THE VERSAILLES ACCIDENT IN 1842.
Mr. Charles F. Adams thus describes it:—“On the 8th of May, 1842, there happened in France one of the most famous and horrible railroad slaughters ever recorded. It was the birthday of the king, Louis Phillipe, and, in accordance with the usual practice, the occasion had been celebrated at Versailles by a great display of the fountains. At half-past five o’clock these had stopped playing, and a general rush ensued for the trains then about to leave for Paris. That which went by the road along the left bank of the Seine was densely crowded, and was so long that it required two locomotives to draw it. As it was moving at a high rate of speed between Bellevue and Menden, the axle of the foremost of these two locomotives broke, letting the body of the engine drop to the ground. It instantly stopped, and the second locomotive was then driven by its impetus on top of the first, crushing its engineer and fireman, while the contents of both the fire-boxes were scattered over the roadway and among the debris. Three carriages crowded with passengers were then piled on top of this burning mass, and there crushed together into each other. The doors of the train were all locked, as was then, and indeed is still, the custom in Europe, and it so chanced that the carriages had all been newly painted. They blazed up like pine kindlings. Some of the carriages were so shattered that a portion of those in them were enabled to extricate themselves, but no less than forty were held fast; and of these such as were not so fortunate as to be crushed to death in the first shock perished hopelessly in the flames before the eyes of
a throng of impotent lookers-on. Some fifty-two or fifty-three persons were supposed to have lost their lives in this disaster, and more than forty others were injured; the exact number of the killed, however, could never be ascertained, as the telescoping of the carriages on top of the two locomotives had made of the destroyed portion of the train a visible holocaust of the most hideous description. Not only did whole families perish together—in one case no less than eleven members of the same family sharing a common fate—but the remains of such as were destroyed could neither be identified nor separated. In one case a female foot was alone recognisable, while in others the bodies were calcined and fused into an undistinguishable mass. The Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to inquire whether Admiral D’Urville, a distinguished French navigator, was among the victims. His body was thought to be found, but it was so terribly mutilated that it could be recognized only by a sculptor, who chanced some time before to have taken a phrenological cast of his skull. His wife and only son had perished with him.
“It is not easy now to conceive the excitement and dismay which this catastrophe caused throughout France. The new invention was at once associated in the minds of an excitable people with novel forms of imminent death. France had at best been laggard enough in its adoption of the new appliance, and now it seemed for a time as if the Versailles disaster was to operate as a barrier in the way of all further railroad development. Persons availed themselves of the steam roads already constructed as rarely as possible, and then in fear and trembling, while steps were taken to substitute horse for steam power on other roads then in process of construction.”