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. T