The Stranger: Part Two: Chapters 4–5

For example, I got bored very quickly with the prosecutor’s speech. Only bits and pieces—a gesture or a long but isolated tirade—caught my attention or aroused my interest.

The gist of what he was saying, if I understood him correctly, was that my crime was premeditated.

I thought his way of viewing the events had a certain consistency.

What he was saying was plausible.

“I have retraced for you the course of events which led this man to kill with full knowledge of his actions. I stress this point,” he said, “for this is no ordinary murder, no thoughtless act for which you might find mitigating circumstances. This man, gentlemen, this man is intelligent. You heard him, didn’t you? He knows how to answer. He knows the value of words. And no one can say that he acted without realizing what he was doing.”

At least that was what struck me, and I stopped listening to the prosecutor until I heard him say, "Has he so much as expressed any remorse? Never, gentlemen. Not once during the preliminary hearings did this man show emotion over his heinous offense.”

I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.

But here in this court the wholly negative virtue of tolerance must give way to the sterner but loftier virtue of justice.

Especially when the emptiness of a man’s heart becomes, as we find it has in this man, an abyss threatening to swallow up society.

According to him, the imagination recoiled before such an odious offense.

He went so far as to hope that human justice would mete out punishment unflinchingly.

But he wasn’t afraid to say it: my callousness inspired in him a horror nearly greater than that which he felt at the crime of parricide.

And also according to him, a man who is morally guilty of killing his mother severs himself from society in the same way as the man who raises a murderous hand against the father who begat him.

In any case, the one man paved the way for the deeds of the other, in a sense foreshadowed and even legitimized them.

He concluded by saying that his duty was a painful one but that he would carry it out resolutely.

For if in the course of what has been a long career I have had occasion to call for the death penalty, never as strongly as today have I felt this painful duty made easier, lighter, clearer by the certain knowledge of a sacred imperative and by the horror I feel when I look into a man’s face and all I see is a monster.

The judge replied by saying that at least that was an assertion, that until then he hadn’t quite grasped the nature of my defense, and that before hearing from my lawyer he would be happy to have me state precisely the motives for my act.

He rushed through a plea of provocation, and then he too talked about my soul.

For after all, if it were necessary to prove the usefulness and importance of such institutions, all one would have to say is that it is the state itself which subsidizes them.

The only thing is, he didn’t say anything about the funeral, and I thought that that was a glaring omission in his summation.

But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.

I barely even heard when my lawyer, wrapping up, exclaimed that the jury surely would not send an honest, hardworking man to his death because he had lost control of himself for one moment, and then he asked them to find extenuating circumstances for a crime for which I was already suffering the most agonizing of punishment—eternal remorse.

All I care about right now is escaping the machinery of justice, seeing if there’s any way out of the inevitable.

I can’t count the times I’ve wondered if there have ever been any instances of condemned men escaping the relentless machinery, disappearing before the execution or breaking through the cordon of police.

I might have discovered that in at least one instance the wheel had stopped, that in spite of all the unrelenting calculation, chance and luck had, at least once, changed something.

What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was.

Because, after all, there really was something ridiculously out of proportion between the verdict such certainty was based on and the imperturbable march of events from the moment the verdict was announced.

It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on.

For a long time I believed—and I don’t know why—that to get to the guillotine you had to climb stairs onto a scaffold.

Mounting the scaffold, going right up into the sky, was something the imagination could hold on to. Whereas, once again, the machine destroyed everything: you were killed discreetly, with a little shame and with great precision.

In order to make my resignation to the first hypothesis more plausible, I had to be level-headed about this one as well.

He sat there for a few seconds, leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, looking at his hands. They were slender and sinewy and they reminded me of two nimble animals.

At that point he threw up his hands in annoyance but then sat forward and smoothed out the folds of his cassock.

“But if you don’t die today, you’ll die tomorrow, or the next day. And then the same question will arise. How will you face that terrifying ordeal?”

The chaplain knew the game well too, I could tell right away: his gaze never faltered.

Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness.

I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated.

Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again.

Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again.

For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.