the
guillotine.

It stood there under the branches of the trees, amidst the delicate
greenery of the fresh leaves of spring. A neighbouring gas-lamp, whose
light was turning yellow in the rising dawn, cast vague gleams upon it.
The work of fixing it in position--work performed as quietly as could be,
so that the only sound was the occasional thud of a mallet--had just been
finished; and the headsman's "valets" or assistants, in frock-coats and
tall silk hats, were waiting and strolling about in a patient way. But
the instrument itself, how base and shameful it looked, squatting on the
ground like some filthy beast, disgusted with the work it had to
accomplish! What! those few beams lying on the ground, and those others
barely nine feet high which rose from it, keeping the knife in position,
constituted the machine which avenged Society, the instrument which gave
a warning to evil-doers! Where was the big scaffold painted a bright red
and reached by a stairway of ten steps, the scaffold which raised high
bloody arms over the eager multitude, so that everybody might behold the
punishment of the law in all its horror! The beast had now been felled to
the ground, where it simply looked ignoble, crafty and cowardly. If on
the one hand there was no majesty in the manner in which human justice
condemned a man to death at its assizes: on the other, there was merely
horrid butchery with the help of the most barbarous and repulsive of
mechanical contrivances, on the terrible day when that man was executed.

As Pierre and Guillaume gazed at the guillotine, a feeling of nausea came
over them. Daylight was now slowly breaking, and the surroundings were
appearing to view: first the square itself with its two low, grey
prisons, facing one another; then the distant houses, the taverns, the
marble workers' establishments, and the shops selling flowers and
wreaths, which are numerous hereabouts, as the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise
is so near. 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. Then, as the sky
brightened, labour awoke throughout the district beyond the crowd, a
district of broad, endle