenders, which stands opposite) is to be abolished, it will be interesting to make a brief survey of the place in which some of the most celebrated French criminals of modern times have awaited the visit of M. Deibler, with his scissors and pinioning straps. Here the "toilet of the guillotine" has been performed on Orsini, Piéri, Verger, La Pommerais, Troppmann, Moreau, Billoir, Prévost, Barré and Lebiez, Campi, Pranzini, and so many others, down to Vaillant and Emile Henry.