In passing along the Boulevard du Temple—and, strange to say, when almost opposite the site of Curtius’s old Museum—a noise was heard resembling an irregular musket fire. In an instant the road and pavement at the point where Louis had been riding was strewn with dead and dying men and horses, and amid the mêlée the King, slightly wounded in the forehead, stood alone by the side of his injured horse.
More than forty persons had been struck and nineteen killed or mortally wounded. Among the latter was Edward Joseph Mortier, Duc de Trevise, the famous Marshal of Napoleon I.
After a few moments’ suspense, attention was directed to a cloud of smoke issuing from the third-floor window of a house on the Boulevard. Herein was discovered a machine composed of a row of twenty-five gun-barrels so arranged as to cover the cavalcade as it passed the premises. It had been fired by a train of gunpowder, with the result that several of the barrels had burst on the discharge.
The room was empty, but from one of the back windows of the house the police caught sight of a man huddled up in a corner of the courtyard below. He was trying to stanch the blood which was flowing from a great wound in his head. In spite of his injury, caused by his firing of the infernal machine, he had had the strength to stagger out of the room, seize a rope, secure it to a window, and by its means escape from the house.
The man turned out to be Giuseppe Fieschi, a rabid conspirator. Our model of him was added some weeks after the event, and, being placed by the side of an exact copy of the machine he had used, the man and his diabolical contrivance proved of considerable interest, a circumstance that substantially assisted to establish the Exhibition as a permanent London attraction.
This political crime was, however, soon eclipsed by one of a particularly sordid character committed much nearer home.
James Greenacre who murdered his fiancée, Hannah Brown, by striking her a fatal blow in a fit of temper, will ever figure as a criminal of a very curious type. Many a deed like that which brought him to the scaffold has occasioned but a passing interest. It was the means he adopted for the purpose of evading the consequences of his crime that aroused the excitement and indignation of the people. He dismembered the body, and deliberately distributed it in broad daylight to widely different parts of the Metropolis.
The discovery of the various parts of the body from time to time, the bringing of them together, and the final identification of the remains wrought up the public mind to a state of high tension, and after the culprit had been brought to justice many thousands visited the Exhibition to scan for themselves the features of his model which had been installed.
It will be remembered that we are dealing with a period when the extreme penalty of the law was exacted in public, a condition of things which lasted till 1868, when it was enacted that all executions should take place privately within prison walls.