By Monique Mabelly, from an account of the September 9, 1977, execution by guillotine, at Marseille’s Baumettes prison, of Tunisian prisoner Hamida Djandoubi, published in Le Monde last October. Mabelly, who died in 2012, was a French magistrate. In 1981 the French parliament abolished the death penalty; Djandoubi, who was convicted of torturing and murdering his girlfriend, was the country’s last prisoner to be executed. Translated from the French by Ryann Liebenthal.

At 7:00 p.m., I went to the cinema with B., then we went back to her place for a snack and watched the Ciné-Club…