Schneider took me there with him."
"By hanging?"
"No, in France they always cut their heads off."
"And what, do they scream?"
"Hardly!
It's instantaneous.
The man is laid down, and a broad knife drops, it's a special machine called the guillotine, heavy, powerful... The head bounces off before you can blink an eye.
The preparations are the bad part.
When they read out the sentence, get everything ready, tie him up, lead him to the scaffold, then it's terrible!
People gather, even women, though they don't like it when women watch."
"It's not their business."
"Of course not!
Of course not!
Such suffering! . . . The criminal was an intelligent man, fearless, strong, mature, his name was Legros.
And I tell you, believe it or not, he wept as he climbed the scaffold, he was white as paper.
Is it possible?
Isn't it terrible?
Do people weep from fear?
I never thought it was possible for a man who has never wept, for a man of forty-five, not a child, to weep from fear!
What happens at that moment with the soul, what convulsions is it driven to?
It's an outrage on the soul, and nothing more!
It's said, 'Do not kill.' So he killed, and then they kill him?
No, that's impossible.
I saw it a month ago, and it's as if it were still there before my eyes.
I've dreamed about it five times."
The prince even grew animated as he spoke, a slight flush came to his pale face, though his speech was as quiet as before.
The valet watched him with sympathetic interest and seemed unwilling to tear himself away; perhaps he, too, was a man with imagination and an inclination to thinking.
"It's a good thing there's not much suffering," he observed, "when the head flies off."
"You know what?" the prince picked up hotly. "You've just observed that, and everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that.
But a thought occurred to me then: what if it's even worse?
To you it seems ridiculous, to you it seems wild, but with some imagination even a thought like that can pop into your head.
Think: if there's torture, for instance, then there's suffering, wounds, bodily pain, and it means that all that distracts you from inner torment, so that you only suffer from the wounds until you die.
And yet the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second—your soul will fly out of your body and you'll no longer be a man, and it's for certain—the main thing is that it's for certain.
When you put your head under that knife and hear it come screeching down on you, that one quarter of a second is the most horrible of all.
Do you know that this isn't my fantasy, but that many people have said so?
I believe it so much that I'll tell you my opinion outright.
To kill for killing is an immeasurably greater punishment than the crime itself.
To be killed by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than to be killed by robbers.
A man killed by robbers, stabbed at night, in the forest or however, certainly still hopes he'll be saved till the very last minute.
There have been examples when a man's throat has already been cut, and he still hopes, or flees, or pleads.
But here all this last hope, which makes it ten times easier to die, is taken away for certain; here there's the sentence, and the whole torment lies in the certainty that there's no escape, and there's no greater torment in the world than that.
Take a soldier, put him right in front of a cannon during a battle, and shoot at him, and he'll still keep hoping, but read that same soldier a sentence for certain, and he'll lose his mind or start weeping.
Who ever said human nature could bear it without going mad?
Why such an ugly, vain, unnecessary violation?
Maybe there's a man who has had the sentence read to him, has been allowed to suffer, and has then been told, 'Go, you're forgiven.'
That man might be able to tell us something.
Christ spoke of this suffering and horror.
No, you can't treat a man like that!"
The valet, though of course he could not have expressed it all like the prince, nevertheless understood, if not all, at least the main thing, as could be seen by his softened expression.
"If you have such a wish to smoke," he said, "it might be possible, if you do it quickly.