"Guillotine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Negroes and Arabs. They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers. They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity could lead them, could ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... parliaments, the noblemen, bishops, capitalists, were the men amongst whom, and through whom, the philosophy of the eighteenth century was propagated. Never was an aristocracy more liberal, more humane, and more thoroughly converted to useful reforms;[2214] many of them remain so under the knife of the guillotine. The magistrates of the superior tribunals, in particular, traditionally and by virtue of their institution, were the enemies of excessive expenditure and the critics of arbitrary acts. As to the gentry of the provinces, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... who avowed everything except that Jane was his daughter. He would not have admitted this had he been threatened with the guillotine. Fanfar ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... 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 ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... 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 point, however, is to get service with the army of Italy. These campaigns here ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... brown fiddler and his daughter who inhabited the same, and who had immediately secured their prize by slipping the displaced board down again, wedging it firmly on the back of his neck, as if he had been fitted for the guillotine, thus nailing him fast, unless he had bolted, and left his ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... 'knout de Russe'; the 'poucettes', the 'crapaudine' on neck and ankles and wrists; all, all as bad as the 'Pater Noster' of the Inquisition, as Mayer said the other day in the face of Charpentier, the Commandant of the penitentiary. How pleasant also to think of the Boulevard de Guillotine! I tell you it is brutal, horrible. Think of what prisoners have to suffer here, whose only crime is that they were of the Commune; that they were just a little madder than ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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
... and condemned to death, on the 16th of June, 1600. The nurse was at the same time condemned to be burnt alive, and suffered her sentence accordingly; but Lady Warriston, in respect of her gentle descent, was appointed to die by the Maiden, a sort of rude guillotine, imported, it is said, from Halifax, by the Earl of Morton, while regent, who was himself the first ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the antechamber of the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent to her, but she dismissed him with thanks, not requiring his ministrations. She preferred the painter Hauer, who had received the Revolutionary Tribunal's permission to paint her portrait in accordance with her request. And during ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... 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." ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... them are four feet two inches diameter; and dangerous things they are to move, for if the men do not all heave or 'give' at the same moment the stone may slip, and the edge will take off a row of fingers as clean as the guillotine. Tibbald, of course, had his joke about that part of the machinery which is called the 'damsel.' He was a righteous man enough as millers go, but your miller was always a bit of a knave; nor could he forbear from boasting to me how he had been half an hour too soon for Hilary ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... courtly graces, to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian, who, whilst he is receiving their homage, is measuring them with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of his guillotine! These ambassadors may easily return as good courtiers as they went; but can they ever return from that degrading residence, loyal and faithful subjects; or with any true affection to their master, or true attachment to the constitution, religion, or laws of their country? ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Jacobin rule was identified with the cause of patriotism in arms against foreign invasion, and with antipathy to the restoration of Bourbon royalty and misrule. In Paris, the revolutionary tribunal was filling the prisons with the suspected, and sending daily its wagon-loads of victims to the guillotine. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the Luxembourg. Just before his confinement he had finished the first part of his 'Age of Reason,' and confided it to the care of his friend Joel Barlow for publication. He was now taken ill, to which circumstance he ascribed his escape from the guillotine; and on the fall of Robespierre was released. In 1795 he published, at Paris, the second part of his 'Age of Reason.' He returned to America in 1802, bringing with him a woman named Madame Bonneville, whom he had seduced away from her husband, with her ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... 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
... opposite to Harris, is British to the core. I remember George quite patriotically indignant with Harris once for suggesting the introduction of the guillotine into England. ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... differed from 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
... misunderstanding, it will not be amiss to say a few words about the temporal peculiarities of these dream processes. In a very interesting discussion, apparently suggested by Maury's puzzling guillotine dream, Goblet tries to demonstrate that the dream requires no other time than the transition period between sleeping and awakening. The awakening requires time, as the dream takes place during that period. One is inclined to believe ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... years of the French Revolution. Alsace and Lorraine had welcomed massacres as signs of political equality; mob leaders destroyed castles and monasteries; Jew-baiters went mad; Schneider, the tyrant of Strassburg, took charge of the guillotine, but not making enough blood flow, was soon aided by professional ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... felt much gratification in murdering them, but to have been so utterly indifferent to their sufferings, that he killed them solely for the sake of their clothes, which were of the poorest description. He was sentenced to the guillotine, ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of what France had of the best and noblest in name, in lineage, in chivalry, in that year of grace 1783. The storm-cloud which a few years hence was destined to break over their heads, sweeping them from their palaces to the prison and the guillotine, was only gathering very slowly in the dim horizon of squalid, starving Paris: for the next half-dozen years they would still dance and gamble, fight and flirt, surround a tottering throne, and ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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
... nobles, all strove to catch the butterfly, but could not. At length poor Tom, having neither bridle nor saddle, slipped from his seat, and fell into a white pot, where he was found almost drowned. The queen vowed he should be guillotined: but while the guillotine was getting ready, he was secured once more in a mouse-trap; when the cat seeing something stir, and supposing it to be the mouse, patted the trap about till she broke it, and set Tom at liberty. Soon afterwards a spider, taking him for a fly, made at him. Tom drew ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... 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
... of the order 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Vannes in 1777; son of a rather mean lawyer, the president of a revolutionary tribunal under the Republic, and a victim of the guillotine subsequent to the ninth Thermidor. His mother died of grief. In 1799 Anne Dumay enlisted in the army of Italy. On the overthrow of the Empire, he retired with the rank of Lieutenant, and came in touch ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... psoriatic poisons, the 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
... vineyards; conspiring a little later with other noble families, entertaining them at secret meetings of the Chiffonne, where oaths were taken; later again, defending itself behind barricades of paving-stones; last of all, marched or carried in batches to the guillotine or the fusillade. He told of Avignon and its Papal Castle overhanging the Rhone, the city where he had spent his school days, and at the age of nine had seen Patriot L'Escuyer stabbed to death in the Cordeliers' Church with women's scissors; ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 you. Second childhood ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... would convert France into the country of gloom. It would strangle liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny God. It would bring into action these two fatal machines, one of which never works without the other—the assignat press and the guillotine. In a word, it would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in fever, and after the grand horrors which our fathers saw, we should have the horrible in all ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... man, you do me justice in 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 ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... funeral pall upon the land which was fast becoming a vast cemetery. The provincial towns, faithful echoes of the central capital, were repeating the theme of horror with a thousand variations. Each considerable city had its guillotine, and where that instrument of punishment was wanting, the fusillade or the mitraille supplied ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... 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
... 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 ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... an instant. They put a man inside a frame and a sort of broad knife falls by machinery—they call the thing a guillotine-it falls with fearful force and weight-the head springs off so quickly that you can't wink your eye in between. But all the preparations are so dreadful. When they announce the sentence, you know, and prepare the criminal and tie his hands, and cart him off to the ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... hostility to the Turks, fought them, shook off their yoke, and erected a national kingdom on the ruins of Turkish tyranny. The French Revolutionists openly declared war upon the old regime, eradicated it by means of the guillotine, and established a republic where it had been. Similarly the English Puritans repudiated allegiance to Charles I, brought him to the block, and instituted the Commonwealth in his place; while the Whigs drove out James II and set up the constitutional monarchy of William ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... of chemistry the remark is frequently heard that one blotch on the fair escutcheon of French science was placed there when the remorseless guillotine ushered Lavoisier into eternity. Was not the British escutcheon of science dimmed when Priestley passed into exile? Priestley—who had wrought so splendidly! And yet we should not be too severe, for an illustrious name—Count Rumford—which should ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... every man in France to take up arms—converting all the churches into arsenals, anathematizing the German princes as so many brute beasts, and recommending to their German subjects the grand republican remedy of the guillotine for all the disorders of the government, past, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... pistols, which he had seized again, while the blood spurted freely from the wound in which he had left his poniard. "You know our agreement; either I die alone or three of us will die together. Forward, march!" He walked straight to the guillotine, turning the knife in his ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... period of the Reign of Terror the Parisians got to find a day weary without the guillotine. If by some immense fortuity there came a day when they were not sprinkled with innocent blood the poor souls s'ennuyaient. This was not so much thirst for any particular liquid as the habit of excitement. Some months before, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... gambling and dissipations, with those of the Count d'Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the guillotine, drew the King on with her, and plunged the world into crimes and calamities which will forever stain the pages ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... the guillotine falls," he answered. "To-night we dance in each other's arms. Immemorial tableau. Laughter, love, and song against the perfect background—death. Let's not cheat ourselves by being sad. To-morrow will ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... turbulent revolutionists who now long to erect the guillotine by the Tuilleries? And who are those secret conspirators and their myrmidon partisans who have sworn to unify Italy or lay it in ruins? Men who were taught to scout the idea of a God and rail at religion, to consider Christianity ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... 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
... thought would not have come, save for the scene she had gone through. With her nerves keyed to breaking point she went up to her own floor with somewhat the sensation she might have had in stepping from the tumbril to the guillotine. It was all she could do not to scream at Sister Lake in the hall; and when Roger appeared also it seemed to Beverley that ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... into the public who might wish to indulge in the same woe! O "manes of July!" (the phrase is pretty and grammatical) why did you with sharp bullets break those Louvre windows? Why did you bayonet red-coated Swiss behind that fair white facade, and, braving cannon, musket, sabre, perspective guillotine, burst yonder bronze gates, rush through that peaceful picture-gallery, and hurl royalty, loyalty, and a thousand years of Kings, head-over-heels out of yonder ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be such, though the fineness of their linen was inconsistent with the rags which were their outward garments, had for their standard a pair of ragged breeches, with the inscription, "Tremble, tyrants; here are the Sans-culottes." One gang of ruffians carried a model of a guillotine. Another bore aloft a miniature gallows with an effigy of the queen herself hanging from it. So great was the crowd that it was nearly three in the afternoon before the head of it reached the Assembly, where its approach had raised a debate on the propriety of receiving any petition at ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... committed in the name of civilization, in reality the price of our modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war in order to stave off the torch and the guillotine. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... licentiousness, violence, and immorality, were it to be exhibited in garbled quotations, divested of all the nots. In the Edinburgh Advertiser of yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:—'It [The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the "bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets of Paris." It has reminded them of the time when a "grey discrowned head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;" ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... oddly enough, Spite so often does. In the Terror he had a narrow escape, for he was brought before Chaumette. Chaumette apostrophised the assailant of Rousseau and Diderot with rude energy, but did not send him to the guillotine. In this the practical disciple only imitated the magnanimity of his theoretical masters. Rousseau had declined an opportunity of punishing Palissot's impertinences, and Diderot took no worse vengeance upon ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... without getting either. Yet our uppish people will eat nothing, drink nothing, wear nothing that is not French. We have been told of certain brokers in Wall-street who import even their desserts from Paris; not their deserts, my friend, for the guillotine is the only French thing which we don't imitate or import. No wine is fit for our tables without the prefix of a chateau something; every thing that is composed of wool is something de laine, and all our clothes are made of drap de this ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... haste I rode to the chateau, hoping secretly to warn my friend. He did indeed escape, but it was my lot to be caught with the conspirators. For the second time in my short life I saw the inside of a prison; I was in danger of the guillotine; despair had almost overpowered me, when I learnt that my friends had prevailed—my sword was returned to me. I became again an officer of the army of him who was now emperor, and I set forth determined to wipe out on the battlefield the doubts that still clung to my loyalty. Marie de Meudon ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... Wilson Croker in Coningsby, says: "He bored his audience with too much history, especially the French Revolution, which he fancied was his forte, so that the people at last, whenever he made any allusion to the subject, were almost as much terrified as if they had seen the guillotine." In spite of these gibes, historians have of late years returned to the earlier and truer view, and have deliberately reaffirmed the tremendous effect of the Revolution on English politics. The philosophical Mr. Lecky says that ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... slaughter, massacre, butcher, murder, assassinate, execute, hang, electrocute, guillotine, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... falling as, approaching nearer, we saw where the roof-thatch had decayed, where the insidious finger of Time had crumbled the stone walls. A chilly wind arising, moaned through the naked trees. The shadow of the guillotine seemed to brood oppressively over the scene, and, shuddering, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... 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 Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... had seemed indifferent to his own fate; whatever it might be, he wished that his mistress should share it. He had no objection to going to the guillotine as long as he was sure that Gabrielle would accompany him. She sought to escape such a consummation by representing herself as a mere instrument in Eyraud's hands. It was even urged in her defence that, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... man,[22] at Paris is too good not to be told. He cannot speak a word of pure French; and of all Anglicizing of the language I have ever heard, his attempts at it are the most droll. He calls the Tuileries, Tullyrees; the Jardin des Plantes, the Garden dis Plants; the guillotine, gullyteen; and the garcons of the cafes, gassons. Choleric, with whiskers like a bear, and a voice of thunder, if anything goes wrong, he swears away, starboard and larboard, in French and English, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... among the laughter and the flowers. 'What have you done, Monsieur le Comte,' he bursts out at last to his master, 'to deserve all these advantages?—I know. Vous vous etes donne la peine de naitre!' In that sentence one can hear—far off, but distinct—the flash and snap of the guillotine. To those happy listeners, though, no such sound was audible. Their speculations went another way. All was roseate, all was charming as the coaches dashed through the narrow streets of Paris, carrying their finely-powdered ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... startled at the prodigal outlay of means, and the reckless summoning of men. I looked at the starred and striped ensign that flaunted above the Fort, and thought of Madame Roland's appeal to the statue by the guillotine. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... good and kind as he was wise and cultivated. He used to stop to gossip with old Cliquot every time he stopped at the porter's room to take or to leave his key. There he heard of the poor little orphan of the guillotine, who had no friend in the world but her father's old servant. He pitied me, and after many consultations with Father and Mother Cliquot, he assumed the position of guardian to me, and placed me ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... And in spite of herself, Julia spoke in the tone of one who controls herself to ask in calmness: "Is my name on the list for the guillotine?" ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... at 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
... by the Clericals and the extreme Independents, partly in the hope of compelling the crown to grant the Magyar words of command and partly out of antipathy towards the person of the young calvinist premier. In March 1904, Tisza, therefore, introduced a drastic "guillotine" motion to amend the standing orders of the House, but withdrew it in return for an undertaking from the Opposition that obstruction would cease. This time the Opposition kept its word. The Recruits bill and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... whenever the classics hissed, the disciples of Romanticism not only cheered, but rose to their feet and howled. When the groans of the Philistines became unbearable, the enthusiasts of the pit would drown them by shouting "To the guillotine with the sycophants." But though the evening was a continual uproar, no doubt was entertained at its close that the victory was with the Romanticists; and at the conclusion of the performance the name of the author was proclaimed as that of a victorious general, and the shouts of acclamation overwhelmed ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... have attained his object as effectually in a manner becoming an officer and a gentleman. Even the victims of the First French Revolution were permitted to express in song through the bars of the Temple sentiments of utter scorn for their enemies, and when the Jacobins in their turn marched to the guillotine they ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... had so wronged had been her own sister! In vain old Doctor Manette pleaded. That his own daughter was now Darnay's wife made no difference in their eyes. The jury at once found Darnay guilty and sentenced him to die by the guillotine ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... 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 game, placing at each deal ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... 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. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fate twenty years later; and in his case revolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of ninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the revolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between Chauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than either of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down from it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth, and that he would not waste his time in ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... pits in operation. Ten miles from Mons Marlborough fought the battle of Malplaquet, in 1709. When we passed, the town was in great commotion with the trial of Count Bocarme and his wife for the murder of her brother. She was by some means acquitted, but he was convicted and executed by the guillotine. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... interesting piece of history. Sweden honored and rewarded Scheele and Bergman for their efforts; England received the intellectuality of Cavendish with less appreciation than the Continent, and a fanatical mob drove Priestley out of the country; while France, by sending Lavoisier to the guillotine, demonstrated how dangerous it was, at that time at least, for an intelligent Frenchman to serve his fellowman and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... In his generation the poor man thinks himself wise. In Russia, however, things are managed differently. The poor man is under the heel of the rich. Some day there will be in Russia a Terror, but not yet. Some day the moujik will erect unto himself a rough sort of a guillotine, but not in our day. Perhaps some of us who are young men now may dimly read in our dotage of a great upheaval beside which the Terror of France will be tame and uneventful. Who can tell? When a country begins to grow, its mental development ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... 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
... course; for he was doing all that could be done, and the arm prospered finely in his hands. But the human mind is prone to prejudice; and though a personable man, speaking French like a born "Parley voo," and whipping off legs like an animated guillotine, I must confess to a sense of relief when he was ordered elsewhere; and suspect that several of the men would have faced a rebel battery with less trepidation than they did Dr. P., when he came briskly in on ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 fleur-de-lys, and ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... talks to us in excellent English of the epoch of the Great Revolution. But the one man 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 ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Gironde, where the volcanic mountain, the fiery, and eloquent Mirabeau, the wily Brissot, the atheistic Lequinios, the remorseless Marat, the bloody St. Just, and the chief of the deplumed and fallen legions of equality? All is desolate and silent. The gaping planks of the guillotine are imbued with their last traces. The haunt of the banditti is uncovered. The revolution has preyed upon her own children, and metaphysical murderers have perished by the daggers ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... instruments, and clothes to swell our growing midden on the deck; and then Nares, going on hands and knees, began to forage underneath the bed. Box after box of Manilla cigars rewarded his search. I took occasion to smash some of these boxes open, and even to guillotine the bundles of cigars; but quite in vain—no secret cache of opium ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... self-liberation, the State is driven the whole length of abolishing, of destroying religion, but it also proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the law of maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it proceeds to the abolition of life, to the guillotine. In the moment of its heightened consciousness, the political life seeks to suppress its fundamental conditions, bourgeois society and its elements, and to constitute itself as the real and uncontradictory generic life of the individual. It is, however, only ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... other function of human affairs, turns on oratory. Orators make and unmake kings, but kings are seldom orators, and orators never secure thrones. Orators are made to die—the cross, the torch, the noose, the guillotine, the dagger, awaits them. They die through the passion that they fan to flame—the fear they generate turns upon themselves, and they are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... 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, ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... Reformation, when a translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue encountered such an invincible opposition. The Scotch proverb, He that invented the maiden first hanselled it; that is, got the first of it! The maiden is that well-known beheading engine, revived by the French surgeon Guillotine. This proverb may be applied to one who falls a victim to his own ingenuity; the artificer of his own destruction! The inventor was James, Earl of Morton, who for some years governed Scotland, and afterwards, it is said, very unjustly suffered by his own invention. It is a striking ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... had, indeed, neither luck nor distinction after Honore's death: and the last of the family died, like others of the renegade nobles of France, by his own hand, to escape the guillotine which he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which the Church, a little earlier, had put forth against inoculation as a remedy for smallpox; but just at that time the great churchmen had other things to think of besides crushing this particular heretic: they were too much occupied in keeping their own heads from the guillotine to give attention to what was passing in the head of Pinel. He was allowed to work in peace, and in a short time the reign of diabolism at Bicetre was ended. What the exorcisms and fetiches and prayers and processions, and drinking of holy water, and ringing of bells, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 in whipping to death, as is sometimes ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... to suffer punishment by this instrument of torture, to be beheaded by a guillotine or ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 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 ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... with 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
... fulfilment of these promises. It appeared as if this interview had exhausted her remaining strength. In 1786, a few days after the meeting with Trenck, Amelia died. Trenck lived but a few years; he went to France and died under the guillotine in 1793. As he sat with his companions upon the car on their way to execution, he said to the gaping crowd: "Eh bien, eh bien, de quoi vous eurerveillez-vous? C'eci n'est qu'une comedie a la Robespierre." These were Trenck's last words; a few moments afterward ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... yesterday a letter he had received from Paris from Count Pahlen, saying that, though the guillotine was not yet erected, the reign of terror had virtually commenced; for that the pusillanimous dread that kept the whole nation in awe of a handful of pickpockets could be ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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
... 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 ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... 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
... Sidney Carton. That beatified face; that hand holding a woman's trembling hand, what time he whispered for her comfort, "I am the resurrection and the life," as the crowded tumbrel rattled on to the guillotine, and he faced death with smile as sweet as love upon his face, and love making a man thus divine,—this is Sidney Carton, who stirs our soul as storms stir the seas. Bonaventure, as drawn by Cable, is of similar design. He is ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... 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
... although the models are rarer. As for the character of Cadio, which is more of an invention than the others, what I like best in him is his ferocious anger. In it is the special truth of the character. Humanity turned to fury, the guillotine become mystic, life only a sort of bloody dream, that is what must take place in such heads. I think you have one Shakespearean scene: that of the delegate to the Convention with his two secretaries, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... atrocious "Carmagnole" and the "Marseillaise" bring up! The "Carillon" had been Marie Antoinette's favorite tune: it pursued her from her palace to her prison, startled her on her way to her trial, and was probably the last sound she heard as she lay bound under the guillotine. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... assassinate, butcher, despatch, execute, lynch, massacre, burke, immolate, guillotine, decimate, destroy, blast; counteract, neutralize; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... old society in an eclectic philosophy which he embodied in a constitution. Excellent Pinheiro! Liberty even to passive submission, fraternity even to identity of language, equality even in the jury-box and at the guillotine,—such was his ideal republic. Unappreciated genius, of whom the present century was unworthy, but whom ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... ground his knuckles into the desk top, "he thinks of no one, of no one—except Maximilian! And he has never thought of aught else. The Republic? Bah, the Republic was only his tool, Senor Presidente. Only his tool, but the tool needed sharpening. They say that's the way with the guillotine, eh, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... he's bound to be. But so far we have only hypothetical suppositions, or rather certainties which are personal to myself. We shall never intercept the guillotine with those. Ah, if we could only find the bank-notes! Given the bank-notes, M. Dudouis would act. Without them, he ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... of February there appeared on the Piazza del Popolo a large platform with a guillotine and two gibbets, on which the culprits were to be executed. Many stands were constructed for the convenience of those who were curious to witness such a terrible act of justice; and the concourse was so great that some windows fetched as much as six dollars each. At eight o'clock Franceschini ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... in France during the last century paid as much heed to their proper business as to their pleasures or manners, the guillotine need never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and secular tradition through which in a normally constituted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only when the reasonable ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Venturist? So am I. Joy! Won't you shake hands with me, as comrades should? We are a very mixed set of people, you know, and between ourselves I don't know that we are coming to much. But we can make an alderman dream of the guillotine—that is always something. Oh! but now we can talk on quite ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 whom he ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... he lives in are enough of themselves to sadden any man's face. In the Reign of Terror no living being in all the city of Paris can rise in the morning and be certain of escaping the spy, the denunciation, the arrest, or the guillotine, before night. Such times are trying enough to oppress any man's spirits; but Lomaque is not thinking of them or caring for them now. Out of a mass of papers which lie before him on his old writing-table, he has just taken ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... 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
... already, they cursed his name; they hurled insults at the poor Empress, that mother in despair. Thiers, putting his senile fingers in the porridge, stirred a ferment that had not even germinated since the guillotine towered in the Place de la Concorde and the tumbrils rattled through the streets. He did not know what he was stirring. The same impulse that possessed Gladstone to devastate trees animated Thiers. He stirred the dangerous mess because he liked to stir, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... 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
... 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
... that exquisitely well, as she did everything, not even advising me that I was to be her errand boy on such an errand, trusting me to find out by accident, as I had, that I was to be my own executioner, was to spring my own guillotine. She knew that, none the less, though I understood what the letter meant thus addressed, I sacredly must execute her silent trust. Oh! Helena, yours was indeed an exquisite revenge for that one hour of ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... 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 by ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the golden flood of morn Was poised the wing of Death, As 'neath the fearful guillotine The ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... gently. "It is a French ring," she said. "It belonged to an aristocrat who was murdered in the Reign of Terror. He sent it by his servant to the girl he loved from the steps of the guillotine. I don't know their names. Nick didn't tell me ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... 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
... 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 ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... 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
... moment in which all men were thinking of the same thing, discussing the same event, and dreading the same results. To have found a parallel state of affairs, it would have been necessary to go back more than a hundred years, to the hour when the head of Louis XVI. fell into the basket of the guillotine, and the monarchies of Europe sprang to arms to ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith |
