The axe’s edge did try;
Then bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.
Others narrate that the Queen ascended the steps of the scaffold in great haste, and with apparent impatience, and turned her eyes with much emotion towards the Palace of the Tuileries, the scene of her former greatness, and that she made some slight resistance before submitting to the executioner. My own impression is that she was two-thirds dead—that the rigor mortis was upon her before she reached the scaffold; that she was lifted out of the cart and half carried to the guillotine, and that she did not give the headsman and his assistants the slightest trouble.
It is, at all events, certain that at half past twelve her head was severed from her body. One of the valets du bourreau, or executioner’s men, lifted and showed the head streaming with blood, from the four quarters of the scaffold, the mob meanwhile screeching “Vive la République!” and it is asserted that a young man who dipped his handkerchief in the blood, and pressed it with veneration to his heart, was instantly apprehended. The corpse of Marie Antoinette was immediately flung into a pit filled with quicklime, in the graveyard of the Madeleine where the remains of her husband had also been interred.
At the Restoration in 1814, diligent search was made for the ashes of the King and Queen in the cemetery, on the site of which was subsequently erected an Expiatory Chapel. Some half calcined bones and a few scraps of cloth and linen were found; and these last having been identified by experts as having been part of the apparel of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the relics with a considerable quantity of the surrounding earth, were inhumed with much pomp and solemnity, in the Royal Vault of the Cathedral of St. Denis.
Touching the executioner, it may be expedient to record that Marie Antoinette was guillotined, not by Charles Henri Sanson, who beheaded Louis XVI, but by his son, Henri, who died in Paris in 1840, aged seventy-three. The elder Sanson died only a few weeks after he had executed Louis, and the Royalist historians maintain that his death was hastened by remorse for the deed which he had been constrained to commit, and that in his will he bequeathed a considerable sum for the celebration of an annual Expiatory Mass. But this is very doubtful. It has been shown, however, without the possibility of doubt, that the Sanson family were of Florentine origin, and that the ancestors of Charles Henri and of Henri Sanson came to France in the train of Catherine de Medicis. For two hundred years, without intermission, had members of this gloomy historic family been executioners in ordinary to the city of Paris.
In addition to Marie Antoinette, the younger Sanson decapitated the Queen’s sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth, and the eloquent advocate, Malesherbes, who undertook the defence of Louise XVI. He likewise beheaded the Duke of Orléans (Philippe Égalité), and last, but not least, Maximilien Robespierre. The so-called Memoirs of the Sanson Family are more than half suspected to be mainly apocryphal, and to have been written by one D’Olbreuse, a bookseller’s hack; and, according to a writer in the Paris Temps, in 1875 the last of the Sansons was a remarkably mild, flaccid and stupid old gentleman, who was certainly incapable of writing any “Memoirs” whatever, since his own memory was hopelessly decayed, and whose circumstances in his old age became so embarrassed that he was arrested for debt, and confined in the prison of Clichy, whence he only procured his enlargement by pawning the guillotine itself for 4,000 francs!
Shortly after the conclusion of this singular transaction, a murderer had to be executed, and the usual instructions were issued by the Procureur General to Henri Sanson, to have his death dealing apparatus ready on a certain morning in the Place de la Roquette. It then became necessary to explain to the authorities that the fatal machine was practically in the custody of My Uncle. Justice, however, had to be satisfied, and the murderer’s head was duly cut off on the appointed morning; but simultaneously with the signature of the Minister of Justice of a draft for 4,000 francs to release the hypothecated guillotine, there was issued an order dismissing Sanson from his post.
And Marie Antoinette? I have drawn her picture as faithfully as I could, not without much toil and more perplexity for the memoirs of the period in which she lived and died absolutely bristle with falsehoods, the inventions now of Royalist and now of Republican writers. Comparatively few are the facts concerning her which have been exactly ascertained and are altogether indisputable; whereas the name of the unfounded assertions, the insinuations, the hypotheses, and the downright lies, is legion. By some this most unhappy woman has been represented as an angel of goodness and purity, a faithful spouse, a fond parent, a kind mistress, and a most pious and charitable princess. By others she has been depicted as a crafty, unscrupulous and vindictive woman, as perfidious as Borgia and profligate as Messalina.