The last words of the governor of the prison summed up the dismal tale of a man condemned to die.  A man cut off from among the living by law belongs to the Bench.  The Bench is paramount; it is answerable to nobody, it obeys its own conscience.  The prison belongs to the Bench, which controls it absolutely.  Poetry has taken possession of this social theme, “the man condemned to death”—­a subject truly apt to strike the imagination!  And poetry has been sublime on it.  Prose has no resource but fact; still, the fact is appalling enough to hold its own against verse.  The existence of a condemned man who has not confessed his crime, or betrayed his accomplices, is one of fearful torment.  This is no case of iron boots, of water poured into the stomach, or of limbs racked by hideous machinery; it is hidden and, so to speak, negative torture.  The condemned wretch is given over to himself with a companion whom he cannot but trust.

The amiability of modern philanthropy fancies it has understood the dreadful torment of isolation, but this is a mistake.  Since the abolition of torture, the Bench, in a natural anxiety to reassure the too sensitive consciences of the jury, had guessed what a terrible auxiliary isolation would prove to justice in seconding remorse.

Solitude is void; and nature has as great a horror of a moral void as she has of a physical vacuum.  Solitude is habitable only to a man of genius who can people it with ideas, the children of the spiritual world; or to one who contemplates the works of the Creator, to whom it is bright with the light of heaven, alive with the breath and voice of God.  Excepting for these two beings—­so near to Paradise—­solitude is to the mind what torture is to the body.  Between solitude and the torture-chamber there is all the difference that there is between a nervous malady and a surgical disease.  It is suffering multiplied by infinitude.  The body borders on the infinite through its nerves, as the spirit does through thought.  And, in fact, in the annals of the Paris law courts the criminals who do not confess can be easily counted.

This terrible situation, which in some cases assumes appalling importance—­in politics, for instance, when a dynasty or a state is involved—­will find a place in the HUMAN COMEDY.  But here a description of the stone box in which after the Restoration, the law shut up a man condemned to death in Paris, may serve to give an idea of the terrors of a felon’s last day on earth.

Before the Revolution of July there was in the Conciergerie, and indeed there still is, a condemned cell.  This room, backing on the governor’s office, is divided from it by a thick wall in strong masonry, and the other side of it is formed by a wall seven or eight feet thick, which supports one end of the immense Salle des Pas-Perdus.  It is entered through the first door in the long dark passage in which the eye loses itself when looking from the middle of the vaulted gateway.  This ill-omened room is lighted by a funnel, barred by a formidable grating, and hardly perceptible on going into the Conciergerie yard, for it has been pierced in the narrow space between the office window close to the railing of the gateway, and the place where the office clerk sits—­a den like a cupboard contrived by the architect at the end of the entrance court.