be re-read.

[Sidenote: _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne._]

Its merits are certainly not ill set off by the two shorter pieces, both
of fairly early date, but the one a little before and the other a little
after _Notre-Dame de Paris_, which usually accompany it in the collected
editions. Of these _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne_ is, with its tedious
preface, almost two-thirds as long as _Bug-Jargal_ itself; the other,
_Claude Gueux_, contents itself with thirty pages. Both are pieces with
a purpose--manifestos of one of Hugo's most consistent and most
irrational crazes--the objection to capital punishment.[95] There is no
need to argue against this, the immortal "Que MM. les assassins," etc.,
being, though in fact the weakest of a thousand refutations, sufficient,
once for all, to explode it. But it is not irrelevant to point out that
the two pieces themselves are very battering-rams against their own
theory. We are not told--the objection to this omission was made at the
time, of course, and Hugo's would-be lofty waving-off of this is one of
the earliest of many such--what the condemned person's crime was. But
the upshot of his lucubrations during these latest hours of his is this,
that such hours are almost more uncomfortable than the minutes of the
actual execution can possibly be. As this is exactly one of the points
on which the advocates of the punishment, whether from the point of view
of deterrence or from that of retribution, chiefly rely, it seems
something of a blunder to bring it out with all the power of a poet and
a rhetorician. We _want_ "M. l'Assassin," in fact, to be made very
uncomfortable--as uncomfortable as possible--and we want M. l'Assassin,
in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he will be so made.
"Serve him right" sums up the one view, "De te fabula" the other. In
fact cheap copies of _Le Dernier Jour_, supplied to all about to commit
murder, would be highly valuable. Putting aside its purpose, the mere
literary power is of course considerable if not consummate; it hardly
pretends to be a "furnished" _story_.

[Sidenote: _Claude Gueux._]

The piece, however, is tragic enough: it could hardly fail to be so in
the hands of such a master of tragedy, just as it could hardly fail to
be illogical in the hands of such a paralogician. But _Claude Gueux_,
though it ends with a murder and an attempt at suicide and an execution,
is really, though far from intentionally, a farce. The hero, made