Who will execute the executioner?
BEHIND THIS WALL AT 35, RUE DE PICPUS THERE COME TOGETHER a number of strands of French history, and some of American history as well. It is a plain address on a plain street in the working-class 12th arrondissement. It is not mentioned in guidebooks. There are no tourist buses pulled up outside. The first time I came here I wasn’t sure it was the place, because from the sidewalk nothing shows. I had been round and round the block searching. I kept coming upon two great wooden doors in the wall with a smaller wooden door inset into one of them, and finally I opened the small door and peered inside. I saw a large gravel courtyard surrounded by buildings, including a church. The concierge’s loge was off to the right, together with a sign: “Visits permitted only from two o’clock to four.”
A woman of about 60 answered my knock. This was the right place, she said, but it was now five past four and closed.
I gave her a smile. I was late by only five minutes, I said, and actually I had been here on time, but I couldn’t find it—
“Je regrette, monsieur.”
I don’t know why I persisted, for I knew Parisian concierges. But I had come all the way from America, I told her. I was going home tomorrow. I was only five minutes late. This was my last chance to see something important to me.
“Je regrette, monsieur.”
It occurred to me to slip her 50 francs. But to succeed at bribing people takes a certain grace. “Perhaps if I give you something you could make an exception,” I said. Instead of just doing it I had had to announce it first. Beautiful.
Her manner became haughty. She said “Je regrette” again and closed the door on me.
There was an iron door in the wall beside the church. It was locked. I knew what was behind it. I wanted to go through it, and couldn’t.
I went into the church. The usual gloomy church, lit principally by candles. About a dozen nuns wearing the elaborate white habits of my youth knelt in pews in prayer, keeping a permanent vigil there. They worked around the clock in relays. That’s what they did for a living. They belonged to the Order of the Sacred Heart and were semicloistered. I watched one or two new ones come in and others go out. I had forgotten there were nuns who still dressed in such habits, that prayer vigils still existed.
In the lateral chapels, immense white marble plaques bordered in black were fixed to the walls. On them were inscribed the names, ages, professions, and dates of each of the victims out in the garden. I walked over and peered up at the names, first in one chapel, then in the other. Some were familiar to me. The nuns on their knees paid no notice. There were about 1,500 names in all. For a moment 1,500 living people marched through my head. The impression it made was overpowering, and I resolved to make one more try at the garden.
A side door up by the altar rail might lead out into the garden. I went through it. The worst that could happen was that I would run into some nun; if so, I would bluff my way past her. I had gone through grade school with nuns like this. I was not afraid of nuns.
But I had come out into a corridor, not the garden, and I met not one nun but three. The first two gave me a startled look. The third said sharply. “Monsieur, vous désirez quelque chose?” And she pointed, exactly in the manner of my grade-school teachers, back in the direction I had come.
Thoroughly humiliated, I went back into the church, out the front door, and back to my hotel.
Today I knock again on the concierge’s loge. Some months have passed. This time she is all smiles. I am acquainted with few important people in France, but one is the Count de Chambrun, a descendant of Lafayette, who has called her on my behalf. Normally, she tells me with a smile, visitors are not permitted at this hour. However, she’s always happy to make an exception for a guest from America like me. I smile right back. Clearly she does not remember me. I remember her well enough. She hands me a heavy bunch of keys and points to the gate to the garden. I tip her 50 francs. It would seem churlish not to. The money disappears into her apron and she thanks me profusely.
The keys are as big as the keys to a jail, and I open the iron door and go through.
The garden is much bigger than I had thought: about 300 yards long, about 60 wide. It is bigger than some parks, an enclave of greenery entirely surrounded by buildings. There are long alleys of trees, mostly horse chestnuts and lindens, and flat sweeps of lawn. The cemetery is in the far right corner. Its gate is locked too—the French lock up everything. But one of my keys opens it, and I go in.
Lafayette’s grave is easy enough to find, for over it flies an American flag. I don’t know when the flag was first put up, but it has never come down. It flew all during the German occupation, which surprises me less than it evidently does some people. Probably, like most modern tourists, the Germans didn’t know it was there, nor the tomb, not even the garden. Lafayette’s wife Adrienne lies beside him, I note, and George Washington de Lafayette behind them both. Just beyond these tombs under the trees, stones mark the place where are buried almost 1,500 headless corpses.
At the start of the Revolution this was a convent, as it is now, but the nuns were forced out, their sacred vessels, paintings, and stained glass confiscated, their chapel demolished and its stones sold to builders. A man named Riedain rented the property from the State, lived in one of the buildings, and in partnership with another man ran what was called a maison de santé et de détention—a euphemism for a kind of prison hospital. Actually what they ran was a profitable extortion. “Enemies of the nation” (a great many euphemisms were in vogue at this time) could claim to be sick, get themselves sent here, and, for as long as their money or their relatives’ money held out, avoid the guillotine. Usually they did not stay long. As more and more goods and property got confiscated, as relatives got arrested too, they were dumped back into the mainstream, en route towards what the men in charge called the Sword-Blade of the Law—the populace, being less pious, called it the National Razor.
By the summer of 1794 the guillotine and the nauseating odor that went with it had been moved several times. Death by decapitation was incredibly messy. The blood pooled on the paving stones underneath. The executioner had a hose and at the end of each day’s work would hose off the scaffold, the blade, washing more blood down among the stones. In the summer heat it decomposed rapidly, attracted flies, and gave off a stench. Whole neighborhoods first stank, then protested.
The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs.
—Alphonse de Lamartine Count d’Orsay
In June of 1794 the instrument was moved again, just in time for the start of the Revolution’s busiest summer. Over 1,300 men, women, and children were executed in a month and a half at the new site, the Place du Trône, today’s Place de la Nation, which is four or five blocks from where I stand. Thirty-eight heads were lopped off on the first day, including 26 belonging to members of the Toulouse parliament, 42 heads two days later, and 61 the day after that. The record seems to have been 68 on July 7, including the 80-year-old Abbé de Salignac Fénélon (some accounts say he was 69), who had founded a home for the small orphan boys who were the chimney sweeps of Paris. A detachment of weeping boys followed the tumbrel to the scaffold, where the priest asked that his hands be unbound so he could give them a final blessing. The entire mob went to its knees as he traced the cross in the air. Ten days later, singing hymns, a convent of Carmelite nuns, about whom Poulenc later wrote an opera, genuflected to their Mother Superior, climbed the steps one by one, and were decapitated. There were sixteen of them in all. One was a novice. Two were 78 years old.
Next the heads of Lafayette’s mother-in-law, her mother, and one of her daughters rolled into the basket, all for the crime of being aristocrats; and the head of André Chenier, 31, poet, about whom Giordano would write an opera 100 years later. Chenier’s crime was that he had written articles in the Journal de Paris protesting the excesses of the Revolution.
Day by day the guillotine worked. It killed the rich and poor, the known and unknown, 1,109 of them men, including at least one seventeen-year-old boy; 197 of them women, including 51 nobles and 23 nuns, the rest being for the most part maids, hair-dressers, and seamstresses from noble households.
The problem became what to do with the corpses, and one morning Riedain woke up and found that a hole had been broken through the wall at the bottom of his garden. Hordes of men were chopping down his fruit trees, digging vast ditches in his lawn, building a heavy door into the breach in his wall. Riedain rushed up and protested. The nation has need of your place, he was told. The ditches got deeper and deeper. He shouted, pleaded, got nowhere. He ran off to plead before the proper ministry. What about his prison hospital? He was doing important work for the Revolution. Again he got nowhere. The first ditch was twenty-five feet long, fifteen wide, twenty deep. The second was even bigger, thirty by twenty by twenty-four.
Night fell, and here came the cartloads of corpses into the garden. Men worked by the light of torches. The headless male, female, and adolescent bodies were first stripped, then dumped naked into the hole. The heads were shaken out of sacks. Sometimes one or another escaped and was booted in like a soccer ball. The bloody clothing, meanwhile, was being inventoried by scribes to be sold.
It rained a lot that summer and the garden turned to mud. The carts were heavy and some nights the men could barely push them up to the edge. Night after night the carts came through, and the corpses fell one upon the other in the ditches, where they were sometimes covered by a light dusting of lime. The ditches remained open, and through the neighborhood on every night breeze moved clouds of stench. After almost two months, neighborhood outrage reached such a pitch that the guillotine was moved back to what is now the Place de la Concorde in front of what is now the Hotel Crillon. But at night fresh corpses continued to arrive here. Finally the order was given: the immense ditches, containing now about half of all the victims of the Terror, were to be filled in. The depths were measured. In the first ditch the headless corpses lay eight feet thick, in the second only five.
Altogether more than 3,000 people were executed in Paris alone, among them many of the best men France had. More than 110,000 others, including all the rest of France’s best, had fled abroad, where they stayed. Napoleon, 30 years old, walked into an empty capital and took over.
By 1802 some of the émigrés had trickled back to Paris, many wanting to visit the graves of guillotined loved ones. In most cases they were unable to find out where they were, for although the executions had taken place in public, the burial details had worked at night and in secret lest grief or rage provoke demonstrations. Officially, the mass graves at 35, Rue de Picpus did not exist. But the surviving Noailles sisters, Adrienne de Lafayette and Pauline de Montagu, learned of a lacemaker who had followed the cart containing the corpses of her father and brother.
The girl led them here.
The two women decided to buy the property. But they had no money anymore and so were obliged to sell subscriptions to other bereaved relatives, the ones they knew, the ones with blood as blue as their own. In time they invited the present order of nuns to establish a new convent here and to build a new church over the ruins of the old.
They also set aside a corner of the garden as a private cemetery for themselves—this cemetery in which I stand—with the result that I walk now past tomb after tomb of counts and marquesses and princes and dukes and their female equivalents. There can’t be such a conglomeration of nobility anywhere else in the world. Hardly a commoner’s tomb anywhere. It is very strange. The commoners are all back there under the trees, headless, buried twenty feet deep, indistinguishable from the aristocrats who died with them.
I am quite alone in this enormous garden, and I walk over to look at the wall where the breach was made for the carts. The carts were painted red so the blood would not show, or at least not show so much. The breach is still visible. After the Revolution it was filled in with stones that are not quite the same color. Also the lintel is still there—the great thick beam that the workmen embedded in the wall so that the doorway would not collapse on the horses and carts.
There are plaques by the breach and more plaques on the wall that surrounds the mass graves—to the sixteen Carmelites, to André Chenier, and to others. If you enjoy reading such things, this is the place for you. You will be busy a long time. Nor is there any similar place elsewhere. There were mass graves in other parts of Paris at the time, but as the city expanded the others were built on; this is the only one extant.
The 1,500 people piled together under my feet, plus that many again who lie today under buildings, were all beheaded by one man, Charles-Henri Sanson. Sanson, who was 50 years old in 1789, came from a family of executioners. The Sansons were themselves the executioners, or were related to the executioners, of eighteen cities in all, and Charles-Henri was the fourth generation in an unbroken line from father to son to serve as executioner of Paris. After him the post would go to his son, and then his grandson, six generations in all before the line petered out.
At the beginning executioners were not allowed to marry outside the profession. By law their houses were painted red. If they had daughters they were sometimes obliged to nail a sign to the front door to warn suitors away. The baker baked their bread apart, and in church their pew was set apart. Commissions brought to them were not handed over but tossed at their feet.
Their job was even messier at first than it later became. In addition to merely killing people, the early Sansons and their relatives and colleagues in other places also had to cut off hands, cut off ears—the left one first because it was thought to control sexual activity—and stretch people out on the wheel so as more easily to break their legs with iron bars. If the court’s sentence called for it they had to peel a criminal like an orange with red-hot pincers or stretch him on the rack until all his limbs were dislocated. Sometimes the executioner used the retentum immediately, or almost immediately. The retentum was a cord so fine the mob couldn’t see it. The executioner strangled the victim, then performed the heavy stuff on the corpse. Whatever happened, eventual death was certain. Vagrants and petty thieves were hanged. Homosexuals were burned. Bad women or bigamists were scourged. Serious felons were decapitated: swords for the nobility, axes for commoners. Executions were popular entertainment. To get the best places, spectators began to gather the night before; they lit fires, bought food from vendors, who abounded.
The first four Paris Sansons were all named Charles, the last two Henri. The sire of the dynasty was an army lieutenant stationed in Rouen who had the misfortune to fall in love with the Rouen executioner’s daughter. He was, in more ways than one, invited into the family. At his first execution, when ordered to start clubbing the condemned man, he is said to have fainted. This was the origin of the legend that the Sansons were at heart kind, sensitive, gentle. There would be more publicity of this nature during the Revolution. Once inside the profession this first Charles found he could not get out. The top job in Rouen being already taken, he moved to Paris, where he made a name for himself.
His son, the second Charles, performed his first execution at eighteen. The prisoner was a woman who had tried to poison her husband. The windows all around were selling, it was said, for 50 louis d’or apiece. The boy’s father ordered him to sword off her head. Butchery. He was trembling so much it took him five or six swings.
The third Charles inherited the post at seven, his father having willed it to him on his deathbed. His mother, née Marthe Dubut, had to hurry him over to the public prosecutor’s office, where she pleaded for the appointment to be approved, and it was. From then on the child had to witness every execution to make it legal. He did not himself perform one until he was eighteen. At thirty-five and in bad health he resigned—one almost wants to say abdicated—in favor of his oldest son, the Charles-Henri of the Revolution, who was then only fifteen—too young. Back to the public prosecutor went Marthe Dubut, dragging her grandson by the hand. The boy had been assisting his father on the scaffold from the age of eleven, she testified. He was certainly experienced. Grandma claimed the job as the family’s right, and again got her way.
This newest Sanson was supposedly the most soft-hearted of the lot, and the execution of a man who had murdered his mistress’s husband is offered as proof. Charles-Henri, by then sixteen, could not watch. A mulatto assistant began bludgeoning the man while Charles-Henri looked away. The mistress, meanwhile, was being made to watch; she was later hanged.
Soon afterwards a man named Damiens stabbed Louis XV. Although the King was only nicked, Damiens was sentenced to horrendous torture. Knowing himself too tenderhearted to carry out the sentence, the boy executioner (so the story goes) went to his grandmother for help. Marthe Dubut must have been one tough lady. She summoned one of her other sons, who was executioner at Reims, and they bought strong horses. On the appointed day the boy and his uncle went to the conciergerie, where the prisoner had his arms dislocated by estrapade and his feet twisted in the boot. Onwards to the scaffold, where the uncle held the would-be renegade’s hand in the brazier and an assistant began peeling off his skin with red-hot pincers. Other assistants poured boiling oil and boiling lead onto the wounds. The limbs were then attached to the four horses, which tried three times to pull the man apart. Finally his limbs had to be severed with axes. Every rooftop around was crowded with people.
This was the climate in October 1789 when Joseph Guillotin, 51, a medical doctor and delegate, made a speech in the Estates Général. A quick and humane method of capital punishment had to be found, he argued. All persons regardless of rank should be similarly executed. Torture must be abolished once and for all. There should be no confiscation of the condemned man’s property—justice did not permit the nation to ruin his family as well. After execution his family should be allowed to claim his body if it wished.
Guillotin was from Saintes. He had once studied for the priesthood in Bordeaux. He had left to study medicine in Paris and was by now an extremely high-priced doctor—consultations cost 36 livres, about double what others dared charge.
Guillotin began to research capital punishment. He found Cranach, that showed primitive. He found engravings by Dürer, by Cranach, that showed primitive guillotines. He found descriptions of such machines elsewhere, and he brought this information to Charles-Henri Sanson.
In Sentimental Education, set in the 1840s, Flaubert wrote: “‘But do you imagine the press is free? Do you imagine we are free?’ said Deslauriers passionately. ‘When I think that you have to fill in anything up to 28 forms just to keep a boat on the river, I feel like going off to live among the cannibals.’”
—Mort Rosenblum, The Secret Life of the Seine
The executioner, we are told, had grown tall and strong. His features were classic, his manner pleasant. He took himself seriously, and he was a snob. He had tried to call himself the Chevalier de Longval, but this did not catch on. He had tried to dress himself in blue, the color reserved for the nobility, had gotten officially reprimanded, and so took to wearing green coats stylishly cut. His title was Bourreau—axman—which he found undignified, and he had petitioned the King to be called instead the Executor of Criminal Judgments. The King, now Louis XVI, had so decreed it. The people went on calling him Bourreau anyway—or else, cynically, Monsieur de Paris. He played the violin and the cello, how well we do not know, and was friends with Tobias Schmidt, a maker of harpsichords.
It was to Schmidt that he brought Dr. Guillotin’s ideas. It was Schmidt, whose name has barely come down to us, who designed the guillotine, but it was the humane Dr. Guillotin whose name got attached to it. He came to be seen as one of the villains of the Revolution, and even of history. During his lifetime—he lived until 1814—he often seemed an object of horror, or else an object of fun. People who passed him in the street would shake their head or give themselves karate chops to the back of the neck. He died a disillusioned man.
In March of 1792 Sanson and Schmidt submitted their designs to a government official at the Tuileries. The King came in and looked them over. He was an enthusiastic amateur locksmith, and it is said that he made suggestions for improving the design of the machine that would ten months later lop off his own head.
The first guillotine was built, and on April 15 Sanson tried it out on some live sheep. Two days later he decapitated three corpses—two men and one woman—in the courtyard of the hospital at Bicêtre, while a crowd of officials, including Dr. Guillotin, looked on. Eight days after that it was used on a thief named Jacques Pelletier. It worked so perfectly that Tobias Schmidt, the harpsichord maker, got orders for 34 more. Someone is supposed to have said: I hope this doesn’t make killing people too easy.
The Terror began the next year, and a guillotine mentality, guillotine fads, swept over the city, together with insane rumors. Did severed heads feel pain, was the guillotine humane or not? Learned men, and some not so learned, disputed this point. Experiments were conducted on heads. When pricked with a knife point, tongues were said to retract into the mouth; when turned to the sun, pupils were said to dilate. Charlotte Corday’s cheeks were said to have blushed when one of Sanson’s assistants slapped her face as he showed her head to the crowd. The general belief seemed to be that severed heads continued to feel pain until they had cooled.
Meanwhile, there were charms for bracelets in the form of guillotines, and toy guillotines for children. Small guillotines were sold to farmers for beheading chickens. At dinner parties similar guillotines beheaded tiny dolls; out flowed a red liqueur into which men dipped their fingers, women their handkerchiefs. Songs were written. Cartoons appeared, in one of which Sanson himself lay bound under the blade; according to the caption he had guillotined everyone else, so there was no one left to guillotine but himself.
Sanson had four assistants, then seven; two tumbrels, then nine. Some days he worked from dawn to dark. He complained of overwork, of burgeoning expenses. He kept asking the Committee of Public Safety for more money; eventually he got it, a bonus of 20,000 livres. Between March 1793 and July 1794, a period of 502 days, he, his brothers, his sons, and whatever other assistants were on the scaffold with him killed 2,362 people. Sensitive? Softhearted? Some were people Sanson knew and had had official contact with; others he came to know, for the ride to the place of execution was frequently long, sometimes two hours or more, and he would converse with them. In addition there were rain delays—Paris is a rainy place—and a rainy, bloody scaffold with that great snaggletooth hanging overhead was too dangerous to work on. While the rain lasted, executioner and condemned prisoners alike would huddle under the scaffold, and again Sanson would converse with them. Sometimes he would apologize for making them wait.
He executed everyone sent to him, no questions asked, nine men over 80, sixteen artists, twenty-five writers, the King, the Queen, the actress Marie Grandmaison and her 18-year-old-serving girl, and eventually, Danton, Robespierre, Public Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville, and most of the others, the signers of the death warrants, the very men he had been taking his orders from.
Under the Revolution he became, in his own eyes at least, a figure of importance. As he saw it he was respected everywhere he went. He was certainly good at his job. The mass graves in this garden attest to that. He once killed 21 men in 38 minutes. He made them get out of the carts and stand in rows facing away from the scaffold. One by one he ordered them to mount the steps. On top their legs were bound together with ropes. Their arms were already bound. They were strapped to the bascule. Their heads were tipped into the lunette. The two halves came together and locked. Down came the blade. Unstrap him. Undo the ropes. Into the basket with him. Next.
Such speed was possible because virtually none of the victims made a fuss. They were all too proud. The rich were especially haughty. They looked out over the cheering mob, their lips came together in what was close to absolute contempt, and they went to their deaths without so much as a grimace. Madame du Barry, once the mistress of Louis XV but now a raddled, middle-aged woman, did kick and scream. It took three men to hold her while her hair was cut and her arms bound. But she was the exception. It was the opinion of a number of witnesses that if everyone had behaved just like her the public would have sickened of the spectacle much more quickly than it did; the Terror would never have lasted so long.
As far as Sanson was concerned the Revolution produced only one tragedy. One day his son Gabriel, who had been assisting him on the scaffold from the age of eleven, but who was by then a grown man, was parading around the perimeter showing someone’s head to the mob. He fell off the edge and was killed instantly. There were railings around every scaffold after that, but Sanson, it was said, was never the same.
The guillotine devoured nearly everyone who came near it, with one glaring exception—Sanson himself—which seems, on the face of it, incredible. He was arrested twice. A Royalist press was found in a room in his house that he had rented out. He argued his way of that one. Later on he and his two brothers were arrested and charged with being Royalist sympathizers—they had hanged, clubbed, and broken the King’s enemies for years, had they not? What else could they be? A charge like this was sufficient to send scores of men to the scaffold, but the Sanson case posed a special problem: who do you get to execute the executioners? In the 1790s you could not just phone up some other town and fly in a substitute. Meanwhile, death warrants were piling up on somebody’s desk. People were waiting to be executed, and there was no one to do it.
So again they let the Sansons go. Soon afterwards Charles-Henri became so busy and also so essential that he was never bothered again.
There were not even recriminations once the Terror finally ended. Outraged or grief-stricken relatives might have come forward. None did. There might have been cries for revenge, but if there were no one heard them. By the standards of the Nuremberg trials Sanson would certainly have been arrested and prosecuted as a war criminal. But this was not 1945. He was a government functionary. He had obeyed orders. He had done his job. He died in bed in 1806.
By then he had been succeeded by his son. Later came his grandson, sixth and last in the line, who got himself fired. He lost his job, and his descendants lost their jobs at the same time. Between 1840 and 1847 this last Sanson guillotined only eighteen people. He was supposed to be a tenderhearted executioner too, and this is offered as the reason he gave himself to gambling and fast women. He felt an intense revulsion for who he was and what he did that could be assuaged in no other way. But the result was unfortunate: he went heavily into debt and faced debtor’s prison.
He pawned the guillotine for the sum he needed, 3,800 francs. He was hoping to be able to redeem it in time.
But someone took a shot at the King (for France had kings again now). The would-be assassin was caught, and the authorities went looking for the executioner. Then they went looking for the guillotine. At first they couldn’t find either. Finally Sanson came back. He was 48 years old. The authorities redeemed the guillotine for him, the execution took place, and then they sacked him, and the family dynasty, after just under 200 years, was over.
A new one promptly started. Louis Deibler became Monsieur de Paris. In 1870 the number of executioners was reduced to one, whose jurisdiction encompassed the entire country. There was only one guillotine too, plus a spare, of course; he and it moved about the roads as needed. Monsieur de Paris had become Monsieur de France. Louis Deibler was succeeded by his nephew Anatole Deibler, who was succeeded by his nephew Henri Desfourneaux, and then by André Obrecht, another nephew of Anatole, who performed the last public execution in 1939 and who later was credited with having “perfected” the guillotine—he put ball bearings instead of grease in the grooves. The great blade still weighed seventy pounds—now it dropped more quickly. When it spoke, people listened. With it Obrecht executed 387 criminals to 1977. He was something of a natty dresser. That is, he became famous for wearing his hat while he worked. There was perhaps something subliminal there—his clients had nothing to wear hats on. He kept going until he was 78 years old, then retired in favor of his nephew by marriage, Marcel Chevalier, the present incumbent and perhaps the last in history, for France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
Every country has its “traditional” method of execution. The Spaniards garrote, the English hang, the Americans electrocute, and the French guillotine; and although the result is the same in all cases, it is the last-named that has so fascinated the world. The very thought of it, it is said, is enough to make a man feel a chill on the back of his neck. No method is “nice,” nor are they always instantaneous. Men in electric chairs jerk and sometimes fry. Men hanged sometimes squirm, strangling, for some time. However, the sensibilities of onlookers are not assaulted. The mess is self-contained. Hanging, garroting, electrocution—these can seem almost euphemisms for killing. The guillotine, by contrast, is graphic, noisy, bloody—the real thing.
And so to a good many people, though not to the French, who remained married to it for so long, it has seemed by far the most horrible method of judicial death. The condemned man, philosophically speaking, is more than executed. His arteries fountain after he is dead, and he goes into his coffin mutilated, his head under his arm, retribution having been carried out seemingly even on his corpse. He will remain both killed and mutilated until the end of time. This is a heavy notion, and everyone who ever pondered the guillotine as a method of execution (condemned men in their cells have tended to ponder it a lot) has had to come to grips with it.
Robert Daley’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Esquire, Playboy, Vogue, Reader’s Digest, and Paris Match. He has served as a New York City deputy police commissioner and gone hunting for sunken treasure in the Caribbean. He is the author of many books, including Prince of the City and Portraits of France, from which this story was excerpted. He lives with his wife in Connecticut and Nice.
Another off-season treat was a visit to one of the Marché aux puces (Market of Fleas). The largest Paris flea market, open on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, is on the edge of the city in a grimy, no-frills town called Saint-Ouen. On a Saturday morning, it attracts lovers of the second-hand, the rare, and the unusual. In October or November there are few tourists to clutter the stalls and few pickpockets, and normally taciturn dealers have more time to talk.
This Market of Fleas is the best-known market of its kind in the world, with more than three thousand separate stalls in various buildings, under tarpaulins, and along rambling alley-ways covered with tin roofs. There is china, porcelain, furniture, postcards, posters, lamps, rugs, silverware, toys, and objets d’art. There is, in short, little that cannot be unearthed here.
The market was founded in 1885, when the city fathers banished the junkmen and ragpickers of Paris to this neighborhood near Porte de Clignancourt, just beyond the Paris city limits. The “market of fleas” was no doubt an apt description of conditions at that time and for years after. It became a weekend market that took advantage of the large numbers of Parisians passing through Saint-Ouen to flee the city for a day in the country. Most of the dealers here are specialists and the chances of unearthing a Matisse are virtually nil. But there are savings of fifteen percent to twenty percent off city prices.
—Everett Potter, “Paris in Winter,” Relax