As the Place de la Revolution, the place of execution, came in view, a ray of sunshine fell upon the guillotine—one of those coincidences which the superstitious and the wonder-loving remember and treasure up.
This open space was filled with a hundred thousand of the lowest rabble; soldiers thick about the scaffold; and high above the people stood a something, the woodwork of which was painted a blood-color.
This was the guillotine!
The guillotine had only just been introduced. It had been invented in Italy, and imported into France by a humane doctor, named Guillotin, whose name was cruelly taken and applied to the machine, an “e” being added to make it feminine—for, according to the custom of most men in most times, a something terrible and merciless is always feminine. If the women had the naming, perhaps the other gender would as frequently be applied to things of terror.
The guillotine was essentially a humane invention. Previous to its introduction, the condemned man knelt down and placed his head on a block. A headsman then with an axe endeavored to sever the head from the body. The least swaying on his part, and instead of death, a wound was the result. Often an executioner, unnerved by the failure of his first blow, would hack and chop many times before the victim ceased to show signs of life, and before the head was off the body.
The guillotine exactly fell in with the views of the equallist Republicans, for they objected to the executioner, because it was a disgrace to a man to be an executioner. On the other hand, the guillotine, consisting of a heavy, razor-like knife, which worked in grooves, and fell upon a neck irrevocably placed below the knife, the head was separated at a blow, in a moment, and death achieved with the least possible cruelty.
But if the guillotine was merciful—and of this there can be no doubt—on the other hand—it may be questioned if so many people would have been condemned to death during the Reign of Terror if the old slow mode of decapitation had remained.
By a singular fatality the head of Guillotin himself was taken off by the very instrument he had introduced from Italy into France.
All the vagabondage of Paris was present at this execution. The trees bent under the masses of people who had climbed into them. There was not breathing room, while, by connivance of the most bloodthirsty of the revolutionary leaders, the spaces immediately round the scaffold were occupied by the men who had effected the massacre of September.
These men were there to applaud.