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More "Guillotine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... under the razor!" she exclaimed, meaning the guillotine. "He tried to drown me, the assassin! Yes, I know him for an assassin,—a murderer! It was he who pushed ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... fair play," as a few years later, under President Polk, the work of decapitation was equally active. Ransom H. Gillett, Register of the Treasury at that time, became so famous at head-chopping, that he was soon nicknamed "Guillotine." ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... court of Europe. And then there comes to us the reverse of the picture. We see her despised, insulted, and made the butt of brutal men and still more fiendish women; until at last the hideous tumbrel conveys her to the guillotine, where her head is severed from her body and her corpse is cast ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Miss Wilson, Ken," Boyd said. "I meant in general." He left, with the air of a man whose world has betrayed him. His back looked, to Malone, like the back of a man on his way to the scaffold or guillotine. ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... into a four-wheeled cab, with the jackdaw on her lap, and Godfrey went to Madame Tussaud's, where he studied the guillotine and the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... summer of 1793, and on the eve of the Reign of Terror, when Paris, from early in October until the end of the year, was in the deadliest throes of revolution. The dull thud of the guillotine, placed in front of the Tuileries, in the Place de la Revolution, which is now the Place de la Concorde, a little to the east of where the obelisk of Luxor now stands, could almost be heard by the quiet workers in ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... French Revolution, was that the royal family lived on the costliest delicacies while many of the common people were actually starving. They thought that was the chief crime to be expiated at the guillotine. ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... name you will—given positive, indubitable signs of want and absence of foresight, as did ours in these Virginia, Norfolk, and Harper's Ferry affairs? Not this or that minister or secretary, but all of them ought to go to the constitutional guillotine. Blindness—no mere short-sightedness—permeates the whole administration, Blair excepted. And Scott, the politico-military adviser of the President! What is the matter with Scott, or were the halo and incense surrounding him based on bosh? Will it ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... many, the garlands of martyrdom? How, if it should be some Marie Antoinette, the widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, turned gray prematurely by sorrow, daughter of Caesars kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death? How, if it were the "martyred wife of Roland," uttering impassioned truth—truth odious to the rulers of her country—with her expiring breath? How, if it were the noble ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... representing him as more stoical than the truth, if we said he was unmoved. So far from this, his moments were bitter, and his anguish would have been extreme, were it not for a high resolution which prompted him to die, as he fancied it, like un Francais. The numerous executions by the guillotine had brought fortitude under such circumstances into a sort of fashion, and there were few who did not meet death with decorum. With our prisoner, however, it was still different; for, sustained by a dauntless spirit, he would have ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... At length poor Tom, having neither bridle nor saddle, slipped from his seat, and fell into a white pot, where he was found almost drowned. The queen vowed he should be guillotined: but while the guillotine was getting ready, he was secured once more in a mouse-trap; when the cat seeing something stir, and supposing it to be the mouse, patted the trap about till she broke it, and set Tom at liberty. Soon afterwards a spider, taking him for a fly, made at him. Tom drew his sword and fought ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... Vannes in 1777; son of a rather mean lawyer, the president of a revolutionary tribunal under the Republic, and a victim of the guillotine subsequent to the ninth Thermidor. His mother died of grief. In 1799 Anne Dumay enlisted in the army of Italy. On the overthrow of the Empire, he retired with the rank of Lieutenant, and came in touch with Charles Mignon, with whom he had become acquainted early in his military career. He ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... forever! She had done that exquisitely well, as she did everything, not even advising me that I was to be her errand boy on such an errand, trusting me to find out by accident, as I had, that I was to be my own executioner, was to spring my own guillotine. She knew that, none the less, though I understood what the letter meant thus addressed, I sacredly must execute her silent trust. Oh! Helena, yours was indeed an exquisite revenge for that one hour of a ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... in the extreme; but whenever the classics hissed, the disciples of Romanticism not only cheered, but rose to their feet and howled. When the groans of the Philistines became unbearable, the enthusiasts of the pit would drown them by shouting "To the guillotine with the sycophants." But though the evening was a continual uproar, no doubt was entertained at its close that the victory was with the Romanticists; and at the conclusion of the performance the name of the author was proclaimed as that of ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... therefore, it was necessary that Jacques Rollet should die; and so the affair took its course; and early one morning the guillotine was erected in the court-yard of the gaol, three criminals ascended the scaffold, and three heads fell into the basket, which were presently afterward, with the trunks that had been attached to them, buried in a corner ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... was a nameless age of black silence, and then there was a crowded hour of glorious life. When I heard the shouts and then the shots I tried to remember Sydney Carton and the French aristocrats taking snuff on the steps of the guillotine, and I tried to think of something handsome and dressy in the way of a farewell speech, in case it might ever be reported in the States. The C.E. was splendid, only, when the great doors clanged open and the mob streamed in ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the end of every vista you see nothing but the gallows." He pursued Rousseau and Dr. Price because their teaching, on his reading of cause and effect, had set the tumbrils rolling and weighted the guillotine for Marie Antoinette. It was precisely the same impulse which had caused him to pursue Warren Hastings for his cruelties towards the Begums of Oude. The spring of all this speculation was a nerve which twitched with a maddening sensitiveness at the ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... to the invention of the mechanical instrument, now known under the name of the guillotine, which is merely an improvement on a complicated machine which was much more ancient than is generally supposed. As early as the sixteenth century the modern guillotine already existed in Scotland under the name of the Maiden, and English historians relate that Lord Morton, regent of Scotland during the minority of James VI., had it constructed after a model of a similar machine, which had long been in use at Halifax, in Yorkshire. ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... Richard. Did I? If you guillotine a man—cut off his head, as they do in France, with an axe that falls like the monkey of a pile-driver—the limbs quiver and stretch, and move almost naturally for a good while afterwards. I've seen the performance more than once. So I suppose the ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... emotion, and Napoleon himself was profoundly affected. The subdued distress of Josephine pierced through the chilly hearts of those who had looked on with composure while men and women were being led to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. But even Josephine's tears and grief were graceful and fascinating, so that it was not surprising that the spectators extended sympathy to her in her sorrow. Almost immediately after the ceremony Napoleon became overcome with grief. He allowed a little time to elapse ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... took part in the subsequent distribution of plunder. For this crime, in which five assassins and one accomplice shared, seven individuals, within the space of four years, mounted the steps of the guillotine. Justice, therefore, killed one man too many: her sword fell upon one who was innocent; nor could he have been one of these six individuals, all of whom confessed their crime. The innocent man was Lesurques, who had never ceased to declare that he was not guilty; and all his alleged accomplices ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... proud, brave faces of these delicate women, walking in high-heeled shoes, all too frail for the hard-dusty roadways. They belonged to the same race and breed as those ladies who defied death with fine disdain upon the scaffold of the guillotine in the ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... Comte,' he bursts out at last to his master, 'to deserve all these advantages?—I know. Vous vous etes donne la peine de naitre!' In that sentence one can hear—far off, but distinct—the flash and snap of the guillotine. To those happy listeners, though, no such sound was audible. Their speculations went another way. All was roseate, all was charming as the coaches dashed through the narrow streets of Paris, carrying their finely-powdered ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... President manifestly inclined to the appeal to the people.* Knox, in a foolish, incoherent sort of a speech, introduced the pasquinade lately printed, called the funeral of George W—n and James W—-n, King and Judge, &c, where the President was placed on a guillotine. The President was much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself; ran on much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government, which was not done ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... I think, do well to return hither, by which time I suppose La Margaretta will arrive. Yesterday evening Sir Roger Curtis landed from the Phaeton. He left Lord Howe on the 4th. I know not the particulars, but there has been a general action; and I think Monsieur Jean Bon L'Andre and his Guillotine have had a thorough drubbing. We have lost very few officers of rank. Lord Howe is perfectly well, of which I ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... Frenchmen's captain had a name I wish I could pronounce; A Breton gentleman was he, and wholly free from bounce, One like those famous fellows who died by guillotine For honour and the fleurs-de-lys, ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... Jacobins, the coarser men of the whole movement—the Dantons, the Robespierres, the Marats, the facetious as ferocious Bareres, the stupid Anacharsis Clootzes—trampled under foot, or finished with the guillotine, the phraseurs and meneurs of the Gironde, your orators of set speech, glittering abstractions, and hair-splitting definitions; the Brissots, Vergniauds, Condorcets, and Rolands, who could degrade, dethrone, and condemn a king to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... sagacity, and the turn which his thoughts, young as he was, were already taking.—But the diadem is trampled under foot in France for ever; and with cannon-shot in his front every day of his life, and the guillotine in his rear, who can answer for the history of any man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... folding up the bill again. "I cannot legally protest this bill any sooner." And within myself I said—"Pay the price of your luxury, pay for your name, pay for your ease, pay for the monopoly which you enjoy! The rich have invented judges and courts of law to secure their goods, and the guillotine—that candle in which so many lie in silk, under silken coverlets, there is remorse, and grinding of teeth beneath a smile, and those fantastical lions' jaws are gaping to set their ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... present to many another thought of death! To how many men its blackness seems to be the sudden swallowing up of the light of their very being! To how many more does it seem to put an end to all their occupations, and to shear their lives in twain, as remorselessly as the fall of the guillotine severs the head from the body. How are the light butterfly wings of the trivialities in which many men and women spend their days to carry them across the awful gulf? What are the people to do on the other side whose ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hand, became quieter and colder amidst the smoke of the pipes and the fumes of the gas which were now filling the little den; and his voice assumed a dry incisive tone, sharp like a guillotine blade, while Robine gently wagged his head without once removing his chin from the ivory knob of his cane. However, some remark of Gavard's led the conversation to the subject ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... punishment:—a cold and indecent pleasantry at the tribunal; one long imprecation on the road to the guillotine;—those are the last thoughts of this dying man, about to appear ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... pausing a moment, her face crimson, stole toward the bed. Molly was in her chair, with her head lolling over the back, as if it were a guillotine, her huge ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... seizure by rough hands, relaxed, and he allowed himself to be led. Truly, he was disgusted with his faintness and weakness. He had seen men die who knew they were going to die. His task as reporter had led him more than once to the foot of the guillotine. And the wretches he had seen there had died bravely. Extraordinarily enough, the most criminal had ordinarily met death most bravely. Of course, they had had leisure to prepare themselves, thinking a long time in advance of that supreme ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... Marseilles this young lad saw terrible sights of men hung from lamp-posts; heard the grisly cry, "A la lanterne! a la lanterne!" and was even himself seized by some of the mob, though he happily contrived, in the confusion, to slip away. In Marseilles, too, he first saw the guillotine; it was carried about the streets in procession whilst the populace yelled out the "Marseillaise Hymn." Later on in the Revolution he was seized, as an Englishman, and imprisoned with a number of others at Abbeville; but, escaping ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... much misery flows! There is not a spot on that plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the pistol-snap of the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a speculator might read a justification of the numerous suicides ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... judicial tribunal which, in France, during the long reign of her monarchs, lent itself to be the instrument of every tyranny, as during the brief reign of terror it did not hesitate to stand forth the unpitying accessory of the unpitying guillotine. Ay, sir, it was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry the Eighth, from the unjust divorce of his queen, to the beheading of Sir Thomas More; which ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... scorn the luxury of potatoes, and with it the life that affords no other, meditate how best to get rid of existence; and this they effect almost ever in one way; viz., by killing their most obnoxious keeper, and thus earning the guillotine. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... already returned a verdict against us—that judgment had been signed—and that the sheriff was coming in the morning to execute the writ of possession in favor of our opponent." This was well meant by the speaker; but surely it was like talking of the machinery of the ghastly guillotine to the wretch in shivering expectation of suffering by it on the morrow. An involuntary shudder ran through Mr. Aubrey. "Sixty thousand pounds!" he exclaimed, rising and walking to and fro. "Why, I am ruined beyond all redemption! How can I ever satisfy it?" Again he paced the room ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... the journalism of the time. No words could express their contempt for a man who was unable to see the advantages of filling the treasury with the issues of a printing press. Marat, Hebert, Camille Desmoulins and the whole mass of demagogues so soon to follow them to the guillotine were especially ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... of revolution which was to see the kings of the earth flying, with or without umbrellas, and the principle of monarchy more shaken by the royal see-saw of submission and vengeance than ever it was by the block of Whitehall or the guillotine ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... French revolution a remarkable passage:—servants denounced masters, debtors denounced creditors, women denounced husbands, children denounced parents, youth denounced protecting age; gratitude was unknown; a favour conferred led to the guillotine: but never, never in that awful period, in that reign of the vilest passions of our nature over reason, was there one instance, one single instance, of a parent ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... existed of saving the throne. The gentlest of the Bourbons was within sight of the scaffold. He had now only to retrieve his character for personal virtue by laying down his head patiently under the blade of the guillotine. His royal character was gone beyond hope, and all henceforth was to be the trial of the legislature and the nation. Even that trial was to be immediate, comprehensive, and condign. No people in the history of rebellion ever suffered, so keenly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... and Saint Lambert the tender nurse of lepers, to the end, they were men noted for bravery, goodness, and learning, and it was not till the Revolution that one was found—and fittingly the last—who, hating the "Oath" and fearing the guillotine, fled his See. ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... their Creator with certain unalienable rights." It was well said. The rights of God are the only basis of the rights of man. One of the most sagacious of modern statesmen has borne his testimony to this fundamental truth—that religion is the only basis of social order—in words as trenchant as the guillotine which suggested them. "It is not," says Napoleon, "the mystery of incarnation which I perceive in religion, but the mystery of social order. It attaches to heaven an idea of equality which prevents the rich from being ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... cannot speak a word of pure French; and of all Anglicizing of the language I have ever heard, his attempts at it are the most droll. He calls the Tuileries, Tullyrees; the Jardin des Plantes, the Garden dis Plants; the guillotine, gullyteen; and the garcons of the cafes, gassons. Choleric, with whiskers like a bear, and a voice of thunder, if anything goes wrong, he swears away, starboard and larboard, in French ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... fought the battle of Malplaquet, in 1709. When we passed, the town was in great commotion with the trial of Count Bocarme and his wife for the murder of her brother. She was by some means acquitted, but he was convicted and executed by the guillotine. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... much that Burke ought to have remembered, and keeps fairly to the philosophical principle which he announces of attributing the revolution to general causes, and not to the schemes of individuals.[137] When assignats became waste paper, when the guillotine got to work, when the religion of reason was being set up against Christianity, when the French were conquering Europe, when a military despotism was arising, when, in short, it became quite clear that the French revolution meant something very different from a philosophical ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... "incompatible with freedom" in France,—a violent and blood-thirsty fellow, who shot at Lafayette on the dix-sept Juillet, narrowly missing him,—led an attacking party against the Tuileries on the dix Aout, and escaped the guillotine to be transported ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... like an aspen leaf, as she lay for a few moments unable to cry or move. Suddenly she believed that she was dreaming, and that the instrument which had burst through her window was a nightmare or a guillotine, and she made dreadful efforts to pinch herself awake without success. Next moment a man's head, looking very grim in the light of a bull's-eye lamp, appeared at the top of the guillotine. So far this was in keeping with her idea; but when the head leapt into ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... me, as he warmed with the theme, so vast a catalogue of public injuries, in language so menacing, yet so eloquent, that I was forced to ask whether I was standing in the midst of a Jacobin club—whether his object was actually to establish a democracy, to govern by the guillotine, to close up the churches, and inscribe the tombs with—death is an eternal sleep; to swear to the extinction of monarchy, and proclaim universal war. Our dispute had now attracted general notice. He answered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... conscious that they were not the Third Estate, that there was a conflict of interest between property and labour, and they began to vent their yet inarticulate rage upon the middle class above them. It presently appeared that these revolutionary heroines, knitting companions of the future guillotine, were not all infuriated or implacable. Parcels of banknotes that they took away were brought back; the priest was left unhung; the torches that were to have lighted the conflagration were extinguished without difficulty. They were easily ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... procession, these boots and shoes clumping across the bare floor called attention to themselves in voices which seemed to shriek and with the fiendishness of inanimate objects screamed the louder at their owners' gingerly steps. A function of the Commune when Madame Guillotine presided must have been a frothy and frivolous affair compared to the beginning of ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... level of Religion, and was confounded with God. The attacks made on it appeared to them a sacrilege; almost a species of cannibalism. In spite of the most humane legislation that ever existed, the spectre of '93 reappeared, and the chopper of the guillotine vibrated in every syllable of the word "Republic," which did not prevent them from despising it for its weakness. France, no longer feeling herself mistress of the situation, was beginning to shriek with terror, like a blind man without ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... intelligent individual in the crowd. The fact is, Rigby bored his audience too much with history, especially with the French Revolution, which he fancied was his 'forte,' so that the people at last, whenever he made any allusion to the subject, were almost as much terrified as if they had seen the guillotine. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... under French royal authority, is another of the ten thousand illustrations of the peculiar morality of crowned heads. Here is a sawyer, a cabinet-maker, a cobbler, and such sort, all food for the guillotine for attempting to do no more than has been most treacherously perpetrated by the present King of the French and the ex-Queen of Spain. How is it that LOUIS-PHILIPPE feels no touch of sympathy for that pusillanimous scoundrel—Just? He is naturally his veritable double; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... notion that we may knock out a series of descriptions for H. W. without much trouble. It is very difficult to get into the Catacombs, but my name is so well known here that I think I may succeed. I find that the guillotine can be got set up in private, like Punch's show. What do you think of that for an article? I find myself underlining words constantly. It is not my nature. It is mere imbecility after the ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... He himself died at Paris on the 15th of April 1788, at the age of eighty-one, of vesical calculus, having refused to allow any operation for his relief. He left one son, George Louis Marie Leclerc Buffon, who was an officer in the French army, and who died by the guillotine, at the age of thirty, on the 10th of July 1793 (22 Messidor, An II.), having espoused the party ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... 46th vols. of the Memoires de l'academie. On the 2nd of August of the same year the last seance of the old academy was held. More fortunate than its sister Academy of Sciences, it lost only three of its members by the guillotine. One of these was the astronomer Sylvain Bailly. Three others sat as members of the Convention; but for the honour of the academy, it should be added that all three were distinguished ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... propounded by Patrick Lovell, to whom physical fear was an unknown quantity. Had he lived in the days of the Terror, he would assuredly have taken his way to the guillotine with the same gay, debonair courage which enabled the nobles of France to throw down their cards and go to the scaffold with a smiling promise to the other players that they would continue their interrupted game in ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... them. In hot haste I rode to the chateau, hoping secretly to warn my friend. He did indeed escape, but it was my lot to be caught with the conspirators. For the second time in my short life I saw the inside of a prison; I was in danger of the guillotine; despair had almost overpowered me, when I learnt that my friends had prevailed—my sword was returned to me. I became again an officer of the army of him who was now emperor, and I set forth determined ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... fire into the public who might wish to indulge in the same woe! O "manes of July!" (the phrase is pretty and grammatical) why did you with sharp bullets break those Louvre windows? Why did you bayonet red-coated Swiss behind that fair white facade, and, braving cannon, musket, sabre, perspective guillotine, burst yonder bronze gates, rush through that peaceful picture-gallery, and hurl royalty, loyalty, and a thousand years of Kings, head-over-heels out ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sight, however, which it fell to my lot to witness at Brussels in this second and short visit, was neither gay nor handsome, nor dear in any sense, but the very reverse; it being that of the punishment of the guillotine inflicted on a wretched murderer, named John Baptist Michel.[2] Hearing, at the moment of my arrival, that this tragical scene was on the point of being acted in the great square of the market-place, I determined for once to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... purpose, which was to guillotine and drive out most of the revolutionary workers from the party. The Constitution committee recommended that it be striken out by unanimous consent without going on the minutes or records. Ruthenberg opposed. He insisted that it be struck out and the ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... Luxembourg, A vild oldt shdory say, A shtudent vonce pring home a dame, Und on de nexter day, He pooled a ribbon from her neck- Off fell de lady's het; She'd trafelled from de guillotine, Und valked de ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... drunk," thought he; "that woman must have intoxicated me with caresses. Good heavens! I was a fool and mad! I risked the guillotine in a business like that. Fortunately it passed off all right. But if it had to be done again, I ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... that ran to meet him, the eyes of Anfossi were turned toward her. His face was expressionless. His eyes neither accused nor reproached. And with the joy of one who has looked upon and then escaped the guillotine, Marie ran down the steps to the waiting automobile. With a pretty cry of pleasure she leaped into the seat beside Thierry. Gayly she threw out her arms. "To Paris!" she commanded. The handsome eyes of Thierry, eloquent with admiration, ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... rooms looked down on the historic Place which was the scene of so many momentous events in French history. The windows were hardly a hundred yards from the very spot where the guillotine dripped red in the days of the Terror. It was here that the heads of Louis XVI and Marie ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... Mr. Dawson took his departure, and I was left alone with Rowley. A man who may be said to have wakened to consciousness in the prison of the Abbaye, among those ever graceful and ever tragic figures of the brave and fair, awaiting the hour of the guillotine and denuded of every comfort, I had never known the luxuries or the amenities of my rank in life. To be attended on by servants I had only been accustomed to in inns. My toilet had long been military, to a ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the city. The street in which our hotel stands is near a large public square; in the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand. I wonder where this statue hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the guillotine, perhaps, stood on that ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his aunt, strongly tempted him to make a journey to Geneva in the summer of 1793. The political condition of Europe at that time was of thrilling interest. On January 21 the head of Louis XVI. fell under the guillotine, to which Marie Antoinette soon followed him. The armies of the coalition were closing in upon France. Of the political necessity for these state executions there has always been and will always be different judgments. That of Mr. Gallatin is of peculiar value. It is found expressed in intimate ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... to drop resistances in other ways, was once brought face to face with the necessity for going to the dentist, and the old fear was at once aroused,—something like the feeling one might have in preparing for the guillotine,—and she suffered from it a day or two before she remembered her new principles. Then, when the new ideas came back to her mind, she at once applied them and said, "Yes, I am afraid, I am awfully afraid. I am perfectly willing to be afraid," and the ease with which ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... Cour des Comptes of Normandy, had been ready to join in a theft which, "the sanctity of the cause," rendered praiseworthy in her eyes? The Marquise de Combray, without knowing it, was a Jacobite reversed; she accepted brigandage as the terrorists formerly accepted the guillotine; the ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... at the platform of the guillotine, already stained with the blood of Bernard, Lesurques exclaimed, "I pardon my judges; I pardon the witnesses through whose error I die; and I pardon Legrand, who has not a little contributed to my judicial assassination. I die protesting my innocence." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... playing upon the brilliant and polished steel of the instrument of justice, dazzled his eyes, and he seemed about to stumble; but the executioner, with the courteous attention of a host who knows how to do the honours of his house, sustained him by the arm, and placed him upon the plank of the guillotine. There Peter Leroux found the clerk of the court, who had come for the purpose of reading formally the order for execution; the gendarmes, who were charged to see that the public peace was kept during the business about to be transacted; and the assistants of the executioner, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... before them, stood in the doorway, with his long pipe in his mouth, with which he puffed smoke into the face of each of the princesses as she passed,—the guard bursting into loud laughs at each puff. Wherever they went, the prisoners saw a guillotine, or a gallows, or some vile inscription chalked upon the walls. One of these inscriptions was, "Little cubs must be strangled." Others threatened death, in a gibing way, to the king or the queen. Clery one day saw the ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... painter's name, he dislocated his jaw, and is now in a precarious state. Our Assistant Critic, Deputy Assistant Critic, Deputy Assistant Sub-Critic, and a few extra Supernumerary Critics, then went in a body and looked at this young woman's head, apparently taken after an interview with Madame Guillotine. They looked at the head from all sides, and finally stood on their own, but they could not make head or tail of it. Any person giving information as to the meaning, and paying threepence, will receive a presentation copy of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... hands, we slew them at their guns, Their boasted horsemen flew like chaff before our forest-sons; That eve we heap'd their baggage high their lines of dead between, And in the centre blazed to heaven their blood-dyed Guillotine! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... oppressed, who throughout his life lost no opportunity of drying up the tears of the afflicted, and never caused one to flow; whose whole life had been consecrated to the happiness of his fellow-creatures and the dignity of his country, but whose spotless reputation could not save him from the guillotine at his age of seventy-two;[9] Schabol; Latapie, who translated Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening, to which he added a discourse on the origin of the art, &c.; Watelet, who wrote Essai sur les Jardins, and whose name has given rise to some most ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... with these empty rooms and that austere daybreak. The moment he saw the garret and Dr. Bull sitting writing at a table, he remembered what the memory was—the French Revolution. There should have been the black outline of a guillotine against that heavy red and white of the morning. Dr. Bull was in his white shirt and black breeches only; his cropped, dark head might well have just come out of its wig; he might have been Marat or a more ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... to serve as a gloomy reminder to Defarge, to say with sudden impatience, "In the name of that sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine, why did you come ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Dutch fought the Spaniards for their hearths, homes, and churches; the French fought all Europe with famine and the guillotine behind them, and empire and plenty in front. The English in India had the pride of superior race and the memory of inexpiable injuries to urge them against the Sepoys; but if ever a nation in this world sacrificed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... engraving, which was the first glimpse I had of him, and the dawn of his subsequent triumphs. For four years he supplied the evening edition and The Sunday World with a comic feature, to say nothing of a comic opera, written to order in five days. The absence of a guillotine in New York State accounts for his escape for this latter offence. Nevertheless, in all else his standard of excellence ascended. He reported the Thaw trial in long-hand, writing nearly 600,000 words of testimony and observation, establishing a new style for ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Napoleonic period, discussing with them the events through which they had passed; and, at various other places and times, with civilians who had heard orations at the Jacobin and Cordelier clubs, and had seen the guillotine at work. The most interesting of my old soldiers at the Invalides wore upon his breast the cross of the Legion of Honor, which he had received from Napoleon at Austerlitz. Still another had made the frightful marches through the Spanish Peninsula under Soult, and ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... construction of the District Court House (burnt in 1872) and City Jail (now the Morrin College.) Messrs. Jourdain had emigrated to Canada after the French Revolution of 1789. They had a holy horror of the guillotine, though, like others of the literati of Quebec in former days, they were well acquainted with the doctrines and works of Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Alembert. One of the Jourdains, judging from his portrait, must have been a shrewd, observant man. Later on, the old ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... and did proper reverence to them. They were moderate idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we thought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage we could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew; indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own politics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before what seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncovered heads for ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... dignity: the space opposite is now occupied by the new market-house—which appears never to be used, for all the goods are spread out on the stones before it, as if it was only there for ornament: in this space, the guillotine was erected in the time of terror, and the murders of the great, and good, and respectable inhabitants took place. Unfortunately, this is a record, too recent, which every town in France ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the invaders, the destroyers of the throne and the Church, impious, sacrilegious, revolutionary,—the authors of every evil. It was they who, for years, destroyed the harvests, shed torrents of blood, smote with the sword or the axe of the guillotine, crowded war upon war, heaped ruins upon ruins, bringing misery and disgrace to all mankind. The old nobility, once so proud of its coats-of-arms and of its sovereign rights, now enslaved, humiliated, shorn of its independence, ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... "But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I have worn something red about me ever since, lest any ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... and strange— This blank and sudden change Men have known ever? This veil as hard and keen As the blade of a guillotine Flashing to sever? ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... sent up the books, instruments, and clothes to swell our growing midden on the deck; and then Nares, going on hands and knees, began to forage underneath the bed. Box after box of Manilla cigars rewarded his search. I took occasion to smash some of these boxes open, and even to guillotine the bundles of cigars; but quite in vain—no secret cache of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her hands and shivered, and felt the fear of one under the flashing guillotine. She willed to move, to obey, at this tardy second, but something within her, stronger than herself, held her back. "I won't!" she screamed. The blow fell swiftly. The rope cut through the air with vicious sibilance and fell across the stooped shoulders. The pain was immediate, hot ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... result of woman suffrage if applied to the large cities of this country is a matter of speculation. What women have done in times of turbulence and excitement in large cities in the past we know. Open that terrible page of the French Revolution and the days of terror, when the click of the guillotine and the rush of blood through the streets of Paris demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of human nature can be driven by political passion. Who led those blood-thirsty mobs? Who shrieked loudest in that hurricane of passion? Woman. Her picture upon the ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... a pretty life!" Madame Lorilleux kept saying. "We all know where the money came from that she paid for her wretched shop! She borrowed it from the blacksmith; and he springs from a nice family too! Didn't the father cut his own throat to save the guillotine the trouble of doing so? Anyhow, there was something ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... interrogations by a copious supply of soap-suds, and now he became the tonsor only, and declares against the mode in which we have our hair cut: "They have cut your hair, Signor, a condannato—nobody adopts the toilette of the guillotine now; it should have been left to grow in front a la Plutus, or have been long at the sides a la Nazarene, which is the mode most of our Sicilian gentlemen prefer." We were about to rise, wash, and depart, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... occasion, and she told me again of her cruel discharge from the Abbaye, and of her being re-arrested before her free feet had sprung lightly up half-a-dozen steps of her own staircase, and carried off to the prison which she only left for the guillotine. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... them? There was no justice in this miserable country, with such a partial and one-sided system of law. He began to fear that his life was in their hands; already he felt his head on the block, under the shadow of the awful guillotine. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... immorality, were it to be exhibited in garbled quotations, divested of all the nots. In the Edinburgh Advertiser of yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:—'It [The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the "bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets of Paris." It has reminded them of the time when a "grey discrowned head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;" insinuating that, if they persisted in opposing the claims of the Free Church, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... upon, along with other organs, to eliminate these morbid taints. Is it any wonder that frequently they become inflamed and subject to decay? What, however, can be gained by destroying them with iodine or extirpating them with the surgeon's scissors or the 'guillotine'? ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... to be. But so far we have only hypothetical suppositions, or rather certainties which are personal to myself. We shall never intercept the guillotine with those. Ah, if we could only find the bank-notes! Given the bank-notes, M. Dudouis would act. Without them, he will laugh ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... seemed to them good. There was something grim about the place even now, and as Julian approached, the High Stile stood up against the last flare of red in the evening sky not yet blotted out by the mist, gaunt and sinister as a guillotine. ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... surrendering all his claims to royalty. About noon on the sixth day of October, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, under the protection of the Marquis de Lafayette, turned their faces forever from Versailles. Little they knew that they were even then traveling the long road to the guillotine. A rabble of men and women surrounded them, some on foot, some in carts and carriages. "All were very merry and amiable in their own fashion, except a few ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... The figure was a very high one. There is no more forgiveness for the beaten General than there was in the days of the Republic when the delegate of the National Convention, with a patent portable guillotine, used to drop in at headquarters to ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... came into the people, and made them believe that the only way to keep themselves free would be to get rid of all who had been great people in the former days. So they set up a machine for cutting off heads, called the guillotine, and there, day after day, nobles and priests, gentlemen and ladies—even the king, queen, and princess, were brought and slain. The two children were not guillotined, but the poor little boy, only nine years old, was worse off than if he had been, for the cruel ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... presented an exact picture of the character of the nation—of the same nation, which, in these dark days of continual horror, could yet amuse, itself by an exhibition of dancing-dogs, under the blood-dropping stage of the guillotine; their cry was then, [55]"Vive la Mort!" Utterly inattentive to these inconsistencies, the French people continue willingly to cry out whatever rallying word may be given to them by those agents who, working in secret, according to the ruling authorities and the prevailing ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... copious supply of soap-suds, and now he became the tonsor only, and declares against the mode in which we have our hair cut: "They have cut your hair, Signor, a condannato—nobody adopts the toilette of the guillotine now; it should have been left to grow in front a la Plutus, or have been long at the sides a la Nazarene, which is the mode most of our Sicilian gentlemen prefer." We were about to rise, wash, and depart, but an impediment is offered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... to their country-houses and danced, sung, and told tales, till the pestilence was upon them. It has a closer resemblance to the piteous madness with which the condemned prisoners during the French Reign of Terror rehearsed the falling of the guillotine, or the terrible pageant with which the same French, as represented by their Parisian brethren, professed to hail the ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the work of an instant. They put a man inside a frame and a sort of broad knife falls by machinery—they call the thing a guillotine-it falls with fearful force and weight-the head springs off so quickly that you can't wink your eye in between. But all the preparations are so dreadful. When they announce the sentence, you know, and prepare ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Concorde. Little over a hundred years ago, this was the brief distance between life and death for those who one minute were dancing in the "Temple of Victory," the next were laying their heads upon the block of the guillotine. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... executed for alleged complicity in the so-called "Foreign Conspiracy," de Batz, who is universally admitted to have been the head and prime-mover of that conspiracy—if, indeed, conspiracy there was—never made either the slightest attempt to rescue his confederates from the guillotine, or at least the offer to perish by their side if he could not succeed in ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... triumph of the Revolution. To him the victory of the tricolor meant the resurrection of Montagne, which this time should surely bring the nobility down to the dust by means more certain than that of the guillotine, because less violent. The peerage without heredity; the National Guard, which puts on the same camp-bed the corner grocer and the marquis; the abolition of the entails demanded by a bourgeois lawyer; the Catholic Church deprived of its supremacy; ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... must, he knew, have reached the outmost border of endurance. Karyl bent solicitously forward and spoke, and she nodded as if answering in a dream, smiling wanly. It was all as some young Queen might have gone to the guillotine rather than to her coronation. As she looked bewilderedly from side to side her glance fell upon the clustering flowers of the vine. Benton gripped the iron bars and groaned, and then her eyes met his. For a moment her pupils dilated ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... add new treasures to the storehouse of beautiful things or noble acts. In that great storm of terror which swept over France in 1793, a certain man who was every hour expecting to be led off to the guillotine, uttered this memorable sentiment. 'Even at this incomprehensible moment'—he said—'when morality, enlightenment, love of country, all of them only make death at the prison-door or on the scaffold more certain—yes, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... into the public who might wish to indulge in the same woe! O "manes of July!" (the phrase is pretty and grammatical) why did you with sharp bullets break those Louvre windows? Why did you bayonet red-coated Swiss behind that fair white facade, and, braving cannon, musket, sabre, perspective guillotine, burst yonder bronze gates, rush through that peaceful picture-gallery, and hurl royalty, loyalty, and a thousand years of Kings, head-over-heels ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... excess of fury, or the infectious frenzies of lycanthropy and similar forms of epidemic madness, rather than such human cruelty as prompted the massacre of Drogheda, the butchery of Melos, or the destruction of Carthage. What could schoolboys have done worthy of the guillotine, even in the eyes of the Jacobin Club? Girls, like children, can try the temper and patience of manhood, and among rough men or in rough times get roughly punished; but when, save in 1793, did men ever think of killing ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... case of that pretty woman from Toulouse, at Bordeaux, a case which made a good deal of stir at the time, it was I who forced the accused to make the confession that led her to the guillotine. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... effectually in a manner becoming an officer and a gentleman. Even the victims of the First French Revolution were permitted to express in song through the bars of the Temple sentiments of utter scorn for their enemies, and when the Jacobins in their turn marched to the guillotine they did so, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... was a giant's step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to travel. Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a history of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... strange emblem; for the cross was the instrument used by the Romans for punishing with death, murderers and criminals of the lowest type; and what would be thought to-day, of a man worshipping the gallows or the guillotine, or carrying copies modeled from the same, suspended from his neck. However we of to-day all understand the emblem of the cross, and the Ancient Egyptians in their time, all understood the emblem ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... suppose a condemned criminal must nerve himself to go to the guillotine or the gallows, I opened the letter. For as long as I might have counted "one, two," slowly, the paper looked black before my eyes, as if ink were spilt over it, blotting out the words: but the dark smudge cleared away, and showed me—nothing, except that, if Alexis Godensky ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... Menippus, the satirist stained with blood. It was the popular chorus which led the people to their most important movements, and which was frequently stifled by the whistling of the cord of the street lamp, or in the hatchet-stroke of the guillotine. Camille Desmoulins was the remorseless offspring of the Revolution,—Marat was its fury; he had the clumsy tumblings of the brute in his thought, and its gnashing of teeth in his style. His journal (L'Ami du Peuple), the People's Friend, smelt of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... fastened an arrangement with two upright posts supporting a dial which he called a "dynamometer." The uprights were braced in the back, and the whole thing reminded me of a miniature guillotine. ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... captured, tried, and executed in the good old French fashion. His political career ended with the guillotine—a sharp remedy, but effective, so far ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... So am I. Joy! Won't you shake hands with me, as comrades should? We are a very mixed set of people, you know, and between ourselves I don't know that we are coming to much. But we can make an alderman dream of the guillotine—that is always something. Oh! but now we can talk on quite a ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of God to prove my good-will towards a multitude of sects, whose opinions I do not share, but whose malice I fear:— theists; I know one who, in the cause of God, would be ready to draw sword, and, like Robespierre, use the guillotine until the last atheist should be destroyed, not dreaming that that atheist would be himself;— mystics, whose party, largely made up of students and women marching under the banner of MM. Lamennais, Quinet, Leroux, and others, has taken for a motto, "Like master, like ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... be allowed to escape! Poor Madame Wolsky shall surely be avenged. But Mrs. Bailey will not be asked to make any statement, except in writing—in what you in England call an affidavit. You do not realise, although you doubtless know, what our legal procedure is like. Not even in order to secure the guillotine for Madame Wachner and her Fritz would I expose Mrs. Bailey to the ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... passed my life in judging, condemning, killing by words pronounced, killing by the guillotine those who had killed by the knife, if I should do as all the assassins whom I have smitten have done, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses[63], one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But Vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets,[64] With which the Doctor paid off an old pox, By borrowing a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... said the old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of sinister irony. "There's only one thing that could remove it—the guillotine. Besides, the malignant condition has spread. There is pressure upon the submaxillary and subclavicular ganglia, and probably the axillary ganglia also. His respiration, circulation and digestion will soon be obstructed and ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... laws are too severe, there will surely come a time when they will not be observed, and history shows that the men who have introduced the guillotine ended their ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... help you, Percy!" she said, "to pull them all down from their pedestals, and drag them to the guillotine!" ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... them are four feet two inches diameter; and dangerous things they are to move, for if the men do not all heave or 'give' at the same moment the stone may slip, and the edge will take off a row of fingers as clean as the guillotine. Tibbald, of course, had his joke about that part of the machinery which is called the 'damsel.' He was a righteous man enough as millers go, but your miller was always a bit of a knave; nor could he forbear from boasting ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... shall keep our eyes open. No half measures! We will return to the great methods of 'ninety-three—the Committee of Public Safety, the Law of Suspects, the Revolutionary Tribunal, every damned one of them! and, if it is necessary, a permanent guillotine! To your ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... of Toulouse, called "The Anacreon of the Guillotine." He was president of the Convention, a member of the Constitutional Committee, and chief agent in the condemnation to death of Louis XVI. As member of the Committee of Public Safety, he decreed that "Terror must be the order of the day." In the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... premature dusk of mid-winter was falling as, approaching nearer, we saw where the roof-thatch had decayed, where the insidious finger of Time had crumbled the stone walls. A chilly wind arising, moaned through the naked trees. The shadow of the guillotine seemed to brood oppressively over the scene, and, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... who scorn the luxury of potatoes, and with it the life that affords no other, meditate how best to get rid of existence; and this they effect almost ever in one way; viz., by killing their most obnoxious keeper, and thus earning the guillotine. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... other hand, became quieter and colder amidst the smoke of the pipes and the fumes of the gas which were now filling the little den; and his voice assumed a dry incisive tone, sharp like a guillotine blade, while Robine gently wagged his head without once removing his chin from the ivory knob of his cane. However, some remark of Gavard's led the conversation to the subject ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... halts, and I had full leisure to gaze around; for, rapidly as the guillotine performed its terrible task, our procession had been extended by some additional victims from every prison which we passed; and we passed so many that I began to think the city one vast dungeon. What strange curiosity is it that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... be demolished. Poplars and fir-trees now cover the ground of the ancient castle, and the name of Joinville is borne by a royal prince, the son of a dethroned king, the grandson of Louis Egalite, who died on the guillotine. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... are a stupid woman," he said. "You think you are serving your friends by adopting this tone. In effect you are bringing them to the guillotine. Now listen. If I leave you without further words you do not see me again. You will know nothing of what is going on until the police have lodged you in a cell. Neither you nor your associates can escape. I promise nothing, but perhaps if you tell me ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... destruction was accomplished. Her long familiarity with the movements of this stupendous enginery of death enabled her to calculate to a nicety when the crash would come. She lay like the bound victim under the guillotine, watching ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... been drunk," thought he; "that woman must have intoxicated me with caresses. Good heavens! I was a fool and mad! I risked the guillotine in a business like that. Fortunately it passed off all right. But if it had to be done again, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... massacre, butcher, murder, assassinate, execute, hang, electrocute, guillotine, lynch, despatch, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... who, at tuck of drum, Salute thy staff, immortal Quattlebum! Or they who, doubly armed with vote and gun, Following thy lead, illustrious Atchison, Their drunken franchise shift from scene to scene, As tile-beard Jourdan did his guillotine! Rather than him who, born beneath our skies, To Slavery's hand its supplest tool supplies; The party felon whose unblushing face Looks from the pillory of his bribe of place, And coolly makes a merit of disgrace, Points to the footmarks of indignant scorn, Shows the deep scars ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... politician who knew the uses of advertisement. The apaches are distinctively a Parisian produce, and if only Paris could be won over, intrigued by the romance and strangeness of the genius that had flowered in the gutter, and given to the world a star of art, all would be arranged and the guillotine would have but three necks to subdue. France at large would only shrug, for France is the husband of Paris and permits her her caprices. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... "Noyades," or drownings, carried off the poor unfortunates, a boatload at a time, until it is estimated that perhaps nine thousand were thus cruelly murdered,—women, children, royalty, and the clergy alike. The wrath which spent itself seemed to know no rank. The guillotine, disease, and famine finished the work, so that the population of the city was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, immeasurably inferior in numbers to what it had been a decade before. The details ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... some ruffianly characters in Phrygian caps, who address each other as "Citizen" and "Citizeness," and at once the imagination of the audience will supply the roll of the tumbrels and the silhouette of the guillotine in the background. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... with the surprise and the nervous strain of the disappearing dollars, she asked no further questions after the welcome news that Miss Hampshire existed and had a "room to rent." Hastily she paid off the chauffeur, adding something for himself (it seemed like tipping the man at the guillotine) and breathed again only when her trunk and dressing-bag blocked the ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... of the French Revolution and the days of terror, when the click of the guillotine and the rush of blood through the streets of Paris demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of human nature can be driven by political passion. Who led those bloodthirsty mobs? Who shrieked loudest in that hurricane of passion? Woman. Her picture upon the page of history is indelible. In ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... doctor, the French physician, Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who gave his name to the guillotine, the terrible knife with which people were beheaded in thousands during the French Revolution. Guillotin did not really invent it, nor was he himself guillotined, as has often been said. The guillotine is supposed to have been invented long ago in Persia, and was used in the Middle Ages both in Italy and Germany. The Frenchman whose name it bears was a kindly person, who merely advised this method of execution at ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... same thing, discussing the same event, and dreading the same results. To have found a parallel state of affairs, it would have been necessary to go back more than a hundred years, to the hour when the head of Louis XVI. fell into the basket of the guillotine, and the monarchies of Europe sprang to arms ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... this country at the time of the emigration, but returning to France, was imprisoned by the Revolutionists. The fall of Robespierre (July, 1794) restored her to liberty. Am6lie de Bouflers, less fortunate than her mother-in-law, perished by the guillotine, June ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... death sentence she would have liked it to be well given; it is quite possible, had she lived at the time, she would have been one of those who objected to the indignity of riding in the tumbrils quite as much as to the guillotine at the end ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... was shown as the place where he was laid when taken out of the bath. The window, behind whose curtains the heroine hid, after she had plunged the dagger into the heart of the man whom she thought was the cause of the shedding of so much blood by the guillotine, was pointed out with a seeming degree of ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... They were charged some seventy years ago with the construction of the District Court House (burnt in 1872) and City Jail (now the Morrin College.) Messrs. Jourdain had emigrated to Canada after the French Revolution of 1789. They had a holy horror of the guillotine, though, like others of the literati of Quebec in former days, they were well acquainted with the doctrines and works of Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Alembert. One of the Jourdains, judging from his portrait, must have been a shrewd, observant man. Later on, the old tenement had sheltered ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... front, long on the sides and behind, with its wild, ruddy hue throwing into relief the strange and fatal character of the physiognomy; his short, thick neck, designed to tempt the hatchet of the guillotine: these details, so accurately photographed, not only prove that M. Michu was a resolute, faithful servant, capable of the profoundest secresy and the most disinterested attachment, but for the really skilful ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... one of those electric contrivances that do their work noiselessly and efficiently, like a garrotter or the guillotine. No odour, no teeth-disturbing grind of rack-and-pinion, no trumpeting, with that machine! It arrived before the gate with such absence of sound that Alice, though she was dusting in the front-room, did not hear it. She heard nothing till the bell discreetly tinkled. Justifiably ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... not know thy fate for many a day, though she shall search long and frantically and not meet the beloved until within the shadow of the guillotine, it may give the reader what comfort it will that the blind sister still lives—a lost mite in the vast ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... people will eat nothing, drink nothing, wear nothing that is not French. We have been told of certain brokers in Wall-street who import even their desserts from Paris; not their deserts, my friend, for the guillotine is the only French thing which we don't imitate or import. No wine is fit for our tables without the prefix of a chateau something; every thing that is composed of wool is something de laine, and all our clothes are made of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... favor of inaugurating a scientific revolution. There is no need to raise a guillotine in the city's square and drag to their death those who are living upon the life's blood of the many. This is the crude way to reach ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... now the summer of 1793, and on the eve of the Reign of Terror, when Paris, from early in October until the end of the year, was in the deadliest throes of revolution. The dull thud of the guillotine, placed in front of the Tuileries, in the Place de la Revolution, which is now the Place de la Concorde, a little to the east of where the obelisk of Luxor now stands, could almost be heard by the quiet workers in the Museum, for sansculottism in its most ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... parchment make, on which, in words of gold, Shall be inscribed, so all the world may read: "Saturnine pleasure it to us doth give, To see them walk the plank from scuttled ship." Caesar: Ha Ha! but speak it not aloud, until 'tis done. Both: Whist! whist as mice! We'll oil the guillotine. Exeunt both while Caesar washes his ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... been signed—and that the sheriff was coming in the morning to execute the writ of possession in favor of our opponent." This was well meant by the speaker; but surely it was like talking of the machinery of the ghastly guillotine to the wretch in shivering expectation of suffering by it on the morrow. An involuntary shudder ran through Mr. Aubrey. "Sixty thousand pounds!" he exclaimed, rising and walking to and fro. "Why, I am ruined beyond all redemption! How can I ever satisfy it?" Again he paced the room several ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled glass towards the sky when you open them towards the street. They are, therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows were used in London, nobody ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... fond of literature. During the sad last months of his imprisonment, before the guillotine took his life, he read over 230 volumes. He especially liked books of travel and geography, and one of his favourite works was the VOYAGES of Cook. He had the volumes near him in the last phase of his existence. There is a pleasant drawing representing the ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... was committed by a masterpiece of cunning. 'Your father's one chance of escape,' argued this villain in a cassock, 'is to be proved an inhuman ruffian. Swear that he beat you unmercifully and you will save him from the guillotine.' All the dupes learned their lesson with a certainty which reflects infinite credit upon the Abbe's method ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... with your two knives?" "Nothing, having no intention to injure any one." "And your parcel?" "Contains a change of linen for my use in the place I shall be sent to." "Where is that?" "To prison; and from thence to the guillotine." The unfortunate girl was ultimately taken there, and ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... followed are only feebly illustrated by the proscriptions of Sulla in ancient Rome (see p. 283). All aristocrats, all persons suspected of lukewarmness in the cause of liberty, were ordered to the guillotine. Hundreds were murdered simply because their wealth was wanted. Others fell, not because they were guilty of any political offence, but on account of having in some way incurred the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... as fierce and strange— This blank and sudden change Men have known ever? This veil as hard and keen As the blade of a guillotine Flashing to sever? ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... the history of chemistry the remark is frequently heard that one blotch on the fair escutcheon of French science was placed there when the remorseless guillotine ushered Lavoisier into eternity. Was not the British escutcheon of science dimmed when Priestley passed into exile? Priestley—who had wrought so splendidly! And yet we should not be too severe, for an illustrious name—Count ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... there appeared on the Piazza del Popolo a large platform with a guillotine and two gibbets, on which the culprits were to be executed. Many stands were constructed for the convenience of those who were curious to witness such a terrible act of justice; and the concourse was so great that some windows fetched as much as six dollars each. At eight o'clock ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... ARNOLD once chaffed me for keeping a guillotine in my back-garden. But my real colour was never sea-green in politics any more than it is yellow in literature or journalism. Yet I have a great tenderness for the old yellow-backs of fifty years ago. Yellow Books are another story. The yellow-backs may have sometimes affronted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... other organs, to eliminate these morbid taints. Is it any wonder that frequently they become inflamed and subject to decay? What, however, can be gained by destroying them with iodine or extirpating them with the surgeon's scissors or the 'guillotine'? ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... thinking of small boys torturing frogs; of Roman emperors at the circus; of sportsmen exterminating game; of the mob watching the guillotine on the streets of Paris. It was Zarathustra who said that when gazing at tragedies, bull fights and crucifixions, man has felt his happiest; and when man invented hell, he made hell his heaven on earth. Couldn't ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... the King, and to his own election to the throne, as in England, a century before, the Prince of Orange had succeeded James II. He voted for the death of his cousin and king, and was, in just retribution, sent to the guillotine by Robespierre at the end of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... hall of the Jacobins, the coarser men of the whole movement—the Dantons, the Robespierres, the Marats, the facetious as ferocious Bareres, the stupid Anacharsis Clootzes—trampled under foot, or finished with the guillotine, the phraseurs and meneurs of the Gironde, your orators of set speech, glittering abstractions, and hair-splitting definitions; the Brissots, Vergniauds, Condorcets, and Rolands, who could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... confessed it by his incoherent gaspings; Sieyes had his carriage ready, with six horses, for flight; the terrible cry, "Hors la loi!" if raised against Bonaparte in the heart of Paris, would certainly have roused the populace to fury in the cause of liberty and have swept the conspirators to the guillotine. But, as it was, the affair was decided in the solitudes of St. Cloud by Lucien and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... numbers applauded a furious despotism, trampling on every right, and sporting with life as the essence of liberty; and the few who conceived freedom to be a plant which did not flourish the better for being nourished with human blood, and who ventured to disapprove the ravages of the guillotine, were execrated as the tools of the coalesced despots, and as persons who, to weaken the affection of America for France, became the calumniators of that republic. Already had an imitative spirit, captivated ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... she answered. "But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should carry ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... between the unbridled dictatorship of their victorious assassins and the musketry of the besieging army, there could be no hesitation by men of any feeling; it was better to be beaten on the ramparts than allow themselves to be bound for the guillotine; brought to a stand under the scaffold, their sole resource was to depend on themselves to the last.—Thus, through its unreasonableness, the "Mountain" condemns itself to a number of sieges or blockades which lasted several months,[1177] to leaving Var and Savoy unprotected, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to be a mother to her. Death, however, prevented the fulfilment of these promises. It appeared as if this interview had exhausted her remaining strength. In 1786, a few days after the meeting with Trenck, Amelia died. Trenck lived but a few years; he went to France and died under the guillotine in 1793. As he sat with his companions upon the car on their way to execution, he said to the gaping crowd: "Eh bien, eh bien, de quoi vous eurerveillez-vous? C'eci n'est qu'une comedie a la Robespierre." These were Trenck's ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his case revolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of ninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the revolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between Chauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than either of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down from it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... told Mrs. Willets of it; and she said, 'Mr. Jefferson carried the Declaration on his shoulders, and would not dare to bow;' and then with such a queer little laugh she asked me 'if his red breeches did not make me think of the guillotine?' I do not think Mrs. Willets likes Mr. Jefferson very much; but, all the same, I wish to dance once with him. I think it will be something to talk about when I am an ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... was unmoved. So far from this, his moments were bitter, and his anguish would have been extreme, were it not for a high resolution which prompted him to die, as he fancied it, like un Francais. The numerous executions by the guillotine had brought fortitude under such circumstances into a sort of fashion, and there were few who did not meet death with decorum. With our prisoner, however, it was still different; for, sustained by a dauntless spirit, he would have faced ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... though I had done all that remains for me to do," he said. "But don't you hear them, those huzzars of the guillotine? Let us go elsewhere." ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... calculated insult. "The majesty of the people," forsooth! The President merely their "representative"! "plain language of man"! and "with respect, your fellow-citizen"! To the heated imaginations of the Federalists of 1800, language of this kind, addressed to the President, was simply prophetic of the guillotine. So amazed and indignant was Mr. Adams, that he submitted the letter to his Cabinet, requesting their opinion as to what should be done with it. Still more incredible is it, that four members of the Cabinet, in writing, declared their opinion to be, that "the contemptuous language ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... lip. The tumbril and the guillotine would not have made her weep. Dry-eyed she would have gone from one to the other. Besides, what on earth was he wowing about? But immediately it occurred to her that he might be experiencing one of the attacks to which he was subject. She leaned over him. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... old story of the way in which the prisoners in the time of the French Revolution used to behave? The tumbrils came every morning and carried off a file of them to the guillotine, and the rest of them had a ghastly make-believe of carrying on the old frivolities of the life of the salons and of society. And it lasted for an hour or two, but the tumbril came next morning all the same, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... prowess best when I find him on the foundering ship under the glare of the lightning in the breakers of Melita. God crowns His children amid the howling of wild beasts and the chopping of blood-splashed guillotine and the crackling fires of martyrdom. It took the persecutions of Marcus Aurelius to develop Polycarp and Justin Martyr. It took the pope's bull and the cardinal's curse and the world's anathema to develop Martin Luther. It took all the hostilities against the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... great scene in French. The fat fatherly corporal (who has a face and expression exactly like the Florentine people in Ghirlandaio's Nativities, and who has the manners of a French aristocrat on his way to the guillotine) tried to control him, but it ended in a sort of fight, and poor Charles got the sack in the end, and has been sent back to Paris to join his regiment. He was awfully good to us Sisters—used to make us coffee in the night, and fill our hot bottles ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c (arms) 727; bodkin &c (perforator) 262; belduque^, bowie knife^, paring knife; bushwhacker [U.S.]; drawing knife, drawing shave; microtome [Micro.]; chisel, screwdriver blade; flint blade; guillotine. sharpener, hone, strop; grindstone, whetstone; novaculite^; steel, emery. V. be sharp &c adj.; taper to a point; bristle with. render sharp &c adj.; sharpen, point, aculeate, whet, barb, spiculate^, set, strop, grind; chip ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... other function of human affairs, turns on oratory. Orators make and unmake kings, but kings are seldom orators, and orators never secure thrones. Orators are made to die—the cross, the torch, the noose, the guillotine, the dagger, awaits them. They die through the passion that they fan to flame—the fear they generate turns upon themselves, and they are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... still clings to them; when you take them in your hands, the mud of the highway comes off upon your fingers. Is it really, one wonders, mere literary craft, mere cunning artfulness, which gives these sentences the weight of a guillotine-blade crashing down upon the prostrate neck ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... necessity might not recur, he relinquished his judicial office.—(See Laponneray's Life of Robespierre, p. 8.) Afterwards, in the Convention of 1791, he urged strongly the abolition of the punishment of death; and yet, for sixteen months, in 1793 and 1794, till he perished himself by the same guillotine which he had so mercilessly used on others, no one at Paris consigned and caused so many fellow-creatures to be put to death by it, with more ruthless insensibility."—Turner's Sacred history of the World, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... by legions of printer's devils; and the very air is charged with the hum of press and with odours of glue and paste and oil. The entire neighbourhood is given up to the printer and binder; and even my patient turned out to be a guillotine-knife grinder—a ferocious and revolutionary calling strangely at variance with his ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... he would almost certainly have been retaken. As it was, Antoine on more than one occasion concealed him behind the bundles of firewood, and once or twice he narrowly escaped detection by less friendly officials. There were times when the guillotine seemed to him almost better than this long suspense: but while other heads passed to the block, his remained on his shoulders; and so weeks and even months went by. And during all this time, sleeping or waking, whenever ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... in power; but the latter, unfortunately, in every period of history, in times of political crisis, as in those of social crisis, have shown themselves unable to conceive of any other remedy than brutal repression—the guillotine or the prison—and they fancy that thus they can cure the organic and constitutional disease which vexes the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... the hall of the Chateau, which was one of the guns of the ill-fated fleet, and over which the river had flowed for almost two hundred years. Seven of England's sovereigns had lived, reigned and died, and in France the Royal house had fallen in the deluge of blood that flowed around the guillotine. Quebec had changed flags—the Tri-color had been unfurled over the Hotel-de-Ville at Paris, and the Stars and ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... like Count de Sauvieres, like Rebec! and even like Henri, although the models are rarer. As for the character of Cadio, which is more of an invention than the others, what I like best in him is his ferocious anger. In it is the special truth of the character. Humanity turned to fury, the guillotine become mystic, life only a sort of bloody dream, that is what must take place in such heads. I think you have one Shakespearean scene: that of the delegate to the Convention with his two secretaries, is of an incredible strength. It makes one cry out! There is one also which struck ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... even as he utters them. But they are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar—a patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand—to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... those of the Count d'Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the guillotine, drew the King on with her, and plunged the world into crimes and calamities which will forever stain the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... variety into the family circle. This was the daughter of Mr. Austen's only sister, Mrs. Hancock. This cousin had been educated in Paris, and married to a Count de Feuillade, of whom I know little more than that he perished by the guillotine during the French Revolution. Perhaps his chief offence was his rank; but it was said that the charge of 'incivism,' under which he suffered, rested on the fact of his having laid down some arable land into pasture—a sure sign of his intention to embarrass the Republican ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... sway of Robespierre, hung like a funeral pall upon the land which was fast becoming a vast cemetery. The provincial towns, faithful echoes of the central capital, were repeating the theme of horror with a thousand variations. Each considerable city had its guillotine, and where that instrument of punishment was wanting, the fusillade or the ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... or a julep, without getting either. Yet our uppish people will eat nothing, drink nothing, wear nothing that is not French. We have been told of certain brokers in Wall-street who import even their desserts from Paris; not their deserts, my friend, for the guillotine is the only French thing which we don't imitate or import. No wine is fit for our tables without the prefix of a chateau something; every thing that is composed of wool is something de laine, and all our clothes are made of drap de this or ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... departed, packed into a four-wheeled cab, with the jackdaw on her lap, and Godfrey went to Madame Tussaud's, where he studied the guillotine and the Chamber ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... most conspicuous of the revolutionists. Through his agency the Comte de Choissy and his young wife, with whom he had been but a twelvemonth united, were arrested, and shortly after sentenced to death. They escaped from prison and the guillotine by the aid of a faithful domestic, and were almost at Calais when they discovered that they were pursued. By leaving the road and sending the carriage forward, they managed to gain the few moments which saved ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... who avowed everything except that Jane was his daughter. He would not have admitted this had he been threatened with the guillotine. ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... cried Skeleton. "I wish all the nobs could hear us talk, who think to make us quake before the guillotine. They have only to come to the Barriere Saint Jacques the day of my benefit; they will hear me crack jokes with the crowd, and say to Jack, in a bold voice, 'Open the door till I go down into the cellar!' Renewed laughter followed ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... had been kneeling with his neck on the guillotine block the intense burden of his suspense could hardly have ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... coalition. That coalition came to a bloody end for the time, four-and-twenty years after Holbach's book proclaimed it, when the Committee of Public Safety despatched Hebert, and better men than Hebert, to the guillotine for being atheists. Atheism, as ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... a sharp point, and the guillotine- axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... they were students—that returned to their desks after the vacation. The final examinations were ahead of them, less than a month away; and those examinations hung over their heads like the relentless, glittering blade of a guillotine. The boys studied. "College life" ceased; there was a brief period ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... little earlier, had put forth against inoculation as a remedy for smallpox; but just at that time the great churchmen had other things to think of besides crushing this particular heretic: they were too much occupied in keeping their own heads from the guillotine to give attention to what was passing in the head of Pinel. He was allowed to work in peace, and in a short time the reign of diabolism at Bicetre was ended. What the exorcisms and fetiches and prayers ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... gun-cotton has been carried out for many years. The process used differs but little from that used at Stowmarket. The cotton used is of a good quality, it is sorted and picked over to remove foreign matters, &c., and is then cut up by a kind of guillotine into 2-inch lengths. It is then dried in the following manner. The cotton is placed upon an endless band, which conducts it to the stove, or drying closet, a chamber heated by means of hot air and ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... table he fastened an arrangement with two upright posts supporting a dial which he called a "dynamometer." The uprights were braced in the back, and the whole thing reminded me of a miniature guillotine. ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... "Mercy upon us, what has happened? Can it be that X. and Y. (it would be wrong to mention the names of the vigorous young friends which occurred to me) are playing Danton and Robespierre; and that a guillotine is erected in the courtyard of Burlington House for the benefit of all anti-Darwinian Fellows of the Royal Society? Where are the secret conspirators against this tyranny, whom I am supposed to favour, and yet not have the courage to join openly? And to think of my poor oppressed friend, Mr. Herbert ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the platform of the guillotine, already stained with the blood of Bernard, Lesurques exclaimed, "I pardon my judges; I pardon the witnesses through whose error I die; and I pardon Legrand, who has not a little contributed to my judicial ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... noise of trumpets. 'Attention!' was among the foot-soldiers instantly. They were marched up to the scaffold and formed round it. The dragoons galloped to their nearer stations too. The guillotine became the centre of a wood of bristling bayonets and shining sabres. The people closed round nearer, on the flank of the soldiery. A long straggling stream of men and boys, who had accompanied the procession from the prison, came pouring into the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Aunt Mary, in a magnificent hotel in the fine square, formerly Place Louis Quinze, afterwards Place de la Revolution, and now Place de la Concorde. Here the guillotine was once at work night and day; and here died Louis Seize, and Marie Antoinette, and Madame Roland: opposite to us is the Seine and La Lanterne. On one side of this square are ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... "moot-hill" that they dispensed their feudal laws as seemed to them good. There was something grim about the place even now, and as Julian approached, the High Stile stood up against the last flare of red in the evening sky not yet blotted out by the mist, gaunt and sinister as a guillotine. ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... that be, Noble?" And in spite of herself, Julia spoke in the tone of one who controls herself to ask in calmness: "Is my name on the list for the guillotine?" ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... The "Carillon" had been Marie Antoinette's favorite tune: it pursued her from her palace to her prison, startled her on her way to her trial, and was probably the last sound she heard as she lay bound under the guillotine. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... not be amiss to say a few words about the temporal peculiarities of these dream processes. In a very interesting discussion, apparently suggested by Maury's puzzling guillotine dream, Goblet tries to demonstrate that the dream requires no other time than the transition period between sleeping and awakening. The awakening requires time, as the dream takes place during that period. One is inclined to believe that the final picture of the dream is so strong ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Scheele and Bergman for their efforts; England received the intellectuality of Cavendish with less appreciation than the Continent, and a fanatical mob drove Priestley out of the country; while France, by sending Lavoisier to the guillotine, demonstrated how dangerous it was, at that time at least, for an intelligent Frenchman to serve his ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... delivered his maiden speech to-night, and acquitted himself so well that in the opinion of Members many months his senior he is likely to go far. The Government had proposed to "guillotine" the remaining Supplementary Estimates in order to get them through before March 31st. Some ardent economists, mainly drawn from the Coalition, while ready to concede the end, protested against the means, and proposed that the House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... pendulum, resided for several months in one of the smaller Shetland islands; and, fresh from the troubles of France—his imagination bearing about with it, if I may so speak, the stains of the guillotine—the state of trustful security in which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment. "Here, during the twenty-five years in which Europe has been devouring herself," he exclaimed, "the door of the house I inhabit has remained open day and night." The interior ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Franklin had been busy with kite and key; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; Fate was pitting the Pitts against Fox; Hume was challenging worshipers of a Fetish and supplying arguments still bright with use; Voltaire and Rousseau were preparing the way for Madame Guillotine; Horace Walpole was printing marvelous books at his private press at Strawberry Hill; Sheridan was writing autobiographical comedies; David Garrick was mimicking his way to immortality; Gainsborough was working the apotheosis of a hat; Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, and West, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Lucie and her child must leave Paris to-morrow," said Carton. "They are in danger of being denounced. It is a capital crime to mourn for, or sympathise with, a victim of the guillotine. Be ready to start at two o'clock to-morrow afternoon. See them into their seats; take your own seat. The moment I come to you, take me in, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... converted into a disgusting warehouse of infamy. Law, with suicidal hand, had destroyed itself, and the decisions of the legislature swayed to and fro, in accordance with the hideous clamors of the mob. The guillotine, with gutters ever clotted with human gore, was the only argument which anarchy condescended to use. Effectually it silenced every remonstrating tongue. Constitution after constitution had risen, like mushrooms, in a night, and ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... a time for amorous conference? Henriot, the tyrant's most devoted creature, Marshals the force of Paris: The fierce club, With Vivier at their head, in loud acclaim Have sworn to make the guillotine in blood Float on the scaffold.—But who ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... divested of all the nots. In the Edinburgh Advertiser of yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:—'It [The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the "bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets of Paris." It has reminded them of the time when a "grey discrowned head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;" insinuating that, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... and women must "go somewhere," they must "do something." The women adopted the Greek costume and appeared in simple white robes caught at the shoulders with miniature stilettos. Many men wore crape on their arms in pretended memory of friends who had been kissed by Madame Guillotine. There was fever in the air, fever in the blood, and the passions held high carnival. In solitude, danger depresses all save the very strongest, but the mob (ever the symbol of weakness) is made ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... system this labor is avoided, and the sheet or block is fed in automatically by means of subsidiary rolls, which are driven by power. When it is required to cut the block or sheet by the guillotine, or cross-cutting knife, instead of the block being moved to the desired point by hand-labor, the subsidiary driven rolls work it up to the knife; and such perfect control does the engine with its hydraulic reversing gear possess, ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... great deeds, what seems to be your weakness would reveal itself as extraordinary power. Under the early emperors you would have been a martyr, at the time of the Reformation an anabaptist, during the French Revolution one of those inspired Girondists who mounted the guillotine with the marseillaise on their lips. But you ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... that I went and drew the curtains of one of the windows. Of course it's a much bigger room than I'm generally accustomed to occupy, as you know, ma'am. And I just threw up the window—it's what they call a guillotine window—and there I saw the water, you know, ma'am, in what they ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... it sad when a woman is thus crushed by neglect or abuse, by the hand of poverty, by hard toil, or the harder fate of a consuming death at the hands of a false or brutal companion. But really, why is it sadder than to die by inches on the guillotine of Fashion? The results are the same in either case. Abused women generally outlive fashionable ones. Crushed and care-worn women see the pampered daughters of Fashion wither and die around them, and wonder why death in kindness does not come to take them away instead. The ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... 1709. When we passed, the town was in great commotion with the trial of Count Bocarme and his wife for the murder of her brother. She was by some means acquitted, but he was convicted and executed by the guillotine. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... the old society to which we belong: and I submit to his lordship with acquiescence; and he takes his place above the best of us at all dinner parties, and there bides his time. I don't want to chop his head off with a guillotine, or to fling mud at him in the streets. When they call such a man a disgrace to his order; and such another, who is good and gentle, refined and generous, who employs his great means in promoting every kindness and charity, and art and grace of life, in the kindest and most gracious ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... together. The stakes were high for them, for each had a little money just then, the result of the sale of some fancy work of theirs, at which they were very clever, though they did not often condescend to take the trouble. Malin had made the model of a guillotine out of a beef bone, and Poivre some dominoes, dice, and box ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... would almost certainly have been retaken. As it was, Antoine on more than one occasion concealed him behind the bundles of firewood, and once or twice he narrowly escaped detection by less friendly officials. There were times when the guillotine seemed to him almost better than this long suspense: but while other heads passed to the block, his remained on his shoulders; and so weeks and even months went by. And during all this time, sleeping or waking, whenever he lay down upon his pallet, the toad crept up on to the ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... "You are a stupid woman," he said. "You think you are serving your friends by adopting this tone. In effect you are bringing them to the guillotine. Now listen. If I leave you without further words you do not see me again. You will know nothing of what is going on until the police have lodged you in a cell. Neither you nor your associates can escape. I promise nothing, but perhaps if you tell me what I want to know there may be a chance ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... trampling on every right, and sporting with life, as the essence of liberty; and the few who conceived freedom to be a plant which did not flourish the better for being nourished with human blood, and who ventured to disapprove the ravages of the guillotine, were execrated as the tools of the coalesced despots, and as persons who, to weaken the affection of America for France, became the calumniators of that republic. Already had an imitative spirit, captivated with the splendour, but copying the errors of a great nation, reared ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... liberal ideas, and others out of respect for their instructions; even after the 10th of August, even after the 2nd of September, even after the 21st of January, like their generals Biron, Custine, de Flers, de Broglie, and de Montesquiou, with the constant perspective of the guillotine that awaits them on leaving the battlefield and even in the ministerial ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Sauvieres, like Rebec! and even like Henri, although the models are rarer. As for the character of Cadio, which is more of an invention than the others, what I like best in him is his ferocious anger. In it is the special truth of the character. Humanity turned to fury, the guillotine become mystic, life only a sort of bloody dream, that is what must take place in such heads. I think you have one Shakespearean scene: that of the delegate to the Convention with his two secretaries, is of an incredible ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... coin of the Hundred Years' War, and lastly a little pin- cushion of cloth in the shape of a heart, ornamented with metal crosses, the relic of some refugee in the Reign of Terror, hiding to escape the guillotine. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... exhumed and appeared in a few days upon the table of the anatomical professor at Camb. He d. in debt, but a subscription was raised for his wife and dau., the latter of whom m. a Frenchman, and is said to have perished under the guillotine. Worthless as a man, S. possessed undoubted genius. He had wit, originality, and pathos, though the last not seldom runs into mawkishness, and an exquisitely delicate and glancing style. He has contributed some immortal ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... shall not know thy fate for many a day, though she shall search long and frantically and not meet the beloved until within the shadow of the guillotine, it may give the reader what comfort it will that the blind sister still lives—a lost mite in the ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... thousands. At first so far away were they, so few, so scattered, and clad to match the colour of the hills, that only the strongest glasses could make out the position of the Guides; but apparent to the naked eye of all was the great straggling mass which was falling with relentless swiftness, guillotine-like, on the narrow neck of the communications with the bridge. With cool intrepid courage, with a deliberation which appeared almost exasperating to the onlookers, Colonel Battye and his men took up the challenge. Little parties of soldiers could ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... destroyers of the throne and the Church, impious, sacrilegious, revolutionary,—the authors of every evil. It was they who, for years, destroyed the harvests, shed torrents of blood, smote with the sword or the axe of the guillotine, crowded war upon war, heaped ruins upon ruins, bringing misery and disgrace to all mankind. The old nobility, once so proud of its coats-of-arms and of its sovereign rights, now enslaved, humiliated, shorn of its independence, ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... martyrdom? How, if it should be some Marie Antoinette, the widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, turned gray prematurely by sorrow, daughter of Caesars kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death? How, if it were the "martyred wife of Roland," uttering impassioned truth—truth odious to the rulers of her country—with her expiring breath? How, if it were the noble Charlotte ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Polk's action occasioned much adverse criticism. The President and several members of his Cabinet privately assured the Governor of their warmest friendship, but, as one member of the radical wing expressed it, "Bouck's appointment became a significant indication of the guillotine prepared for ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... pregnancy. Before she left Neuilly, she happened one day to enter Paris on foot (I believe, by the Place de Louis Quinze), when an execution, attended with some peculiar aggravations, had just taken place, and the blood of the guillotine appeared fresh upon the pavement. The emotions of her soul burst forth in indignant exclamations, while a prudent bystander warned her of her danger, and intreated her to hasten and hide her discontents. She described to me, more than once, the ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... flowers. 'What have you done, Monsieur le Comte,' he bursts out at last to his master, 'to deserve all these advantages?—I know. Vous vous etes donne la peine de naitre!' In that sentence one can hear—far off, but distinct—the flash and snap of the guillotine. To those happy listeners, though, no such sound was audible. Their speculations went another way. All was roseate, all was charming as the coaches dashed through the narrow streets of Paris, carrying ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... rude sort of guillotine, called the maiden. The implement is now in possession of ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... saw terrible sights of men hung from lamp-posts; heard the grisly cry, "A la lanterne! a la lanterne!" and was even himself seized by some of the mob, though he happily contrived, in the confusion, to slip away. In Marseilles, too, he first saw the guillotine; it was carried about the streets in procession whilst the populace yelled out the "Marseillaise Hymn." Later on in the Revolution he was seized, as an Englishman, and imprisoned with a number of others at Abbeville; but, ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... not contain them," said the Egyptian. "You will force yourself to meet what you call the horrors. You will sacrifice yourself. You will meet the worst as the women of '93 ascended the guillotine—laughing." ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... praise is undeserved. Certainly, the King of the French was not a cruel man, and it was with sincere regret that he signed the death-warrants of men who had sought his own life, and who had murdered his friends; but it would have been no act of cruelty, had he sent his rival to the guillotine. When a man makes a throw for a crown, he accepts what is staked, against it,—a coffin. Nothing is better established than this, that, when a sovereign is assailed, the intention of the assailant being his overthrow, that sovereign has a perfect right to put his rival ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Concorde—Its name is a strong contrast to the great number of victims here sacrificed —Execution of the King and Queen, Philippe Egalite, Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, Robespiere, cum multus aliis —Unexampled dispatch introduced in putting persons to death by means of the guillotine—Guillotin, the inventor or improver of this instrument, dies of grief—Little impression left on the mind of the spectators of these sanguinary scenes—Lord Cornwallis arrives ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... and restored me to confidence in the establishment. I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine—an awful instrument in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its blade—which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement placed there by Signor P——. Yet my credulity was so strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... not kill my son. It was a murderer that I had with me, a murderer for whom the police were hunting and for whom the guillotine was waiting!" ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... regiments of the Republic, had seen France answer Europe with the head of a king, with the head of a queen, had observed how the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own children, had witnessed with fear as well as with fury the apotheosis of the guillotine. While the events in France were shaking every European State, including England, to its centre, it was hard for the public mind to keep itself fixed with any degree of intentness upon ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... cabinet, ministry—call it what name you will—given positive, indubitable signs of want and absence of foresight, as did ours in these Virginia, Norfolk, and Harper's Ferry affairs? Not this or that minister or secretary, but all of them ought to go to the constitutional guillotine. Blindness—no mere short-sightedness—permeates the whole administration, Blair excepted. And Scott, the politico-military adviser of the President! What is the matter with Scott, or were the halo and incense surrounding him based on bosh? ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... "the cause! Can't you see, sir, that you are torturing me frightfully, pitilessly! I am an innocent man, and you are trying to deprive me of my life. You have been turning me this way and that way for so many hours that I begin to feel as if I were standing on the guillotine. Each time I open my mouth to speak I ask myself, is it this answer that will send me to the scaffold? My anxiety and dismay surprise you, do they? Why, since this examination began, I've felt the cold knife graze my neck at least ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... continued by the Clericals and the extreme Independents, partly in the hope of compelling the crown to grant the Magyar words of command and partly out of antipathy towards the person of the young calvinist premier. In March 1904, Tisza, therefore, introduced a drastic "guillotine" motion to amend the standing orders of the House, but withdrew it in return for an undertaking from the Opposition that obstruction would cease. This time the Opposition kept its word. The Recruits bill and the estimates ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... wish change for the sake of it. They love liberty and would die for it. Many of this class were murdered in cold blood by Louis Napoleon. Others were sent to Cayenne, to fall a prey to a climate cruel as the guillotine, or were sent into strange lands to beg their bread. These men were the real glory of France, and yet they ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... being of a romantic turn of mind, remembered how a lady had been found by a student sitting on the lowest steps of the guillotine, desolate and helpless, at night; and how the student had taken her home and sheltered her, and had straightway fallen desperately in love with her, to discover, with unutterable horror, that her head had been severed from her fair shoulders by the cruel knife ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... lifetime, and who had been learning to drop resistances in other ways, was once brought face to face with the necessity for going to the dentist, and the old fear was at once aroused,—something like the feeling one might have in preparing for the guillotine,—and she suffered from it a day or two before she remembered her new principles. Then, when the new ideas came back to her mind, she at once applied them and said, "Yes, I am afraid, I am awfully afraid. I am perfectly willing to be afraid," and the ease with which the fear disappeared ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... opposite discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses[63], one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But Vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets,[64] With which the Doctor paid off an old pox, By borrowing a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... ass's jaw has slain a million. Adapted to the weakness of human nature, which receives with rivirince ideas however childish, that come draped in long-tailed and exotic words, that aasimine polysyllable has riconciled the modern mind to the chimeras of th' ancients, and outbutchered the guillotine, the musket, and the sword: ay, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... French garcon was very drunk, and spilt the soup all over me! There was a great scene in French. The fat fatherly corporal (who has a face and expression exactly like the Florentine people in Ghirlandaio's Nativities, and who has the manners of a French aristocrat on his way to the guillotine) tried to control him, but it ended in a sort of fight, and poor Charles got the sack in the end, and has been sent back to Paris to join his regiment. He was awfully good to us Sisters—used to make us coffee in the night, and fill our hot bottles and give us hot ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... and the king and royal family imprisoned. The priests had nearly all perished or been banished from France. The national assembly was divided into desperate factions, which often turned their arms against one another. When one party triumphed, proscription followed, and the guillotine was put in requisition, and blood flowed in torrents. The grossest irreligion likewise prevailed. Leaders of the atheistical mob would extend their arms to heaven and dare a God, if he existed, to vindicate his insulted majesty, and ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... an incident in Dickens's touching Tale of two Cities, where a young man going innocent to the guillotine, and riding on the death-cart with a young girl whom he had never before seen, is able to sustain and comfort her, even to the last awful moment, by the look of his face and the clasp of his hand. That man, I have often thought, must have been ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the leap ("Memoires," i. 122)? No doubt Dumas believed what he heard about this ancestor—in whom, perhaps, one may see a hint of the giant Porthos. In the Revolution and in the wars his father won the name of Monsieur de l'Humanite, because he made a bonfire of a guillotine; and of Horatius Cocles, because he held a pass as bravely as the Roman "in ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... youth and laughter long pent-up. It was as though an avalanche of joy had been released; it was in reality the reaction from the terrors and nightmares of those two years of horror. The people were free, free to do as they pleased without the fear of the guillotine ever present; and all France ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... exquisitely well, as she did everything, not even advising me that I was to be her errand boy on such an errand, trusting me to find out by accident, as I had, that I was to be my own executioner, was to spring my own guillotine. She knew that, none the less, though I understood what the letter meant thus addressed, I sacredly must execute her silent trust. Oh! Helena, yours was indeed an exquisite revenge for that one hour of a dour ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... ago I witnessed in Paris a man's head cut off by the guillotine in the presence of thousands of spectators. I knew that the man was a horrible criminal. I was acquainted with all the arguments which people have been devising for so many centuries, in order to justify this sort of deed. I knew that they had ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... golden sunlight shone through the window, illuminating the pictures on the walls of my room. They were sketches from the War of Independence, which faithfully portrayed what heroes we all were; further, there were scenes representing executions on the guillotine, from the time of the revolution under Louis XIV., and other similar decapitations which no one could behold without thanking God that he lay quietly in bed drinking excellent coffee, and with his head comfortably adjusted upon neck ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the brown fiddler and his daughter who inhabited the same, and who had immediately secured their prize by slipping the displaced board down again, wedging it firmly on the back of his neck, as if he had been fitted for the guillotine, thus nailing him fast, unless he had bolted, and left ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... tumbril and the guillotine would not have made her weep. Dry-eyed she would have gone from one to the other. Besides, what on earth was he wowing about? But immediately it occurred to her that he might be experiencing one of the attacks to which he was subject. She leaned ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names in one's old age:' in fact, he reckoned on being styled 'Lord Methusalem.' He had lived to hear of the cruel deaths of the once gay and high-born friends whom he had known in Paris, by the guillotine: he had lived to execrate the monsters who persecuted the grandest heroine of modern times, Marie Antoinette, to madness; he lived to censure the infatuation of religious zeal in the Birmingham riots. 'Are not the devils escaped out of the swine, and overrunning ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the chief was Robespierre, a lawyer from Artois, filled with fanatical notions of the rights of man. He, with a party of other violent republicans, called the Mountain, of whom Danton and Marat were most noted, set to work to destroy all that interfered with their plans of general equality. The guillotine, a recently invented machine for beheading, was set in all the chief market-places, and hundreds were put to death on the charge of "conspiring against the nation." Louis XVI. was executed early in 1793; and it was enough to have any sort ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "The shadow of the guillotine is over you!" said Sissy, in a bombastic whisper addressed to Mrs. Pemberton—a comforting formula the Madigans had invented to still their envy of those who rode in carriages. But her smiling face, when it turned toward Crosby, had no ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... He was convicted of manifold extortions, and launched by the common executioner into that eternity whither he could carry none of his ill-gotten gains with him. Here, at least, we succeed in meeting a guillotine which catches its maker. By a singular coincidence another lord of Noisy, Cardinal Balue, underwent a long detention in an iron-barred cage—one of those famous cages, so much favored by Louis XI., of which the cardinal, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Mademoiselle Adele? I have a very fine stock at home," said Monsieur Goupille. Mademoiselle Adele de Courval sighed: "Helas! they remind me of happier days, when I was a petite and my dear grandmamma took me in her lap and told me how she escaped the guillotine: she was an emigree, and you know her father was ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in the effete French society before the Revolution the Queen played at Arcadia, the King played at being a mechanic, everyone played at simplicity and universal philanthropy, leaving for most durable outcome of their philanthropy the guillotine, as the most durable outcome of ours may be execution by electricity;—so in our own society the talk of benevolence and the cult of childhood are the very fashion of the hour. We, of this self-conscious, incredulous generation, sentimentalise our children, ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... 1788, at the age of eighty-one, of vesical calculus, having refused to allow any operation for his relief. He left one son, George Louis Marie Leclerc Buffon, who was an officer in the French army, and who died by the guillotine, at the age of thirty, on the 10th of July 1793 (22 Messidor, An II.), having espoused the party of the duke ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the guillotine both of my comrades were sent, But the Church, saving me for the tonsure, Hid me off in the wilds, and my dame, to her shame, To be Pere sold me out from a Monsieur; And now she is clad in the silk of the court, And I in the wool ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... The most festive times of peace under the most expensive kings were thrown into the shade by the frequency, variety, and extent of the republican exhibitions. Yet this was a time of perpetual miseries throughout France. The guillotine was bloody from morn till night. In the single month of July, 1794, nearly eight hundred persons, the majority, principal individuals of the state, and all possessing some respectability of situation, ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... and make a start, after long waiting, as deputy to some rascal or other in a hole of a place where the Government will fling you a thousand francs a year like the scraps that are thrown to the butcher's dog. Bark at thieves, plead the cause of the rich, send men of heart to the guillotine, that is your work! Many thanks! If you have no influence, you may rot in your provincial tribunal. At thirty you will be a Justice with twelve hundred francs a year (if you have not flung off the gown for good before then). By the ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... infinite degradation until the guillotine should have dispatched its business in arrear, I found much to my advantage. The man who expects nothing, cannot be hurt by disappointment; and when I was conducted from my solitary cell into the midst of four or five hundred prisoners, I felt the human ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... than tragic shadows; and for a week there was no meal in that house to which she sat down earlier than half an hour Jate. She had a rightful property-interest in the Revolution, her own great-uncle having been one of those who "suffered;" not, however, under the guillotine; for to Georges Meilhac appertained the rare distinction of death by accident on the day when the business-like young Bonaparte played upon the ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... in the nature of a guillotine by which a person could chop his own head off neatly without chance of failure, and the other had to do with the improvement of science ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... the passage wall. Jeremy, who had not seen her, vanished into his room. She waited, then plucking up all her courage with the desperate suffocating sense of a prisoner laying himself beneath the guillotine, she ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... he asked, and he addressed the question to Wethermill. It struck Ricardo as one of the strangest details in all this strange affair that the detective should ask with confidence for information which might help to bring Celia Harland to the guillotine from the man who had staked his happiness ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... morrow, in the Place de la Revolution, he is brought to the guillotine; beside him, brave Abbe Edgeworth says, "Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven"; the axe clanks down; a king's life is shorn away. At home, this killing of a king has divided all friends; abroad it has united all enemies. England declares war; Spain declares war; they all ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... in the Luxembourg prison, under the shadow of the guillotine. But life is only a sentence of death, with an indefinite reprieve. Prison, to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... him, and the dawn of his subsequent triumphs. For four years he supplied the evening edition and The Sunday World with a comic feature, to say nothing of a comic opera, written to order in five days. The absence of a guillotine in New York State accounts for his escape for this latter offence. Nevertheless, in all else his standard of excellence ascended. He reported the Thaw trial in long-hand, writing nearly 600,000 words of testimony and observation, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... King of France, taking an affectionate leave of his family just before he suffered under the guillotine: The Queen appears in a rage of distraction—the King's Sister deeply affected—the young Princess is fainting—and the Dauphin is embracing his unhappy Father—the Queen's Maid of Honor also appears in great distress. A guard of Soldiers are waiting to conduct him to the place of ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... one fellow with a horrid grin; "if we had you in la belle France, your head would not remain long on your shoulders. We guillotine all such. It's the best way to treat them. They have trampled too long on our rights, to ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... were not the Third Estate, that there was a conflict of interest between property and labour, and they began to vent their yet inarticulate rage upon the middle class above them. It presently appeared that these revolutionary heroines, knitting companions of the future guillotine, were not all infuriated or implacable. Parcels of banknotes that they took away were brought back; the priest was left unhung; the torches that were to have lighted the conflagration were extinguished ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of the house, where the eldest brother awaited her with the hatchet, it was nearly as dark outside as it had been in the barn. So the eldest brother—for the little girl had hurried away after giving him the chickens—could not tell which leghorn suffered the guillotine first. His sanguinary work being done, the little girl returned and carried the dead fowls into the coal-shed, where she tied their toes together and ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... he lives in are enough of themselves to sadden any man's face. In the Reign of Terror no living being in all the city of Paris can rise in the morning and be certain of escaping the spy, the denunciation, the arrest, or the guillotine, before night. Such times are trying enough to oppress any man's spirits; but Lomaque is not thinking of them or caring for them now. Out of a mass of papers which lie before him on his old writing-table, he has just taken ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... of the "chiffon pinafore" ladies upon the ballroom floor. I have in my blood that gayety which led some of my ancestors to laugh and compliment each other and play piquet up even to the edge of the guillotine, and I refused to see the countenance of my Uncle, the General Robert, regarding me from the door in the end of the ballroom. I considered that an hour of pleasure was a sacred thing not to be interfered with, and I danced with that sweet Sue Tomlinson right past the ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... beginning of that revolution, the Duke espoused the popular cause, and even commanded an army under the orders of the legislative assembly; but in the storms that succeeded, being altogether unequal to stem the torrent of popular fury or direct its course, he fell by the guillotine ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... putting a grotesque toothpick into his mouth. History has recorded this atrocious levity. So petty an act done in the midst of that great catastrophe pictures the Parisian populace, which deserves the sarcastic jibe of Boileau: "Frenchmen, born malin, created the guillotine." The Parisian of all time cracks jokes and makes lampoons before, during, and after the most ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... mob law is to prevail in each section of the Union, and the man who dares to plead for the cause of justice and moderation in either section is to be marked down as a traitor to his section. If this state of things is allowed to go on, how long before you will have the guillotine in active operation? ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... foreign invasion, and with antipathy to the restoration of Bourbon royalty and misrule. In Paris, the revolutionary tribunal was filling the prisons with the suspected, and sending daily its wagon-loads of victims to the guillotine. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... was no justice in this miserable country, with such a partial and one-sided system of law. He began to fear that his life was in their hands; already he felt his head on the block, under the shadow of the awful guillotine. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... precedent set by the French Revolution, but other nations might feel as little inclined to join it as during the time when bloodthirsty demagogues ruled France in the name of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, with the liberal assistance of the rifle and the guillotine. ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... peasantry and laborers of France, smarting under the wrongs of centuries, rose in a mighty wave, and swept away the nobles, their masters. The royal head of King Louis fell a prey to the remorseless spirit of the guillotine, and the reign of terror in Paris began. Soon the roll of the drum was heard in every European city, and the armies of every nation were on the march for France. England was foremost in the fray; and the people of the United States, seeing their old enemy at ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... I had thoroughly explored that portion, making the acquaintance of all the new-comers, putting my head into the guillotine, taking a turn in the condemned cell, sitting in Napoleon's carriage, and otherwise informing myself concerning the seamy side of human nature, I determined to be virtuous and devote at least half an hour to the study of the royalties in ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... whatever its other results, would undoubtedly have conducted him to the guillotine with his political friends in May 1793,—was rendered impossible by a somewhat undignified hindrance. Wordsworth, while in his own eyes "a patriot of the world," was in the eyes of others a young man of twenty-two, travelling on a small allowance, and running his ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... gone so far, therefore, it was necessary that Jacques Rollet should die; so the affair took its course; and early one morning the guillotine was erected in the court-yard of the jail, three criminals ascended the scaffold, and three heads fell into the basket, which were presently afterward, with the trunks that had been attached to them, buried in ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... Shall be inscribed, so all the world may read: "Saturnine pleasure it to us doth give, To see them walk the plank from scuttled ship." Caesar: Ha Ha! but speak it not aloud, until 'tis done. Both: Whist! whist as mice! We'll oil the guillotine. Exeunt both while Caesar washes ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... Antoinette, then but fifteen years of age, and marvelously beautiful, was married to the young dauphin of France, subsequently the unhappy Louis XVI. As she left Vienna, for that throne from which she was to descend to the guillotine, her mother sent by her hand the following letter ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... to Joe Hume, while Louis Philippe but shares attention with the rivalling models of the Bastille and Guillotine! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 580. More than 300 were supposed to have gone clown in the ship which sunk, and the number of prisoners removed is stated at 2,300. On board the French fleet was Jean Bon Saint Andre, the friend and creature of Robespierre; and he was there on commission, to remind every officer and man of the guillotine, and of the duty he owed to the republic. Jean Bon Saint Andre wished himself ashore as soon as the battle commenced; and, in bold defiance of facts which had been witnessed by many thousands of individuals, he declared, in his report to the convention, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Lodbrok, thrown among serpents in a pit, defies his enemies, and bids them beware of the revenge of Woden ("Corpus Poeticum Boreale," vol. ii. pp. 341 ff.). In the prisons, at the time of the Terreur, the guillotine was a subject for chansons. The mail steamer la France caught fire, part of the cargo being gunpowder; the ship is about to be blown up; a foreign witness writes thus: "Tous jusqu'aux petits marmitons rivalisaient d'elan, de bravoure et ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... disenthralled France, we learn that the guillotine bathed in blood was the emblem of their transition state, from serfs to freemen. With the Negro were the antithesis of anger, revenge, or despair, that of joy, gratitude, and hope, has been ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... of these parties in succession rests upon its more advanced element. So soon as it has carried the revolution far enough not to be able to keep pace with, much less march ahead of it, it is shoved aside by its more daring allies, who stand behind it, and it is sent to the guillotine. Thus the revolution moves along an ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... windows give glimpses into Hadean caverns tenanted by legions of printer's devils; and the very air is charged with the hum of press and with odours of glue and paste and oil. The entire neighbourhood is given up to the printer and binder; and even my patient turned out to be a guillotine-knife grinder—a ferocious and revolutionary calling strangely at variance with his harmless appearance ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... laugh." The rough rain-smelling earth still clings to them; when you take them in your hands, the mud of the highway comes off upon your fingers. Is it really, one wonders, mere literary craft, mere cunning artfulness, which gives these sentences the weight of a guillotine-blade crashing down upon the prostrate neck of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... four feet two inches diameter; and dangerous things they are to move, for if the men do not all heave or 'give' at the same moment the stone may slip, and the edge will take off a row of fingers as clean as the guillotine. Tibbald, of course, had his joke about that part of the machinery which is called the 'damsel.' He was a righteous man enough as millers go, but your miller was always a bit of a knave; nor could he forbear from boasting to me how he had ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... victim until within a few feet of the spot, when the engineer saw the man's head and endeavoured to stop his heavy train. But too late; the moving mass passed over, cutting his head from the shoulders as clean as it could have been done by the guillotine itself. Cooper was ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... those unfamiliar with our religion, as also based on a veneration for a very strange emblem; for the cross was the instrument used by the Romans for punishing with death, murderers and criminals of the lowest type; and what would be thought to-day, of a man worshipping the gallows or the guillotine, or carrying copies modeled from the same, suspended from his neck. However we of to-day all understand the emblem of the cross, and the Ancient Egyptians in their time, all understood the emblem of ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... 1790, and stipulated that the old castle should be demolished. Poplars and fir-trees now cover the ground of the ancient castle, and the name of Joinville is borne by a royal prince, the son of a dethroned king, the grandson of Louis Egalite, who died on the guillotine. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... his efforts vain, became somewhat anxious. He accordingly resolved to spend the night at Montmartre, accompany his brother and watch over him. In former times, when engaged with Abbe Rose in charitable work in the Charonne district, he had learnt that the guillotine could be seen from the house where Mege, the Socialist deputy, resided at the corner of the Rue Merlin. He therefore offered himself as a guide. As the execution was to take place as soon as it should legally be daybreak, that is, about half-past four o'clock, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... good and kind as he was wise and cultivated. He used to stop to gossip with old Cliquot every time he stopped at the porter's room to take or to leave his key. There he heard of the poor little orphan of the guillotine, who had no friend in the world but her father's old servant. He pitied me, and after many consultations with Father and Mother Cliquot, he assumed the position of guardian to me, and placed me at one of the best schools in Paris. He lingered in the city and came to see me very ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... from capital punishment became intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he enjoyed a respite ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... of February there appeared on the Piazza del Popolo a large platform with a guillotine and two gibbets, on which the culprits were to be executed. Many stands were constructed for the convenience of those who were curious to witness such a terrible act of justice; and the concourse was so great that some windows fetched as much as six dollars each. At ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... completed, to the right, it will present an almost matchless front of domestic architecture, built upon the Grecian model. It was in this place, facing his own regal residence of the Thuileries, that the unfortunate Louis—surrounded by a ferocious and bloodthirsty mob—was butchered by the guillotine. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... it?... And you too, you blackguard, since you were there and didn't stop him! Blood! Blood! You know I won't have it... Well, it's a bad lookout for you, my fine fellows... You'll have to pay the damage! And you won't get off cheaply either... Mind the guillotine!" And, shaking him violently, "What was it? Why ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... magnificent fete in honour of the Supreme Being, a man of the highest celebrity in science, and as distinguished for virtue and probity as philosophic genius, Lavoisier, was led out to the scaffold. On the day following that, Madame Elizabeth, that Princess whom the executioners could not guillotine, till they had turned aside their eyes from the sight of her angelic visage, stained the same axe with her blood!—And a month after, Robespierre, who wished to restore order for his own purposes—who wished to still the bloody ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... had a name I wish I could pronounce; A Breton gentleman was he, and wholly free from bounce, One like those famous fellows who died by guillotine For honour and the ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... has served its purpose, which was to guillotine and drive out most of the revolutionary workers from the party. The Constitution committee recommended that it be striken out by unanimous consent without going on the minutes or records. Ruthenberg opposed. He insisted that it be struck out and the minutes show the record of the action. It ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... upheaval at that time, for the people had revolted against their rulers and had overthrown their king and their nobility. Their king, Louis the Sixteenth perished on the public scaffold under the knife of the guillotine, and the French revolutionists had carried on such a reign of terror that all Europe was in turmoil and the hand of almost every other nation in the world was against the French. Even a number of the French themselves were opposed to their own government and had placed the town ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... misery flows! There is not a spot on that plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the pistol-snap of the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a speculator might read a justification of the numerous suicides complained of by hypocritical writers who are ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... shoulders, and cover the work I was engaged on. I started up, and looking up at my big sunlight, saw to my horror that I had wound up my easel, which is twelve feet high, and more nearly resembles a guillotine than anything else, so far that the top of it was in immediate contact with the gas, and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... had given to her a chance to know of what stuff she was made; that she did not marry him, as was proposed by the great Eugene; and that she did not live to see the beautiful head of her daughter, Marie Antoinette, fall under the guillotine. Though the court of Charles VI. rivalled in ceremonial observance that of Spain, the little archduchess was reared in almost Spartan simplicity of dress and food. From Jesuit text-books she learned ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... am quite of your opinion. And I should be very sorry," he added wickedly, "to make things seem blacker to you than they already do. But you see we have had a revolution against the nobility; we shall have one against wealth. Great names have been abolished by the guillotine, and great fortunes will be done away with next. A man was considered guilty if his name happened to be M. de Montmorency; it will be criminal to be M. Two Thousand Pounds a Year. Things are certainly getting on. I can speak all the more freely as I am absolutely disinterested, myself. I should ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... abstractions out of sight of the practical. Our publicists were not misled by convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of the human mind," the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more pure, accurate and profound are the principles upon which the constitution and laws of France have been formed than those which directed the Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure, and, as we may venture to term them, the untrained races, we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... and will remain, a Menippus, the satirist stained with blood. It was the popular chorus which led the people to their most important movements, and which was frequently stifled by the whistling of the cord of the street lamp, or in the hatchet-stroke of the guillotine. Camille Desmoulins was the remorseless offspring of the Revolution,—Marat was its fury; he had the clumsy tumblings of the brute in his thought, and its gnashing of teeth in his style. His journal (L'Ami du Peuple), the People's Friend, smelt of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... insight of the incredible depths of depravity of which the human mind is sometimes capable as I could certainly not otherwise have gained, unless indeed by associating with the ruffians who gathered daily round the guillotine to insult and exult over ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... for empire over the hearts of men it was surely Jeanne Becu, who first opened her eyes one August day in the year 1743, at dreary Vaucouleurs, in Joan of Arc's country, and who was fated to dance her light-hearted way through the palace of a King to the guillotine. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... of man- made creeds were persecuted and anathematized. The church formed a league with worldly rulers and used the strong arm of the law to crush those who would not accept its human standards of orthodoxy. The Inquisition, with the dungeon, stocks, guillotine and other diabolical means of torture, was called into requisition. It is claimed that no less than fifty million human beings were martyred in this effort of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, calling itself ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... gloom. It would strangle liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny God. It would bring into action these two fatal machines, one of which never works without the other—the assignat press and the guillotine. In a word, it would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in fever, and after the grand horrors which our fathers saw, we should have the horrible in all ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... the young preacher prayed to God for this infidel, and then he spoke so beautifully that the crowd was entranced. The big thin man replied, saying, "They had done right to guillotine Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and all the family." The indignation increased, and the men from Bois-de-Chenes, and especially their wives, wanted to get into the pew to knock him down, but just then Sirou came up, crying "Room! room!" ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... most curious features of popular Anarchism is its martyrology, aping Christian forms, with the guillotine (in France) in place of the cross. Many who have suffered death at the hands of the authorities on account of acts of violence were no doubt genuine sufferers for their belief in a cause, but others, ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... uttering the oft-quoted words, "The tree of Liberty thrives only when watered by the blood of tyrants;" escaped the fate of his associates; became a spy under Napoleon; was called by Burke, from his flowery oratory, the Anacreon of the Guillotine, and by Mercier, "the greatest liar in France;" he was inventor of the famous fable "his masterpiece," of the "Sinking of the Vengeur," "the largest, most inspiring piece of blaque manufactured, for some centuries, by any man or nation;" died in beggary (1755-1841). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... picture of the character of the nation—of the same nation, which, in these dark days of continual horror, could yet amuse, itself by an exhibition of dancing-dogs, under the blood-dropping stage of the guillotine; their cry was then, [55]"Vive la Mort!" Utterly inattentive to these inconsistencies, the French people continue willingly to cry out whatever rallying word may be given to them by those agents who, working in secret, according to the ruling authorities and the prevailing politics ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... you not know that to ignore our cry too long is to wake the Red Terror? Rameses refused to listen to it and perished miserably. Caesar refused to listen and was stabbed in the Senate House. The Bourbon Louis refused to listen and died on the guillotine; Charles Stuart refused to listen and died on the block; the white Czar refused to listen and was blown up in his own capital. Will you let it come to that? Will you drive us to it? We who boast ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. "Do you not see," he said, "the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S., though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?" He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted. He had great abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... they were particularly addressed. His Corinthian style, in which the Maenad of Mr. Burke was habited in the last mode of Almack's, his sarcasms against the illiterate and his invectives against the low, his descriptions of the country life of the aristocracy contrasted with the horrors of the guillotine, his Horatian allusions and his Virgilian passages, combined to produce a whole which equally fascinated ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... fulfilled his duty, had combated the outrage and defended the law. For this he had been condemned to death. The justice of that time, as we know. Justice executed justice. For this crime of being an honest man they had guillotined Charlet, guillotined Cuisinier, guillotined Cirasse. The guillotine was an instrument of the reign. Assassination by the guillotine was one of the means of order of that time. It was necessary to save Preveraud. He was little and slim: they dressed him as a woman. He was not sufficiently ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... butterfly, but could not. At length poor Tom, having neither bridle nor saddle, slipped from his seat, and fell into a white pot, where he was found almost drowned. The queen vowed he should be guillotined: but while the guillotine was getting ready, he was secured once more in a mouse-trap; when the cat seeing something stir, and supposing it to be the mouse, patted the trap about till she broke it, and set Tom at liberty. ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... face into her hands and shivered, and felt the fear of one under the flashing guillotine. She willed to move, to obey, at this tardy second, but something within her, stronger than herself, held her back. "I won't!" she screamed. The blow fell swiftly. The rope cut through the air with ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... always just one letter behind. He never understood this. Even when he laid his head under the guillotine, he felt that he was a much-abused man who had received a most unwarrantable treatment at the hands of people whom he had loved to the best ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... brave faces of these delicate women, walking in high-heeled shoes, all too frail for the hard-dusty roadways. They belonged to the same race and breed as those ladies who defied death with fine disdain upon the scaffold of the guillotine in the great Revolution. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... have done so, as he would almost certainly have been retaken. As it was, Antoine on more than one occasion concealed him behind the bundles of firewood, and once or twice he narrowly escaped detection by less friendly officials. There were times when the guillotine seemed to him almost better than this long suspense: but while other heads passed to the block, his remained on his shoulders; and so weeks and even months went by. And during all this time, sleeping ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... thirteenth century in him, had lost himself in pursuing his Rose, and how he had lost the Rose, too, waking up at last to the dull memory of pain and sorrow and death, that "tout porrist." The world had still a long march to make from the Rose of Queen Blanche to the guillotine of Madame du Barry; but the "Roman de la Rose" made epoch. For the first time since Constantine proclaimed the reign of Christ, a thousand years, or so, before Philip the Fair dethroned Him, the deepest expression of social feeling ended with the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... promises. It appeared as if this interview had exhausted her remaining strength. In 1786, a few days after the meeting with Trenck, Amelia died. Trenck lived but a few years; he went to France and died under the guillotine in 1793. As he sat with his companions upon the car on their way to execution, he said to the gaping crowd: "Eh bien, eh bien, de quoi vous eurerveillez-vous? C'eci n'est qu'une comedie a la Robespierre." These were Trenck's ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... weather to his hostess. In the middle of one of his sentences, he suddenly divined the situation, on seeing the row of servants sitting in a thievish corner of the hall. He took his seat with the air of a man driving to the guillotine, and I do not think I ever saw any one so much upset as he was for the remainder of his stay. Of course it may be said that a sense of humour should have saved a man from such a collapse of moral force, but a sense of ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Dalahaide was dead in life. That is true. Family influence, the tremendous eloquence of a man engaged to plead his cause, the fact that Max insisted upon his innocence, while the evidence was entirely circumstantial, saved him from the guillotine, which I believe he would have preferred, in his desperation. He was sent to that Hades upon earth, New Caledonia, ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... priests, and roars of massacre. I there heard the names of men long suspected, but of whom they now spoke openly as the true leaders of the national movement; and of others marked for assassination. They drank toasts to Death, to Queen Poissarde, and to Goddess Guillotine. It was a pandemonium. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... are only feebly illustrated by the proscriptions of Sulla in ancient Rome (see p. 283). All aristocrats, all persons suspected of lukewarmness in the cause of liberty, were ordered to the guillotine. Hundreds were murdered simply because their wealth was wanted. Others fell, not because they were guilty of any political offence, but on account of having in some way incurred the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Celie?" he asked, and he addressed the question to Wethermill. It struck Ricardo as one of the strangest details in all this strange affair that the detective should ask with confidence for information which might help to bring Celia Harland to the guillotine from the man who had staked ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... French crisis would have been quite as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats and Coleridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies. In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly; and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine. Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed freely over Kubla Khan; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have locked him up for a madman. Even Hebert (the one really ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... his generation the poor man thinks himself wise. In Russia, however, things are managed differently. The poor man is under the heel of the rich. Some day there will be in Russia a Terror, but not yet. Some day the moujik will erect unto himself a rough sort of a guillotine, but not in our day. Perhaps some of us who are young men now may dimly read in our dotage of a great upheaval beside which the Terror of France will be tame and uneventful. Who can tell? When a country begins to grow, its mental ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... itself as extraordinary power. Under the early emperors you would have been a martyr, at the time of the Reformation an anabaptist, during the French Revolution one of those inspired Girondists who mounted the guillotine with the marseillaise on their lips. But you are my ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... struggling, but it is on the heights, where, Goethe tells us, "lies repose." There are many and many women martyrs who go to their graves unknown, suffering no pangs of the Inquisition, the gallows, or the guillotine, but tortured by unrequited affections,—by a love which it was not possible to gratify without a loss of principle or a sacrifice of conscience. Is it not better to break one's heart than to break ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... "Yes, to-morrow the guillotine falls," he answered. "To-night we dance in each other's arms. Immemorial tableau. Laughter, love, and song against the perfect background—death. Let's not cheat ourselves by being sad. To-morrow will ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... traitorous dealings of your Petions and Rolands. It is well if the federalists in arms do not march on Paris and massacre the patriot remnant whom famine is too slow in killing! There is no time to lose; we must tax the price of flour and guillotine every man who speculates in the food of the people, foments insurrection or palters with the foreigner. The Convention has set up an extraordinary tribunal to try conspirators. Patriots form the court; but will its ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... entries; basement windows give glimpses into Hadean caverns tenanted by legions of printer's devils; and the very air is charged with the hum of press and with odours of glue and paste and oil. The entire neighbourhood is given up to the printer and binder; and even my patient turned out to be a guillotine-knife grinder—a ferocious and revolutionary calling strangely at variance with his ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... Place de la Revolution, he is brought to the guillotine; beside him, brave Abbe Edgeworth says, "Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven"; the axe clanks down; a king's life is shorn away. At home, this killing of a king has divided all friends; abroad it has united all enemies. England declares war; Spain declares war; they all declare war. "The coalised ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... in are enough of themselves to sadden any man's face. In the Reign of Terror no living being in all the city of Paris can rise in the morning and be certain of escaping the spy, the denunciation, the arrest, or the guillotine, before night. Such times are trying enough to oppress any man's spirits; but Lomaque is not thinking of them or caring for them now. Out of a mass of papers which lie before him on his old writing-table, he has just taken up and read one, which has carried his thoughts back to the past, and to the ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... Jacobins. Each of these parties in succession rests upon its more advanced element. So soon as it has carried the revolution far enough not to be able to keep pace with, much less march ahead of it, it is shoved aside by its more daring allies, who stand behind it, and it is sent to the guillotine. Thus the revolution moves ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... of a guillotine by which a person could chop his own head off neatly without chance of failure, and the other had to do with the improvement of science in respect ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... an instant. They put a man inside a frame and a sort of broad knife falls by machinery—they call the thing a guillotine-it falls with fearful force and weight-the head springs off so quickly that you can't wink your eye in between. But all the preparations are so dreadful. When they announce the sentence, you know, and prepare the criminal and tie his hands, and cart him off to the scaffold—that's the fearful ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... will remain, a Menippus, the satirist stained with blood. It was the popular chorus which led the people to their most important movements, and which was frequently stifled by the whistling of the cord of the street lamp, or in the hatchet-stroke of the guillotine. Camille Desmoulins was the remorseless offspring of the Revolution,—Marat was its fury; he had the clumsy tumblings of the brute in his thought, and its gnashing of teeth in his style. His journal (L'Ami du Peuple), the People's Friend, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... are called upon, along with other organs, to eliminate these morbid taints. Is it any wonder that frequently they become inflamed and subject to decay? What, however, can be gained by destroying them with iodine or extirpating them with the surgeon's scissors or the 'guillotine'? ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... great: it may be well, if in this huge French Revolution itself, with its all-developing fury, we find some Three. Mortals driven rabid we find; sputtering the acridest logic; baring their breast to the battle-hail, their neck to the guillotine; of whom it is so painful to say that they too are still, in good part, manufactured Formalities, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... arrested and committed to the prison of the Luxembourg. Just before his confinement he had finished the first part of his 'Age of Reason,' and confided it to the care of his friend Joel Barlow for publication. He was now taken ill, to which circumstance he ascribed his escape from the guillotine; and on the fall of Robespierre was released. In 1795 he published, at Paris, the second part of his 'Age of Reason.' He returned to America in 1802, bringing with him a woman named Madame Bonneville, whom he had seduced away from her husband, with her two sons, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... such crowds met before? Somewhere he had seen them in body or in spirit. Was it in the streets of Paris before the French Revolution sent those long lines of death carts rumbling over her pavements to the guillotine? ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... the Altar of Freedom; And though neither marble nor gilding Was used in those days to adorn Our simple republican building, Corbleu! but the MERE GUILLOTINE Cared little for splendor or show, So you gave her an axe and a beam, And a plank and a ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of that pretty woman from Toulouse, at Bordeaux, a case which made a good deal of stir at the time, it was I who forced the accused to make the confession that led her to the guillotine. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... which it fell to my lot to witness at Brussels in this second and short visit, was neither gay nor handsome, nor dear in any sense, but the very reverse; it being that of the punishment of the guillotine inflicted on a wretched murderer, named John Baptist Michel.[2] Hearing, at the moment of my arrival, that this tragical scene was on the point of being acted in the great square of the market-place, I determined for once to make a sacrifice of my feelings to the desire of being present at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... Charlotte Corday! we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by moonlight—silent and terror-stricken, our very ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... far, therefore, it was necessary that Jacques Rollet should die; and so the affair took its course; and early one morning the guillotine was erected in the court-yard of the gaol, three criminals ascended the scaffold, and three heads fell into the basket, which were presently afterward, with the trunks that had been attached to them, buried in a corner of ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... nearly all perished or been banished from France. The national assembly was divided into desperate factions, which often turned their arms against one another. When one party triumphed, proscription followed, and the guillotine was put in requisition, and blood flowed in torrents. The grossest irreligion likewise prevailed. Leaders of the atheistical mob would extend their arms to heaven and dare a God, if he existed, to vindicate his insulted majesty, and crush them with his thunderbolts. Over the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... possessed, and used it unscrupulously, to drive a Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons. He was a man trained in the historical traditions of Parliament. He assuredly did not relish the use of the closure and the guillotine. He was supported in the Commons by a very narrow majority, never I think exceeding forty-eight, and often falling below that number. The power of the party system, or as Americans say, the "Machine," was ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... noise of their marching feet on the roadway had the ominous sound of the roll of the tumbrils, bearing their victims to the guillotine. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... speediest thoroughbred will sometimes run like a cart horse. No one can be always at the "top of his form." But after making all allowances for human weakness and occasional lapses, when he once reached a definite conclusion he was as abrupt and remorseless as a guillotine. Many a hopeful athlete had been decapitated so swiftly and neatly, that, like the man in the fable, he did not know his head was off until ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... dislocated his jaw, and is now in a precarious state. Our Assistant Critic, Deputy Assistant Critic, Deputy Assistant Sub-Critic, and a few extra Supernumerary Critics, then went in a body and looked at this young woman's head, apparently taken after an interview with Madame Guillotine. They looked at the head from all sides, and finally stood on their own, but they could not make head or tail of it. Any person giving information as to the meaning, and paying threepence, will receive a presentation copy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... hair and bare bosom, gave the queen a handful of rods, bearing the inscription, "For Marie Antoinette!" Another showed her a guillotine, a third a gallows, with the inscription, "Tremble, tyrant! thy hour has come!" Another held up before her, on the point of a pike, a human heart dripping with blood, and cried: "Thus shall they all bleed—the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... when she had sat for him. He could recall Del Ferice's mock heroics, Donna Tullia's ill-expressed invectives, and his own half-sarcastic sympathy in the liberal movement; but the young fellow in an old velveteen jacket who used to talk glibly about the guillotine, about stringing-up the clericals to street-lamps and turning the churches into popular theatres, was surely not the energetic, sunburnt Zouave who had been hunting down brigands in the Samnite hills last summer, who spent three-fourths ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... ages. A methodical exploration has revealed a spearhead of silex, a bronze axe, bone bracelets, a coin of the Hundred Years' War, and lastly a little pin- cushion of cloth in the shape of a heart, ornamented with metal crosses, the relic of some refugee in the Reign of Terror, hiding to escape the guillotine. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... de Sauvieres, like Rebec! and even like Henri, although the models are rarer. As for the character of Cadio, which is more of an invention than the others, what I like best in him is his ferocious anger. In it is the special truth of the character. Humanity turned to fury, the guillotine become mystic, life only a sort of bloody dream, that is what must take place in such heads. I think you have one Shakespearean scene: that of the delegate to the Convention with his two secretaries, is of an ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... a very fine stock at home," said Monsieur Goupille. Mademoiselle Adele de Courval sighed: "Helas! they remind me of happier days, when I was a petite and my dear grandmamma took me in her lap and told me how she escaped the guillotine: she was an emigree, and you know her father ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sacrificed —Execution of the King and Queen, Philippe Egalite, Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, Robespiere, cum multus aliis —Unexampled dispatch introduced in putting persons to death by means of the guillotine—Guillotin, the inventor or improver of this instrument, dies of grief—Little impression left on the mind of the spectators of these sanguinary scenes—Lord Cornwallis arrives ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... their hides And parchment make, on which, in words of gold, Shall be inscribed, so all the world may read: "Saturnine pleasure it to us doth give, To see them walk the plank from scuttled ship." Caesar: Ha Ha! but speak it not aloud, until 'tis done. Both: Whist! whist as mice! We'll oil the guillotine. Exeunt both while Caesar washes his ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... exterminating angel had come up the Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those white heads under the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern that the old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended my advent, to see a furrowed ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "To the guillotine both of my comrades were sent, But the Church, saving me for the tonsure, Hid me off in the wilds, and my dame, to her shame, To be Pere sold me out from a Monsieur; And now she is clad in the silk of the court, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... ways, poor, spotless angel! They brought him in guilty of a foul murder and he was guillotined—gentleman and artist of merit though he was. They were kind to his young son; his friends made up a purse and sent him afar to be educated and reared in ignorance. But the shadow of the guillotine is projected afar, and I saw its red finger point to the assassin's offspring. I have found him. If my hand is not too feeble to ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... father's name. I tell you, not only does he stand in peril of his life, but that this household, even you—you, so fair, so gentle, so delicate—may at any moment become the prey of a populace as frenzied as ever dragged to the guillotine the shrieking beauties of the Court of France. Miss Allison, whatsoever may be the injustice with which your father has treated me, it sinks into nothingness in comparison with my sense of the peril that threatens you. I am charged with ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... herself forever! She had done that exquisitely well, as she did everything, not even advising me that I was to be her errand boy on such an errand, trusting me to find out by accident, as I had, that I was to be my own executioner, was to spring my own guillotine. She knew that, none the less, though I understood what the letter meant thus addressed, I sacredly must execute her silent trust. Oh! Helena, yours was indeed an exquisite revenge for that one hour of a dour man's ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... of the French was not a cruel man, and it was with sincere regret that he signed the death-warrants of men who had sought his own life, and who had murdered his friends; but it would have been no act of cruelty, had he sent his rival to the guillotine. When a man makes a throw for a crown, he accepts what is staked, against it,—a coffin. Nothing is better established than this, that, when a sovereign is assailed, the intention of the assailant being his overthrow, that sovereign has a perfect right to put his rival to death, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... all the nots. In the Edinburgh Advertiser of yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:—'It [The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the "bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets of Paris." It has reminded them of the time when a "grey discrowned head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;" ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Paolo Giacometti, in which Madame Ristori was wont to perform, presents an instance of this kind. "Marie Antoinette" is in five acts, with a prologue exhibiting the queen's life at Versailles, in 1786, and an epilogue showing her imprisonment in the Conciergerie, and her march to the guillotine in the custody ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... Bailly [Jean Sylvani, born September 17, 1736], First National President, First Mayor of Paris.... It is the 10th of November, 1793, a cold bitter drizzling rain, as poor Bailly is led through the streets.... Silent, unpitied, sits the innocent old man.... The Guillotine is taken down ... is carried to the riverside; is there set up again, with slow numbness; pulse after pulse still counting itself out in the old man's weary heart. For hours long; amid curses and bitter frost-rain! 'Bailly, thou tremblest,' said one. 'Mon ami, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... was at the same time condemned to be burnt alive, and suffered her sentence accordingly; but Lady Warriston, in respect of her gentle descent, was appointed to die by the Maiden, a sort of rude guillotine, imported, it is said, from Halifax, by the Earl of Morton, while regent, who was himself the first ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... allowed to escape! Poor Madame Wolsky shall surely be avenged. But Mrs. Bailey will not be asked to make any statement, except in writing—in what you in England call an affidavit. You do not realise, although you doubtless know, what our legal procedure is like. Not even in order to secure the guillotine for Madame Wachner and her Fritz would I expose Mrs. Bailey to the ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of those proceedings last night would be, of course, the guillotine at Hyde Park Corner. Coryston wants our heads! There's nothing else to be said. I took the speeches for young men's nonsense—just midsummer madness, but I find people very angry. Your son! one ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of sinister irony. "There's only one thing that could remove it—the guillotine. Besides, the malignant condition has spread. There is pressure upon the submaxillary and subclavicular ganglia, and probably the axillary ganglia also. His respiration, circulation and digestion will soon be obstructed ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar—a patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand—to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 'knout de Russe'; the 'poucettes', the 'crapaudine' on neck and ankles and wrists; all, all as bad as the 'Pater Noster' of the Inquisition, as Mayer said the other day in the face of Charpentier, the Commandant of the penitentiary. How pleasant also to think of the Boulevard de Guillotine! I tell you it is brutal, horrible. Think of what prisoners have to suffer here, whose only crime is that they were of the Commune; that they were just a little madder than ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... grow a little uneasy. A disagreeable surprise, if my excursion, in which I was to break banks and hearts, and, as you see, heads, should end upon the gallows or the guillotine. I was not clear, in those times of political oscillation, which was ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the cause of Christ, another king was dragged forth from the gates of his Renaissance palace,[27] to die, by the hands of the thousands of his people gathered in another crusade; or what shall that be called—whose sign was not the cross, but the guillotine?" ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... points of detail; some of which might succeed, but the result of the whole must be to cut to pieces the small force we have, without adequate success. Besides this, the reliance on the dispositions of the country, with the single exception of Toulon, pressed as it was by famine at one door, and the guillotine at the ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... was tumultuous in the extreme; but whenever the classics hissed, the disciples of Romanticism not only cheered, but rose to their feet and howled. When the groans of the Philistines became unbearable, the enthusiasts of the pit would drown them by shouting "To the guillotine with the sycophants." But though the evening was a continual uproar, no doubt was entertained at its close that the victory was with the Romanticists; and at the conclusion of the performance the name of the author was proclaimed as that of a victorious ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... seemed indifferent to his own fate; whatever it might be, he wished that his mistress should share it. He had no objection to going to the guillotine as long as he was sure that Gabrielle would accompany him. She sought to escape such a consummation by representing herself as a mere instrument in Eyraud's hands. It was even urged in her defence that, in committing the ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... persistent asseverations of innocence. His known hatred of Destouches, the threats he had uttered concerning him, his conduct in front of the cathedral, Marguerite's evidence, and the finding the crown in his pocket, left no doubt of his guilt, and he was condemned to suffer death by the guillotine. He appealed of course, but that, everybody felt, could only prolong his life for a short ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... soil, the climate, are the same. If those dull, honest Englishmen, who explain the events of 1793 and 1794 by saying that the French are naturally frivolous and cruel, were in the right, why is the guillotine now standing idle? Not surely for want of Carlists, of aristocrats, of people guilty of incivism, of people suspected of being suspicious characters. Is not the true explanation this, that the Frenchman of 1832 has been ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... misunderstanding, it will not be amiss to say a few words about the temporal peculiarities of these dream processes. In a very interesting discussion, apparently suggested by Maury's puzzling guillotine dream, Goblet tries to demonstrate that the dream requires no other time than the transition period between sleeping and awakening. The awakening requires time, as the dream takes place during that period. One is inclined to believe that the final picture ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... everything down to your hat-box, your socks (don't you go in for ribbed socks?), your shovel and tongs, and the very wood you've got in the cellar! Gobseck! Gobseck! in the name of virtuous folly, who told you to go to that commercial guillotine?" ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... there was no meal in that house to which she sat down earlier than half an hour Jate. She had a rightful property-interest in the Revolution, her own great-uncle having been one of those who "suffered;" not, however, under the guillotine; for to Georges Meilhac appertained the rare distinction of death by accident on the day when the business-like young Bonaparte played upon the ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... suffered from this fear for a lifetime, and who had been learning to drop resistances in other ways, was once brought face to face with the necessity for going to the dentist, and the old fear was at once aroused,—something like the feeling one might have in preparing for the guillotine,—and she suffered from it a day or two before she remembered her new principles. Then, when the new ideas came back to her mind, she at once applied them and said, "Yes, I am afraid, I am awfully afraid. I am perfectly willing to be afraid," ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... was not considered "incompatible with freedom" in France,—a violent and blood-thirsty fellow, who shot at Lafayette on the dix-sept Juillet, narrowly missing him,—led an attacking party against the Tuileries on the dix Aot, and escaped the guillotine to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... tongue were paralyzed. [Footnote: "Memoires de Madame de Creque," vol. iii., p. 179.] From hundreds of healthy women the physician of the dauphiness chose three nurses for the prince. At the end of a week two of them were dead, and the third one, Madame Guillotine, after nursing him for six weeks, was carried of by small-pox. Even the frivolous grandfather was terrified by such an accumulation of evil omens, and he was heard to regret that he had given to his grandson the title of Duke ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... execution of the king, uttering the oft-quoted words, "The tree of Liberty thrives only when watered by the blood of tyrants;" escaped the fate of his associates; became a spy under Napoleon; was called by Burke, from his flowery oratory, the Anacreon of the Guillotine, and by Mercier, "the greatest liar in France;" he was inventor of the famous fable "his masterpiece," of the "Sinking of the Vengeur," "the largest, most inspiring piece of blaque manufactured, for some centuries, by any man or nation;" died ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... block, and there held down by main force till the axe had fallen, and his dissevered head rolled on the scaffold."(343) Nor was the king the only victim; near the same spot two thousand and eight hundred human beings perished by the guillotine during the bloody days ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... did not kill my son. It was a murderer that I had with me, a murderer for whom the police were hunting and for whom the guillotine was waiting!" ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... love, for it is the duty of the subjects to love their emperor. Bear this in mind, count, and do not repeat again this new-fashioned word 'people;' I cannot bear it, it smells so much of the republic and guillotine. Well, I have told you that, if we resumed hostilities, we should be destitute of three very essential things, namely, a good army, a great captain, and money. There is no doubt whatever that we should lose the first battle again; ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... Maggard had been kneeling with his neck on the guillotine block the intense burden of his suspense could hardly have ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... hoarse, for a 'cobbler' or a julep, without getting either. Yet our uppish people will eat nothing, drink nothing, wear nothing that is not French. We have been told of certain brokers in Wall-street who import even their desserts from Paris; not their deserts, my friend, for the guillotine is the only French thing which we don't imitate or import. No wine is fit for our tables without the prefix of a chateau something; every thing that is composed of wool is something de laine, and all our clothes are made of drap de ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... and Poissardes of the last French revolution but three, would have raised you by acclamation to the dignity of Decollator of the royal family of France for that brave sentiment. But you were not at Paris, I suppose, during the reign of the guillotine, Mr. Landor? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... to Harris, is British to the core. I remember George quite patriotically indignant with Harris once for suggesting the introduction of the guillotine into England. ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... leap ("Memoires," i. 122)? No doubt Dumas believed what he heard about this ancestor—in whom, perhaps, one may see a hint of the giant Porthos. In the Revolution and in the wars his father won the name of Monsieur de l'Humanite, because he made a bonfire of a guillotine; and of Horatius Cocles, because he held a pass as bravely as the Roman "in the ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... A rude sort of guillotine, called the maiden. The implement is now in possession of ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... ordinary prisoner of war, and threw him Into that forbidding prison, the Temple, from whose iron-barred windows the unfortunate sailor watched for two years the horrors of the Reign of Terror in its last stages, the tossing crowds, the tumbrils rolling past, crowded with victims for the guillotine. Sidney Smith escaped at last by a singularly audacious trick. Two confederates, dressed in dashing uniform, one wearing the dress of an adjutant, and the other that of an officer of still higher rank, presented themselves at the Temple with forged ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... disappointment. No man could be more thoroughly ruined; baffled in theory, undone in practice—an exile from his country, a fugitive from his troops—overwhelmed by the hopelessness of giving a constitution to France, and with nothing but the dungeon before him, and the crash of the guillotine behind. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... Power is always right; weakness always wrong. Power is always insolent and despotic: whether exercised in throwing its opposers into a bastile; burning them at the stake; torturing them on a rack; beheading them with a guillotine; or taking them off, as at the massacre of St. Bartholomew, at a general sweep. Power is the same in Turkey as in America. When the will of man is raised above law, it is always tyranny and despotism, whether it is the will of a bashaw or of ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... had been her own sister! In vain old Doctor Manette pleaded. That his own daughter was now Darnay's wife made no difference in their eyes. The jury at once found Darnay guilty and sentenced him to die by the guillotine the next morning. ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... with a horrid grin; "if we had you in la belle France, your head would not remain long on your shoulders. We guillotine all such. It's the best way to treat them. They have trampled too long on our ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... dream) would not interfere with her vacation. Maury, an early student of this topic, was awakened from a feverish dream of the French Revolution by something falling on his neck; this, under the circumstances, he took to be the guillotine. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... employed with his experiments on the second pendulum, resided for several months in one of the smaller Shetland islands; and, fresh from the troubles of France—his imagination bearing about with it, if I may so speak, the stains of the guillotine—the state of trustful security in which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment. "Here, during the twenty-five years in which Europe has been devouring herself," he exclaimed, "the door of the house I inhabit has ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... her child must leave Paris to-morrow," said Carton. "They are in danger of being denounced. It is a capital crime to mourn for, or sympathise with, a victim of the guillotine. Be ready to start at two o'clock to-morrow afternoon. See them into their seats; take your own seat. The moment I come to you, take me in, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... weary streets. It was past midnight when I found myself, without knowing where I was, in a large open space, in the midst of which a solitary lamp was burning. I approached it, and, to my horror, saw that it was the guillotine, over which, in mournful cadence, a lantern swung, creaking its chain as the night-wind stirred it. The dim outline of the fearful scaffold, the fitful light that fell upon the platform, and the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... never repeat without a strong emotion the following stanzas, begun by Andre Chenier, in the dreadful period of the French revolution. He was waiting for his turn to be dragged to the guillotine, when ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... doorway, with his long pipe in his mouth, with which he puffed smoke into the face of each of the princesses as she passed,—the guard bursting into loud laughs at each puff. Wherever they went, the prisoners saw a guillotine, or a gallows, or some vile inscription chalked upon the walls. One of these inscriptions was, "Little cubs must be strangled." Others threatened death, in a gibing way, to the king or the queen. Clery one day saw the king reading some such threat of death, and would have rubbed it out; ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... Skeleton. "I wish all the nobs could hear us talk, who think to make us quake before the guillotine. They have only to come to the Barriere Saint Jacques the day of my benefit; they will hear me crack jokes with the crowd, and say to Jack, in a bold voice, 'Open the door till I go down into the cellar!' Renewed ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... her family. Politics in their larger aspect—revolution and war—were of course very real at that date to every patriotic citizen, and came home with especial force to the Austens, whose cousin's husband perished by the guillotine,[23] and whose brothers were constantly fighting on the sea. In her last published sentence at the end of Persuasion the author tells us how her Anne Elliot 'gloried' in being the wife of a sailor; and no ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... his ink when he cursed the English and damned the Prussians; and he obtained much gratification in jabbing his quill-bodkin into what he termed the sniveling nobility of the old regime. Dog of dogs! was he not himself noble? Had not his parents and his brothers gone to the guillotine with the rest of them? But he, thank God, had no wooden mind; he could look progress and change in the face and follow their bent. And now, all the crimes and heroisms of the Revolution, all the glorious pageantry of the empire, had come to nothing. A Bourbon, thick-skulled, sordid, worn-out, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... Dugdale and Dodsworth had done for England—and a Monasticum Neustriacum was the commendable object of his ambition. He promised much, and perhaps did more than he promised. His curious collection (exclusively of the cart-loads of books which were sent to Caen) was shewn to his countrymen; but the guillotine was now the order of the day—when Moysant "resolved to visit England, and submit to the English nobility the plan of his work, as that nation always attached importance to the preservation of the monuments, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... in favor of inaugurating a scientific revolution. There is no need to raise a guillotine in the city's square and drag to their death those who are living upon the life's blood of the many. This is the crude way ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... voluminous account of the terrors of the French revolution a remarkable passage:—servants denounced masters, debtors denounced creditors, women denounced husbands, children denounced parents, youth denounced protecting age; gratitude was unknown; a favour conferred led to the guillotine: but never, never in that awful period, in that reign of the vilest passions of our nature over reason, was there one instance, one single instance, of a parent ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... of the guillotine is over you!" said Sissy, in a bombastic whisper addressed to Mrs. Pemberton—a comforting formula the Madigans had invented to still their envy of those who rode in carriages. But her smiling face, when it turned toward Crosby, had ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... diagnostical value for the classes in power; but the latter, unfortunately, in every period of history, in times of political crisis, as in those of social crisis, have shown themselves unable to conceive of any other remedy than brutal repression—the guillotine or the prison—and they fancy that thus they can cure the organic and constitutional disease which vexes ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... the Vivarais. 26. Decreed, that the Louvre and the Tuilleries united shall be the habitation of the King, and that all monuments of science and art shall be collected and kept there. 31. Decreed, that the punishment of death shall be inflicted without torture. From thence came the use of the guillotine;-an instrument of death so called from its author, a member of the national assembly. June. Letter of the Abbe Raynal to the assembly. Persecutions against non-conforming priests. Their tithes given ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... liberty, equality, and fraternity, he combined the good and the evil of our old society in an eclectic philosophy which he embodied in a constitution. Excellent Pinheiro! Liberty even to passive submission, fraternity even to identity of language, equality even in the jury-box and at the guillotine,—such was his ideal republic. Unappreciated genius, of whom the present century was unworthy, but whom ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... is alleged, was that Tallien provoked the episode of the 9th Thermidor (July 22, 1794). The few faltering sentences which Robespierre wished to utter were never spoken. He was "choked by the blood of Danton," and hurried off to the guillotine which awaited him ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... and his sentence to six months' imprisonment, for simply writing a strong Editorial in the Evenement in condemnation of Legal Killing, is making a profound sensation here. I think it will hasten the downfall both of the Guillotine and the "party of Order" which thus assumes the championship of that venerated institution. The Times' Paris correspondent, I perceive, takes up the tale of Hugo's article having been calculated to ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... political creeds committed as by the present Administration? The infamous Sag Nicht party with which you act, and of which you are a leader and a High Priest, though the "son of a now sainted father," has applied the political guillotine to almost every man in office who has dared to differ with them in their high estimate of foreign paupers and Catholic vagabonds, in many instances turning out native-born Protestants, and filling their ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... O "manes of July!" (the phrase is pretty and grammatical) why did you with sharp bullets break those Louvre windows? Why did you bayonet red-coated Swiss behind that fair white facade, and, braving cannon, musket, sabre, perspective guillotine, burst yonder bronze gates, rush through that peaceful picture-gallery, and hurl royalty, loyalty, and a thousand years of Kings, head-over-heels out ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pretty life!" Madame Lorilleux kept saying. "We all know where the money came from that she paid for her wretched shop! She borrowed it from the blacksmith; and he springs from a nice family too! Didn't the father cut his own throat to save the guillotine the trouble of doing so? Anyhow, there was something disreputable of ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... giant's step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to travel. Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a history of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... enthusiastic, at the march of tremendous events, until the evil hour in which friend began to denounce friend, and heads, quite other than aristocratic—those of men and women but yesterday the idols and chosen leaders of the people—went daily to the filling of la veuve Guillotine's unspeakable market-basket. The spectacle proved too upsetting both to Mr. Verity's amiable mind and rather queasy stomach. Faith failed; while even the millennium seemed hardly worth purchasing at so detestable a cost. He stood altogether too close to the terrible ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... would convert France into the country of gloom. It would strangle liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny God. It would bring into action these two fatal machines, one of which never works without the other—the assignat press and the guillotine. In a word, it would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in fever, and after the grand horrors which our fathers saw, we should have the horrible in all that ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... also based on a veneration for a very strange emblem; for the cross was the instrument used by the Romans for punishing with death, murderers and criminals of the lowest type; and what would be thought to-day, of a man worshipping the gallows or the guillotine, or carrying copies modeled from the same, suspended from his neck. However we of to-day all understand the emblem of the cross, and the Ancient Egyptians in their time, all understood the emblem of ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... hands, relaxed, and he allowed himself to be led. Truly, he was disgusted with his faintness and weakness. He had seen men die who knew they were going to die. His task as reporter had led him more than once to the foot of the guillotine. And the wretches he had seen there had died bravely. Extraordinarily enough, the most criminal had ordinarily met death most bravely. Of course, they had had leisure to prepare themselves, thinking a long time in advance ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... smiling citizens who have been nearly hanged by the Turks. The fortunate gentleman seems still to be regarding his escape with a broad grin. If you were introduced to a polite Frenchman who had come straight from the guillotine, or to an affable American who had only just vacated the electrical chair, you would feel a faint curiosity about the whole story. If a friend introduced somebody, saying, "My friend Robinson; his sentence has been commuted to penal ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... continued insurrections. Some time afterwards, having again refused to obey the order these commissioners of the Convention gave, to mow down with grapeshot the insurrectionists of Paris, he had been summoned before a commission, which would not have failed to send him to the guillotine, if General Bonaparte, who had succeeded him in the command of the army of the interior, had not used all his influence to save his life. Such repeated acts of courage and generosity are enough, and more than enough, to cause us to pardon in this brave officer, the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Greeks proclaimed their undying hostility to the Turks, fought them, shook off their yoke, and erected a national kingdom on the ruins of Turkish tyranny. The French Revolutionists openly declared war upon the old regime, eradicated it by means of the guillotine, and established a republic where it had been. Similarly the English Puritans repudiated allegiance to Charles I, brought him to the block, and instituted the Commonwealth in his place; while the Whigs drove out James II and ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... France, we learn that the guillotine bathed in blood was the emblem of their transition state, from serfs to freemen. With the Negro were the antithesis of anger, revenge, or despair, that of joy, gratitude, and hope, has ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... with that half-stunned misery written clear in lips and eyes, she must, he knew, have reached the outmost border of endurance. Karyl bent solicitously forward and spoke, and she nodded as if answering in a dream, smiling wanly. It was all as some young Queen might have gone to the guillotine rather than to her coronation. As she looked bewilderedly from side to side her glance fell upon the clustering flowers of the vine. Benton gripped the iron bars and groaned, and then her eyes met his. For a moment her pupils ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... nameless age of black silence, and then there was a crowded hour of glorious life. When I heard the shouts and then the shots I tried to remember Sydney Carton and the French aristocrats taking snuff on the steps of the guillotine, and I tried to think of something handsome and dressy in the way of a farewell speech, in case it might ever be reported in the States. The C.E. was splendid, only, when the great doors clanged open and the mob streamed in calling wildly ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... surprise and the nervous strain of the disappearing dollars, she asked no further questions after the welcome news that Miss Hampshire existed and had a "room to rent." Hastily she paid off the chauffeur, adding something for himself (it seemed like tipping the man at the guillotine) and breathed again only when her trunk and dressing-bag blocked the ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... nor her air tragic, for he found her an excellent companion, fond of children and flowers, and at times merry in her own fashion. But this gaiety of hers always reminded Morris of that which is said to have prevailed in the days of the Terror among those destined to the guillotine. Never for one hour did she seem to forget the end. "'Vanity of vanities,' saith the Preacher"; and ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... surely Jeanne Becu, who first opened her eyes one August day in the year 1743, at dreary Vaucouleurs, in Joan of Arc's country, and who was fated to dance her light-hearted way through the palace of a King to the guillotine. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... he's bound to be. But so far we have only hypothetical suppositions, or rather certainties which are personal to myself. We shall never intercept the guillotine with those. Ah, if we could only find the bank-notes! Given the bank-notes, M. Dudouis would act. Without them, he ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... by the judge, might be grossly misrepresented; but how was he to dispute them? There was no justice in this miserable country, with such a partial and one-sided system of law. He began to fear that his life was in their hands; already he felt his head on the block, under the shadow of the awful guillotine. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... sights of men hung from lamp-posts; heard the grisly cry, "A la lanterne! a la lanterne!" and was even himself seized by some of the mob, though he happily contrived, in the confusion, to slip away. In Marseilles, too, he first saw the guillotine; it was carried about the streets in procession whilst the populace yelled out the "Marseillaise Hymn." Later on in the Revolution he was seized, as an Englishman, and imprisoned with a number of others at Abbeville; but, escaping from there, he made a wonderful journey through France, Switzerland, ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... another indefinite period Joy opened her eyes under the remarkable impression that Oliver Cromwell was carrying her to the guillotine in a cocoa-nut shell; it was really a very remarkable impression, considering that she had been broad awake ever since she came to bed. As soon as her eyes were opened she opened her mouth likewise—to gasp out a little scream. For something very tall and white was sitting ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the shrieks of females, I could perceive that plunder was going on, and that the intention was, after having ransacked the place, to set it on fire. Yet a strong body of cavalry mounted in the middle of the square, and keeping guard round a waggon on which a guillotine had been already erected, still made me feel that an attack would be hopeless. I soon saw a rush of the people from one of the side streets; a couple of dragoon helmets were visible above the crowd; and three or four carts followed, filled with young ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... the black And hideous structure of the guillotine; Beside the haloed countenance of saints There hangs the multiple and knotted lash. The Christ of love, benign and beautiful, Looks at the torture-rack, by hate conceived And bigotry sustained. The prison cell, With blood-stained walls, ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... if my friends will not come to my aid when I want them? Messieurs, you may believe that Herbert de Lernac is quite as formidable when he is against you as when he is with you, and that he is not a man to go to the guillotine until he has seen that every one of you is en route for New Caledonia. For your own sake, if not for mine, make haste, Monsieur de ——, and General ——, and Baron —— (you can fill up the blanks for yourselves as you read this). I ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which he had seized again, while the blood spurted freely from the wound in which he had left his poniard. "You know our agreement; either I die alone or three of us will die together. Forward, march!" He walked straight to the guillotine, turning the knife in his breast as ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... of it, one of our most powerful and inveterate foes. British gold and British influence could, however, now command the use of the bow-string in Russia, as it had heretofore directed the use of the guillotine in France; for, on the 23d of March, he was found murdered in his chamber, and his amiable and ingenuous son, Alexander, the present tyrant, succeeded him, he being understood to be better disposed to listen to the proposals of the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... reformer, at once courageous and wise, shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his case revolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of ninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the revolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between Chauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than either of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down from it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth, and that he would not waste his time in frivolities that were ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... his growing aversion from capital punishment became intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he enjoyed a respite ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... large public square; in the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand. I wonder where this statue hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the guillotine, perhaps, stood on that ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are torturing me frightfully, pitilessly! I am an innocent man, and you are trying to deprive me of my life. You have been turning me this way and that way for so many hours that I begin to feel as if I were standing on the guillotine. Each time I open my mouth to speak I ask myself, is it this answer that will send me to the scaffold? My anxiety and dismay surprise you, do they? Why, since this examination began, I've felt the cold knife graze my neck at least twenty ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... flatter yourself with the notion that you're going to have something nice handed to you some day. Well, you'll get it handed to you, all right, but not in a silver salver. You'll get it where the chicken got the a-x-e; you'll get it with the bank guillotine. You're now doing thirty dollars worth of work each week at a salary of seven dollars. What guarantee have you that the bank will ever change its policy toward you? If they tie a can on you to-day, it ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... capture them. In hot haste I rode to the chateau, hoping secretly to warn my friend. He did indeed escape, but it was my lot to be caught with the conspirators. For the second time in my short life I saw the inside of a prison; I was in danger of the guillotine; despair had almost overpowered me, when I learnt that my friends had prevailed—my sword was returned to me. I became again an officer of the army of him who was now emperor, and I set forth determined to wipe out on the battlefield the doubts that still clung to my loyalty. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... the great square, with its obelisk and circle of statues, its pavilions and balustrades; beautiful now, and peaceful, but peopled with ghastly memories—for it was here the Revolution set up its guillotine, and it was here that some four thousand men and women, high and low, looked their last upon this earth, mounted the scaffold and passed under the knife. Surely, if any spot on earth be haunted, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... with a mob of howling, bloodthirsty Parisians in his antechamber, and who on the eve of his execution slept well, despite his knowledge that within fifteen hours his head would in all probability be lopped off by the guillotine to gratify the lust for blood which was the chief characteristic of the promoters of the ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... aera of the revolution, their favourite cry presented an exact picture of the character of the nation—of the same nation, which, in these dark days of continual horror, could yet amuse, itself by an exhibition of dancing-dogs, under the blood-dropping stage of the guillotine; their cry was then, [55]"Vive la Mort!" Utterly inattentive to these inconsistencies, the French people continue willingly to cry out whatever rallying word may be given to them by those agents who, working in secret, according to the ruling authorities and the prevailing politics of ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... of speculation. What women have done in times of turbulence and excitement in large cities in the past we know. Open that terrible page of the French Revolution and the days of terror, when the click of the guillotine and the rush of blood through the streets of Paris demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of human nature can be driven by political passion. Who led those blood-thirsty mobs? Who shrieked loudest in that hurricane of ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... British Government, contended in the National Convention for a republican constitution for France, did his best to prevent the execution of Louis XVI., fell with the Girondins, was thrown into prison, and only escaped with his life by an accident. Then, under the very shadow of the guillotine Paine wrote his "Age of Reason," to recall France from atheism to a mild humanitarian theism. This book was fatal to Paine's reputation. Henceforth the violent denunciation of theological opponents pursued him to the grave, and left his name a byword ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... one day surprised his father by the sight of a column, which he had raised to the memory of his father's eloquent genius. "It will do you honour," observed the Gallic sage.[B] And when that son in the revolution was led to the guillotine, he ascended in silence, so impressed with his father's fame, that he only told the people, "I am the son ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
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