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More "Guillotine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... violence, and 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 ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... on the 8th of Thermidor; i.e. the day before the fall of Robespierre. The fatal tumbril which bore Chenier to the guillotine, conveyed also to the same scaffold the poet Roucher, his friend:—"Ils parlerent de la poesie a leurs derniers moments; pour eux, apres l'amitie, c'etait la plus belle chose de la terre. Racine fut l'objet de leur entretien et de leur ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... 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 with the splendour, but copying the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... 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
... 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
... once walked along the marble steps with grace, To meet grim death by guillotine—a smile was on her face, A smile of scorn that lifted her above the howling crowd, A smile that mocked at pallid fear—a smile serene ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... nearly ten to one, were practical masters of the island; and Don Chacon, whenever he did anything unpopular, had to submit to 'manifestations,' with tricolour flag, Marseillaise, and Ca Ira, about the streets of Port of Spain; and to be privately informed by Admiral Artizabal that a guillotine was getting ready to cut off the heads of all loyal Spaniards, French, and British. This may have been an exaggeration: but wild deeds were possible enough in those wild days. Artizabal, the story goes, threatened to hang a certain ringleader (name not given) at his yard-arm. Chacon begged ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... 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 and English, in ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs. They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers. They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity could lead them, could ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... born at 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 ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... way towards the Barriere du Trone. At a distance they saw the crowd growing thick and dense as throng after throng hurried past them, and the dreadful guillotine rose high in the light blue air. As they came into the skirts of the mob, the father, for the first time, took his child's hand. "I must get you a good place for the show," he said, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 massacred by ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Quinze was 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
... 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
... 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 hands ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... Louis Quinze; that of Napoleon on the column of the Place Vendome. The only difference consists in the opposite character of the equality advocated by these two men; one is the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades; one brings a king within reach of the guillotine, the other elevates the people to a level with the throne. Observe," said Villefort, smiling, "I do not mean to deny that both these men were revolutionary scoundrels, and that the 9th Thermidor and the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... their ancestors had ruled England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain—were filled with the wildest alarms. Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits anticipated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely more dreaded than ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... outburst, as of one filled with the spirit of prophecy, I said to myself, "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 ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... sabot-maker, had given him. During the autumn of 1806, Maxence, then seventeen, committed an involuntary murder, by frightening in the dusk a young woman who was pregnant, and who came upon him suddenly while stealing fruit in her garden. Threatened with the guillotine by Gilet, who doubtless wanted to get rid of him, Max fled to Bourges, met a regiment then on its way to Egypt, and enlisted. Nothing came of the ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... 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 set up the constitutional monarchy of ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... 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 ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... France during the last century paid as much heed to their proper business as to their pleasures or manners, the guillotine need never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and secular tradition through which in a normally constituted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only when the reasonable and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... she hoped (in the 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
... Waltham Abbey, the manufacture of 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 steam traps ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... the house, to the no small amazement of 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 his head ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... 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
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Egyptian Hall, were dramatically depicted. Another, and still more remarkable, contrast of Mr. Reed's was that in which the terrible tricoteuses of the French Revolution, knitting with quite tragic joviality before the guillotine, are compared with the modern Society ladies in court enjoying a criminal's sensational trial, so that the spectator hardly knows which are the more repellent. It may be stated, as a matter of curiosity, that—except for the point of contrast, which, after all, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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 ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... by a portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the old regime, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru: Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... 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
... 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
... 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
... the 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 ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... 'To the guillotine with them!' cried the bilious little octavo, and then I saw that my tobacco-cutter had been extemporised ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... the figures of it were more 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 Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... repentance, as well as to honour Accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him As everywhere else, supported injustice by violence Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than all other Chevalier of the Guillotine: Toureaux Country where power forces the law to lie dormant Encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations Error to admit any neutrality at all Expeditious justice, as it is called here French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder He was too honest to judge soundly ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... I, who have passed my life in judging, condemning, killing by the spoken word, killing by the guillotine those who had killed by the knife, I, I, if I should do as all the assassins have done whom I have smitten, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive guillotine without troubling the judges. Even in 1880 there existed (and I presume there still exists) a certain 'liberty of the Savoy,' under the shadow of the new courts of justice, which can deal with keepers ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... musicians marched all day amid the hoarse yells of the drunken revolutionists. He was also enrolled in the National Guard, and obliged to accompany daily the march of the unfortunate throngs who shed their blood under the axe of the guillotine. Cherubini would have fled from these horrible surroundings, but it was difficult to evade the vigilance of the French officials; he had no money; and he would not leave the beautiful Cecile Tourette, ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... was a Frenchman, who, after having framed the Constitution of the State of New-York, and witnessed the close of the American revolution, returned to France—became a member of the French Convention, and was finally brought to the guillotine!—N.Y. Com. Adv. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... 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 of our land of freedom, we who live in the country of liberty? Go on as you have begun and ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... beheaded; but he mounted the scaffold, laid his head upon the block, and the masked man lifted his sword and cut it off. All that is left for you is not to falter—to keep down that tremor and sickening of the heart; when Danton of the French Revolution reached the guillotine, he was heard to mutter, "Danton, no weakness!" And many an unrecorded Danton, on the night before his appointed death, has lain down and slept soundly. It recurred to my memory that my father, shortly before his death, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... commencement of the year, was our most vigorous and magnanimous ally, became, at the latter end 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 ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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, and ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... tournays of the middle ages, but in the prize-ring fights and public executions by ax or guillotine, of the age that is just passing away. The thousands who perished for religious ideas by means of the Holy Roman Inquisition should not be overlooked by the Spanish writers who are so indignant that Montezuma and his priests sacrificed tens ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... confidence savagely, 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 stutters ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... President of the 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 hoped-for end ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... sinister profile among the laughter and the 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 their finely-powdered ladies and gentlemen, in silks and jewels, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the hereditary enemies, 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, knew no limit ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... much safer, certainly not London, whence Clarence wrote accounts of formidable mobs who were expected to do more harm than they accomplished; though their hatred of the hero of our country filled us with direful prognostications, and made us think of the guillotine, which was linked with revolution in our minds, before we had I beheld the numerous changes that followed upon the thirty years of peace in which ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... always cruelty. He hated the French philosophers because in the groves of their Academy "at 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
... 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 ordeal ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... 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
... destined to affect gravely the growth of the new nation. The oppressed 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 ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... 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! ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... beforehand of his sales. It is a fat record, taking the story from the earliest wax profiles made by Dr. CURTIUS for the Parisian aristocracy in the days before the Revolution; through the Terror, when his niece (afterwards Madame TUSSAUD) was employed to model notable heads from the basket of the guillotine, which was itself subsequently to figure amongst the attractions of her collection, and finally bringing the enterprising artist and her models to England and Baker Street, whence a comparatively recent move established them (the foundress in effigy only) in their present palace. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... hours together on this 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
... intimately associated with all these scenes. Her father fell beneath the slide of the guillotine; her mother was imprisoned and doomed to die; and she and her brother were turned penniless into the streets. By the marriage of her mother with Napoleon, she became the daughter of the Emperor, and one of the most brilliant and illustrious ladies of the imperial court. ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... their calm mien Which damns the crowd around the guillotine. Satan, at last take pity on ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... to the crucifix[15] that grew up in opposition to the monophysites, was introduced into the Occident by them. During the first five centuries Christians felt an unconquerable repugnance to the representation of the Saviour of the world nailed to an instrument of punishment more infamous than the guillotine of to-day. The Syrians were the first to substitute reality in all its pathetic horror ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... me the heroes 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, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... 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
... wife, sister, and two children, were shut up in prison. An evil spirit 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 wretches ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exasperated conductor. "Don't you know the old man's on, that he wanted to stop at Pee-Wee to meet the G.M. this morning, that a whole engineering outfit will be idle there for half a day, and you'll get the guillotine?" ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... his coach and four, so our heroine did not in the least resemble George Eliot, for instance, as she sat before her mirror at high noon with Monsieur Cadron and her maid Mathilde in worshipful attendance. Some of the ladies, indeed, who have left us those chatty memoirs of the days before the guillotine, she might have been likened to. Monsieur Cadron was an artist, and his branch of art was hair-dressing. It was by his own wish he was here to-day, since he had conceived a new coiffure especially adapted, he declared, to the type of Madame Spence. Behold ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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. ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... betrayal!... You pointed out the Nihilist's haunt to Juve, to Fandor, to my most personal enemies, to those who would hound me to the guillotine!" ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... 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 ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... flowed like water, the guillotine was never idle, the prisons were crowded, while the pageant of rank and fashion resumed its old course, and went ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... paint, but who is going to buy your pictures, Henri?" Cuthbert said, quietly. "As soon as the reds get the upper hand we shall have the guillotine at work, and the first heads to fall will be those of your best customers. You don't suppose the ruffians of Belleville are going to become patrons of art. For my part I would rather fight against the savages than level my rifle against ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... the town, everywhere chalked up upon the walls and the houses are inscriptions concerning 'L'Indivisibilite de la Republique.' How many subsequent writings upon the wall did Mrs. Opie live to see! The English party find rooms at a hotel facing the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine, that token of order and tranquillity, was then perpetually standing. The young wife's feelings may be imagined when within an hour of their arrival Opie, who had rushed off straight to the Louvre, returned ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... enterprise displayed their implements of death on every hand. One was startled at the prodigal outlay of means, and the reckless summoning of men. I looked at the starred and striped ensign that flaunted above the Fort, and thought of Madame Roland's appeal to the statue by the guillotine. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... 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 ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... guillotine is saved unnecessary soiling," said Sovrani fiercely. "And you, Monsignor Gherardi, should have a special 'Jubilate' sung for the world being well-rid of an exceptionally damned ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... 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 development ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... deserved praise and blame in equal measure; a noblesse that will never be judged impartially until some poet shall arise to tell how joyfully the nobles obeyed the King though their heads fell under a Richelieu's axe, and how deeply they scorned the guillotine of '89 ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... filled up by the swelling worlds before her 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 fer ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... taken shape, and addressed some remarks upon the 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 humour requires to be very strong to save ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 as the breath ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... such a vivid 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 the death-agonies of ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... 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
... GUILLOTINE', an instrument for beheading: "Guillotin," who invented and brought it into use at the time of the French ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... a furious decree from the Convention ordering every man in France to take up arms—converting all the churches into arsenals, anathematizing the German princes as so many brute beasts, and recommending to their German subjects the grand republican remedy of the guillotine for all the disorders of the government, past, present, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... know very well that public opinion over there has largely been misled by our opponents and is continuously being misled. Did not the English at the very beginning of the war cut our cable, in order to be able to guillotine our honor without the least interference? For this reason I cannot blame the masses if they took for truth the absurd fables dished out to them, when no contradicting voice could reach them. Less than that, however, can I understand how educated beings, even men who, thanks to ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... 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 this ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... 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
... the shooting in the Lawrence strike, when all those men (Syndicalists) had streamed through the streets, showing off before everybody their fine, brave-looking thoughtless, superficial, guillotine feelings and their furious little banner, "No God and no Master"—it did one good, only a day or so later, to see a vast crowd of Lawrence workers, thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets, singing, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 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
... 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 Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... authorities, they tried for a while to operate from small country towns by collusion with dishonest postmasters. As the delinquencies of the offenders were successively brought to light, their heads rolled into the basket at the foot of the official guillotine. The swindlers, however, succeeded in bribing fresh victims, and for a time cunning and duplicity managed with tolerable success to maintain a foothold against the power of ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 party ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... slowly decaying power. The real rulers at Paris were Hugh the Tall and Hugh Capet,[39] grandson and great-grandson of Robert the Strong. They revolutionized the ideal of kingship and founded the line of kings of France which stretches onward through history for a thousand years until the guillotine of the Revolution cut it in twain. It is Hugh Capet whom Dante, following a legend of his time, calls the son of a butcher of Paris, and whom he hears among the weeping souls cleaving to the dust and purging their avarice in the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... that by William White. Traditions have come to us concerning the clairvoyance of the Greek exponent of the Pythagorean teachings, Apollonius of Tyana, and the case of Cavotte, who predicted his own death and that of Robespierre and others by the guillotine, is on record. The illumination of Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie seer, and that of Thomas Lake Harris of Fountain Grove, are modern examples of abnormal faculty of a nature which places them outside the field of direct evidence. A prophecy made ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... of official life, within a month after the 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
... treated their opponents, so that in case the conflict should become still more embittered, his "reformed" democracy may resemble the purified republic of which Robespierre and St. Just dreamed when they sent Desmoulins and Danton to the guillotine. When he embodies such ideas and betrays such a spirit, the disputed point as to Hearst's sincerity sinks into insignificance. A fanatic sincerely possessed by these ideas is a more dangerous menace to American national integrity and the Promise of American democracy than ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... 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 strike, ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... part was written 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
... 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 of his time among soldiers like himself, and who ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... was afoot to 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... 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, it ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... 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
... at Steventon, who must have introduced greater 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
... dissipations, with 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 for ever stain the pages of modern history. I have ever believed, that had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution. No force would have been provoked, nor exercised. The King would have gone ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... very 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 King in his prison, ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... 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. It ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... her. She was immediately seized by the mob, and dragged before the revolutionary tribunal of Luciennes. She was condemned as a Royalist, and was hurried along in the cart of the condemned, amid the execrations and jeers of the delirious mob, to the guillotine. Her long hair was shorn, that the action of the knife might be unimpeded; but the clustering ringlets, in beautiful profusion, fell over her brow and temples, and veiled her voluptuous features and bare bosom, from which the executioner had torn the veil. The yells of the ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... brig touched at 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, ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... 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 earth headlong?'—he ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... against Jefferson. His letters contain predictions of disaster in case of the success of his opponents, and the Federalists spoke as harshly of him as he of them. They charged him with being a disciple of Robespierre, said that he was in favor of anarchy, and would erect a guillotine in every market-place. He called them monarchists, and said they sighed after King, Lords, and Commons. Neither charge will be believed. The heads of the Federalists were safe after the election of Mr. Jefferson, and the republic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... with other noble families, entertaining them at secret meetings of the Chiffonne, where oaths were taken; later again, defending itself behind barricades of paving-stones; last of all, marched or carried in batches to the guillotine or the fusillade. He told of Avignon and its Papal Castle overhanging the Rhone, the city where he had spent his school days, and at the age of nine had seen Patriot L'Escuyer stabbed to death in the Cordeliers' Church with women's scissors; had seen Jourdan, the avenger, ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... trampled with the feet of men and horses, and the wheel of a tumbril was over her neck. And Napoleon, under compulsion of the mob, ascended the tumbril; and Abbe Sieyes and Bishop Talleyrand rode at his side, administering spiritual consolation. Thus they came within sight of the guillotine, whereon stood M. de Robespierre in his sky-blue coat, and his jaw bound up in a bloody cloth, bowing and smiling, nevertheless, and beckoning Napoleon to ascend to him. Napoleon had never feared the face of man; but when he saw M. ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 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 ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... 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, equally honored, are more questionable. One of the most curious ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... scornfully. "I don't call them men. I call them monkeys! Men! Butchers, as cut off the head of their beautiful Queen Mary What-you-may-call-it, and then after shedding blood like that, sending no end of poor women who never did them a bit of harm to that guillotine. I'd be ashamed of myself, Mr Rodd, to ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... unassimilating environment for a John Gaymer, but this one had not gone in alone and he had certainly not been assimilated. A closely knit and self-isolated group had formed itself there, as it could be trusted to form itself in a house-party or under the shadow of the guillotine, genially unapproachable ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... Oxford Republicans. On his second visit he joined the Girondists, or the moderate Republicans, and only the decision of his relatives, who cut off his allowance and hurried him back to England, prevented his going headlong to the guillotine with the leaders of his party. Two things rapidly cooled Wordsworth's revolutionary enthusiasm, and ended the only dramatic interest of his placid life. One was the excesses of the Revolution itself, and especially the execution of Louis XVI; the other was the rise of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... had, indeed, neither luck nor distinction after Honore's death: and the last of the family died, like others of the renegade nobles of France, by his own hand, to escape the guillotine which he himself had helped ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 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 the time of the French Revolution, because he thought, ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... the hair "full and flowing" because they found it so, not that they as a class dictated to their patronesses in despite of fashion. The French Revolution had somewhat to do with the change; a powdered head or wig was a token of aristocracy, and as the fashion might lead to the guillotine, sensible people discarded it long before the English legislature put a tax upon its use. With reference to this Sir Walter Scott says, in the fifth chapter of "The Antiquary:" "Regular were the Antiquary's inquiries at an old-fashioned barber, who dressed the only ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... court. The king, queen, and nobles, all strove to catch the butterfly, but could not. At length poor Tom, having neither bridle nor saddle, slipped from his seat, and fell into a watering-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 a mouse, patted the trap about till she broke it, and set Tom at liberty. Soon afterwards ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... they were playing cards 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
... 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 ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... little money these people spend, It must hurt them terribly to cough up their taxes. They all till the land, and eat what they grow. Amelie's husband spends exactly four cents a week—to get shaved on Sunday. He can't shave himself. A razor scares him to death. He looks as if he were going to the guillotine when he starts for the barber's, but she will not stand for a beard of more than a week's growth. He always stops at my door on his way back to let his wife kiss his clean old face, all wreathed with smiles—the ordeal is over for ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... she could at first utter no cry, nor call for help, and before she could recover herself the murderer threatened her with the ensanguined knife. She threw herself on her knees, imploring pity, but the man Quadling told her that she was an eye-witness, and could take him to the guillotine,—she ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... on the one side, and the fundamental laws of France on the other,—or between all these systems amongst themselves. It is a controversy (weak, indeed, and unequal, on the one part) between the proprietor and the robber, between the prisoner and the jailer, between the neck and the guillotine. Four fifths of the French inhabitants would thankfully take protection from the emperor of Morocco, and would never trouble their heads about the abstract principles of the power by which they were snatched from imprisonment, robbery, and murder. But then these men can do little ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the prince cardinal was a victim rather than an accessory, and of which the queen was utterly ignorant, though the odium of the transaction clung to her until her death. When, eight years afterwards, she was borne through a raging mob to the guillotine, insulting references to this affair of the diamond necklace were among the terms of opprobrium heaped upon her by the dregs ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... 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 other, has ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... 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 ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... don't call them men. I call them monkeys! Men! Butchers, as cut off the head of their beautiful Queen Mary What-you-may-call-it, and then after shedding blood like that, sending no end of poor women who never did them a bit of harm to that guillotine. I'd be ashamed of myself, Mr ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... 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
... 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
... 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 brave ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... 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 good health!" ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... 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 earth headlong?'—he ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Reign of Terror the Parisians got to find a day weary without the guillotine. If by some immense fortuity there came a day when they were not sprinkled with innocent blood the poor souls s'ennuyaient. This was not so much thirst for any particular liquid as the habit of excitement. Some months before, dancing, theaters, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... "Water! By Sainte Guillotine, he asks for water!" The drunken sans-culottes were intensely amused. "Patience, my friend—patience, and you shall drink your fill. You shall drink from the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... proofs or examine all the other details with you? Surely not. You now possess the key to the riddle; and you know as I do that only a lunatic can behave in this way, stupidly, savagely, mechanically, like a striking clock or the blade of the guillotine...." ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... resents the betrayal of his own confidence savagely, 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 stutters ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... had 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 crime, she had acted under the influence of hypnotic suggestion on the ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... 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
... 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 dilated and one gloved hand convulsively ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... There hangs over every great struggle, and especially over every civil war, a hot and hazy atmosphere of excited feeling which is too apt to distort all objects to the view. In the French Revolution, men were suspected of being objects of suspicion, and sent to the guillotine for that offence. The same feverish and delirious fancies prevailed as to the conduct of other nations. All the most natural effects of a violent revolution—the depreciation of the assignats, the disturbance of trade, the consequent scarcity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... 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
... wielded the yataghan. He was an old Turk, with wide gray moustaches, dressed in a remarkable and theatrical fashion. He wore a yellow turban of colossal size, and an ample orange girdle over a dress of light green. Poor Tobriz—that was his name—was violently opposed to the introduction of the guillotine in Algeria. In the days of his prosperity an enormous sabre was passed through his flaming girdle. In the early years of the French conquest Tobriz was employed in the decapitations, which were executed with a saw, and must have been a horrible spectacle. He remembered well the execution of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... 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 ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... tumbril was over her neck. And Napoleon, under compulsion of the mob, ascended the tumbril; and Abbe Sieyes and Bishop Talleyrand rode at his side, administering spiritual consolation. Thus they came within sight of the guillotine, whereon stood M. de Robespierre in his sky-blue coat, and his jaw bound up in a bloody cloth, bowing and smiling, nevertheless, and beckoning Napoleon to ascend to him. Napoleon had never feared the face of man; but when he saw M. de Robespierre great dread fell upon him, and he ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 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
... town called Toulon. All France was in 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 ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... 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 orders ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... 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 King in his prison, with the little ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... after the shooting in the Lawrence strike, when all those men (Syndicalists) had streamed through the streets, showing off before everybody their fine, brave-looking thoughtless, superficial, guillotine feelings and their furious little banner, "No God and no Master"—it did one good, only a day or so later, to see a vast crowd of Lawrence workers, thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets, singing, with bands of music, and with banners, "In God we trust" and "One is our Master, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the national revolutionary cult—in the style of Danton, or of Robespierre—were the bitterest adversaries of the internationalism of today; though they did not always agree perfectly amongst themselves, and the friends of Danton and Robespierre, with the shadow of the guillotine between them, hurled the epithet of heretic at each other with the deadliest threats. They did, however, all agree on one point, and devoted to destruction those who did not believe that Liberty is shot out of the mouth ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... 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 by sorrow—daughter of Caesars kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death? How, if it were the noble Charlotte Corday, that in the bloom of youth, that with the loveliest of persons, that with homage waiting upon her smiles wherever she turned her face to scatter ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Principal, seating himself in his revolving chair, which creaked in a way that reminded Miss Gordon horribly of stories of the guillotine, "I am making out the list of those whom I consider competent to write on the final examinations, and I feel it my duty to notify you that I cannot see my way clear to ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was tragedy. Gray-faced, dumb, Father stood by Mother's chair, stroking her dull hair as she laid her head on the crude kitchen table and sobbed. Mechanically, back and forth, back and forth, his hand passed over her dear, comfortable head, while he listened, even as, on the stairs to the guillotine, a gallant gentleman of old France might have caressed ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... their chorus rang through 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 ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... 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
... 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
... thankful to say, beginning to amuse me again. Politicians, I believe, pranced about with fascinating agility. I did not care to look at them. Newspaper proprietors demanded the immediate execution of one public man after another. I do not believe I should have cared if a guillotine had been set up in Piccadilly Circus and a regular reign of terror established. I lost sight of Gorman. The Aschers ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... of his failures, Berruyer was recalled to Paris, tried for his conduct, and narrowly escaped the guillotine. ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... in buying the English government, these new classes have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the world as they are, they know that they must have a Religion. They have read the story of the French revolution, and the shadow of the guillotine is always over their thoughts; they see the giant of labor, restless in his torment, groping as in a nightmare for the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the eyes of this giant, who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is but one agent, without rival—the Keeper of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... and he was gone, I opened the staircase window and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view of the Inn through the window's encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... 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, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... woman who had 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 ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... The Jacobin rule was identified with the cause of patriotism in arms against 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
... quarters. Danger often gathers congenial folk together and adds a new attractiveness to the pleasures of a community. The tender affections of the prisoners of the Terror, when they were expecting momentarily to be conducted to the guillotine, flashed through his mind. Let us drain Life's goblet at one draught since we have to die! . . . The studio of the rue de la Pompe was about to witness the mad and desperate revels of a castaway bark well-stocked ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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
... infatuated disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that ever shocked the world; his masterly character study of the "sea-green incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which came in through ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... HARRISON writes: "MATT. 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... that of Napoleon on the column of the Place Vendome. The only difference consists in the opposite character of the equality advocated by these two men; one is the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades; one brings a king within reach of the guillotine, the other elevates the people to a level with the throne. Observe," said Villefort, smiling, "I do not mean to deny that both these men were revolutionary scoundrels, and that the 9th Thermidor and the 4th of April, in the year 1814, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... France and gleaming like a star in the most splendid 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
... 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 ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... 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 pride by ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... arrived, the dog, notwithstanding the guards, penetrated into the hall, where he lay crouched between the legs of his master. Again, at the hour of execution, the faithful dog is there; the knife of the guillotine falls—he will not leave the lifeless and headless body. The first night, the next day, and the second night, his absence alarmed his new patron, who, guessing whither he had retired, sought him, and found him stretched upon his master's grave. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... 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, equally ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... quarter of a mile back on Prospect Hill, facing the cross road to East Greenbush. Edmond Charles Genet was sent out to this country in the Spring of 1793 by the new French Republic. Things moved rapidly in France in those days, and Genet's friends were soon removed and he, fearing the guillotine, became an American citizen, "a scientific farmer and an ornament to New York society." In 1810 he moved to Greenbush, where he died in 1834. His tombstone in the burial ground of the Dutch Church in East Greenbush tells us that "His heart was love and friendship's sun." ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... other,—or between all these systems amongst themselves. It is a controversy (weak, indeed, and unequal, on the one part) between the proprietor and the robber, between the prisoner and the jailer, between the neck and the guillotine. Four fifths of the French inhabitants would thankfully take protection from the emperor of Morocco, and would never trouble their heads about the abstract principles of the power by which they were snatched from imprisonment, robbery, and murder. But then these men can do little ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... professions of loyalty. The 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 set up the constitutional monarchy of William ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... the golden flood of morn Was poised the wing of Death, As 'neath the fearful guillotine The ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... 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
... 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 Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... 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
... of popular opinion in Europe, showed at once his 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
... 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
... close of this year it was manifest that the king was on the high-road to the scaffold. Red-caps were worn in public by the victorious Jacobins as a party badge, and as a declaration of war against all the moderate and all the friends of right; and the guillotine, beneath which thousands of victims were to bleed, was introduced. France had already assumed the aspect of an arena of wild beasts: Dan-ton, Robespierre, and Marat were already licking their jaws in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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 ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... can betide me, than to see my father die at the guillotine, and my last, my only friend, carried ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... he answered, which seemed to me inconsistent, when he told of the execution which he had witnessed in Paris, where a father had lifted up his little child that it might have a good view of the horrors of the guillotine. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... 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
... not waver in his faith that the movement 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 ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... of BUFFON 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
... fast narrowing, which were to be filled up by the swelling worlds before her 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 fer the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... 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 fangs in ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... 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 of birthright to be thought ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who had come to meet him on hired horses; and lastly Bernard, who had procured the horses, and 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 ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... 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: ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... 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 humour ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 mob ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... 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
... Academy "at 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
... 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
... books. What 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 ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... class. The English equivalents of Talleyrand—the men who directly or in their ancestors had ruled England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain—were filled with the wildest alarms. Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits anticipated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... condemned to death, on the 16th of June, 1600. The nurse 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
... picture of the guillotine, calling up thoughts of severed heads from memory's cloisters. On the left you see a ghastly head; on the right the decapitated trunk. By the victim stand the bloody actors in the tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen! When I review the awful ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... forward to the 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
... the United States and England had a good deal of fun, not only with President Lincoln, but the latter's Cabinet officers and military commanders as well. It was said by these funny publications that the President had set up a guillotine in his "back-yard," where all those who offended were beheaded with both neatness, and despatch. "Harper's Weekly" of January 3rd, 1863, contained a cartoon labeled "Those Guillotines; a Little Incident at the White House," the personages figuring in the "incident" being Secretary ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... be in incessant fears from the police, which, sooner or later, catches all malefactors in its nets. I added, that one crime generally leads to another; that he would risk his neck who ran straight towards the guillotine; and the termination of my discourse was, that they would do well to renounce the dangerous career on which they had entered. 'Not so bad!' cried Blondy, when I had finished my lecture, 'not so bad.' 'But can ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... 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 admittedly much less ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... 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 of ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... 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 ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... been able to remain in France, but another foolish attempt on my part to save the life of the old lawyer at Marseilles, who had assisted me in recovering part of my father's property, rendered me suspected. Aware that between suspicion and the guillotine there were but few hours of existence, I contrived to get on board of an Italian brig that had put in from stress of weather, and made my escape. The vessel was bound to North America for a cargo of salt fish, to be consumed on the ensuing Lent, and had a crew of fifteen men. The captain ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... relief, 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 ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... operate from small country towns by collusion with dishonest postmasters. As the delinquencies of the offenders were successively brought to light, their heads rolled into the basket at the foot of the official guillotine. The swindlers, however, succeeded in bribing fresh victims, and for a time cunning and duplicity managed with tolerable success to maintain a foothold against the power ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... crowned a god and Tully slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. Contention hisses from a million mouths, And from ten thousand muttering craters smokes The smell of sulphur. Gaul becomes ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... peasant is yet very ignorant. The suffering workman is frightened as he thinks of the punishments that ensued on the insurrections of May and June. The man of property is full of horror at the brotherly scope of Socialism. The aristocrat dreams of the guillotine always when he hears men speak of the people. The influence of the Jesuits is still immense in France. Both in France and England the grossest falsehoods have been circulated with unwearied diligence about the state of things in Italy. An amusing ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of course, supersede Parliament. As those societies grew more mature, instead of becoming more rational they exhibited more savage ferocity. Placards were distributed in the form of a playbill, announcing, "For the Benefit of John Bull, La Guillotine," or, "George's Head in a Basket." The airs of their meetings were Ca Ira and the Marseillaise. Attempts were made to corrupt the army. It was openly declared in their harangues, that it was "impossible to do any thing without some bloodshed, and that Pitt's and the King's heads ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... 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 in ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... 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. It rested with ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... me," said Quetineau, "what becomes of me; were you to give me unconditional liberty, I should go to Paris—and the Convention would accuse me of betraying my trust, and I should become another victim of the guillotine." ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... you? Does nothing check you? Do 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 of our land of freedom, we who live in the country of liberty? ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... signs of sympathy. Even the Bonapartes were compelled to yield to 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 ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... more than they did the French. The fishermen and other miscreants came to a solemn conclusion that it was clearly their duty as a Christian people to combine, and each choose one whom they should privately guillotine when the opportunity offered. With the idea of paying a high compliment to Troubridge, who had so splendidly protected the Royalists, fought the French, and subdued the revolutionists, they made him the recipient of a decapitated ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... 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 ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 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. ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... 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 ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 hands with ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide called his adversary "brother Judas," or "slave of Saint-Anthony." Vuillet gallantly retorted by terming the Republican "a monster glutted with blood whose ignoble purveyor was the guillotine." ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... at my betrayal!... You pointed out the Nihilist's haunt to Juve, to Fandor, to my most personal enemies, to those who would hound me to the guillotine!" ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... Beauclerk to see Dr. Johnson. She revisited 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 27, 1794.-ED. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... was a Prussian officer, whose adventures, imprisonments, and escape form the subject of memoirs which he wrote in Hungary. He at last settled in France, and there, in 1794, perished by the guillotine. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... national excesses committed in the name of civilization, in reality the price of our modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war in order to stave off the torch and the guillotine. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... agreeable. The guillotine, for instance, possesses the most lively interest for the condemned man at ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... part of the world. "I never saw anything so strange. They seem to me to have got a fixed idea that there is no natural manner but the English manner (in itself so exceptional that it is a thing apart, in all countries); and that unless a Frenchman—represented as going to the guillotine for example—is as calm as Clapham, or as respectable as Richmond-hill, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... through the streets of Paris amid cheering crowds. One of his suite remarked to him that it must be gratifying to see how his subjects loved him. "Bah!" said the Emperor, "The same rabble would cheer just as madly if I were going to the guillotine." He was right. It was just the same with this Jerusalem crowd. The populace thought that the Jesus who had seemed so strong was not so strong after all, and therefore their base fury vented itself upon Him just as priests and Pharisees ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... I been saying for an hour past?" exclaimed the obstinate Mouton. "Murat, who used to work in a cellar, eh? Well, to put a case. Were not the Bourbons right to guillotine him, since he ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine individuals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interest, to renounce their inviolability and to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Calincourt, after whom I am called, was a famous character. She was so good-looking that Robespierre offered to let her retain her head if she would give him a kiss, but she preferred to drive to the guillotine in the cart with her friends, only she took a rose to keep off the smell of the common people, and, they say, ran up the steps smiling. Grandmamma has her miniature, and it is, she says, exactly ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... 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 lighted the fires of persecution that glowed at ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... least. You have more houses than you know what to do with, and a great deal more money than anybody in the world ought to have. If they ever do set up the guillotine at Hyde Park Corner, we shall be among ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Democratic societies went to the bounds of extravagance. Taking offence at a tavern sign in Philadelphia, they were not content until the proprietor had painted a red streak about the neck of Marie Antoinette to denote the work of the guillotine. A waxworks in the same city drew large crowds to witness a representation of the execution of Louis XVI. According to the advertisement, "The knife falls, the head drops, and the lips turn blue. The whole is performed to the life by an invisible machine, without any perceivable assistance." ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... for from thence also, the courier brought news. Blood, he says, flows like water, and not content with having taken the life of their king, they force the queen and the rest of the royal family to languish in prison; and the guillotine is constantly at work dispatching its wretched victims, whose only crime, in many instances, is that of wealth ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... existence. This was a sentence, it was a refusal of justice. Poor poet! a deadly cold seized on him when he saw de Marsay eying him through his glass; and when the Parisian lion let that optical instrument fall, it dropped in so singular a fashion that Lucien thought of the knife-blade of the guillotine. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... exclaimed 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 ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... builders. 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 the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... 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, or literary materials, of the middle ages."—He knew (continues the nephew) ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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 ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... grotto. guante m. glove. guardar to guard, keep, put away; vr. to be upon one's guard. guardia guard, watch. guardian m. keeper, guardian. guarida lurking place, lair. guerra war. guiar to guide. guillotina guillotine. guindilla small red pepper; m. policeman (slang). guinar to wink. guisa guise; a —— de, by way of. guisar to cook, prepare. guitarra guitar. gustar to taste, like, please. gusto ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... 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 vicious sibilance and fell ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Alencon. In the same year were published the 45th and 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
... it, if Julia had got to receive a 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
... not," 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 strangulation will ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... Frenchman'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 ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • 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 hearts of tyrants ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... 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 party ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... "What did the man die of?" asked the King. "Of hunger," answered the peasant. But the sound of the hunt was in the King's ear, and he forgot the cry of want. Soon the day came when the King stood before the guillotine, and with mute appeals for mercy fronted a mob silent as statues, unyielding as stone, grimly waiting to dip the ends of their pikes in regal blood. He gave cold looks; ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... advocate 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.
... Vergniaud smiled with the air of one who admits the position to be curious but by no means alarming. "I want to save him from the guillotine; and if he murders me I cannot! It is a question of natural instinct merely. The ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... slaughter, massacre, butcher, murder, assassinate, execute, hang, electrocute, guillotine, lynch, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Beaconsfield, quizzing John Wilson Croker in Coningsby, says: "He bored his audience with too much history, especially 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." In spite of these gibes, historians have of late years returned to the earlier and truer view, and have deliberately reaffirmed the tremendous effect of the Revolution on English politics. The philosophical ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... I, who have 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, I, I—who ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Cinq-Pierres is, or rather what it was? Mind, not Saint-Pierre, but Cinq-Pierres (Five Stones). Gavroche,[55] who loves puns and is very fond of slang, gave this nickname to a set of huge stones which stood before the prison of La Roquette, and on which the guillotine used to be erected on the mornings when a capital punishment was to take place. The executioner was the Abbe de Cinq-Pierres, for Gavroche is as logical as he is ingenious. Well! the abbey exists no longer, swept clean ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... forth and enforced in my work entitled Hereditary Emotions—lib. II, c. XI) the shrug is a poor foundation upon which to build so important a theory, for previously to the Revolution the gesture was unknown. I have not a doubt that it is directly referable to the terror inspired by the guillotine during the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... children unprotected, and subject to the insults and severities of an enraged and lawless mob. She and her two daughters, then about fifteen and twelve, were cast into prison in Paris. The family estates were confiscated, and most of his particular friends fell by the stroke of the guillotine. In this agonizing condition, she maintained the most wonderful fortitude and patience; without uncommon firmness and sincere trust in providence, she must have sunk under such deep and complicated distress. While she was in prison, she was often ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... 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 ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... 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 the day, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... 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
... height; France and the assembly were dominated by the little group of revolutionary orators who took their name from the south-western province from which most of them came, and with this group—the Girondists—Wordsworth threw in his lot. Had he remained he would probably have gone with them to the guillotine. As it was, the commands of his guardian brought him back to England, and he was forced to contemplate from a distance the struggle in which he burned to take an active part. One is accustomed to think of Wordsworth ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... thoroughly infatuated disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that ever shocked the world; his masterly character study of the "sea-green incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind. Of all his philosophizing, there was ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... 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 ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... sat. The evening 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 general, and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... gained little by leaving it if he could 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 or waking, whenever he lay down upon his pallet, the toad crept ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... by Mother's chair, stroking her dull hair as she laid her head on the crude kitchen table and sobbed. Mechanically, back and forth, back and forth, his hand passed over her dear, comfortable head, while he listened, even as, on the stairs to the guillotine, a gallant gentleman of old France ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... 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 ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... would have its Whigs and its Tories, but that it was forever rid of Republicans and Imperialists. At the accession of Charles X. the word Republican, become a synonym of Jacobin, awoke only memories of the guillotine and the "Terror." A moderate republic seemed but a chimera; only that of Robespierre and Marat was thought of. The eagle was no longer mentioned; and as to the eaglet, he was a prisoner at Vienna. What chance of reigning had the ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... 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
... Maria 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 ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... a breathless hazard. Might not a mob arise like that which gathered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their rage added another horror to the horror of the victim on the tumbril, making the guillotine a welcome release? ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... laughing Vaubernier forsee the day when, as Madame du Barry, she would reign as Dame du Palais, after the death of La Pompadour. Still less could she imagine that in her old age, in the next reign, she would be dragged to the guillotine, filling the streets of Paris with her shrieks, heard above the howlings of the mob of the Revolution: "Give me life! life! for my repentance! Life! to devote it to the Republic! Life! for the surrender of all ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... narrowing, which were to be filled up by the swelling worlds before her 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 fer the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... reclaim them. They deem it timidity, and despise without fearing the tameness from which it flows. Backed by England, they never lose the hope that their day is to come, when the terrorism of their earlier power is to be merged in the more gratifying system,of deportation and the guillotine. Being now hors de combat myself, I resign to others these cares. A long attack of rheumatism has greatly enfeebled me, and warns me, that they will not very long be within my ken. But you may have to meet the trial, and in the focus of its fury. God send you a safe deliverance, a happy ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... than they did the French. The fishermen and other miscreants came to a solemn conclusion that it was clearly their duty as a Christian people to combine, and each choose one whom they should privately guillotine when the opportunity offered. With the idea of paying a high compliment to Troubridge, who had so splendidly protected the Royalists, fought the French, and subdued the revolutionists, they made him the recipient of a decapitated head which had proudly sat on the shoulders of ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... 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 orders for the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... monkeys! Men! Butchers, as cut off the head of their beautiful Queen Mary What-you-may-call-it, and then after shedding blood like that, sending no end of poor women who never did them a bit of harm to that guillotine. I'd be ashamed of myself, Mr Rodd, ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... a great relief, 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 ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... 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 moment, at the note of a bugle, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 of these significant events ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • 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 ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... or Tennyson or Longfellow. One morning, Adams happened to be chatting in the studio of Hamilton Wilde, when a middle-aged Englishman came in, evidently excited, and told of the shock he had just received, when riding near the Circus Maximus, at coming unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been put to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had quite overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till time had blunted it, listened sympathetically ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the betrayal of his own confidence savagely, 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 stutters ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... towards the proposed fraternity, is required to abjure the unjust hatred which it bears to this body of honor and virtue. I thank God I am neither a minister nor a leader of opposition. I protest I cannot do what they desire. I could not do it, if I were under the guillotine,—or, as they ingeniously and pleasantly express it, "looking out of the little national window." Even at that opening I could receive none of their light. I am fortified against all such affections by the declaration of the government, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... world, and what else can I do 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 promise you that ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 itself deliberately and manfully to an ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... month or two since, he informed me he had lately conversed with Count—, who had witnessed the execution of Louis XVI, and that he was told there was a general error prevalent as regarded the spot where the guillotine was erected on that occasion. According to this account, which it is difficult to believe is not correct, it was placed on the side of the Place near the spot where the carriages for Versailles usually stand, and just within the borgnes that line the road that here diverges towards ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... not tremble for the future, if not for the present, among a people so versatile as those among whom she is now thrown? And can she look from the windows of the palace she has been recalled to inhabit, without seeing the spot where the fearful guillotine was reared that ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... 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, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... 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
... poverty, leaving three sons and a daughter. The sons were Louis Philippe, who became Duke of Orleans, the Comte de Beaujolais, and the Duc de Montpensier. One of these had shared the imprisonment of his father, and narrowly escaped the guillotine. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... Randall's, might be made against Jefferson. His letters contain predictions of disaster in case of the success of his opponents, and the Federalists spoke as harshly of him as he of them. They charged him with being a disciple of Robespierre, said that he was in favor of anarchy, and would erect a guillotine in every market-place. He called them monarchists, and said they sighed after King, Lords, and Commons. Neither charge will be believed. The heads of the Federalists were safe after the election of Mr. Jefferson, and the republic would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... 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
... the soul. An old dying mother, children perishing of hunger, a despairing wife; have these pictures of their deeds ever arrested drunkards, gamblers, or profligates? No more have the tragic phantoms of the tribunal, the prison, and the guillotine, when, thirsting for gold, they kill to procure it. The scaffold is far off, the brothel is at the street corner, and the being sunk in vice kills a man, just as a butcher would kill a beast, that he may go thither, or to the tavern, or to the low gaming-house, with a pocket full of money. ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... 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, looked back into hers. He stooped, ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... 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 with the splendour, but copying the errors of a great nation, reared up in every ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... 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 incapable of taking a step ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... 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
... a remarkable and theatrical fashion. He wore a yellow turban of colossal size, and an ample orange girdle over a dress of light green. Poor Tobriz—that was his name—was violently opposed to the introduction of the guillotine in Algeria. In the days of his prosperity an enormous sabre was passed through his flaming girdle. In the early years of the French conquest Tobriz was employed in the decapitations, which were executed with a saw, and must have been a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... doing all that could be done, and the arm prospered finely in his hands. But the human mind is prone to prejudice; and though a personable man, speaking French like a born "Parley voo," and whipping off legs like an animated guillotine, I must confess to a sense of relief when he was ordered elsewhere; and suspect that several of the men would have faced a rebel battery with less trepidation than they did Dr. P., when he came briskly in ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... United States and England had a good deal of fun, not only with President Lincoln, but the latter's Cabinet officers and military commanders as well. It was said by these funny publications that the President had set up a guillotine in his "back-yard," where all those who offended were beheaded with both neatness, and despatch. "Harper's Weekly" of January 3rd, 1863, contained a cartoon labeled "Those Guillotines; a Little Incident at the White ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... strong mind was not strong enough to prevent her strong body from trembling 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 ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... standing against 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 knocked timidly on ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... Caesar crowned a god and Tully slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. Contention hisses from a million mouths, And from ten thousand muttering craters smokes The smell of ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... Madame Cardinal, "that those who have nothing are to give to those who have much? A fine thing such a law as that! It's as bad as guardians who, for nothing at all, talk about calling the police. Yes! I'd like to see 'em calling the police to me! Let 'em guillotine me! It won't prevent my saying that the rich are swindlers; yes, swindlers! and the people ought to make another revolution to get their rights; and then, my lad, you, and my daughter, and barrister Minard, and that little old guardian, you'll all ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... he may be dignified by the name, had the baseness to say in the hearing of the unfortunate Louis XVI., when on trial, "Well! when are we to have his head dressed, a la guillotine." ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... 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
... 1806, Maxence, then seventeen, committed an involuntary murder, by frightening in the dusk a young woman who was pregnant, and who came upon him suddenly while stealing fruit in her garden. Threatened with the guillotine by Gilet, who doubtless wanted to get rid of him, Max fled to Bourges, met a regiment then on its way to Egypt, and enlisted. Nothing came of the death ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... students—for the first time 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
... of 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 to me how he had ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... such as he is, he is a part of 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 • William Makepeace Thackeray
... admirers. Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in contemporary letters. After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song in praise of the Guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America, and built a fine residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the Columbiad. The first ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... listened; 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!" and old Koekli in his red gown threw himself before the man, ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... return, had 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 ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... 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
... 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... and another situation. But the picture that persisted was that of the Conciergerie during the French Revolution. I was a noble, talking gaily to beautiful ladies also under the shadow of death, and, right in the middle of a jest, a gloomy fellow had just come in—to lead me to the guillotine. The door was opening, and I kissed ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... well what you are doing. The nobles, weak and exhausted, have fled for refuge to the famous fortress of the Holy Trinity,[1] and await our arrival, as men wait the knife of the guillotine. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... you imagine that citizen Schneider has not thrown off the absurd mummery of priesthood? If you were a little older you would go to prison for calling him Father Schneider—many a man has died for less;" and he pointed to a picture of a guillotine, which ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the bolts; and, stepping 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 king ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... 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 members have energy enough ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... 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, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... 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
... this house again," he cried. "That papier-mache marquise sells her tea too dear. She thinks me amusing! I understand now why Saint-Just wanted to guillotine ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... waver in his faith that the movement 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 ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... into the interior of the house, to the no small amazement of 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 his ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... 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
... 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 a second before we ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... 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 ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... 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 guillotine had not been idle during the few weeks of Condorcet's retreat. Fancying that (if discovered) he might be the means of injuring his benefactress, he resolved to escape from the house of Madame Vernet. Previous to doing this, he made his will. M. Arago, describing ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... 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 ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... reserve, a brief gravity, in the delineation of him, his clear will, his quickness, his intrepidity, his relentlessness, which make of him the incarnation of aristocratic coldness, hatred, and pride. You might guillotine Lantenac with exquisite satisfaction, and yet he does not make us ashamed of mankind. Into his mouth, as he walks about his dungeon, impatiently waiting to be led out to execution, Victor Hugo has put the aristocratic view of the Revolution. Some portions of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Louis Philippe had at first become stationary, then reactionary; the mere enunciation of a general idea inspired its members with terror, and made the centres (right and left) afraid of the horrors of the guillotine. The government of Louis Philippe was not a reign of terror, like that of 1793, but it was a reign of prospective terror, which it wished to avoid. Louis Philippe had no faith in the people; he treated them as the keeper of a menagerie would a tame tiger—he knew ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... surviving French nobility—retaining their titles by courtesy, and compelled to fritter away their lives upon chateaux, travelling, aeroplanes, or amatory intrigues, instead of directing their wisdom and influence to the right government of the State. The guillotine was better. He could not imagine his descendants without a House of Lords to sit in. Without the Lords, he was indeed the last of the Runnymedes, and upon the scaffold he might at least ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... survives in connection with the men whom he maligned. He lived to be old, as, oddly enough, Spite so often does. In the Terror he had a narrow escape, for he was brought before Chaumette. Chaumette apostrophised the assailant of Rousseau and Diderot with rude energy, but did not send him to the guillotine. In this the practical disciple only imitated the magnanimity of his theoretical masters. Rousseau had declined an opportunity of punishing Palissot's impertinences, and Diderot took no worse vengeance upon him than by making an occasional reference of contempt to him in a dialogue which ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... 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
... 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 Stripes ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... the French Revolution. The head of Louis XVI was severed in January; the knife of Charlotte Corday was plunged into the heart of Marat in July; Marie Antoinette, the grey discrowned Queen of thirty-eight, mounted the scaffold in October. The guillotine was very busy, and France was frantic amid internal disruption and the menace of a ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... 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
... 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. ...
— 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.
... good-natured tone, "I 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 ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... able to swallow as much as he likes for the first time. You cannot govern men brought up as slaves otherwise than as slaves are governed. You may pile Bills of Right and Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American Constitutions; burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop off the heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of feudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth century there has been as much brute coercion and savage ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 memory's ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... 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; but he had one defect,—he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... 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 aggressive ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... German sympathies shown by a portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the old regime, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru: Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a commander more than a match for the wrangling ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... courtly graces, to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian, who, whilst he is receiving their homage, is measuring them with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of his guillotine! These ambassadors may easily return as good courtiers as they went; but can they ever return from that degrading residence, loyal and faithful subjects; or with any true affection to their master, or true attachment to the constitution, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... 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
... had gone forth, followed by his thousands in 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
... 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 the time of ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... 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). ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... 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, analyse our children, think we are endowed ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... middle of the room stood a very large table. At the one end were the bookbinder's tools; at the other, writing materials. The inkstand was a skull; the ruler was a fore-arm; the paper-weight was a guillotine, and ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... loved, 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 ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... victim rather than an accessory, and of which the queen was utterly ignorant, though the odium of the transaction clung to her until her death. When, eight years afterwards, she was borne through a raging mob to the guillotine, insulting references to this affair of the diamond necklace were among the terms of opprobrium heaped upon her by the dregs ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... 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
... put forth against him which the Church, a 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 and processions, and drinking of holy water, and ringing of bells, had been ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... for I served my apprenticeship under Robert Lindet. The clerks had to work in his day! You ought to have seen how they scratched paper here till midnight; why, the stoves went out and nobody noticed it. It was all because the guillotine was there! now-a-days they only mark 'em when they come ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... termed them. "I am a French officer and noble!" he exclaimed—"I have served my king, I have a son in the army of Conde, and now the wretches have seized on my only daughter, my Amalia, and they are carrying her to their accursed guillotine." I could resist no longer; yet I looked round despairingly at my force. "Follow me," said the agonized old man; "one half of the villains are drunk in the cafes already, the other half are busy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... Hundred, which refuses to admit him. His libel on England. The Liberty of the Seas. His flight to St Ouen. Sends a copy of his work to the First Consul. Allowed by Bonaparte to remain in Paris. Refuses; becomes a writer and a spy to Bonaparte. Sends his friend Demerville to the guillotine. Spies set to watch the spy. Ordered to quit Paris. Employed in the lowest political drudgery. His "Memorial Antibritannique" and pamphlets. His fulsome adulation of the Emperor. Causes of his failure as a journalist. Treated with contempt by Napoleon. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... studio, and that was the reason of this unexpected call. But his whispers were lost in the noise of the court and the monotonous hum from the bench, as cases were called on and disposed of, the invariable 'This day week, this day week' descending like the stroke of the guillotine and cutting short the barrister's protest, and the entreaties of poor red-faced fellows mopping their brows before the seat of justice. 'But, Monsieur le President...' 'This day week.' Sometimes from the back of the court ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 earth ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... 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 there cared much for the ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... walls and the houses are inscriptions concerning 'L'Indivisibilite de la Republique.' How many subsequent writings upon the wall did Mrs. Opie live to see! The English party find rooms at a hotel facing the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine, that token of order and tranquillity, was then perpetually standing. The young wife's feelings may be imagined when within an hour of their arrival Opie, who had rushed off straight to the Louvre, returned with a face of consternation to say that ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... '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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to a rough old tar. When I got out, the cart then passing held Mr. Talbot, who smiled benignly and waved his hat like the rest. He looked still better in his black coat, but the carts reminded me of what the guillotine days must have been in France. He shouted "Good-bye," we shouted "Come to us, if you are wounded"; he smiled and bowed, and I cried, "Use that sword!"—whereupon he sprang to his feet and grasped the hilt as ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... profiles made by Dr. CURTIUS for the Parisian aristocracy in the days before the Revolution; through the Terror, when his niece (afterwards Madame TUSSAUD) was employed to model notable heads from the basket of the guillotine, which was itself subsequently to figure amongst the attractions of her collection, and finally bringing the enterprising artist and her models to England and Baker Street, whence a comparatively recent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... some remarks upon the 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, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... beat black and blue; beat to a mummy, beat to a jelly; give a black eye. tar and feather; pelt, stone, lapidate[obs3]; masthead, keelhaul. execute; bring to the block, bring to the gallows; behead, decapitate, guillotine; decollate; hang, turn off, gibbet, bowstring, hang draw and quarter; shoot; decimate; burn; break on the wheel, crucify; empale[obs3], impale; flay; lynch; electrocute; gas, send to the gas chamber. torture; put on, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... stringency, the "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 of these significant events are recounted quite fully enough by historians ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain—were filled with the wildest alarms. Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits anticipated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely more ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... a portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the old regime, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru: Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a commander more ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... men. I call them monkeys! Men! Butchers, as cut off the head of their beautiful Queen Mary What-you-may-call-it, and then after shedding blood like that, sending no end of poor women who never did them a bit of harm to that guillotine. I'd be ashamed of myself, Mr Rodd, ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... portion of the dialogue our mouth was shut to all further 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, but an impediment is offered by the artist. "Non l'ho ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... are used in perforating stamps. One perforates only a single row of holes at a time. This is known as the guillotine machine because its action suggests that unpleasant instrument. Another machine is called the comb machine because the needles are arranged to perforate across the top of a row of stamps and at the same time between the stamps of that row. This arrangement ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... mediocrity of Gilbert-Liendon Girondists, the; late of the; surrendered by the Convention; vote for Louis' death Glosson, Professor, experiment in crowd psychology Governments, feeble resistance of, to revolution; best tactics to pursue; revolutions effected by Greek Revolution Gregoire Gregory XIII Guillotine, regeneration by Guiraud, M. ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... it," Robespierre was crying, "therefore every individual who was more than fifteen years old in 1789 should have his throat cut." "Away with the nobles!" was shouting another vicious leader, "and if there are any good ones so much the worse for them. Let the guillotine work incessantly through the whole Republic. France has nineteen millions too many inhabitants, she will have enough with five." "Milk is the nourishment of infants," announced another; "blood is that of ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... house, to the no small amazement of 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
... Great of Prussia, for thus she 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 her history and geography, and she ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... to prevent her strong body from trembling 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 ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... invented, should have produced, through its most thoroughly infatuated disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that ever shocked the world; his masterly character study of the "sea-green incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind. Of all his philosophizing, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... good friend to you," said Eugene; "he stands well with all parties. The Convention trust him, the sansculottes are afraid of him, and the few men of family whom the guillotine has left look up to him as one of their stanchest adherents. Depend upon it, therefore, your promotion is safe enough, even if there were not a field open for every man who seeks the path to eminence. The great ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... driven the whole length of abolishing, of destroying religion, but it also proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the law of maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it proceeds to the abolition of life, to the guillotine. In the moment of its heightened consciousness, the political life seeks to suppress its fundamental conditions, bourgeois society and its elements, and to constitute itself as the real and uncontradictory generic life of the individual. It is, however, only enabled to do this by a flagrant ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Politicians, I believe, pranced about with fascinating agility. I did not care to look at them. Newspaper proprietors demanded the immediate execution of one public man after another. I do not believe I should have cared if a guillotine had been set up in Piccadilly Circus and a regular reign of terror established. I lost sight of Gorman. The Aschers ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... 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 the time of the French Revolution, because he thought, and ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... take an interest in the affairs of the day, but I do think that a little girl might be taught by its father (or if more convenient, mother) which part of a newspaper to read. Had Margery asked me the difference between a bunker and a banker, had she demanded an explanation of "ultimatum" or "guillotine," I could have done something with it; but to let a child of six fill her head with ideas as to the firmness or otherwise of Home Rails is hardly nice. However, an explanation had to ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... You don't know what a good-looking town is till you strike Paris. And they're proud of it, too. Every man acts as if he owned it. They've had the statue of Alsace in that Place de la Concorde of yours, Mr. Whitwell, where they had the guillotine all draped in black ever since the war with Germany; and they mean to have her ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... speech," says Jefferson, "introduced the pasquinade, lately printed, called The Funeral of George Washington"—a parody on the decapitation of the French king, in which the president was represented as placed on a guillotine. "The president," says Mr. Jefferson, "was much inflamed; got into one of those passions [which only for a moment and very rarely occurred] where he can not control himself; ran on much on the personal abuse that had been bestowed upon him; ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... how, in the Convention and the 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 degrade, dethrone, and condemn a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... 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, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... would not have come, save for the scene she had gone through. With her nerves keyed to breaking point she went up to her own floor with somewhat the sensation she might have had in stepping from the tumbril to the guillotine. It was all she could do not to scream at Sister Lake in the hall; and when Roger appeared also it seemed to Beverley that ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... 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 itself deliberately and manfully to an idea, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... meanest-looking weapon I ever saw. Well, I went, along about dark, determined to have it out with her once for all; but those aristocrats during the French Revolution had nothing on me. I know how it feels to mount the steps of the guillotine. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... enquiry, again has it put by, and thereupon splits the unfortunate official's skull with a hatchet, digging also a pair of scissors, which once belonged to his (left-handed) wife, into his own throat. And the wretches actually cure this hardly fallen angel, and then guillotine him, which he takes most sweetly, placing at the last moment in the hand of the attendant priest, with the words Pour les pauvres, a five-franc piece, which one of the Sisters of the prison hospital had given him! After this Hugo, not contented with the tragedy of the edacious murderer, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... 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, a ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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 ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... remains, 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 ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... by name, devoted years of patient investigation to the volcanic rocks in his diocese. The result of his studies were recorded in letters to a learned friend, but the Revolution stopped the poor bishop's discoveries. He perished by the guillotine during the Terror. The celebrated founder of socialism ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... later, riding down-town through the late afternoon beside Warren, the others following in Roberta's car close behind, Bernice had all the sensations of Marie Antoinette bound for the guillotine in a tumbrel. Vaguely she wondered why she did not cry out that it was all a mistake. It was all she could do to keep from clutching her hair with both bands to protect it from the suddenly hostile world. Yet she did neither. Even the thought of her mother was no deterrent ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... sympathy. Even the Bonapartes were compelled to yield to 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 ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... 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 ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive guillotine without troubling the judges. Even in 1880 there existed (and I presume there still exists) a certain 'liberty of the Savoy,' under the shadow of the new courts of justice, which can deal with keepers of disorderly houses after the same fashion.[177] From this primitive ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... with the feet of men and horses, and the wheel of a tumbril was over her neck. And Napoleon, under compulsion of the mob, ascended the tumbril; and Abbe Sieyes and Bishop Talleyrand rode at his side, administering spiritual consolation. Thus they came within sight of the guillotine, whereon stood M. de Robespierre in his sky-blue coat, and his jaw bound up in a bloody cloth, bowing and smiling, nevertheless, and beckoning Napoleon to ascend to him. Napoleon had never feared the face of man; but when he saw M. ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... always 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
... a head of you that would startle you," thought Dick,—this was before the red-haired girl had brought him under the guillotine,—but he only said, "I am very sorry," and harrowed Torpenhow's soul that evening with blasphemies against Art. Later, insensibly and to a large extent against his own will, he ceased to interest ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 a ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... army surgeon's ambition lay in his passionate love for his wife, the last survivor of the family of Rubempre, saved as by a miracle from the guillotine in 1793. He had gained time by declaring that she was pregnant, a lie told without the girl's knowledge or consent. Then, when in a manner he had created a claim to call her his wife, he had married her in spite ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... 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 their finely-powdered ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... smiled with the air of one who admits the position to be curious but by no means alarming. "I want to save him from the guillotine; and if he murders me I cannot! It is a question of natural instinct merely. The would-be assassin ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... they did the French. The fishermen and other miscreants came to a solemn conclusion that it was clearly their duty as a Christian people to combine, and each choose one whom they should privately guillotine when the opportunity offered. With the idea of paying a high compliment to Troubridge, who had so splendidly protected the Royalists, fought the French, and subdued the revolutionists, they made him the recipient of a decapitated head which had proudly sat on the shoulders of a revolutionist. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... My son has fallen ill from the love he has conceived for your daughter." "Your Majesty, I tell you it is a doll, and not a human being." "I don't want to hear nonsense! If you don't present your daughter to me in a fortnight, your head will fall under the guillotine." (Do you not know what the guillotine is? It is the gallows. He was to be hung if he did not take her his daughter within a fortnight.) The merchant went home, weeping. His wife said: "What is the matter; what has the king ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... present, and pacific future. The result of which necromancy I shall duly report. I am afraid that they will not find that an operation will do good, if so I shall truly despair. And if they decide for the knife, I shall go to the guillotine like the gayest Marquis of the ancient regime. Yes, I should do better for I have my chance, and he, poor ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... 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 ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... custom—absolutely done for. But this time we 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
... 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," ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... this portrait," returned Anastase, quite unmoved. "It is an exceedingly good likeness; and in case you should ever disappear—you know people sometimes do in revolutions—or if by any unlucky accident your beautiful neck should chance beneath that guillotine you just mentioned,—why, then, this canvas would be the most delightful souvenir of many ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... bloodshed, Burke was secretly writing to the Queen of France, entreating her not to compromise, and to "trust to the support of foreign armies" ("Histoire de France depuis 1789." Henri Martin, i., 151). While Burke thus helped to bring the King and Queen to the guillotine, Paine pleaded for their lives to the last moment. While Paine maintained the right of mankind to improve their condition, Burke held that "the awful Author of our being is the author of our place in the order of existence; and that, having ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... 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, vol. 2 ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... 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 ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... poor foundation upon which to build so important a theory, for previously to the Revolution the gesture was unknown. I have not a doubt that it is directly referable to the terror inspired by the guillotine during the period of that ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... places in the city of Paris, moreover, commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hotel de Ville was formerly the Place de Greve, famous in all hangmen's annals,—burnings ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... was a 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 open space. The bald spot ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... 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
... figures of it were more 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 mob ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... 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
... dishevelled 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 hearts of tyrants ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... 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
... his advance and lost his most valuable time in the siege of fortresses. Verdun fell: three beautiful citizens' daughters, who had presented bouquets to the king of Prussia, were afterward sent to the guillotine by the republicans as traitoresses to their country. Ferdinand, notwithstanding this success, still delayed his advance in the hope of gaining over the wily French commander and of thus securing beforehand his triumph ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... what France had of the best and noblest in name, in lineage, in chivalry, in that year of grace 1783. The storm-cloud which a few years hence was destined to break over their heads, sweeping them from their palaces to the prison and the guillotine, was only gathering very slowly in the dim horizon of squalid, starving Paris: for the next half-dozen years they would still dance and gamble, fight and flirt, surround a tottering throne, and hoodwink a weak monarch. The Fates' avenging sword still rested in ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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 and alarmed ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... 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
... Madeleine, down at the obelisk in the Place de la 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
... 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 of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 a ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... 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 he ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... Ten miles from Mons Marlborough 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
... 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
... 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 New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... 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 moment. But they affronted death, came to it almost ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... Wilson Croker in Coningsby, says: "He bored his audience with too much history, especially 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." In spite of these gibes, historians have of late years returned to the earlier and truer view, and have deliberately reaffirmed the tremendous effect of the Revolution on English politics. The philosophical Mr. Lecky says that it influenced English history in the later years of the eighteenth ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... 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, and but ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... only survives in connection with the men whom he maligned. He lived to be old, as, oddly enough, Spite so often does. In the Terror he had a narrow escape, for he was brought before Chaumette. Chaumette apostrophised the assailant of Rousseau and Diderot with rude energy, but did not send him to the guillotine. In this the practical disciple only imitated the magnanimity of his theoretical masters. Rousseau had declined an opportunity of punishing Palissot's impertinences, and Diderot took no worse vengeance upon him than by making an occasional reference of contempt to him in a dialogue ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... 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 and one gloved hand ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... lady was tried, and condemned to death, on the 16th of June, 1600. The nurse 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 that suffered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... name of civilization, in reality the price of our modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war in order to stave off the torch and the guillotine. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... do not 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 were ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... is green and gold, The unbridged river runs all green With queenly swan-clouds floating bold Down to the mill's swift guillotine. Beyond the mill each murdered queen Floats ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... 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 ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... she laid her head on the crude kitchen table and sobbed. Mechanically, back and forth, back and forth, his hand passed over her dear, comfortable head, while he listened, even as, on the stairs to the guillotine, a gallant gentleman of old France might have caressed ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... in too great a hurry to get the operation completed to think of flaps. Cut through all the parts at the same level with a red-hot knife, if you will, like Fabricius Hildanus; by a single blow with a chisel and mallet, like Scultetus; or by a crushing guillotine, like Purmannus: or by two butchers' chopping-knives fixed in heavy blocks of wood, one fixed, the other falling in a grove, like Botal; and then try to check the bleeding by tying a pig's bladder over the face of the stump, like Hans de Gersdorf; or tying ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... and some men are gods, And some are gods who fall while climbing back Up to Olympus whence they came. And some While fighting for the race fall into holes Where to return and rescue them is death. Why look you here! You'd think America Had gone to war to cheat the guillotine Of Thomas Paine, in fiery gratitude. He's there in France's national assembly, And votes to save King Louis with this phrase: Don't kill the man but kill the kingly office. They think him faithless to the revolution For words like these—and ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... staggering under the shock of the French Revolution. The head of Louis XVI was severed in January; the knife of Charlotte Corday was plunged into the heart of Marat in July; Marie Antoinette, the grey discrowned Queen of thirty-eight, mounted the scaffold in October. The guillotine was very busy, and France was frantic amid internal disruption and the menace of a ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... a picture of the guillotine, calling up thoughts of severed heads from memory's cloisters. On the left you see a ghastly head; on the right the decapitated trunk. By the victim stand the bloody actors in the tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen! When I review the awful guilt of Marat ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... suppose, even for a moment, upon the thought of how the highest and noblest sentiments may be perverted into becoming the allies of the lowest crime. 'O Liberty! what crimes have been done in thy name!' you remember one of the victims of the guillotine said, as her last words. 'O Religion! what crimes have been done in thy name!' is one of the lessons to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... to 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 Royal George" ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... as the banker rakes it in among his gains—and you will at once perceive that here, at least, his wonted powers fail him. No jest escapes the lips of one, that would badinet upon the steps of the guillotine. The mocker who would jeer at the torments of revolution, stands like a coward quailing before the impassive eye and pale cheek of a croupier. While I continued to occupy myself by observing the different groups about me, I had been almost ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... 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
... 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 ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... as 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 often; ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... 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, shuddering, we ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... so wronged 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
... 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 ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... war; but even at their worst they never sank to the depths revealed in the correspondence of Dumouriez with Pache. In truth, both Powers began the war very badly; but France repaired her faults far more quickly, chiefly because the young democracy soon came to award the guillotine for incompetent conduct over which the nepotism of Whitehall spread a decent cloak. The discovery by the Jacobins of the law of the survival of the fittest served to array the military genius of France against Court favourites or the dull products ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... 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 hands with ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... aimed at my betrayal!... You pointed out the Nihilist's haunt to Juve, to Fandor, to my most personal enemies, to those who would hound me to the guillotine!" ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... On his second visit he joined the Girondists, or the moderate Republicans, and only the decision of his relatives, who cut off his allowance and hurried him back to England, prevented his going headlong to the guillotine with the leaders of his party. Two things rapidly cooled Wordsworth's revolutionary enthusiasm, and ended the only dramatic interest of his placid life. One was the excesses of the Revolution itself, and especially the execution of Louis XVI; ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... woman whom you sent innocent to prison for twenty years; to whom, as a magistrate, you did the foulest wrong; whose sanctity you insulted; whose beautiful daughter you tore from her arms and condemned to the cruellest of all deaths, for she died on the guillotine." ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... Louis Quinze was 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 ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... him; nor indeed was any other place much safer, certainly not London, whence Clarence wrote accounts of formidable mobs who were expected to do more harm than they accomplished; though their hatred of the hero of our country filled us with direful prognostications, and made us think of the guillotine, which was linked with revolution in our minds, before we had I beheld the numerous changes that followed upon the thirty years of peace in ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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)
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... 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 times. I wouldn't like my worst ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... 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
... something fascinating to Albert about that back this morning. He followed the young man with the interest and the undisguised admiration of a Paris gamin watching an aristocrat go to the guillotine. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... own confidence savagely, 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 stutters ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view of the Inn through the window's encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself that London was ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... each day afterwards. When the day of sentence arrived, the dog, notwithstanding the guards, penetrated into the hall, where he lay crouched between the legs of his master. Again, at the hour of execution, the faithful dog is there; the knife of the guillotine falls—he will not leave the lifeless and headless body. The first night, the next day, and the second night, his absence alarmed his new patron, who, guessing whither he had retired, sought him, and found him stretched upon his master's grave. From this time, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... who have passed my life in judging, condemning, killing by the spoken word, killing by the guillotine those who had killed by the knife, I, I, if I should do as all the assassins have done whom I have smitten, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... William Coleman, subsequently the brilliant editor of the Evening Post, established by Jay and Hamilton; and William Stewart, a brother-in-law of George Clinton, displaced Nathan W. Howell as assistant attorney-general. Thus the work of the political guillotine went on. It took sheriffs and surrogates; it spared neither county clerks nor justices of the peace; it left not a mayor of a city, nor a judge of a county. Even the residence of an appointee did not control. Sylvanus Miller of Ulster was made surrogate of New York with as much disregard ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... while waiting for the guillotine to happen. So we were the guillotine, and he was executed ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... 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 war with the country of Lafayette, fired ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... 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 ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... 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, I would ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... 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 ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... 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 ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... back parlor there are Chinese gongs; there are old Saxe and Sevres plates; there is Furstenberg, Carl Theodor, Worcester, Amstel, Nankin and other jimcrockery. And in the corner what do you think there is? There is an actual GUILLOTINE. If you doubt me, go and see—Gale, High Holborn, No. 47. It is a slim instrument, much slighter than those which they make now;—some nine feet high, narrow, a pretty piece of upholstery enough. There is the hook over ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 of his ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Marseillaise" bring up! 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
... were shut up in prison. An evil spirit 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 wretches who kept ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was on this "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
... vital forces of the temperament and the soul. An old dying mother, children perishing of hunger, a despairing wife; have these pictures of their deeds ever arrested drunkards, gamblers, or profligates? No more have the tragic phantoms of the tribunal, the prison, and the guillotine, when, thirsting for gold, they kill to procure it. The scaffold is far off, the brothel is at the street corner, and the being sunk in vice kills a man, just as a butcher would kill a beast, that he may go thither, or to the tavern, or to the low gaming-house, with ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... in our earth from which men and women might lean and look on nobilities like Sidney Carton. That beatified face; that hand holding a woman's trembling hand, what time he whispered for her comfort, "I am the resurrection and the life," as the crowded tumbrel rattled on to the guillotine, and he faced death with smile as sweet as love upon his face, and love making a man thus divine,—this is Sidney Carton, who stirs our soul as storms stir the seas. Bonaventure, as drawn by Cable, is of similar design. He is unconscious as a flower; but had learned, as his ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... revolt against the omnipotence of God, made a firm 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 Robespierre assured them, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... understood in those days as it afterwards came to be, not unnaturally misled Mr. Tenniel, for in his satire, Playing with Edged Tools, we behold him studying (of all things in the world) a model of the guillotine, an instrument of terror to which those of the Bonaparte family who profess to be guided by the policy of the great Napoleon, must always entertain the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... ecstasy of being able to swallow as much as he likes for the first time. You cannot govern men brought up as slaves otherwise than as slaves are governed. You may pile Bills of Right and Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American Constitutions; burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop off the heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of feudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth century there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as much ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... The distant relative who succeeded to the estates and the title of the Marquis de la Roche-Guyon has fallen a victim to the guillotine. Would this have been the fate of Honora's husband had he forsaken her and returned home? There is reason to believe it. At all events, she finds herself greatly comforted by this news for the sacrifice which her husband made to his love, and no longer regrets the exile to which he has been ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
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