Rossette's tragic realism made readers feel as if they were almost there at the scene of the execution, but with the relative freedom to experience their emotions. In a way, he writes, the new penal voyeurs experienced a similar sense of being almost there. From behind their windows, at a considerable distance from the scaffold, they could gaze out at the real life drama unfolding beneath them. And they could take it all in, the suffering of the patient, the compassion of the crowd,. As if they were all characters in a magnificent spectacle to which they themselves were not participants, but spectators. For them, the crowd gathered around the scaffold had become a kind of greek chorus