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PIERRE-FRANÇOIS LACENAIRE 1800 – 1836

“I’m going to my death,” says Lacenaire, “by a poor route: up a stairway.”

Deserter and forger in France, murderer in Italy, then thief and murderer in Paris—and constantly, as he himself said, “thinking up sinister projects against society”—Lacenaire devoted the few months preceding his execution to writing his Memoirs, Revelations, and Poems, and put all his efforts into reinforcing the spectacular appeal of his trial. The ghost of not one of his victims, whether the Swiss guard from Verona, his ex-cellmate Chardon, or the latter’s mother, no more than the image of the bank messenger whom he had tried to kill in order to rob, ruffled for even one instant the half-distracted, half-amused attitude he maintained throughout the proceedings. Without seeking in the least to save his own neck, he played one last cruel trick by testifying against his accomplices, who were trying mightily to save theirs. As for himself, he limited his efforts to offering a materialistic justification for his crimes. From the ethical viewpoint, there seems never to have been a more serene conscience than this bandit’s.

On the eve of his death, he joked with the priests who came to bother him, the phrenologists and anatomists who were waiting to get their hands on him; he admitted feeling “little bouts of melancholy” that “entertained” him. That night, through the bars of his cell, he was “on the verge of playing peek-a-boo with the guard.”

One critic, recently celebrating the hundredth anniversary of a famous work by Balzac, wrote: “In 1836, when the book appeared, coldly received and even denigrated by the press, the public that had just been wild about Lacenaire, the elegant murderer in the blue frock coat, the poet of the courtroom and theoretician of the ‘right to crime,’ did not seem immediately to appreciate the charms of The Lily of the Valley.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mémoires, Révélations et Poésies de Lacenaire, 1836.

DREAMS OF A MAN ON DEATH ROW

How happy you are when you dream! …

Dreams without sleep are a treat.

In less than an hour, I compose

A novel both pleasant and sweet.

I dream up a world to my taste,

The best lots are always for me,

And so I shall never decide

A king or a ruler to be.

In my retreat so solitary

The future is not my concern;

I revel in my fantasy

And dwell on the past’s sweet return;

Such dreams fresh and green from my youth,

Which sorrow could not mortify,

Bring comfort to soothe my old age:

One is old when one is soon to die.

Sometimes in a palace superb

I gather up beauties galore;

More frequently stretched on the grass

I have only Lise to adore;

The gauze that her breast gently lifts

Despite me calls my mind to roam.

What pity that I am then left

To finish these visions alone.

Sometimes in a humble abode,

Glad father and sensible spouse,

My good mother dotes at my side

And my children rest on my knees;

In the shadow of plants green and lush

I read and I write turn by turn;

But alas! comes a storm loud and harsh—

Oh why must this dream end so soon?

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