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More "Guillotine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 my wealth to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... both proceeding in the 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, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of the world had been done. The nations at home sat like the knitting ring about the guillotine, waiting for the final scene to be staged. Germany was no more in the world's mind. They had tried to think about her. Their thought had been brought to folly and confusion. Already she was forgotten. She had become a piece of territory that shortly their ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as a present at the hands of his subjects, not even their love, for it is the duty of the subjects to love their emperor. Bear this in mind, count, and do not repeat again this new-fashioned word 'people;' I cannot bear it, it smells so much of the republic and guillotine. Well, I have told you that, if we resumed hostilities, we should be destitute of three very essential things, namely, a good army, a great captain, and money. There is no doubt whatever that we should lose the ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... the platform of the guillotine, already stained with the blood of Bernard, Lesurques exclaimed, "I pardon my judges; I pardon the witnesses through whose error I die; and I pardon Legrand, who has not a little contributed to my judicial assassination. I die protesting my innocence." In another ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... 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 down into a ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... do feel horribly about it, and really and truly, without exaggeration, I would have died sooner than repay her kindness to me by giving her away like this. An ancestress of yours in the Revolution ran up the steps of the guillotine laughing and kissing her hands to the friends she left in the tumbril, and I could have been almost half as brave if by so doing I might have avoided this dreadful abandoning of Ellaline's interests, trusted to me. But what can you do between ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... lepers, to the end, they were men noted for bravery, goodness, and learning, and it was not till the Revolution that one was found—and fittingly the last—who, hating the "Oath" and fearing the guillotine, fled his See. ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... of a romantic turn of mind, remembered how a lady had been found by a student sitting on the lowest steps of the guillotine, desolate and helpless, at night; and how the student had taken her home and sheltered her, and had straightway fallen desperately in love with her, to discover, with unutterable horror, that her head had been severed from her fair shoulders by the cruel knife twelve hours before, and ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... the first sign of winter the outside windows, removed for the summer, are brought back again. Our windows are unknown on the continent, and disliked by continentals who see them here. They call them guillotine windows, and consider them dangerous. Theirs all open like doors, so that you have four doors to each window, and until you get used to them you find they make a pretty clatter whenever you set them wide. But in winter ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... 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, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... 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 ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... 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 ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... Maenad of Mr. Burke was habited in the last mode of Almack's, his sarcasms against the illiterate and his invectives against the low, his descriptions of the country life of the aristocracy contrasted with the horrors of the guillotine, his Horatian allusions and his Virgilian passages, combined to produce a whole which equally fascinated ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... street in which our hotel stands is near a large public square; in the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand. I wonder where this statue hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the guillotine, perhaps, stood on that ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... noise in the streets; and, upon her inquiring the occasion of it, her guards told her she was welcome to go to the front windows and satisfy her curiosity. She went, and saw an immense crowd of people surrounding a guillotine that had been erected the preceding night. Madame de Fleury started back with horror—her guards burst into an inhuman laugh, and asked whether her curiosity was satisfied. She would have left the room; but it was ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... grow a little uneasy. A disagreeable surprise, if my excursion, in which I was to break banks and hearts, and, as you see, heads, should end upon the gallows or the guillotine. I was not clear, in those times of political oscillation, which was the ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... expected more than the unexpected. The heavy punishment for a crime they had not committed was no stranger than the countless strange things that white devils did. In the weeks that followed, Ah Cho often contemplated Ah Chow with mild curiosity. His head was to be cut off by the guillotine that was being erected on the plantation. For him there would be no declining years, no gardens of tranquillity. Ah Cho philosophized and speculated about life and death. As for himself, he was not perturbed. Twenty years were merely ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the party ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... 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 himself in his ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 another week. He never needs ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... things, never carried away by excessive love or hate; in a word, he must keep calm reason always in control of all his actions. This attitude existed in Europe in the eighteenth century, but perished in the French Revolution: romanticism, Rousseau, and the guillotine put an end to it. In China, though wars and revolutions have occurred constantly, Confucian calm has survived them all, making them less terrible for the participants, and making all who were not immediately involved hold aloof. It is bad manners in China to attack your adversary in wet weather. ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... blaze in some of the windows, and the shrieks of females, I could perceive that plunder was going on, and that the intention was, after having ransacked the place, to set it on fire. Yet a strong body of cavalry mounted in the middle of the square, and keeping guard round a waggon on which a guillotine had been already erected, still made me feel that an attack would be hopeless. I soon saw a rush of the people from one of the side streets; a couple of dragoon helmets were visible above the crowd; and three or four carts followed, filled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... was accomplished. Her long familiarity with the movements of this stupendous enginery of death enabled her to calculate to a nicety when the crash would come. She lay like the bound victim under the guillotine, watching ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... 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
... avowed everything except that Jane was his daughter. He would not have admitted this had he been threatened with the guillotine. Fanfar listened attentively. ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... syl.), an 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 first empire Barere bore no ...
— 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.
... weakness would reveal itself as extraordinary power. Under the early emperors you would have been a martyr, at the time of the Reformation an anabaptist, during the French Revolution one of those inspired Girondists who mounted the guillotine with the marseillaise on their lips. But you are my ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... 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, ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... incredible that Charles I should be 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 ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 death ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... said he was unmoved. So far from this, his moments were bitter, and his anguish would have been extreme, were it not for a high resolution which prompted him to die, as he fancied it, like un Francais. The numerous executions by the guillotine had brought fortitude under such circumstances into a sort of fashion, and there were few who did not meet death with decorum. With our prisoner, however, it was still different; for, sustained by a dauntless spirit, he would have faced the great tyrant of the race, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Begum and the health of Rigdum, though Gillian was forced to confess that she had not transferred to him the kiss that she had been commissioned to convey. Nobody was disappointed except Fergus, who could not but vituperate the housemaids for the destruction of his new patent guillotine for mice, which was to have been introduced to Clement Varley. To be sure it would hardly ever act, and had never cut off the head of anything save a dandelion, but ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arrive. Yesterday evening Sir Roger Curtis landed from the Phaeton. He left Lord Howe on the 4th. I know not the particulars, but there has been a general action; and I think Monsieur Jean Bon L'Andre and his Guillotine have had a thorough drubbing. We have lost very few officers of rank. Lord Howe is perfectly well, of which I give ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... disappointment. No man could be more thoroughly ruined; baffled in theory, undone in practice—an exile from his country, a fugitive from his troops—overwhelmed by the hopelessness of giving a constitution to France, and with nothing but the dungeon before him, and the crash of the guillotine behind. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... 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
... 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 of War Stanton ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... 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 with ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... Robespierre overthrew the Girondists, Roland, with others of his party, saved his life by a flight to Rouen. His wife was soon sentenced to death by the infamous Fouquier Tinville. She rode to the guillotine clad in white, her glossy black hair hanging down to her girdle, and embraced her fate with divine courage and dignity. Hearing the direful news, Roland walked a few miles out of Rouen, and deliberately killed himself with his cane sword. His body was found by the roadside, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... gardens, and fancied the Swiss in the windows yonder; where they were to be slaughtered when the King had turned his back. What a great man that Carlyle is! I have read the battle in his History so often, that I knew it before I had seen it. Our windows look out on the obelisk where the guillotine stood. The Colonel doesn't admire Carlyle. He says Mrs. Graham's Letters from Paris are excellent, and we bought Scott's Visit to Paris, and Paris Re-visited, and read them in the diligence. They are famous good reading; but the Palais Royal is very much altered since Scott's time: no end of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tonsils are called upon, along with other organs, to eliminate these morbid taints. Is it any wonder that frequently they become inflamed and subject to decay? What, however, can be gained by destroying them with iodine or extirpating them with the surgeon's scissors or the 'guillotine'? ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... 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
... humanity, like noxious parasites! We've been striving for something utterly, utterly different. I can make nothing of it. I have given up understanding. 'Do you understand,' I cried to him, 'that if you have the guillotine in the foreground of your programme and are so enthusiastic about it too, it's simply because nothing's easier than cutting off heads, and nothing's harder than to have an idea. Vous etes des paresseux! Votre drapeau est un guenille, une impuissance. It's those carts, or, what was it?... ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... which are now, I am 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 faded ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... grotesque toothpick into his mouth. History has recorded this atrocious levity. So petty an act done in the midst of that great catastrophe pictures the Parisian populace, which deserves the sarcastic jibe of Boileau: "Frenchmen, born malin, created the guillotine." The Parisian of all time cracks jokes and makes lampoons before, during, and after the ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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 fifth ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... outline of a tree grows suddenly more ragged and rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails, so the human city rises under the wind of the spirit into toppling temples or sudden spires. No man has ever seen a revolution. Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood pouring down the gutters, the guillotine lifted higher than the throne, a prison in ruins, a people in arms—these things are not revolution, but the results ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... 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
... feigned The harsh voice calling me,—then clinched my nails So deeply in my palms, the sharp wounds pained, And tossed my face toward heaven, as one who pales In splendid martyrdom, with soul serene, As near to God as high the guillotine. And I had envied her? Not that—O no! But I had longed for some sweet haven so!— Wherein the tempest-beaten heart might ride Sometimes at peaceful anchor, and abide Where those that loved me touched me with their hands, And looked upon me with glad eyes, and slipped Smooth fingers o'er my ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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 the man's ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... 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, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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 said to you at the palace, ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... "The guillotine," rejoined the Emperor. "It was the freedom of speech which people of those sanguinary days allowed themselves that landed many a fine head in the basket. As for me, I simply held my tongue with both hands, and ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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. de Robespierre great dread ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 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
... 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 ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... 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 ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... result 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
... 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 white ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... 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 ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... of Robespierre. At the beginning of that revolution, the Duke espoused the popular cause, and even commanded an army under the orders of the legislative assembly; but in the storms that succeeded, being altogether unequal to stem the torrent of popular fury or direct its course, he fell by the guillotine early in 1794.-E. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... 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 reading some such threat of death, ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... Wolsky shall surely be avenged. But Mrs. Bailey will not be asked to make any statement, except in writing—in what you in England call an affidavit. You do not realise, although you doubtless know, what our legal procedure is like. Not even in order to secure the guillotine for Madame Wachner and her Fritz would I expose Mrs. Bailey to the ordeal of ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... He arrived at New York nearly destitute; and after passing his life, not only in splendour, but in the splendour of the court of France, he found himself jostled by the busy population of the New World, without a dollar between him and starvation. In such a situation one might almost sigh for the guillotine. The young noble strove to labour; but who would purchase the trembling efforts of his white hands, while the sturdy strength of many a black Hercules was in the market? He abandoned the vain attempt to sustain himself by the aid of his fellow-men, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... when to the passion for saving is added the incessant aspiration of that leech called commerce. We must make up our minds to some course; the bourgeoisie are rising round us like a flood; it is almost affable in them to buy our chateaus and estates when they might guillotine us as in 1793, and ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Mademoiselle Adele? I have a very fine stock at home," said Monsieur Goupille. Mademoiselle Adele de Courval sighed: "Helas! they remind me of happier days, when I was a petite and my dear grandmamma took me in her lap and told me how she escaped the guillotine: she was an emigree, and you know her father was ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... times in France then, and every one who was suspected of being friendly to the king and his family was sent to prison and to the guillotine. The prisoners in the Temple passed the time as best ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... I had thoroughly explored that portion, making the acquaintance of all the new-comers, putting my head into the guillotine, taking a turn in the condemned cell, sitting in Napoleon's carriage, and otherwise informing myself concerning the seamy side of human nature, I determined to be virtuous and devote at least half an hour to the study of the royalties in the ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... rude sort of guillotine, called the maiden. The implement is now in possession of the Society ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... 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
... laws are too severe, there will surely come a time when they will not be observed, and history shows that the men who have introduced the guillotine ended their careers in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday! we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by moonlight—silent and terror-stricken, our very ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... greater part of 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 late hour of the day because there ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... machine which calls itself a State, and I'd guillotine the ruffian that invented it. I cannot do that, but I can ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... continued insurrections. Some time afterwards, having again refused to obey the order these commissioners of the Convention gave, to mow down with grapeshot the insurrectionists of Paris, he had been summoned before a commission, which would not have failed to send him to the guillotine, if General Bonaparte, who had succeeded him in the command of the army of the interior, had not used all his influence to save his life. Such repeated acts of courage and generosity are enough, and more ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... word. I dreaded the moment they should end. Edouard sat beside me. We had not exchanged a word during the morning. How could I speak? What should I say? I was in a nervous flutter, like unto those who watch the final pinioning of a criminal whose guillotine is awaiting him. I could not keep my eyes from the fair face beside me, with its delicately cut profile, made all the more cameo-like by its pallid whiteness. The lips were tightly compressed. I could see askant that the tiny nostrils were quivering with excitement. All else ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... 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
... not merely an exhaustive but an exhausting discussion. I am told by ingenious calculators in the newspapers that over six hundred hours, from some of which I confess I have been absent, of debate have been accorded to the Committee stage. No guillotine closure has been applied. Full, free, unfettered debate has been accorded—has been accorded with a patience and with a generosity unprecedented in Parliamentary annals, and which in effect has left a minority not merely satisfied in all the conditions of reasonable debate, but ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... 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
... 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
... 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 in the next ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thy trumpet sound! Tell all the world around How Capet fell! And when great George's poll Shall in the basket roll, Let mercy then control The Guillotine! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... knew the uses of advertisement. The apaches are distinctively a Parisian produce, and if only Paris could be won over, intrigued by the romance and strangeness of the genius that had flowered in the gutter, and given to the world a star of art, all would be arranged and the guillotine would have but three necks to subdue. France at large would only shrug, for France is the husband of Paris and permits her her caprices. It rested with ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... story of the way in which the prisoners in the time of the French Revolution used to behave? The tumbrils came every morning and carried off a file of them to the guillotine, and the rest of them had a ghastly make-believe of carrying on the old frivolities of the life of the salons and of society. And it lasted for an hour or two, but the tumbril came next morning all the same, and the guillotine stood there gaping in the Place. And so it is useless, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... The French Revolution will compare with the revolution that is to come, that must come, that is inevitable, as a puddle on the road-side compares with the sea. Men will hang like pears on every lamp-post, in every great quarter of London, there will be an electric guillotine that will decapitate the rich like hogs in Chicago. Christ, who with his white feet trod out the blood of the ancient world, and promised Universal Peace, shall go out in a cataclysm of blood. The neck of mankind shall be ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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! ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... Wilson, Ken," Boyd said. "I meant in general." He left, with the air of a man whose world has betrayed him. His back looked, to Malone, like the back of a man on his way to the scaffold or guillotine. ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... like British royalty, 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 Duke of Reichstadt, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... before? Somewhere he had seen them in body or in spirit. Was it in the streets of Paris before the French Revolution sent those long lines of death carts rumbling over her pavements to the guillotine? ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... massacre, butcher, murder, assassinate, execute, hang, electrocute, guillotine, lynch, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... 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 ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... of which might succeed, but the result of the whole must be to cut to pieces the small force we have, without adequate success. Besides this, the reliance on the dispositions of the country, with the single exception of Toulon, pressed as it was by famine at one door, and the guillotine at the ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... revolution, their favourite cry presented an exact picture of the character of the nation—of the same nation, which, in these dark days of continual horror, could yet amuse, itself by an exhibition of dancing-dogs, under the blood-dropping stage of the guillotine; their cry was then, [55]"Vive la Mort!" Utterly inattentive to these inconsistencies, the French people continue willingly to cry out whatever rallying word may be given to them by those agents who, working ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... 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
... 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 on his ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;—of thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... instantly crowded the French prisons with the merchants, the bankers, and the whole monied class in France. Those who could be plundered no longer, were sent to execution. In Paris alone, within six months, a thousand persons of the various professions had been murdered by the guillotine. During the three years of the democracy, no less than eighteen thousand individuals, chiefly of the middle ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... might wish to indulge in the same woe! O "manes of July!" (the phrase is pretty and grammatical) why did you with sharp bullets break those Louvre windows? Why did you bayonet red-coated Swiss behind that fair white facade, and, braving cannon, musket, sabre, perspective guillotine, burst yonder bronze gates, rush through that peaceful picture-gallery, and hurl royalty, loyalty, and a thousand years of Kings, head-over-heels out of yonder ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 1770, 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
... now the summer of 1793, and on the eve of the Reign of Terror, when Paris, from early in October until the end of the year, was in the deadliest throes of revolution. The dull thud of the guillotine, placed in front of the Tuileries, in the Place de la Revolution, which is now the Place de la Concorde, a little to the east of where the obelisk of Luxor now stands, could almost be heard by the quiet workers in the Museum, for sansculottism in its most aggressive and hideous forms ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the subject, to say a word or two respecting the minister of justice in this country; in plain words, I mean the hangman. It has always appeared to me that, in the mode of inflicting capital punishments with us, there is too much of the ministry of the human hand. The guillotine, as performing its functions more of itself and sparing human agency, though a cruel and disgusting exhibition, in my mind has many ways the advantage over our way. In beheading, indeed, as it was formerly practised in England, and ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... fond of children and flowers, and at times merry in her own fashion. But this gaiety of hers always reminded Morris of that which is said to have prevailed in the days of the Terror among those destined to the guillotine. Never for one hour did she seem to forget the end. "'Vanity of vanities,' saith the Preacher"; and that lesson was ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... 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, for three months, every morning the ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... her fears for herself and the lovely Angele could now be laid to rest. Her ruffianly son was even now being conveyed by Leroux and his gendarmes to the frontier, where the law would take its course. I was indeed not sorry for him. I was not sorry to think that he would end his evil life upon the guillotine or the gallows. I was only grieved for Angele who would spend a night and a day, perhaps more, in agonized suspense, knowing nothing of the events which at one great swoop would free her and her beloved mother from the tyranny of a hated brother and send him to expiate his crimes. ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... sculptured duchesses in classical costume playing at Diana, and covered his walls with Watteaus and his ceilings with decorations by Pesne, a less worthy Frenchman—and remain in complete ignorance of hungry Jacques, who, with pike-staff and guillotine, was so soon to change all that and usher in the period of the Revolution, Before the evil day dawned for the gilded gentry of France, however, the British colonies in America, influenced by the teachings of the precursors of the French Revolution, and aided by their isolation, ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... 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 take ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... another thought of death! To how many men its blackness seems to be the sudden swallowing up of the light of their very being! To how many more does it seem to put an end to all their occupations, and to shear their lives in twain, as remorselessly as the fall of the guillotine severs the head from the body. How are the light butterfly wings of the trivialities in which many men and women spend their days to carry them across the awful gulf? What are the people to do on the other side ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Under the guillotine fell during this month the head of the queen's friend, the Princess de Lamballe, who was followed in crowds by the king's faithful adherents, sealing their loyalty and their love ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... victims of the Terror who went gaily to their doom with the hymn of freedom upon their proud lips. Danton also, the second Titan of the Revolution, was an Atheist. He fell in trying to stop the bloodshed, which Robespierre, the Deist, continued until it drowned him. With Danton there went to the guillotine another Atheist, bright, witty Camille Desmoulins, whose exquisite pen had served the cause well, and whose warm poet's blood was destined to gush out under the fatal knife. Other names crowd upon us, too numerous ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... 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 die worthy of ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... in the French Revolution who shaved each other out of the fragments of bomb shells, and wore ghastly trophies from the guillotine. But short of a Reign of Terror, making all men mad, one does not expect such things. Few people (I fancy) if they knew it, would care to use the glass from which some poor wretch had drunk his draught of poison; and even to touch the murderer's knife ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... the engineer saw the man's head and endeavoured to stop his heavy train. But too late; the moving mass passed over, cutting his head from the shoulders as clean as it could have been done by the guillotine itself. Cooper was ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... Lindet. I know, 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 ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... lopper had laid it bare, had finished its toilets for the guillotine, when the woodcutters were about to sap its base, five men commenced hauling at the ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... thinkness—what you shall call the recollect—of monsieur's speech in preserves, so that they shall forget it not continualle. We shall all the time say we have not witness something like it since the time we come here, and have not so much enjoy ourselves since the grand assassination by the guillotine. Come next winter and be with us for one week. Some of us will remain in ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... was shown as the place where he was laid when taken out of the bath. The window, behind whose curtains the heroine hid, after she had plunged the dagger into the heart of the man whom she thought was the cause of the shedding of so much blood by the guillotine, was pointed out with a seeming degree of pride by ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... had shaken 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 ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... might be taught by her 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 ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... 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
... This universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the street, there is no one de trop, there is no one absolutely useful, or absolutely harmful—knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... were moderate idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we thought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage we could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew; indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own politics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before what seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncovered heads for a second ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... France, taking an affectionate leave of his family just before he suffered under the guillotine: The Queen appears in a rage of distraction—the King's Sister deeply affected—the young Princess is fainting—and the Dauphin is embracing his unhappy Father—the Queen's Maid of Honor also appears in great distress. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... 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, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... vengeance against kings and priests, and roars of massacre. I there heard the names of men long suspected, but of whom they now spoke openly as the true leaders of the national movement; and of others marked for assassination. They drank toasts to Death, to Queen Poissarde, and to Goddess Guillotine. It was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... 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 to its abuse of the ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... life!" Madame Lorilleux kept saying. "We all know where the money came from that she paid for her wretched shop! She borrowed it from the blacksmith; and he springs from a nice family too! Didn't the father cut his own throat to save the guillotine the trouble of doing so? Anyhow, there was something disreputable of ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... through my fingers and shatter on the lab bench, I gave it up. How would you have acted if you had gotten that kind of news? That first gut-twisting admission that you really may be a snake! Then sharp awareness of what it means. A guillotine couldn't cut you off more sharply from Normal humanity. But the spirit struggles and refuses to accept it. You can't ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... Neuilly, she happened one day to enter Paris on foot (I believe, by the Place de Louis Quinze), when an execution, attended with some peculiar aggravations, had just taken place, and the blood of the guillotine appeared fresh upon the pavement. The emotions of her soul burst forth in indignant exclamations, while a prudent bystander warned her of her danger, and intreated her to hasten and hide her discontents. She ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... when showers of sparks and particles of smouldering wood began to descend upon my head and shoulders, and cover the work I was engaged on. I started up, and looking up at my big sunlight, saw to my horror that I had wound up my easel, which is twelve feet high, and more nearly resembles a guillotine than anything else, so far that the top of it was in immediate contact with the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... sleep; We tore the bayonets from their hands, we slew them at their guns, Their boasted horsemen flew like chaff before our forest-sons; That eve we heap'd their baggage high their lines of dead between, And in the centre blazed to heaven their blood-dyed Guillotine! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... 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 ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... 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
... her lip. The tumbril and the guillotine would not have made her weep. Dry-eyed she would have gone from one to the other. Besides, what on earth was he wowing about? But immediately it occurred to her that he might be experiencing one of the attacks to which he was subject. She leaned over ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... what seems to be your weakness would reveal itself as extraordinary power. Under the early emperors you would have been a martyr, at the time of the Reformation an anabaptist, during the French Revolution one of those inspired Girondists who mounted the guillotine with the marseillaise on their lips. But you are my ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... upon the black And hideous structure of the guillotine; Beside the haloed countenance of saints There hangs the multiple and knotted lash. The Christ of love, benign and beautiful, Looks at the torture-rack, by hate conceived And bigotry sustained. The prison cell, With blood-stained walls, where starving men went mad, Lies ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... could express their contempt for a man who was unable to see the advantages of filling the treasury with the issues of a printing press. Marat, Hebert, Camille Desmoulins and the whole mass of demagogues so soon to follow them to the guillotine were especially ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definite 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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... sight, however, which it fell to my lot to witness at Brussels in this second and short visit, was neither gay nor handsome, nor dear in any sense, but the very reverse; it being that of the punishment of the guillotine inflicted on a wretched murderer, named John Baptist Michel.[2] Hearing, at the moment of my arrival, that this tragical scene was on the point of being acted in the great square of the market-place, I determined for once to make a sacrifice of my feelings to the desire ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... she undressed her mistress, "must that man sleep in Monsieur Auguste's bed, and put on Monsieur Auguste's slippers, and eat the pate I made for Monsieur Auguste? They may guillotine ...
— The Recruit • Honore de Balzac
... on his motives. An entry of August 2, 1793, in Jefferson's private diary, forming the volume since known as "The Anas," relates that at a cabinet meeting Knox exhibited a print entitled the funeral of George W——n, in which the President was placed on a guillotine. "The President was much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself; ran much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed upon him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the Government ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... Jacobins. Each of these parties in succession rests upon its more advanced element. So soon as it has carried the revolution far enough not to be able to keep pace with, much less march ahead of it, it is shoved aside by its more daring allies, who stand behind it, and it is sent to the guillotine. Thus the revolution ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... royal family imprisoned. The priests had nearly all perished or been banished from France. The national assembly was divided into desperate factions, which often turned their arms against one another. When one party triumphed, proscription followed, and the guillotine was put in requisition, and blood flowed in torrents. The grossest irreligion likewise prevailed. Leaders of the atheistical mob would extend their arms to heaven and dare a God, if he existed, to vindicate his insulted majesty, and crush them with his ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... 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, Points to the footmarks of indignant scorn, Shows the deep scars ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Dublin on nothing a year. The grandmother of grandmamma, Ambrosine Eustasie de 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 ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... lust, and France, la belle France , had been converted into a disgusting warehouse of infamy. Law, with suicidal hand, had destroyed itself, and the decisions of the legislature swayed to and fro, in accordance with the hideous clamors of the mob. The guillotine, with gutters ever clotted with human gore, was the only argument which anarchy condescended to use. Effectually it silenced every remonstrating tongue. Constitution after constitution had risen, like mushrooms, ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... thunders!" cried Skeleton. "I wish all the nobs could hear us talk, who think to make us quake before the guillotine. They have only to come to the Barriere Saint Jacques the day of my benefit; they will hear me crack jokes with the crowd, and say to Jack, in a bold voice, 'Open the door till I go down into the cellar!' ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... of the city. The street in which our hotel stands is near a large public square; in the centre is a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.; and the square itself is called the Place de Louis le Grand. I wonder where this statue hid itself while the Revolution was raging in Lyons, and when the guillotine, perhaps, stood on that ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... remorse and 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 ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... Even the victims of the First French Revolution were permitted to express in song through the bars of the Temple sentiments of utter scorn for their enemies, and when the Jacobins in their turn marched to the guillotine they did so, singing ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... punishment:—a cold and indecent pleasantry at the tribunal; one long imprecation on the road to the guillotine;—those are the last thoughts of this dying man, about ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... his aunt, strongly tempted him to make a journey to Geneva in the summer of 1793. The political condition of Europe at that time was of thrilling interest. On January 21 the head of Louis XVI. fell under the guillotine, to which Marie Antoinette soon followed him. The armies of the coalition were closing in upon France. Of the political necessity for these state executions there has always been and will always be different judgments. That of Mr. Gallatin is of peculiar ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... by the hardships he endured in the war of La Vendee and I put from me forever all thought of marriage. But then my mother, an emigrant here in London, claimed all my care. It called me again when she departed, dear saintly being. But then there were my brother's sons—orphaned by the guillotine—to place. And when I had established them honourably, our beloved Lucia turned to me, with her many enchantments and exquisite tragedy of the heart. And, now, in my old age I come to you—whom I receive from her as a welcome legacy—to remain just so long as I am not a burden to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Comte de Cambray," said Clyffurde with slow emphasis, "his mother, his sister, his brother-in-law and two of their faithful servants, were rescued from the very foot of the guillotine by a band of heroes—known in those days as the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... need. We could both have cried, if we hadn't feared to spoil our eyes and redden our noses! But even if we'd not been strong enough to stifle our tears, there was everything at hand to repair their ravages. And all this in a place where the Revolution had sent fourteen lovely ladies to the guillotine for servilely begging the King of ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... 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
... 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
... in Rome went to paint from nature in the Campagna, either with Somerville or with Lady Susan Percy, who drew very prettily. Once we set out a little later than usual, when, driving through the Piazza of the Bocca della Verita, we both called out, "Did you see that? How horrible! "It was the guillotine; an execution had just taken place, and had we been a quarter of an hour earlier we should have passed at the fatal moment. Under Gregory XVI. everything was conducted in the most profound secrecy; arrests were made almost at our very door, of which ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c. (arms) 727; bodkin &c. (perforator) 262; belduque[obs3], bowie knife[obs3], paring knife; bushwhacker [U.S.]; drawing knife, drawing shave; microtome[Microbiol]; chisel, screwdriver blade; flint blade; guillotine. sharpener, hone, strop; grindstone, whetstone; novaculite[obs3]; steel, emery. V. be sharp &c. adj.; taper to a point; bristle with. render sharp &c. adj.; sharpen, point, aculeate, whet, barb, spiculate[obs3], set, strop, grind; chip [flint]. cut &c. (sunder) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... this. A judgment in a lump, like that suggested by the duke, would destroy all hope of saving a single one of these unfortunate men from the guillotine. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... he said—ought to be versed in ancillary sciences; in fortification, wood-carving, architecture, and so on. Leonardo da Vinci, you know. Well, one day they could not get into his bedroom. They broke open his door and discovered that he had constructed a perfectly-formed guillotine; the knife had fallen; his head lay on one side and his body on the other. You may well be surprised. I went carefully into that case. He was in the best of health, with a creditable artistic record behind him. He had no troubles, financial ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 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 corner of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... been drunk," thought he; "that woman must have intoxicated me with caresses. Good heavens! I was a fool and mad! I risked the guillotine in a business like that. Fortunately it passed off all right. But if it had to be done again, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... poor Bailly [Jean Sylvani, born September 17, 1736], First National President, First Mayor of Paris.... It is the 10th of November, 1793, a cold bitter drizzling rain, as poor Bailly is led through the streets.... Silent, unpitied, sits the innocent old man.... The Guillotine is taken down ... is carried to the riverside; is there set up again, with slow numbness; pulse after pulse still counting itself out in the old man's weary heart. For hours long; amid curses and bitter frost-rain! 'Bailly, thou ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... 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
... 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 institution Fitzjames ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... other residents I gathered some interesting particulars about the Danton family. The great tribune left two little sons, George and Antoine, who grew up and resided in their ancestral home, hiding themselves from the world. Their young step-mother it was whose memory, when on the way to the guillotine, evoked from Danton the only betrayal of personal emotion throughout his stormy career: "Must I leave thee for ever, my beloved," then, quickly recovering himself, cried "Danton, ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... 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 ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... 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
... and literature. Meot's and Masse's were the trysting places of the Royalists in the days preceding the outbreak, but welcomed the Revolutionists after they came in power. The Chartres was notorious as the gathering place of young aristocrats who escaped the guillotine, and, thus made bold, often called their like from adjoining cafes to partake in some of their plans for restoration of the empire. The Trois Freres Provencaux, well known for its excellent and costly dinners, is mentioned by Balzac, Lord ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... whose face and figure dwell most vividly in my recollection is Orsini, the great Italian who, after a lifetime spent in the attempt to deliver Tuscany and Lombardy from the yoke of the tyrant, died under the guillotine in Paris, and by his death secured for Italy her long-sought freedom. Orsini came to Newcastle shortly after his escape from an Austrian dungeon at Mantua, and addressed a great meeting in the Lecture Room. He spoke English fairly well; but it was the appearance of the man, ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... 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
... that French royalty, like British royalty, 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. ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... history of which these were the scenes. The Bridge of Sighs has two covered passages, one for the political and one for the criminal prisoners. Here is shown a narrow ledge on which the condemned man stood, with a slanting stone passageway before him, which, when the guillotine had done its swift and deadly work, conveyed the crimson flood into the dark waters of the canal below, while the body was thrown in the water on the other side. There are the "Chambers of Lead," where prisoners ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... nothing daunt 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 ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— 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
... 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 ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... me 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
... logical result of those proceedings last night would be, of course, the guillotine at Hyde Park Corner. Coryston wants our heads! There's nothing else to be said. I took the speeches for young men's nonsense—just midsummer madness, but I find people very angry. Your son! one ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the look of cold despair that tracks his stake 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 mechanically following the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... his 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 ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... 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
... it bare, had finished its toilets for the guillotine, when the woodcutters were about to sap its base, five men commenced hauling at the ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... 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 ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... 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 ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... "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
... Normandy was to become Dauphin in his place, and, in some few years, with his little sister, was to be made a close prisoner in the Temple. The king and the queen, separated from their children and each other, were to go out to the guillotine; the girl was to live through the seething hell of the Terror as by a miracle, and thereafter unhappily enough as the Duchess of Angouleme; but the fair boy, heir to one of the noblest heritages in all this vast world, torn from Marie Antoinette whilst the queen still lived, a prisoner, ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... 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
... 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
... 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, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... yesterday. Again and again the gallant soldier penetrated the low doorway; again and again he swerved and recoiled from the furnace fumes that met him—a more fearful encounter than the fury of the sans-culottes and the reeking pools beneath the guillotine. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... forget you, do I? I said to-day that Max Dalahaide was dead in life. That is true. Family influence, the tremendous eloquence of a man engaged to plead his cause, the fact that Max insisted upon his innocence, while the evidence was entirely circumstantial, saved him from the guillotine, which I believe he would have preferred, in his desperation. He was sent to that Hades upon earth, New Caledonia, a ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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 with a face of consternation to say that they must leave Paris at once. The Louvre ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... exhausting discussion. I am told by ingenious calculators in the newspapers that over six hundred hours, from some of which I confess I have been absent, of debate have been accorded to the Committee stage. No guillotine closure has been applied. Full, free, unfettered debate has been accorded—has been accorded with a patience and with a generosity unprecedented in Parliamentary annals, and which in effect has left a minority ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... 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 the Cabinet of ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... were 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 Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... 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 ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... break that infernal machine which calls itself a State, and I'd guillotine the ruffian that invented it. I cannot do that, but I can ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... 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 ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... Constitution to construct a scaffolding for coercion—another name for execution—we will reverse the order of the French Revolution, and save the blood of the people by making those who would inaugurate a reign of terror the first victims of a national guillotine!" ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... into his mouth. History has recorded this atrocious levity. So petty an act done in the midst of that great catastrophe pictures the Parisian populace, which deserves the sarcastic jibe of Boileau: "Frenchmen, born malin, created the guillotine." The Parisian of all time cracks jokes and makes lampoons before, during, and after ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... diatribe against the bishops was in full swing, whether Lady Moyne would succeed in moulding McNeice into a weapon for her hand. It seemed to me more probable at the moment that McNeice would in the end tumble her beautiful head from the block of a guillotine into the basket ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... 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
... two 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, to ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... feel horribly about it, and really and truly, without exaggeration, I would have died sooner than repay her kindness to me by giving her away like this. An ancestress of yours in the Revolution ran up the steps of the guillotine laughing and kissing her hands to the friends she left in the tumbril, and I could have been almost half as brave if by so doing I might have avoided this dreadful abandoning of Ellaline's interests, trusted to me. But what can you do between two evils? Isn't it a law of ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... fellow with a horrid grin; "if we had you in la belle France, your head would not remain long on your shoulders. We guillotine all such. It's the best way to treat them. They have trampled too long on our rights, ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... People to include every man of British blood, was a great, 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 ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... almost certainly have been retaken. As it was, Antoine on more than one occasion concealed him behind the bundles of firewood, and once or twice he narrowly escaped detection by less friendly officials. There were times when the guillotine seemed to him almost better than this long suspense: but while other heads passed to the block, his remained on his shoulders; and so weeks and even months went by. And during all this time, sleeping or waking, whenever he lay down upon his pallet, the toad crept up on to the stone, ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... believing that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names in one's old age:' in fact, he reckoned on being styled 'Lord Methusalem.' He had lived to hear of the cruel deaths of the once gay and high-born friends whom he had known in Paris, by the guillotine: he had lived to execrate the monsters who persecuted the grandest heroine of modern times, Marie Antoinette, to madness; he lived to censure the infatuation of religious zeal in the Birmingham riots. 'Are not the devils escaped out of the swine, and overrunning the earth headlong?'—he asked ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... 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 ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... are a stupid woman," he said. "You think you are serving your friends by adopting this tone. In effect you are bringing them to the guillotine. Now listen. If I leave you without further words you do not see me again. You will know nothing of what is going on until the police have lodged you in a cell. Neither you nor your associates can escape. I promise nothing, but perhaps if you tell me what I want to ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... the streets; and upon her inquiring the occasion of it, her guards told her she was welcome to go to the front windows, and satisfy her curiosity. She went, and saw an immense crowd of people surrounding a guillotine, that had been erected the preceding night. Mad. de Fleury started back with horror—her guards burst into an inhuman laugh, and asked whether her curiosity was satisfied. She would have left the room; but it was now their pleasure to detain her, and to force her to continue the whole day in this ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... poor with cheap bread, which bread was served at his own table; and, as if clinging to the memory of the youth of his son, he formed a plan for the establishment of an emigrant school at Penn, where the children of those who had perished by the guillotine or the sword amid the French convulsions, could be received, supported, and educated. He made a generous appeal to government for the benefit of these children, which was as generously responded to. The house appropriated to this humane purpose had been inhabited by Burke's old friend, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... least who did 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
... and threw him into that ill-omened 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 transfer ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... Mr. Gladstone used every power he possessed, and used it unscrupulously, to drive a Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons. He was a man trained in the historical traditions of Parliament. He assuredly did not relish the use of the closure and the guillotine. He was supported in the Commons by a very narrow majority, never I think exceeding forty-eight, and often falling below that number. The power of the party system, or as Americans say, the "Machine," was admittedly much less in 1893 than it has become ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... 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 and had ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... me, as he warmed with the theme, so vast a catalogue of public injuries, in language so menacing, yet so eloquent, that I was forced to ask whether I was standing in the midst of a Jacobin club—whether his object was actually to establish a democracy, to govern by the guillotine, to close up the churches, and inscribe the tombs with—death is an eternal sleep; to swear to the extinction of monarchy, and proclaim universal war. Our dispute had now attracted general notice. He answered with still more vehement and elaborate detail. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... stood the Altar of Freedom; And though neither marble nor gilding Was used in those days to adorn Our simple republican building, Corbleu! but the MERE GUILLOTINE Cared little for splendor or show, So you gave her an axe and a beam, And a plank and a basket ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brought 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" went down with all her crew, and Cowper ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... 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 ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... was a nameless age of black silence, and then there was a crowded hour of glorious life. When I heard the shouts and then the shots I tried to remember Sydney Carton and the French aristocrats taking snuff on the steps of the guillotine, and I tried to think of something handsome and dressy in the way of a farewell speech, in case it might ever be reported in the States. The C.E. was splendid, only, when the great doors clanged open and the mob streamed in calling wildly for Emilio Hernandez, he very naturally failed to hold ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... masse of France was but the rudest, as it was the earliest, form of the new discovery. There, terror was the moving principle. The conscription was the recruiting-officer. The guillotine was the commander who manoeuvred the generals, the troops, and the nation. Yet, the revolutionary armies differed in nothing from the monarchical, but in the superiority of their numbers, and the inferiority ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... scissors, shears, pruning shears, cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c. (arms) 727; bodkin &c. (perforator) 262; belduque[obs3], bowie knife[obs3], paring knife; bushwhacker [U.S.]; drawing knife, drawing shave; microtome[Microbiol]; chisel, screwdriver blade; flint blade; guillotine. sharpener, hone, strop; grindstone, whetstone; novaculite[obs3]; steel, emery. V. be sharp &c. adj.; taper to a point; bristle with. render sharp &c. adj.; sharpen, point, aculeate, whet, barb, spiculate[obs3], set, strop, grind; chip [flint]. cut &c. (sunder) 44. Adj. sharp, keen; acute; acicular, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... bone bracelets, a coin of the Hundred Years' War, and lastly a little pin- cushion of cloth in the shape of a heart, ornamented with metal crosses, the relic of some refugee in the Reign of Terror, hiding to escape the guillotine. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... person of some consequence if I had 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 ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... brains that propound them. All the instituted rights of men were accordingly violated in the fierce desire to establish the abstract rights of man. A government founded on reason was to be created by a preliminary and provisional government founded on the guillotine. The ideals of Rousseau were to be realized by practices learned in the school of Draco; and a celestial democracy of thought was to spring from a demonized democracy of fact. Now we are accustomed to call these wretches young men. But there was no youth in them. Young in respect to age, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... getting either. Yet our uppish people will eat nothing, drink nothing, wear nothing that is not French. We have been told of certain brokers in Wall-street who import even their desserts from Paris; not their deserts, my friend, for the guillotine is the only French thing which we don't imitate or import. No wine is fit for our tables without the prefix of a chateau something; every thing that is composed of wool is something de laine, and all our clothes ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... 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 take ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... to lose, instantly crowded the French prisons with the merchants, the bankers, and the whole monied class in France. Those who could be plundered no longer, were sent to execution. In Paris alone, within six months, a thousand persons of the various professions had been murdered by the guillotine. During the three years of the democracy, no less than eighteen thousand individuals, chiefly of the middle order, perished ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... Younger Branch was the triumph of the Revolution. To him the victory of the tricolor meant the resurrection of Montagne, which this time should surely bring the nobility down to the dust by means more certain than that of the guillotine, because less violent. The peerage without heredity; the National Guard, which puts on the same camp-bed the corner grocer and the marquis; the abolition of the entails demanded by a bourgeois lawyer; the Catholic Church deprived of its supremacy; ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... sat down just for a minute or two, and I turned over queer—so queer, ma'am, that I went and drew the curtains of one of the windows. Of course it's a much bigger room than I'm generally accustomed to occupy, as you know, ma'am. And I just threw up the window—it's what they call a guillotine window—and there I saw the water, you know, ma'am, in what ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... 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 ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... cause she espoused, the soul of honor, and the conscience of all who embraced it." When Robespierre overthrew the Girondists, Roland, with others of his party, saved his life by a flight to Rouen. His wife was soon sentenced to death by the infamous Fouquier Tinville. She rode to the guillotine clad in white, her glossy black hair hanging down to her girdle, and embraced her fate with divine courage and dignity. Hearing the direful news, Roland walked a few miles out of Rouen, and deliberately killed himself with his cane ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... 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
... them, and had adhered to the cause of the mother land, had their property confiscated, and were expelled from the country. Revolutions have ever been marked by cruelty. Liberty in France inaugurated the guillotine. The fathers of the American Revolution cast out their kindred, who found a refuge in the wilderness of Canada, where they endured for a time the most severe privations and hardships. This was the first illustration or definition of "liberty and the pursuit of happiness," from ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... 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 cheek, weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... thy fate for many a day, though she shall search long and frantically and not meet the beloved until within the shadow of the guillotine, it may give the reader what comfort it will that the blind sister still lives—a lost mite in the vast ocean ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... us, Ruthie!" broke off Helen, laughing. "Remember how scared we were when we walked up the old Cedar Walk with The Fox, here, and didn't know whether we were going to be met with a brass band or a ticket to the guillotine?" ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... Council House. The divines who attended the prisoner were not of his own persuasion; but he listened to them with civility, and exhorted them to caution their flocks against those doctrines which all Protestant churches unite in condemning. He mounted the scaffold, where the rude old guillotine of Scotland, called the Maiden, awaited him, and addressed the people in a speech, tinctured with the peculiar phraseology of his sect, but breathing the spirit of serene piety. His enemies, he said, he forgave, as he hoped to be forgiven. Only a single acrimonious expression escaped ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with a half-ironical smile, 'he is turned quite Flemish. Poor fellow! to what has he come?—to smoking tobacco, and losing all faith in art. Persecution does more harm than the guillotine,' added the tragedian in a tone of bitterness. 'There is a living death. David's exile has deprived us of many a chef-d'oeuvre. I can forgive the Restoration for surrounding itself with nobodies, but it need not banish our men of talent: they are not to be found ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... their 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, with a ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... Marie Antoinette, the widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, turned gray prematurely by sorrow, daughter of Caesars kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death? How, if it were the "martyred wife of Roland," uttering impassioned truth—truth odious to the rulers of her country—with her expiring breath? How, if it were the noble Charlotte Corday, that in the bloom of youth, that with the loveliest of ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... to be eradicated, and that the sufferings of its martyrs only tended to propagate and confirm it. Hence the scaffolds flow less frequently with blood, and the barbarous prudence of CAMILLE DESMOULINS' guillotine economique has been adopted. But exaction and oppression are still practised in every shape, and justice is not less violated, nor is property more secure, than when the former was administered by revolutionary ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... was assembled at Conlie, sixteen or seventeen miles away. They formed what was called the "Army of Brittany," and were commanded by Count Emile de Keratry, the son of a distinguished politician and literary man who escaped the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. The Count himself had sat in the Legislative Body of the Second Empire, but had begun life as a soldier, serving both in the Crimea and in Mexico, in which latter country he had acted as one of Bazaine's orderly officers. At the Revolution ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... to character or condition, and bought at so many pounds of tobacco per head. The cannon used by James II. in his desperate struggle for the throne, were melted up and coined into the famous gun money; and the bells of Paris which tolled over the horrors of the guillotine, in the bloody days of Robespierre, met a similar useful end. Charles I., with a Vandal hand, melted up the plate of the aristocracy and the almost inestimable relics of Oxford into siege pieces. In 1641, Massachusetts enacted that wheat should be received in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ink when he cursed the English and damned the Prussians; and he obtained much gratification in jabbing his quill-bodkin into what he termed the sniveling nobility of the old regime. Dog of dogs! was he not himself noble? Had not his parents and his brothers gone to the guillotine with the rest of them? But he, thank God, had no wooden mind; he could look progress and change in the face and follow their bent. And now, all the crimes and heroisms of the Revolution, all the glorious pageantry of the empire, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... when God's avenging judgments fell upon the enemies of the Christians. But to consider this murderous warrior on his white charger as literally death, would be as erroneous as to imagine the bare armed executioner and the guillotine to be themselves the death which they inflict. No more appalling picture of death has been drawn than that by Milton, whose dire image has this stroke of truth in it, that its adumbrate formlessness typifies the disorganizing force which reduces all cunningly built bodies of life to the elemental ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... prevail in each section of the Union, and the man who dares to plead for the cause of justice and moderation in either section is to be marked down as a traitor to his section. If this state of things is allowed to go on, how long before you will have the guillotine in active operation? ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... They 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 forced to ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... might succeed, but the result of the whole must be to cut to pieces the small force we have, without adequate success. Besides this, the reliance on the dispositions of the country, with the single exception of Toulon, pressed as it was by famine at one door, and the guillotine at the other, ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... drive a dog mad, and make a start, after long waiting, as deputy to some rascal or other in a hole of a place where the Government will fling you a thousand francs a year like the scraps that are thrown to the butcher's dog. Bark at thieves, plead the cause of the rich, send men of heart to the guillotine, that is your work! Many thanks! If you have no influence, you may rot in your provincial tribunal. At thirty you will be a Justice with twelve hundred francs a year (if you have not flung off the gown for good before then). By the time ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... the jury had already returned a verdict against us—that judgment had been signed—and that the sheriff was coming in the morning to execute the writ of possession in favor of our opponent." This was well meant by the speaker; but surely it was like talking of the machinery of the ghastly guillotine to the wretch in shivering expectation of suffering by it on the morrow. An involuntary shudder ran through Mr. Aubrey. "Sixty thousand pounds!" he exclaimed, rising and walking to and fro. "Why, I am ruined beyond all redemption! How can I ever satisfy it?" Again he paced ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... people against Louis XVI, at the time of the French Revolution, was that the royal family lived on the costliest delicacies while many of the common people were actually starving. They thought that was the chief crime to be expiated at the guillotine. ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... 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 ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... 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: ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... glued together all over except for two inches on one side of each. The boards then are squared to the book in a mill-board machine. The back of the book is glued up, and in the ordinary way rounded and backed. The edges may be cut with a guillotine. The ends of the tapes are glued on the waste end paper, which should be cut off about an inch and a half from the back. The split boards are then opened and glued, and the waste end papers with slips attached are placed in them (see ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the pistol-snap of the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a speculator might read a justification of the numerous suicides ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... democrat can feel towards him. But, 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 ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that chant ushered in, Falling of thrones and baubles and crowns— Bastille walls and guillotine, Sack of Tuileries, Temple frowns. Heard that Chant of the Marseillais, "Le jour de gloire ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... way, 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 ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 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
... a 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
... tree of Liberty thrives only when watered by the blood of tyrants;" escaped the fate of his associates; became a spy under Napoleon; was called by Burke, from his flowery oratory, the Anacreon of the Guillotine, and by Mercier, "the greatest liar in France;" he was inventor of the famous fable "his masterpiece," of the "Sinking of the Vengeur," "the largest, most inspiring piece of blaque manufactured, for some centuries, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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
... Duke of Normandy was to become Dauphin in his place, and, in some few years, with his little sister, was to be made a close prisoner in the Temple. The king and the queen, separated from their children and each other, were to go out to the guillotine; the girl was to live through the seething hell of the Terror as by a miracle, and thereafter unhappily enough as the Duchess of Angouleme; but the fair boy, heir to one of the noblest heritages in all this ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... 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
... Paolo Giacometti, in which Madame Ristori was wont to perform, presents an instance of this kind. "Marie Antoinette" is in five acts, with a prologue exhibiting the queen's life at Versailles, in 1786, and an epilogue showing her imprisonment in the Conciergerie, and her march to the guillotine in the custody of Samson ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... lives in are enough of themselves to sadden any man's face. In the Reign of Terror no living being in all the city of Paris can rise in the morning and be certain of escaping the spy, the denunciation, the arrest, or the guillotine, before night. Such times are trying enough to oppress any man's spirits; but Lomaque is not thinking of them or caring for them now. Out of a mass of papers which lie before him on his old writing-table, he has just taken up and read one, which has carried his thoughts ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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
... 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 yonder ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... being of a romantic turn of mind, remembered how a lady had been found by a student sitting on the lowest steps of the guillotine, desolate and helpless, at night; and how the student had taken her home and sheltered her, and had straightway fallen desperately in love with her, to discover, with unutterable horror, that her head had been severed ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Atlantic that were 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 of the United States, seeing their old ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... 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 ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... better it was to owe an existence to honest toil, than to 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 ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... fists of the soldiers that ran to meet him, the eyes of Anfossi were turned toward her. His face was expressionless. His eyes neither accused nor reproached. And with the joy of one who has looked upon and then escaped the guillotine, Marie ran down the steps to the waiting automobile. With a pretty cry of pleasure she leaped into the seat beside Thierry. Gayly she threw out her arms. "To Paris!" she commanded. The handsome eyes of Thierry, ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... 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 of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... the work of an instant. They put a man inside a frame and a sort of broad knife falls by machinery—they call the thing a guillotine-it falls with fearful force and weight-the head springs off so quickly that you can't wink your eye in between. But all the preparations are so dreadful. When they announce the sentence, you know, and prepare the criminal and tie his hands, and cart ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... looked up their monument and did proper reverence to them. They were moderate idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we thought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage we could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew; indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own politics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before what seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... is an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Topham 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 ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... was crowded with French exiles, escaped from the devouring sword of Robespierre and his helpers in the work of government by the guillotine, almost all of whom claimed to be members of, or closely connected with, the ancient nobility of France. Among these was an elderly gentleman of the name of De Tourville, who, with his daughter Eugenie, had for a considerable time occupied a first floor in King Street, Holborn. Him ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... 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 ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... required to abjure the unjust hatred which it bears to this body, of honour 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 ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... and key; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; Fate was pitting the Pitts against Fox; Hume was challenging worshipers of a Fetish and supplying arguments still bright with use; Voltaire and Rousseau were preparing the way for Madame Guillotine; Horace Walpole was printing marvelous books at his private press at Strawberry Hill; Sheridan was writing autobiographical comedies; David Garrick was mimicking his way to immortality; Gainsborough was working the apotheosis of a hat; Reynolds, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Mazzinists against Pius IX. is to be condemned in all its personal aspects. They would kill him to a certainty, if our troops were not there to defend him. This murder would be as unjust as that of Louis XVI., and as useless. The guillotine would deprive a good old man of his life, but it would not put an end to the bad principle ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... the guillotine falls," he answered. "To-night we dance in each other's arms. Immemorial tableau. Laughter, love, and song against the perfect background—death. Let's not cheat ourselves by being sad. To-morrow will be ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... 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
... witnessed in Paris a man's head cut off by the guillotine in the presence of thousands of spectators. I knew that the man was a horrible criminal. I was acquainted with all the arguments which people have been devising for so many centuries, in order to justify this sort of deed. I knew that they had done this expressly, deliberately. But at the moment ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... vis a vis to Joe Hume, while Louis Philippe but shares attention with the rivalling models of the Bastille and Guillotine! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... 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 and ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... 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 ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... inevitable of first causes and consequences invariable, the comparative freedom of commercial principles in the old regime of France allied with political despotism, was, however, ruthlessly condemned to the guillotine, along with the head of the Capets, never to be replaced by the ferocious spirit of democracy, revelling in the realization of all other visionary abstractions of perfect liberty, equality, levelling of distinctions and monopolies. With the reign of the rights of man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... suppose a condemned criminal must nerve himself to go to the guillotine or the gallows, I opened the letter. For as long as I might have counted "one, two," slowly, the paper looked black before my eyes, as if ink were spilt over it, blotting out the words: but the dark smudge cleared away, and showed me—nothing, except ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... sake of religious and political creeds committed as by the present Administration? The infamous Sag Nicht party with which you act, and of which you are a leader and a High Priest, though the "son of a now sainted father," has applied the political guillotine to almost every man in office who has dared to differ with them in their high estimate of foreign paupers and Catholic vagabonds, in many instances turning out native-born Protestants, and filling their places with foreign Catholics. And yet, with a degree of effrontery ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... representing him as more stoical than the truth, if we said he was unmoved. So far from this, his moments were bitter, and his anguish would have been extreme, were it not for a high resolution which prompted him to die, as he fancied it, like un Francais. The numerous executions by the guillotine had brought fortitude under such circumstances into a sort of fashion, and there were few who did not meet death with decorum. With our prisoner, however, it was still different; for, sustained by a dauntless spirit, he would have faced the great tyrant ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • 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 ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... be true, Boyne. It may be true, but I wouldn't put faith in it—not for one icy minute. I don't want to see here in Ireland the horrors and savagery of France. I don't want to see the guillotine up ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... will America draw from the present Great War? Must she see the heads of her own children at the foot of the guillotine to realize that it will cut, or will she accept the evidence of the thousands which have lain there before? Will she heed the lesson of all time, that national unpreparedness means national downfall, or will she profit from the experience and misfortunes of others and take those needed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... 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 on as merrily ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... February there appeared on the Piazza del Popolo a large platform with a guillotine and two gibbets, on which the culprits were to be executed. Many stands were constructed for the convenience of those who were curious to witness such a terrible act of justice; and the concourse was so great that some windows ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Paul Kauvar, has for his prototype Camille Desmoulins, one of the most conspicuous and sincere sons of liberty of his day, who—in spite of his magnificent devotion to freedom—when he dared oppose the Jacobins, was beheaded at the guillotine—a martyr to national, as ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy • Steele Mackaye
... 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)
... slight compression of his lip, and a still slighter movement in his chair,—"look you, this is no question of ifs and buts! it is a question of must and shall,—a question of existence to you and to me. When Danton was condemned to the guillotine, he said, flinging a pellet of bread at the nose of his respectable judge, 'Mon individu sera bientot dans le neant.' My patrimony is there already! I am loaded with debts. I see before me, on the one side, ruin or suicide; on the other side, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from me forever all thought of marriage. But then my mother, an emigrant here in London, claimed all my care. It called me again when she departed, dear saintly being. But then there were my brother's sons—orphaned by the guillotine—to place. And when I had established them honourably, our beloved Lucia turned to me, with her many enchantments and exquisite tragedy of the heart. And, now, in my old age I come to you—whom I receive from her as ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... '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
... me as though I had done all that remains for me to do," he said. "But don't you hear them, those huzzars of the guillotine? ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... little uneasy. A disagreeable surprise, if my excursion, in which I was to break banks and hearts, and, as you see, heads, should end upon the gallows or the guillotine. I was not clear, in those times of political oscillation, which ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 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 down ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of the revolution, their favourite cry presented an exact picture of the character of the nation—of the same nation, which, in these dark days of continual horror, could yet amuse, itself by an exhibition of dancing-dogs, under the blood-dropping stage of the guillotine; their cry was then, [55]"Vive la Mort!" Utterly inattentive to these inconsistencies, the French people continue willingly to cry out whatever rallying word may be given to them by those agents who, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... connection between Corsica and the French Republic. The convention suspecting such a design, and perhaps occasioning it by their suspicions, ordered him to their bar. That way he well knew led to the guillotine; and returning a respectful answer, he declared that he would never be found wanting in his duty, but pleaded age and infirmity as a reason for disobeying the summons. Their second order was more summary; and the French troops, who were in Corsica, aided by those ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... remarkable passage:—servants denounced masters, debtors denounced creditors, women denounced husbands, children denounced parents, youth denounced protecting age; gratitude was unknown; a favour conferred led to the guillotine: but never, never in that awful period, in that reign of the vilest passions of our nature over reason, was there one instance, one single instance, of a ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... 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 ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... 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 tightened ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... 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
... other with that calm and assured air of superiority which the people once tried in vain to stamp out with the guillotine. "No, it is not. You want to demonstrate that you are superior, and you cannot do it. You say that you have as much right to walk on the pavement as I. I admit it. In your heart you want to prove that you have more, and you cannot ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... daughter-in-law, at Auteuil, where she lived a happy life and received the best society of Paris. When she died or under what circumstances is not known. During the Revolution she lived in obscurity, busying herself with charitable work; she was one of the few women of the nobility to escape the guillotine, "This woman, who had kept the intellectual world alive with her esprit and goodness, of a sudden vanishes like a star from the horizon; she lives on, unnoticed by everyone, and, in that new society, no one misses ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... 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. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... females, I could perceive that plunder was going on, and that the intention was, after having ransacked the place, to set it on fire. Yet a strong body of cavalry mounted in the middle of the square, and keeping guard round a waggon on which a guillotine had been already erected, still made me feel that an attack would be hopeless. I soon saw a rush of the people from one of the side streets; a couple of dragoon helmets were visible above the crowd; and three ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... times when she had sat for him. He could recall Del Ferice's mock heroics, Donna Tullia's ill-expressed invectives, and his own half-sarcastic sympathy in the liberal movement; but the young fellow in an old velveteen jacket who used to talk glibly about the guillotine, about stringing-up the clericals to street-lamps and turning the churches into popular theatres, was surely not the energetic, sunburnt Zouave who had been hunting down brigands in the Samnite hills ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... why, here was something else; the very document alluded to by Francoise in her memoir of travel—the autobiography of the dear little countess, her beloved Alix de Morainville, made fatherless and a widow by the guillotine in the ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... persistent asseverations of innocence. His known hatred of Destouches, the threats he had uttered concerning him, his conduct in front of the cathedral, Marguerite's evidence, and the finding the crown in his pocket, left no doubt of his guilt, and he was condemned to suffer death by the guillotine. He appealed of course, but that, everybody felt, could only prolong his life for a short time, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... century was famous for the executions of women on account of their radical political opinions, Madame Roland, the leader of the liberal party in France, going to the guillotine with the now famous words upon her lips, "Oh, Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" The beautiful Charlotte Corday sealed with her life her belief in liberty, while Sophia Lapierre barely escaped the same fate; though ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the great public 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 alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the wheel, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... 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 nobility ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... began to descend upon my head and shoulders, and cover the work I was engaged on. I started up, and looking up at my big sunlight, saw to my horror that I had wound up my easel, which is twelve feet high, and more nearly resembles a guillotine than anything else, so far that the top of it was in immediate contact with the gas, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... painter's name, he dislocated his jaw, and is now in a precarious state. Our Assistant Critic, Deputy Assistant Critic, Deputy Assistant Sub-Critic, and a few extra Supernumerary Critics, then went in a body and looked at this young woman's head, apparently taken after an interview with Madame Guillotine. They looked at the head from all sides, and finally stood on their own, but they could not make head or tail of it. Any person giving information as to the meaning, and paying threepence, will receive a presentation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... 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 ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... provinces, where a periphrastic style 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
... 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 infuriated ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... considered, by those unfamiliar with our religion, as also based on a veneration for a very strange emblem; for the cross was the instrument used by the Romans for punishing with death, murderers and criminals of the lowest type; and what would be thought to-day, of a man worshipping the gallows or the guillotine, or carrying copies modeled from the same, suspended from his neck. However we of to-day all understand the emblem of the cross, and the Ancient Egyptians in their time, all understood the ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... and shatter on the lab bench, I gave it up. How would you have acted if you had gotten that kind of news? That first gut-twisting admission that you really may be a snake! Then sharp awareness of what it means. A guillotine couldn't cut you off more sharply from Normal humanity. But the spirit struggles and refuses to accept it. You ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... pausing a moment, her face crimson, stole toward the bed. Molly was in her chair, with her head lolling over the back, as if it were a guillotine, her huge mouth ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... myself in one 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 ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... better friend than the pawnbroker. This universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the street, there is no one de trop, there is no one absolutely useful, or absolutely harmful—knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon Valentin's table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head; and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it was only a Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some note. But O'Brien was an Irishman, ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the so-called "Foreign Conspiracy," de Batz, who is universally admitted to have been the head and prime-mover of that conspiracy—if, indeed, conspiracy there was—never made either the slightest attempt to rescue his confederates from the guillotine, or at least the offer to perish by their side if he could not succeed in ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... gasped the 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
... things of which I have spoken sow in the breast of poverty the seeds of hatred and revolution. These poor men, hunted by the officers of the law, cornered, captured, imprisoned, excite the sympathy of other poor men, and if some are dragged to the gallows and hanged, or beheaded by the guillotine, they become saints and martyrs, and those who sympathize with them feel that they have the power, and only the power of hatred—the power of riot, of destruction—the power of the torch, of revolution, that is to say, of chaos and anarchy. The injustice of the higher classes ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses[63], one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But Vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets,[64] With which the Doctor paid off an old pox, By borrowing a new one from ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 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 of our ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... 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
... 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 our rights, to ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... of action,—which, whatever its other results, would undoubtedly have conducted him to the guillotine with his political friends in May 1793,—was rendered impossible by a somewhat undignified hindrance. Wordsworth, while in his own eyes "a patriot of the world," was in the eyes of others a young man of twenty-two, travelling on a small allowance, and running ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... 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 ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... he asked, and he addressed the question to Wethermill. It struck Ricardo as one of the strangest details in all this strange affair that the detective should ask with confidence for information which might help to bring Celia Harland to the guillotine from the man who had staked his happiness ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... gayety with all of the "chiffon pinafore" ladies upon the ballroom floor. I have in my blood that gayety which led some of my ancestors to laugh and compliment each other and play piquet up even to the edge of the guillotine, and I refused to see the countenance of my Uncle, the General Robert, regarding me from the door in the end of the ballroom. I considered that an hour of pleasure was a sacred thing not to be interfered with, and I danced with that sweet Sue Tomlinson right past the edge ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... 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
... large, coarse. grupa back (of horse). grupo group. gruta 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. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... royalty, like British royalty, 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 Duke of Reichstadt, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... ever 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 ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... stupid woman," he said. "You think you are serving your friends by adopting this tone. In effect you are bringing them to the guillotine. Now listen. If I leave you without further words you do not see me again. You will know nothing of what is going on until the police have lodged you in a cell. Neither you nor your associates can escape. I promise nothing, but perhaps if you tell me what I want to know ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... handsome features fascinated the crowd. But, unlike his great predecessor, he could hold the affection of the people, indeed, he proved one of the few conspicuous leaders against whom the people did not turn on the day of going to the guillotine. A lawyer, and of a lawyer's family, he was in lucrative practice when the Revolution broke out, a fine advocate, not overscrupulous in method, flexible, but large in view, generous in heart, irresistible in courage, strong in political instincts, a man of the greatest ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... 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
... the "deputies on mission," radical members of the Convention who were detailed to watch the generalship and movements of the various French armies, endowed with power to send any suspected or unsuccessful commander to the guillotine and charged with keeping the central government constantly informed of military affairs. Gradually, a new group of brilliant young republican generals appeared, among whom the steadfast Moreau (1763- 1813), the stern Pichegru (1761-1804), and the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... 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 ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... disenthralled France, we learn that the guillotine bathed in blood was the emblem of their transition state, from serfs to freemen. With the Negro were the antithesis of anger, revenge, or despair, that of joy, gratitude, and hope, has been ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... were 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
... inquiry, was occupied in practising and advocating a gentle manipulation to induce sleep, in preference to the more violent crises. I have no plea for telling you how M. de Puysegur served in the first French revolutionary armies; how he quitted the service in disgust; how narrowly he escaped the guillotine; how he lived in retirement afterwards, benevolently endeavouring to do good to his sick neighbours by mesmerism; how he survived the Restoration; and how, finally, he died of a cold caught by serving again in the encampment at Rheims to assist as an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... 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 splendor, but copying the errors, of a ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... the 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 my wealth to the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... misrepresented; but how was he to dispute them? There was no justice in this miserable country, with such a partial and one-sided system of law. He began to fear that his life was in their hands; already he felt his head on the block, under the shadow of the awful guillotine. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... particles of smouldering wood began to descend upon my head and shoulders, and cover the work I was engaged on. I started up, and looking up at my big sunlight, saw to my horror that I had wound up my easel, which is twelve feet high, and more nearly resembles a guillotine than anything else, so far that the top of it was in immediate contact with ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we thought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage we could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew; indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own politics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before what seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncovered heads for a second before we took ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... 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 ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... getting red at once with the passion of his protest—"hard—it ought to condemn him, to guillotine him. What are juries for if they don't kill such rascals ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... 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 unable ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Robespierre, and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday! we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by moonlight—silent and terror-stricken, our ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... of all the nots. In the Edinburgh Advertiser of yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:—'It [The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the "bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets of Paris." It has reminded them of the time when a "grey discrowned head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;" insinuating that, if they persisted in ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... ministry—call it what name you will—given positive, indubitable signs of want and absence of foresight, as did ours in these Virginia, Norfolk, and Harper's Ferry affairs? Not this or that minister or secretary, but all of them ought to go to the constitutional guillotine. Blindness—no mere short-sightedness—permeates the whole administration, Blair excepted. And Scott, the politico-military adviser of the President! What is the matter with Scott, or were the halo ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... capital! 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 and ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... 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 ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... imaginative independence as Keats and Coleridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies. In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly; and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine. Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed freely over Kubla Khan; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have locked him up for a madman. Even Hebert (the one really vile Revolutionist), ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 leapt out of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 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 ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... poverty the seeds of hatred and revolution. These poor men, hunted by the officers of the law, cornered, captured, imprisoned, excite the sympathy of other poor men, and if some are dragged to the gallows and hanged, or beheaded by the guillotine, they become saints and martyrs, and those who sympathize with them feel that they have the power, and only the power of hatred—the power of riot, of destruction—the power of the torch, of revolution, that is to say, of chaos and anarchy. The injustice ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... coincidence. Upon Valentin's table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head; and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it was only a Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some note. But O'Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... classes in power; but the latter, unfortunately, in every period of history, in times of political crisis, as in those of social crisis, have shown themselves unable to conceive of any other remedy than brutal repression—the guillotine or the prison—and they fancy that thus they can cure the organic and constitutional disease which vexes ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... retaken. As it was, Antoine on more than one occasion concealed him behind the bundles of firewood, and once or twice he narrowly escaped detection by less friendly officials. There were times when the guillotine seemed to him almost better than this long suspense: but while other heads passed to the block, his remained on his shoulders; and so weeks and even months went by. And during all this time, sleeping or waking, whenever he lay down upon his pallet, the toad crept up on to the stone, and ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... woman is thus crushed by neglect or abuse, by the hand of poverty, by hard toil, or the harder fate of a consuming death at the hands of a false or brutal companion. But really, why is it sadder than to die by inches on the guillotine of Fashion? The results are the same in either case. Abused women generally outlive fashionable ones. Crushed and care-worn women see the pampered daughters of Fashion wither and die around them, and wonder ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... Miss Wilson, Ken," Boyd said. "I meant in general." He left, with the air of a man whose world has betrayed him. His back looked, to Malone, like the back of a man on his way to the scaffold or guillotine. ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... have drawn the breath 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 cheek, weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was driving him forward. Above the clinched fists of the soldiers that ran to meet him, the eyes of Anfossi were turned toward her. His face was expressionless. His eyes neither accused nor reproached. And with the joy of one who has looked upon and then escaped the guillotine, Marie ran down the steps to the waiting automobile. With a pretty cry of pleasure she leaped into the seat beside Thierry. Gayly she threw out her arms. "To Paris!" she commanded. The handsome eyes of Thierry, eloquent with admiration, looked ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... 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 ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... stamps of this series had a gauge of 12, as with the stamps of the preceding issue, and was the work of single line or guillotine machines. That is, each line of perforation, both horizontally and vertically, represented a separate stroke on the machine. The Monthly Journal for February, 1899, lists a minor variety of perforation in ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... world had been done. The nations at home sat like the knitting ring about the guillotine, waiting for the final scene to be staged. Germany was no more in the world's mind. They had tried to think about her. Their thought had been brought to folly and confusion. Already she was forgotten. She had become a piece of territory that shortly their ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 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
... the eyes of 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 them—homage that followed those smiles as surely as the carols ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... 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
... two took their 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 ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ordinary prisoner of war, and threw him Into that forbidding prison, the Temple, from whose iron-barred windows the unfortunate sailor watched for two years the horrors of the Reign of Terror in its last stages, the tossing crowds, the tumbrils rolling past, crowded with victims for the guillotine. Sidney Smith escaped at last by a singularly audacious trick. Two confederates, dressed in dashing uniform, one wearing the dress of an adjutant, and the other that of an officer of still higher rank, presented ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... 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
... young lad saw terrible sights of men hung from lamp-posts; heard the grisly cry, "A la lanterne! a la lanterne!" and was even himself seized by some of the mob, though he happily contrived, in the confusion, to slip away. In Marseilles, too, he first saw the guillotine; it was carried about the streets in procession whilst the populace yelled out the "Marseillaise Hymn." Later on in the Revolution he was seized, as an Englishman, and imprisoned with a number of others at Abbeville; but, escaping from ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... uppish people will eat nothing, drink nothing, wear nothing that is not French. We have been told of certain brokers in Wall-street who import even their desserts from Paris; not their deserts, my friend, for the guillotine is the only French thing which we don't imitate or import. No wine is fit for our tables without the prefix of a chateau something; every thing that is composed of wool is something de laine, and all our clothes are made of drap de ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... with a horrid grin; "if we had you in la belle France, your head would not remain long on your shoulders. We guillotine all such. It's the best way to treat them. They have trampled too long on our rights, ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... courageous graces. She would smile, talk, play cards with them, those doomed ones, she herself doomed; she would make life's last day livable, in every exquisite sense of the word. And he could see her in the tumbril, her arm round a terrified girl; he could see her mounting the steps of the guillotine, perhaps with no upward glance to heaven, but with a composure as resolute and ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... he exclaimed, "what prison do you suppose remains open for the murderer of seven men! You shrink from death. Yet let me assure you that the guillotine, with the certain prospect of it before you day after day through a long trial, is no pleasant outlet from the world for a sybarite. Be a philosopher. Go and die as you have lived. Write your confession, summon your dearest friend by telephone, ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 my ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... State, for there the Church is the State. A secret, summary, and atrocious tribunal it is, differing in no essential particular from that sanguinary tribunal in Paris where Robespierre passed sentence, and the guillotine executed it. The Gregorian Code[6] enacts, that in cases of sedition or treason, the trial may take place by a commission nominated by the Pope's Secretary; that the trial shall be secret; that the prisoner shall not ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... 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
... by rough hands, relaxed, and he allowed himself to be led. Truly, he was disgusted with his faintness and weakness. He had seen men die who knew they were going to die. His task as reporter had led him more than once to the foot of the guillotine. And the wretches he had seen there had died bravely. Extraordinarily enough, the most criminal had ordinarily met death most bravely. Of course, they had had leisure to prepare themselves, thinking a long time in advance of that supreme moment. But they affronted ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... a 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Majesty." "What do you mean? 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 said to you at the palace, to make you weep?" "Can you not guess ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... 'crapaudine' on neck and ankles and wrists; all, all as bad as the 'Pater Noster' of the Inquisition, as Mayer said the other day in the face of Charpentier, the Commandant of the penitentiary. How pleasant also to think of the Boulevard de Guillotine! I tell you it is brutal, horrible. Think of what prisoners have to suffer here, whose only crime is that they were of the Commune; that they were just a little madder ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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
... many proud, brave faces of these delicate women, walking in high-heeled shoes, all too frail for the hard-dusty roadways. They belonged to the same race and breed as those ladies who defied death with fine disdain upon the scaffold of the guillotine in the ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... 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 my wealth to the nation!" ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... here stood the Altar of Freedom; And though neither marble nor gilding Was used in those days to adorn Our simple republican building, Corbleu! but the MERE GUILLOTINE Cared little for splendor or show, So you gave her an axe and a beam, And a plank and a ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with that calm and assured air of superiority which the people once tried in vain to stamp out with the guillotine. "No, it is not. You want to demonstrate that you are superior, and you cannot do it. You say that you have as much right to walk on the pavement as I. I admit it. In your heart you want to prove that ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... but the hatred of the Mazzinists against Pius IX. is to be condemned in all its personal aspects. They would kill him to a certainty, if our troops were not there to defend him. This murder would be as unjust as that of Louis XVI., and as useless. The guillotine would deprive a good old man of his life, but it would not put an end to the bad ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... Danton disenthralled France, we learn that the guillotine bathed in blood was the emblem of their transition state, from serfs to freemen. With the Negro were the antithesis of anger, revenge, or despair, that of joy, gratitude, and hope, has been ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... years old, and left a numerous family. One grandson was the Abbe Edgeworth, known in France as De Firmont, such being the alteration of Fairymount on French lips. It was he who, at the peril of his own life, attended Louis XVI. to the guillotine, and thus connected his name so closely with the royal cause that when his cousin Richard Lovell Edgeworth, of Edgeworths-town, visited France several years after, the presence of a person so called was deemed perilous to the rising power of Napoleon. This latter Mr. Edgeworth was ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 spoke several languages, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... 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, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... to the revealing of my terrible past, my perturbed 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 chap, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... skipper 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 take ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... sacrificed —Execution of the King and Queen, Philippe Egalite, Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, Robespiere, cum multus aliis —Unexampled dispatch introduced in putting persons to death by means of the guillotine—Guillotin, the inventor or improver of this instrument, dies of grief—Little impression left on the mind of the spectators of these sanguinary scenes—Lord Cornwallis ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... problematical dinner, and feeling timid in the solitude of their own 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 ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... furnace through which they had passed. But we, who had grown up upon a strange soil, understood that the world had moved, and that new issues had arisen. We were inclined to forget these feuds of the last generation. France to us was no longer the murderous land of the sans-culotte and the guillotine basket; it was rather the glorious queen of war, attacked by all and conquering all, but still so hard pressed that her scattered sons could hear her call to arms for ever sounding in their ears. It was that call ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inscribed, so all the world may read: "Saturnine pleasure it to us doth give, To see them walk the plank from scuttled ship." Caesar: Ha Ha! but speak it not aloud, until 'tis done. Both: Whist! whist as mice! We'll oil the guillotine. Exeunt both while Caesar washes his ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... 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
... were not of his own persuasion; but he listened to them with civility, and exhorted them to caution their flocks against those doctrines which all Protestant churches unite in condemning. He mounted the scaffold, where the rude old guillotine of Scotland, called the Maiden, awaited him, and addressed the people in a speech, tinctured with the peculiar phraseology of his sect, but breathing the spirit of serene piety. His enemies, he said, he ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... at the platform of the guillotine, already stained with the blood of Bernard, Lesurques exclaimed, "I pardon my judges; I pardon the witnesses through whose error I die; and I pardon Legrand, who has not a little contributed to my judicial assassination. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Gladstone used every power he possessed, and used it unscrupulously, to drive a Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons. He was a man trained in the historical traditions of Parliament. He assuredly did not relish the use of the closure and the guillotine. He was supported in the Commons by a very narrow majority, never I think exceeding forty-eight, and often falling below that number. The power of the party system, or as Americans say, the "Machine," was admittedly ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... elaborately set 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 period of that ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Place de la Revolution, he is brought to the guillotine; beside him, brave Abbe Edgeworth says, "Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven"; the axe clanks down; a king's life is shorn away. At home, this killing of a king has divided all friends; abroad it has united all enemies. England declares war; Spain declares war; they all declare ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... to remorse and 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 ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... Evening World, the half-tone engraving, which was the first glimpse I had of him, and the dawn of his subsequent triumphs. For four years he supplied the evening edition and The Sunday World with a comic feature, to say nothing of a comic opera, written to order in five days. The absence of a guillotine in New York State accounts for his escape for this latter offence. Nevertheless, in all else his standard of excellence ascended. He reported the Thaw trial in long-hand, writing nearly 600,000 words of testimony and observation, establishing a new style ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Flagg was proclaiming herself a moral coward, in the local room of the REPUBLIC Collins, the copy editor, was editing Sam's story' of the laying of the corner-stone. The copy editor's cigar was tilted near his left eyebrow; his blue pencil, like a guillotine ready to fall upon the guilty word or paragraph, was suspended in mid-air; and continually, like a hawk preparing to strike, the blue pencil swooped and circled. But page after page fell softly to the desk and the blue pencil remained inactive. As he read, the voice of Collins rose in ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... unconscious, steeped in worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this. It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is somehow not the same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution, or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements, or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and pictures—no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity, interest, wonder, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... eminent and already detested Mr. Dawson took his departure, and I was left alone with Rowley. A man who may be said to have wakened to consciousness in the prison of the Abbaye, among those ever graceful and ever tragic figures of the brave and fair, awaiting the hour of the guillotine and denuded of every comfort, I had never known the luxuries or the amenities of my rank in life. To be attended on by servants I had only been accustomed to in inns. My toilet had long been military, to a moment, at the note of a bugle, too often at a ditch-side. And it need not be wondered at ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you want?" whispered Rokoff, for the look in the ape-man's eyes frightened him. "Have you come to kill me? You do not dare. They would guillotine you. You do not dare ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... cities of this country is a matter of speculation. What women have done in times of turbulence and excitement in large cities in the past we know. Open that terrible page of the French Revolution and the days of terror, when the click of the guillotine and the rush of blood through the streets of Paris demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of human nature can be driven by political passion. Who led those blood-thirsty mobs? Who shrieked loudest in that hurricane of passion? Woman. Her picture upon the pages of history ...
— 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.
... and the nervous strain of the disappearing dollars, she asked no further questions after the welcome news that Miss Hampshire existed and had a "room to rent." Hastily she paid off the chauffeur, adding something for himself (it seemed like tipping the man at the guillotine) and breathed again only when her trunk and dressing-bag blocked the ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... have 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 ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... Egalite, sold Joinville in 1790, and stipulated that the old castle should be demolished. Poplars and fir-trees now cover the ground of the ancient castle, and the name of Joinville is borne by a royal prince, the son of a dethroned king, the grandson of Louis Egalite, who died on the guillotine. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... 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 ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... shops and Maxim's, glance up at the 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
... under the razor!" she exclaimed, meaning the guillotine. "He tried to drown me, the assassin! Yes, I know him for an assassin,—a murderer! It was he who pushed me into ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... only exasperated by the stupidity of the crowd, sitting very still and erect, had upon her face that expression of bored contempt with which aristocrats in the French Revolution are said to have gone to the guillotine. Then that was shouted in her ear which, though but half, understood, turned her scarlet with anger. Unfortunately Savage, hitherto patiently self-controlled, had heard the compounded epithet hurled at ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... 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 ago. Yellow Books are another story. The yellow-backs may have sometimes affronted the eye, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... deposit your wife, your daughter, your umbrella, everything down to your hat-box, your socks (don't you go in for ribbed socks?), your shovel and tongs, and the very wood you've got in the cellar! Gobseck! Gobseck! in the name of virtuous folly, who told you to go to that commercial guillotine?" ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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, ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to banish tranquillity from the first months of her pregnancy. Before she left Neuilly, she happened one day to enter Paris on foot (I believe, by the Place de Louis Quinze), when an execution, attended with some peculiar aggravations, had just taken place, and the blood of the guillotine appeared fresh upon the pavement. The emotions of her soul burst forth in indignant exclamations, while a prudent bystander warned her of her danger, and intreated her to hasten and hide her discontents. She described to me, more than once, the anguish she felt at hearing of the death ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... last survivor of that memorable body. Soon after succeeding to his fortune, and when he was by far the wealthiest man in the State, Louis Philippe, the fugitive son of Louis Egalite, Duke of Orleans, came to New Orleans, an exile from his native land, after his father had perished by the guillotine. Marigny received him, and entertained him as a prince. He gave him splendid apartments in his house, with a suite of servants to attend him, and, opening his purse to him, bade him take ad libitum. For some years he remained his guest, indeed until he deemed it necessary ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the lovely Angele could now be laid to rest. Her ruffianly son was even now being conveyed by Leroux and his gendarmes to the frontier, where the law would take its course. I was indeed not sorry for him. I was not sorry to think that he would end his evil life upon the guillotine or the gallows. I was only grieved for Angele who would spend a night and a day, perhaps more, in agonized suspense, knowing nothing of the events which at one great swoop would free her and her beloved mother from ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... poet was executed 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 derriere admiration. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... and the very air is charged with the hum of press and with odours of glue and paste and oil. The entire neighbourhood is given up to the printer and binder; and even my patient turned out to be a guillotine-knife grinder—a ferocious and revolutionary calling strangely at variance with his ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... chant ushered in, Falling of thrones and baubles and crowns— Bastille walls and guillotine, Sack of Tuileries, Temple frowns. Heard that Chant of the Marseillais, "Le jour ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... gradually reassembled, and stood, hands in pockets, lips still sullen and contemptuous, but eyes watchful of the spectacle. There were such few spectacles these days, other than the monotonous processions of tumbrils with their load of aristocrats for the guillotine! ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... asked, and he addressed the question to Wethermill. It struck Ricardo as one of the strangest details in all this strange affair that the detective should ask with confidence for information which might help to bring Celia Harland to the guillotine from the man who had staked ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... 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 Holy Secrets, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... in bed and dreamed of the French Revolution. Bloody scenes passed before him. He held long conversations with Robespierre, Marat, and other monsters of that time, was dragged before the tribunal, was condemned to death, and carried through a great crowd of people, bound to a plank. The guillotine severed his head from his shoulders. He woke with terror to find that a rail over the bed had got unfastened and had fallen upon his neck like a guillotine, and, as his mother who was sitting by him declared, at that ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... suddenly more ragged and rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails, so the human city rises under the wind of the spirit into toppling temples or sudden spires. No man has ever seen a revolution. Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood pouring down the gutters, the guillotine lifted higher than the throne, a prison in ruins, a people in arms—these things are not revolution, but the ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... of many such heart-breaking instances the movement for safeguarding machinery and securing indemnity for industrial accidents proceeds all too slowly. At a recent exhibition in Boston the knife of a miniature guillotine fell every ten seconds to indicate the rate of industrial accidents in the United States. Grisly as was the device, its hideousness might well have been increased had it been able to demonstrate the connection between certain of these accidents and the complete moral ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... 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 ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... animals mere glimpses of the phenomenon,—mere indications of it, doubtfully apparent for at most a few minutes. The blood drawn from the human arm by the lancet continues to live in the cup until it has cooled and begun to coagulate; and when head and body have parted company under the guillotine, both exhibit for a brief space such unequivocal signs of life, that the question arose in France during the horrors of the Revolution, whether there might not be some glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on the fearfully ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
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