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Updated: June 29, 2025
All heads were uncovered, all eyes were fixed, and a deep silence fell upon the crowded boulevard. The carriage passed the journalist and the detective at a gallop and pulled up with a jerk just opposite them, on the other side of the guillotine, and at the very foot of the scaffold. M. Deibler jumped down from the box, and opening the door at the back of the vehicle let down the steps.
He thrust the assistants away, and plunging his hands into the bran that was all soaked with blood, he seized the severed head by the hair and stared at it. Horrified by this scandalous action the assistants rushed upon the detective. Deibler forced him backwards. "You must be mad!" "Get away!" Fandor saw that Juve was staggering and seemed about to swoon. He rushed towards him.
He understood what the chaplain said and took a step towards him. "I not " M. Havard intervened, and spoke to the chaplain. "Really, sir, no: it is time." Deibler nodded approval. "Let us be quick; we can proceed; the sun has risen." The Public Prosecutor was still bleating "Be brave! Be brave!"
The van stopped a few yards from Juve and Fandor; the police rode off, and a shabby brougham came into view, from which three men in black proceeded to get out. "Monsieur de Paris and his assistants," Juve informed Fandor: "Deibler and his men." Fandor shivered, and Juve went on with his explanations. "That van contains the timbers and the knife.
Deibler and the Public Prosecutor, and people generally, think that it is merely Gurn who is going to be decapitated now. I may have secured this man's condemnation, but none the less he has beaten me and deprived me of the satisfaction of having brought him, Fantômas, to the scaffold! I have only consigned Gurn to the scaffold, and that is a defeat!" The detective stopped.
Deibler leant calmly against the guillotine, fitted the shank into the grooves in the two uprights, and, setting the mechanism to work, hoisted up the knife which glittered strangely; he looked the whole thing over and turned again to his assistants. "The hay!" A truss was arranged in the lunette, and Deibler came up to the instrument and pressed a spring.
Like a flash the knife dropped down the uprights and severed the truss in two. The rehearsal was finished. Now for the real drama! While the guillotine was being set up Juve had stood by Fandor nervously chewing cigarettes. "Everything is ready now," he said to the lad. "Deibler has only got to put on his coat and take delivery of Fantômas."
There is a technical word for his condition: he is in a state of inhibition. He is alive, and yet he is a corpse. Anyhow he is utterly unconscious, incapable of any clear thought, or of saying a word that has any sense. I have never seen such complete stupefaction." Deibler waved aside the men who were pressing round him.
The executioner pulled on his coat, rubbed his hands mechanically, and then strode towards a group of officials who had arrived while the guillotine was being erected, and were now standing by the entrance to the prison. "Gentlemen," said Deibler, "it will be sunrise in a quarter of an hour. We can proceed to awaken the prisoner." Slowly, in single file, the officials went inside the prison.
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