"Guillotine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... 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
... "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 when I wearied of that ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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
... 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 ...
— 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.
... 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
... 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 ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... 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
... 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, ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 |
