Pierre Laval spent his last days in sackcloth in the death row of the Fresnes prison. He wrote farewell letters to his family, his lawyers. He chain-smoked. His grieving wife cried that the people who "got France into the war so unprepared" now wanted to silence him with death. General Charles de Gaulle refused every request for a new or re-opened trial; the grotesquerie of the first one had revolted all France.
Laval turned philosopher. To a fellow prisoner going to death he said: "Ne t'en fais pas: it lasts only a few seconds . . . it's like being killed...
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