DRAFT: short story “So Humane”

The cell was dark and damp; he dirt floor covered with dried rushes. They were not fresh. No bench, no chair, no low stone bed.

The man sat huddled in one corner. He had pulled together some of rushes to make an ersatz cushion. Still, the cold emanating from the nearby walls seeped through his thin garment. At least it was warmer now that it was in April—the winters were cold here in the center of Paris.

His excrement was piled in the far corner of the cell, a psychological attempt to remove himself from the stench. The guards tossed a bucket into his cell every few days, to collect the defecation with his hands. He was not able to wash except when they delivered his food once a day: a hunk of cheese, a thick slice of bread, and a bowl of water. Since he also needed the water to drink, his washing was miserly. The meager attempts at hygiene and health had little effect on the piss-and-shit smell of the cell. He was filthy, even after the ablutions, but the ritual made him feel like he had some control over this miserable life.

There was a small opening in the heavy wooden door to the cell, reinforced with iron. It was just large enough for a guard to peer through or pass the board through. They had to open the door to retrieve and return the bucket. A faint, indirect light came through the cracks around the door—presumably from the torches that lined the hallway. He had only seen that hallway once, seven weeks ago when he had been brought in. At least e thought it was seven weeks. From the first day he made little scratches at feeding time on the floor in one corner. He assumed they corresponded to days, though there were no cycles of light and dark to know for sure.

To an outside observer, it would appear that he was curled up in the corner, hugging his knees, staring out into the cell, unmoving. Every few moments his head moved slightly. This outside observer might assume that he had lost his mind, or was in a stupor from the beatings and the conditions. Perhaps reflecting on his crimes. Or wondering what would come of him to him.

In fact, he was engaged in a mental exercise concerning the stones of the cell, which were rough rectangular shapes. They were a dirty white-gray, but without more light he could not be sure. The first row of blocks were laid end to end. The mortar had been slopped between them when the prison was built. Some of it was crumbling, but the stones were so close together, and so large, there was no chance of digging one out. Besides, even if he did, there would be so many more obstacles beyond this cell that it would be a futile effort

The next row of blocks were laid on top of the others, but staggered so that each block was sitting half on one below, half on the next one below. The result was that no mortar line ran straight up the wall, adding stability. The third row was back in line with the first row, and this alternating pattern continued to the ceiling, which was made of thick wood beams, with more stones laid on top. Another cell, he assumed.

His mental exercise consisted of counting those blocks. He began at the wall opposite the door, and counted across, moving up at the end of each row. On the alternating rows, where the builders began with a half-block, he counted one half. Once finished with one wall, he began on the wall to its left, then on the wall to its right. To count the blocks of the wall in which the door was set, he had to crawl to the center of the cell and look back.

At first, he stood in the center of the cell to count, but he was so weak these days he sat. He wasn’t sure if he was sick, or if the paucity of diet made him feeble.

He had performed this exercise many times. Sometimes he lost count, and he then forced himself to start over. Sometimes he came up with different numbers, off by one or two from a previous counting. Usually, the was three hundred and twenty-one and a half, so he was pretty sure that was the correct number. It was a mind-numbing exercise that took him out of his environment, out of his condition, and into a world dominated by the order and mental focus.

He was in the midst of counting when a noise at the door startled him. He heard keys in lock and the door swung open.

“Prisoner! To the far wall!”

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He knew the routine. It was the same every time they brought the shit bucket. But it had only been one day. Had he lost count?

He rose and hobbled to the far wall and turned to face the door, as he had been taught. The door opened the rest of the way, and he saw two guards—not the usual single guard with the bucket. The livery and the gilded sword of the second man betrayed an officer of some importance, not a common jailer. As if to punctuate that fact, the man’s face cringed at the stench. “Merde!” he said with a turn of his head.

He turned back to the prisoner and spoke. “Nicolas Pelletier! I am Antoine Brissot, the official representative of Charles-Henri Sanson, the High Executioner of France. I am here to inform you of your sentence,” he said, chin raised. “For the crimes of highway thievery which you have committed, tomorrow morning at nine o’clock you will be put to death.”

The words were no surprise. He knew his fate soon after his arrest and brief trial. Highway robbery was a serious crime in France, more so than common thievery, for it preyed on the wealthy as they travelled in their fancy stagecoaches. The sure knowledge of his pending death, even when expected, seemed unreal.

He had seen death, of course. Knew people who existed and then did not. Sometimes he was the cause of the demise. But he could not fathom his own nonexistence. Should he scream? Protest? Fall on the floor and beg for mercy? He felt nothing.

“I am also to inform you,” began Brissot, as a bit of sardonic glee crept into his tone, “that the Assemblée Nationale has recently decided that the purpose of the death penalty is not to make a sinner suffer, but to remove him from society. Therefore, you will not be hanged, beheaded, or dismembered. No, a new age dawns in France, the beacon of the world. We will be humane.”

Nicolas looked up. A reprieve?

“I see you are surprised. But even a common thief like you knows that France is the epitome of advanced culture and the pinnacle of society throughout all of history!” He paused, raising his chin in the air. “You will be the first prisoner to be executed using a new device. It is called the louison. The people are ecstatic to see this new device in action. So your infamy continues, right up to the moment of your death and beyond!” He paused for dramatic effect, which seemed childish to Nicolas. “In fact, I believe this new device was invented by a Alsacian. You hail from Strasbourg, is it so?”

His mind reeled with all this information. No reprieve, but a new device? “Louison” was a personal name, giving no clues to the nature of the device. Probably named after the inventor, or the king.

Nicolas nodded.

“I thought so. A monsieur Laquiante is the inventor. You might know him, since he is an officer of the court in Strasbourg.” He smiled.

“No,” Nicolas replied, “most of my best work was around Île-de-France.” It felt good to be flippant, though he did not know why.

The liveried officer looked at him a moment, as if considering whether Nicolas’ response was disrespectful. “Your ‘work.’” The officer waved dismissively. “Eh, bien.” He nodded to the guard, and with a flourish and a slam of the door, they were gone.

*

The cell was dark and damp. The prisoner was curled up in a corner, staring at the opposite wall. He was in the midst of his regular mental exercise when keys jangled at the door. The door swung open and slammed against the wall. In came Brissot and two soldiers.

“Prisoner! On your feet!”

He blinked. This was different.

He struggled to his feet with a hand on one wall to steady himself, it dawned on him that he had not been ordered to the far wall. One of the soldiers walked behind him; the other strode to the middle of the cell in front. Now he could see more soldiers standing at attention outside the cell. Their muskets were in the ready position.

This was it.

“Follow me!” Brissot shouted—unnecessarily loud, it seemed to Nicolas. As Nicolas followed, the two soldiers fell in behind. The rest—maybe four or five gendarmes—took places in front and behind. As they marched, his mind wheeled. Moments of sheer panic interspersed with analysis and thoughts that seemed a contrast to the doom that lay ahead. As they moved through the darkened corridor, Nicolas began counting the doors along both sides. He wondered about the prisoners in those cells. What fate were they awaiting? He knew that the Prison de la Grand Roquette housed both those to be executed and those awaiting less harsh punishments.

What was this new device, this louison? Nicolas did not fear death. When he spurred his horse and descended upon an unsuspecting carriage, he knew that the coach driver might have a musket and could get of a shot before Nicolas. What if one of the passengers was a soldier? Unlikely perhaps, but still a risk. Sometimes, when he visited Paris, cloaked and hooded, he feared recognition by a former victim and a call to authorities. Again, unlikely. Back then, it caused him anxiety. He did not want to die.

Waiting for his execution in prison had cured him of that particular fear. He would face death with apathy. Hanging? It was usually over as soon as the noose tightened and broke the neck. Even if there was no break, strangulation came within minutes. Nothing to fear. But he had seen men tortured to death because of certain crimes. Dismemberment was common, and he had heard pathetic victims howl like an animal as the executioner held up his severed limbs. Disembowelment was even more gruesome—the prisoner watched as the hooded butcher pull out bloody entrails. The indescribable smell. The crowd yelling and cheering as a modern equivalent to Roman gladiator shows.

But this new thing, this louison—what did it mean? Was it a torture? Or just some new method of hanging?

The hallway curved and they arrived at crosswise hallway, though not at a precise ninety-degree angle. It was larger and better lit. He blinked. His eyes had not been exposed to this much light in many weeks. Far down the hall was an even a brighter light, up high. A window?

What if Bissot was playing with him? A new invention for punishing the “worst of criminals”? Nicolas had heard nothing of this. But he knew how executions worked. The people gathered to cheer someone else’s pain. “There is a person far worse than me…” We hate most what we fear in ourselves. “Am I capable of doing what he did?” The thought terrifies us, so we must kill it, wipe out, so it can no longer remind us of our own flaws. Much safer than trying to understand it.

The company of men slowed and stopped near the opening, now high above. His eyes continued to adjust. Two massive wooden doors in front, crossed and beamed with iron. He could hear a faint buzzing sound from beyond it.

Bissot and a guard exchanged a few words. Two soldiers moved to the side of the doors at the doors, struggling with weighty chains and bolts. The clanking of heavy chains and locks echoed down the stone corridor behind them. The noise stopped, and each guard grabbed a door handle, leaned into them, and pushed with their weight. The doors began to open.

A vertical sliver of illumination appeared from the floor up to the top of the door frame. It grew wider, as did the brightness, as if a rip in the universe was opening to the throne-room of God. The buzzing he heard was the noise of a crowd talking and murmuring beyond the doors.

Soon the light was so intense that it hurt. The guards began to move forward, but he could not make out anything in the bright light. A shove from behind made him stumble to his knees, as if he was falling in mercy before the Shekinah.

“On your feet, prisoner!” He was seized by both arms and hoisted to his feet. For a moment, the aroma of soap touched his nostrils. Bodies nearby that had been washed with clean water. It was the closest to a human he had been in some time, and he became painfully aware of his own stench. Since he had been tossed into his cell, no one had touched him. He felt a sensation of intimacy—strange since these were the same guards leading him to his death. Even the touch of an enemy is better than no touch at all.

He shuffled forward, now without the help of the guards, through the doorway. His eyes began to adjust. The day was not bright after all, but overcast and gray. The public square before him was an undulating mass of people. The close-packed buildings, of various sizes and ages, lined the square. Streets ran off in different directions out of the square. Something large stood between him and the crowd. A fountain? A statue?

He was led towards the structure, and as he drew close, he saw that it was not a monument at all, but a tall, wooden frame, with metal reinforcements and a base, sitting on a plinth of stone.

“Step up,” said a quiet voice to his right. Below the plinth was a short flight of stairs, just wide enough for three to walk abreast. He climbed the steps with one of the guards and was brought to stand before the contraption, three times as high as a man. Two men stood beside the structure.

Nicolas’ brow furrowed as he looked at the bottom of the frame. There was a thick board, set on edge, running from one side to the other; the top about two feet off the ground. In its middle was a half-circle cutout. It reminded him of stocks. The wrong-doer places his neck on the half-circle and the wrists in the small half-circles to either side. The guards slide the other board on top and lock it in place. The prisoner is fixed in place with his head and hands caught between the two boards. The criminal was on public display, like a trapped animal, where the righteous masses could ridicule the ugly beast, spit upon him, and use his head for target practice with rotten fruit and garbage.

But the stocks were not a new invention, nor were they for executions. The presence of metal brackets on either side of the vertical struts made sense of stocks, but the lack of smaller half-circles for the wrists did not. A second board, leaning against the side of the structure, with a similar single half-circle cut, matched up to the bottom board—but again, no wrist cutouts.

Were they going to lock him in there and then dismember him? That wasn’t efficient, and the contraption would block the public’s view. Usually they merely strapped the criminal to a table before beginning the cutting.

He raised his eyes. Why was it so tall?

Realization crept over him like a dark, cold mist. At the top of the structure, suspended by a rope between the two struts, was a large, heavy iron blade, the bottom edge honed to shiny sharpness. The edge was curved down in the middle. The rope passed through a series of pulleys to the side, slanting down to the edge of the platform, where the end was lashed to a metal cleat, like a boat of death moored to a dock. An oaf of a man, dressed in black with a hood over his eyes with only his mouth and chin visible, stood beside the cleat. He rocked back and forth as if he could not wait to cast off the grisly vessel on its maiden voyage.

The crowd roared. Nicolas became aware that Bissot had been standing at the front of the platform speaking. He gazed out over the people, a blur of humans packed together, spreading out like a strange carpet of hair, hats, hoods, and bonnets, filling the space all the way to the buildings and down the adjoining streets as far as he could see. More people lived in the Eleventh Arrondissment than any other section in Paris—the most densely populated area in any city of Europe—and it appeared they had all turned out to watch Nicolas and his appointment with the louison.

Nicolas was terrified. How did this work? Did he place one arm in the cutout to have it chopped off by the lowered blade? Then the other? Then his legs? Was it merely a new way to dismember him before he bled to death? Would the oaf lower the heavy blade slowly? Perhaps up and down, make a deeper cut each time. Was it—

Wait. Slow down. Bissot said it was more “humane.” He wasn’t quite sure what that meant. But at minimum, it would not be torture, correct? He could relax.

The unknown was making that difficult.

Bissot had stopped speaking and the crowd was yelling and screaming. Hands grabbed his arms from either side to force him forward. This time, Nicolas felt no intimacy.

“To your knees.” He knelt before the device and began to sweat and shake. Fear and Panic were his masters now, despite his previous resolve to meet his death with studied stoicism and the single word he held on to: “humane.” He intended that his last act of defiance would be to rob the bastards of any pleasure in his death. But he thought he’d be hung by the neck until dead—a shock and brief struggle, then over. Or perhaps a few moments of strangling, but he could handle that. This unknown device was making his mind betray him..

A guard forced his head down and his neck into the shallow cut. He began to struggle agains his own volition as the top board was placed over his neck and latched. Trapped! When would the blade come down? The crowd was roaring. He fought with himself not to cry out, tried to calm his mind. Humane! This was humane! He pulled and pushed against he boards. He was a madman. A moan and a grunt escaped his mouth.

The crowd went silent. A reprieve? He stopped struggling. Humane. Everything was okay. He tried to take a breath.

“Commencez!” a voice shouted. Individual screams and jeers from the crowd sounded out, with more joining in the hue second by second. Another cry erupted unbidden from his throat. His body, on its own again, struggled against the boards. He defecated. The crowd noise swelled. A wooden and metallic clunk sounded from above. Like a stagecoach being unhitched. Metal scraped on wood.

Nicolas screamed.

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Photo by Tim Hüfner on Unsplash