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Only a few minutes before it left, two guns and a mortar had been brought to fire on the prison; they were now dragged away in the wake of the Government. The criminal prisoners at La Roquette were in a state of great excitement.
I said I should like to know when he was to be executed, and the night before, a friend of mine came to the theatre and told me that the execution was to take place the following day, Monday, at seven in the morning. I started after the performance, and went to the Rue Merlin, at the corner of the Rue de la Roquette. People were singing, laughing, and dancing everywhere.
Before long one could plainly distinguish the black lines of the spectators standing around in a circle, the heads leaning forward from windows and balconies, and the people who had climbed to the very house roofs. The prison of La Petite Roquette over the way had been turned into a kind of tribune for guests; and mounted Gardes de Paris went slowly to and fro across the intervening expanse.
Paul and his friend the other Seminarist were of the number. Before the gates of La Roquette they found a fierce crowd shouting insults and curses. Many were women and children. "Here they come!" the mob yelled. "Down with the priests! shoot them! kill them!" Paul preserved his composure, and looked on with a smile of serene hope upon his face.
On Sunday, May 21, the Versailles army began to make its way into Paris, and the Commune, seeing its fantastic and terrible power about to pass away, tried to startle the world by its excesses. Orders were sent at once to Mazas to send the archbishop, the priests, Senator Bonjean, suspected spies, and sergents de ville to that part of the prison of La Roquette reserved for condemned criminals.
A year afterwards, in the same convent of Carmelites, the Bishop of Autun, Roquette, whom Molière had in view when drawing the character of Tartuffe, pronounced her funeral oration.
Later that year came the famous affair of the Pantin crimes, and I was present with my father when Troppmann, the brutish murderer of the Kinck family, stood his trial at the Assizes. But, quite properly, my father would not let me accompany him when he attended the miscreant's execution outside the prison of La Roquette.
At last, the mass became formidable in numbers, covering every inch of ground within sight of the prison, and many soldiers and sergeants de ville, mounted and on foot, pushed through the dense mass to restore order. At midnight, a body of cavalry forced back the people from the square of La Roquette.
The Regent made a last effort to convert him, as well as the Duke of Noailles, to the projects of Law. It was at a small house in the faubourg St. Antoine, called La Roquette, belonging to the last named, that the four interlocutors discussed the new system thoroughly.
My destination is reached in an hour, a charmingly placed village amid beautiful mountain scenery, over against it towering the hamlet of La Roquette, apparently inaccessible as cloudland. Here a tributary stream joins the Var, the long winding valley, surrounded by lofty crags and olive-clad slopes, affording a delightful and most exhilarating prospect.
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