Some of the shopkeepers went so far as to display earrings shaped like little guillotines. Two years before the fall of Robespierre, when violence had begun but had not yet assumed its more fearful aspect, aristocratic or royalist families kept a good deal within doors in their Parisian mansions, and sometimes amused themselves in a strangely morbid way.
Dolls or puppets were provided with features resembling those of the chief popular leaders. After dinner, during dessert, a small mahogany guillotine was introduced, and wheeled along the table from guest to guest; one by one the puppets were placed under the knife and their heads chopped off.
Inside the trunk or body of the puppet was a liquid, vinous and fragrant enough to be tasteful to the palate, but blood-red; this flowed out over the table, and the guests, including ladies, dipped their handkerchiefs into it, and applied it to their lips! In all probability this strange game was played but seldom, but opposition journalists magnified it into a regular habit of “les aristocrats.”
They do these things differently in France, even as regards hanging and head chopping, to what we do in England, observes a writer while noticing the well-known work, entitled “The Memoirs of the Sansons.”
There the office of public executioner is hereditary, and has been held by one of the same family from 1681 down to 1867.
Here, when Mr. Calcraft resigned his post, Mr. Marwood, a person in no way connected or related with his predecessor, succeeded him.
In this instance merit alone, and not hereditary right or title, we presume, assured to the present hangman his high office.
M. Sanson, whose memoirs are here translated from the French, is the last of his line. As the translator informs us, “he was the lineal descendant of a race of headsmen through whose hands every State victim, as well as every common criminal, had passed during two centuries. They had hung, beheaded, guillotined, quartered, and tortured, from father to son, without interruption.”
The grandfather of the author executed King Louis the Sixteenth and his queen, besides a host of nobles and others.
He likewise had to carry into execution part of the sentence passed on Madame de la Motte, who had been found guilty of cheating two jewellers out of a valuable necklace on pretence that Queen Marie Antoinette had commissioned Cardinal de Rohan to purchase it for her.