Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 21, 2024
Looking up, he found himself opposite the gloomy mass of La Roquette prison. Sentinels slouched and dawdled up and down before the little painted sentry boxes under the great gate. Over the archway was some lettering, and Gethryn stopped to read it: La Roquette Prison of the Condemned He looked up and down the cheerless street.
The two other executions which I witnessed were at the Place de la Roquette, Paris. The first was that of a young medical student, who with the help of one of his friends had killed an old woman who sold newspapers. It was a stupid, odious crime, but the man was more mad than criminal. He was more than ordinarily intelligent, and had passed his examinations at an earlier age than is usual.
The brothers nevertheless managed to reach it, and for a few minutes remained there, peering into the darkness before them. The sloping street grew broader between the two prisons, the "great" and the "little" Roquette, in such wise as to form a sort of square, which was shaded by four clumps of plane-trees, rising from the footways.
"In this," says La Roquette, "he has laid down and systematized the principal scientific results of his expedition in Asia, and has recorded some ingenious speculation as to the shape of the continents and the configuration of the mountains of Tartary, giving special attention to the vast depression which stretches from the north of Europe to the centre of Asia beyond the Caspian Sea and the Ural River."
I heard a vague, muffled sound of footsteps, whispering, and of wood which creaked heavily, but I did not know what these strange, mysterious sounds were until day began to break. I saw that the scaffold was there. A man came to extinguish the lamps on the Place de la Roquette, and an anaemic-looking sky spread its pale light over us.
The whole scene was lit up by fires which blazed in all directions. At last the night gave place to dawn, and the scene was one to be remembered for a lifetime. The faces of the crowd wore different expressions of horror, amazement, and abject terror.... Early in the morning of Wednesday 24th, I, with some others, was ordered to the barricade of La Roquette.
"Not at all!" exclaimed Duthil. "Massot knows very well that a deputy ought to be the very first to bow to the laws." This exclamation warned Massot that Duthil did not wish to leave the balcony. "You ought to have secured a card of invitation, madame," said he, in reply to Silviane. "They would then have found you room at one of the windows of La Petite Roquette.
The service of the prison is carried on by the sisters of charity. La Nouvelle Force is a new prison in a healthier quarter than La Force, and is used for the same purposes. It contains twelve hundred and sixty separate cells. Depot de Condemnes is in the Rue de la Roquette, and is a prison for the confinement of persons condemned to forced labor and to death.
In The Prototype of Tartuffe we are shown President La Roquette at the court of Louis XIV., obliged at last, in spite of his long continued successful efforts to suppress the play, to witness his own public unmasking in the person of Molière's Tartuffe, of whom he is the sneaking, hypocritical original.
On quitting this delightful spot, we must pass by the Prison de la Roquette, destined for the reception of prisoners condemned to the galleys or to death; the excellent system that is here followed with regard to the airiness, cleanliness, and strict order, is such that it is styled the model prison; 318 is the number of prisoners that it can contain.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking