"Guillotine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... among the lists. In her, I was sure, was personified that courage for which her order will go down eternally through the pages of history, and in my darker moments I pictured her standing beside the guillotine with a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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
... on his own gallows. He was convicted of manifold extortions, and launched by the common executioner into that eternity whither he could carry none of his ill-gotten gains with him. Here, at least, we succeed in meeting a guillotine which catches its maker. By a singular coincidence another lord of Noisy, Cardinal Balue, underwent a long detention in an iron-barred cage—one of those famous cages, so much favored by Louis XI., of which the cardinal, as we learn from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... "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
... read this denunciatory outburst, as of one filled with the spirit of prophecy, I said to myself, "Mercy upon us, what has happened? Can it be that X. and Y. (it would be wrong to mention the names of the vigorous young friends which occurred to me) are playing Danton and Robespierre; and that a guillotine is erected in the courtyard of Burlington House for the benefit of all anti-Darwinian Fellows of the Royal Society? Where are the secret conspirators against this tyranny, whom I am supposed to favour, and yet not have ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... as fierce and strange— This blank and sudden change Men have known ever? This veil as hard and keen As the blade of a guillotine Flashing ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... but returning to France, was imprisoned by the Revolutionists. The fall of Robespierre (July, 1794) restored her to liberty. Am6lie de Bouflers, less fortunate than her mother-in-law, perished by the guillotine, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... 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 you are forty you may look to marry a ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... red at once with the passion of his protest—"hard—it ought to condemn him, to guillotine him. What are juries for if they don't kill such rascals ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... take an interest in the affairs of the day, but I do think that a little girl might be taught by its father (or if more convenient, mother) which part of a newspaper to read. Had Margery asked me the difference between a bunker and a banker, had she demanded an explanation of "ultimatum" or "guillotine," I could have done something with it; but to let a child of six fill her head with ideas as to the firmness or otherwise of Home Rails is hardly nice. However, an explanation ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... the platform of the guillotine, already stained with the blood of Bernard, Lesurques exclaimed, "I pardon my judges; I pardon the witnesses through whose error I die; and I pardon Legrand, who has not a little contributed to my judicial ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... in the studio of Hamilton Wilde, when a middle-aged Englishman came in, evidently excited, and told of the shock he had just received, when riding near the Circus Maximus, at coming unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been put to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had quite overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till time had blunted it, listened sympathetically to learn what new form of grim ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... himself and Isabel no one was present but her father and mother, he watched her guide the conversation into the channels of an urbane small-talk, and it occurred to him that in just such a manner would a marquise under the shadow of the guillotine toy with the affairs of a day that would know no morrow. Her delicate features, the aristocratic shortness of her upper lip, and her wealth of fair hair suggested the marquise again, and it must have been obvious, even if it were not notorious, that in her veins flowed the best blood in ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... Revolution and the Bastile. You have seen the picture—I cannot think of the painter's name now—of the members of the old regime in the prison amusing themselves, not knowing whose name was to be called next for the guillotine? To me there is a miniature human world in a chicken coop. All under sentence of death, and all eating and drinking, and clucking and crowing as if they were going to last forever. All scrambling and fighting over ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... the "Terror" of Cromwell, it was of a nobler type than the Terror of France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were effective just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. If he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians, the holiest and the most renowned of English churchmen. If he struck at the baronage, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... reader to consider with himself, whether indeed it be less Kingly, or more savage, to strike an uncivil soldier on the head with one's own battle-axe, than, for instance, to strike a person like Sir Thomas More on the neck with an executioner's,—using for the mechanism, and as it were guillotine bar and rope to the blow—the manageable forms of National Law, and the gracefully twined intervention of a polite group of noblemen ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... him with his 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 breast as ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... Paris, he procrastinated his advance and lost his most valuable time in the siege of fortresses. Verdun fell: three beautiful citizens' daughters, who had presented bouquets to the king of Prussia, were afterward sent to the guillotine by the republicans as traitoresses to their country. Ferdinand, notwithstanding this success, still delayed his advance in the hope of gaining over the wily French commander and of thus securing beforehand ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... 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
... avowed everything except that Jane was his daughter. He would not have admitted this had he been threatened with the guillotine. Fanfar listened attentively. ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... 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
... own efforts to the contrary, backed as they were by those of the five policemen, before he knew where he was, Sir John found himself being hustled by a lot of sturdy fellows towards the filthy duck-pond, like an aristocrat to the guillotine. They soon arrived, and then followed the most painful experience of all his life, one of which the very thought would ever afterwards move him most profoundly. Two strong men, utterly heedless of his yells and lamentations, took him by the heels, and two yet stronger than they ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... wish to indulge in the same woe! O "manes of July!" (the phrase is pretty and grammatical) why did you with sharp bullets break those Louvre windows? Why did you bayonet red-coated Swiss behind that fair white facade, and, braving cannon, musket, sabre, perspective guillotine, burst yonder bronze gates, rush through that peaceful picture-gallery, and hurl royalty, loyalty, and a thousand years of Kings, head-over-heels ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Julia had got to receive a death sentence she would have liked it to be well given; it is quite possible, had she lived at the time, she would have been one of those who objected to the indignity of riding in the tumbrils quite as much as to the guillotine at the end of ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... the English government, these new classes have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the world as they are, they know that they must have a Religion. They have read the story of the French revolution, and the shadow of the guillotine is always over their thoughts; they see the giant of labor, restless in his torment, groping as in a nightmare for the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the eyes of this giant, who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is but ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... supersede Parliament. As those societies grew more mature, instead of becoming more rational they exhibited more savage ferocity. Placards were distributed in the form of a playbill, announcing, "For the Benefit of John Bull, La Guillotine," or, "George's Head in a Basket." The airs of their meetings were Ca Ira and the Marseillaise. Attempts were made to corrupt the army. It was openly declared in their harangues, that it was "impossible to do any thing without some bloodshed, and that Pitt's and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... forsee the day when, as Madame du Barry, she would reign as Dame du Palais, after the death of La Pompadour. Still less could she imagine that in her old age, in the next reign, she would be dragged to the guillotine, filling the streets of Paris with her shrieks, heard above the howlings of the mob of the Revolution: "Give me life! life! for my repentance! Life! to devote it to the Republic! Life! for the surrender of all my wealth to the nation!" And death, not life, was given in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... growing aversion from capital punishment became intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he enjoyed ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... hand, became quieter and colder amidst the smoke of the pipes and the fumes of the gas which were now filling the little den; and his voice assumed a dry incisive tone, sharp like a guillotine blade, while Robine gently wagged his head without once removing his chin from the ivory knob of his cane. However, some remark of Gavard's led the conversation to ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... help, and before she could recover herself the murderer threatened her with the ensanguined knife. She threw herself on her knees, imploring pity, but the man Quadling told her that she was an eye-witness, and could take him to the guillotine,—she also must die. ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... which time I suppose La Margaretta will arrive. Yesterday evening Sir Roger Curtis landed from the Phaeton. He left Lord Howe on the 4th. I know not the particulars, but there has been a general action; and I think Monsieur Jean Bon L'Andre and his Guillotine have had a thorough drubbing. We have lost very few officers of rank. Lord Howe is perfectly well, of which ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... The lady was tried, and condemned to death, on the 16th of June, 1600. The nurse was at the same time condemned to be burnt alive, and suffered her sentence accordingly; but Lady Warriston, in respect of her gentle descent, was appointed to die by the Maiden, a sort of rude guillotine, imported, it is said, from Halifax, by the Earl of Morton, while regent, who was himself the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... resolved to lay down his life for his friend—a text swept suddenly into his mind, and, from that moment, it seemed to be written everywhere. He was in Paris; the French Revolution was at its height; sixty-three shuddering victims had been borne that very day to the guillotine; each day's toll was heavier than that of the day before; no man's life was safe. Among the prisoners awaiting death in the Conciergerie was Charles Darnay, the husband of her whom Sydney himself had loved with so much devotion ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... are the only basis of the rights of man. One of the most sagacious of modern statesmen has borne his testimony to this fundamental truth—that religion is the only basis of social order—in words as trenchant as the guillotine which suggested them. "It is not," says Napoleon, "the mystery of incarnation which I perceive in religion, but the mystery of social order. It attaches to heaven an idea of equality which prevents the rich from ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... their ancestors had ruled England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain—were filled with the wildest alarms. Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits anticipated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely more dreaded than ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... see such goings-on under Monsieur Robert Lindet. I know, for I served my apprenticeship under Robert Lindet. The clerks had to work in his day! You ought to have seen how they scratched paper here till midnight; why, the stoves went out and nobody noticed it. It was all because the guillotine was there! now-a-days they only mark 'em when they come ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... stamps of this series had a gauge of 12, as with the stamps of the preceding issue, and was the work of single line or guillotine machines. That is, each line of perforation, both horizontally and vertically, represented a separate stroke on the machine. The Monthly Journal for February, 1899, lists a minor variety of perforation in the 2c, 3c, 6c, 12-1/2c and 15c denominations in which the measurement ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... XVI, with a French friend, a month or two since, he informed me he had lately conversed with Count—, who had witnessed the execution of Louis XVI, and that he was told there was a general error prevalent as regarded the spot where the guillotine was erected on that occasion. According to this account, which it is difficult to believe is not correct, it was placed on the side of the Place near the spot where the carriages for Versailles usually stand, and just within the borgnes that line the road that here ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... uneven teeth; his thick and glossy whiskers; his hair, close in front, long on the sides and behind, with its wild, ruddy hue throwing into relief the strange and fatal character of the physiognomy; his short, thick neck, designed to tempt the hatchet of the guillotine: these details, so accurately photographed, not only prove that M. Michu was a resolute, faithful servant, capable of the profoundest secresy and the most disinterested attachment, but for the really skilful reader ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... taken out of the bath. The window, behind whose curtains the heroine hid, after she had plunged the dagger into the heart of the man whom she thought was the cause of the shedding of so much blood by the guillotine, was pointed out with a seeming degree of ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... work. And it seems to me that if indeed—as is plainly the case—moral ends are supreme in our life's history, it brings utter intellectual bewilderment and confusion to suppose that these ends are kept in view up till the moment of death, and that then down comes the guillotine and cuts off all. God does not take the rough ore out of the mine, and deal with it, and change it to polished steel, and shape His weapons, and then take them when they are at their highest temper and their sharpest edge, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Frenchmen's captain had a name I wish I could pronounce; A Breton gentleman was he, and wholly free from bounce, One like those famous fellows who died by guillotine For honour and the fleur-de-lys, ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... A rude sort of guillotine, called the maiden. The implement is now in possession of the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... strong contrast to the great number of victims here sacrificed —Execution of the King and Queen, Philippe Egalite, Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, Robespiere, cum multus aliis —Unexampled dispatch introduced in putting persons to death by means of the guillotine—Guillotin, the inventor or improver of this instrument, dies of grief—Little impression left on the mind of the spectators of these sanguinary scenes—Lord ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the Russian people, arrived in Moscow, we found quiet—at least externally—so far restored that the parties which had been attacking each other with reckless fury had agreed to a provisional truce at the news of our arrival. Not merely the cannons and rifles, but even the guillotine and the gallows were at rest. Radoslajev, our plenipotentiary commissioner, called the chiefs of the parties together, induced them to lay down their weapons, to give up their prisoners, to dissolve the seven different parliaments, each one of which ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... 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 ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... pregnancy. Before she left Neuilly, she happened one day to enter Paris on foot (I believe, by the Place de Louis Quinze), when an execution, attended with some peculiar aggravations, had just taken place, and the blood of the guillotine appeared fresh upon the pavement. The emotions of her soul burst forth in indignant exclamations, while a prudent bystander warned her of her danger, and intreated her to hasten and hide her discontents. She described to me, more than once, the ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... from without into the interior of the house, to the no small amazement of the brown fiddler and his daughter who inhabited the same, and who had immediately secured their prize by slipping the displaced board down again, wedging it firmly on the back of his neck, as if he had been fitted for the guillotine, thus nailing him fast, unless he had bolted, and left ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... were hoarse, for a 'cobbler' or a julep, without getting either. Yet our uppish people will eat nothing, drink nothing, wear nothing that is not French. We have been told of certain brokers in Wall-street who import even their desserts from Paris; not their deserts, my friend, for the guillotine is the only French thing which we don't imitate or import. No wine is fit for our tables without the prefix of a chateau something; every thing that is composed of wool is something de laine, and all our clothes are made of drap de ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... men are disposed to persecute. Power is always right; weakness always wrong. Power is always insolent and despotic: whether exercised in throwing its opposers into a bastile; burning them at the stake; torturing them on a rack; beheading them with a guillotine; or taking them off, as at the massacre of St. Bartholomew, at a general sweep. Power is the same in Turkey as in America. When the will of man is raised above law, it is always tyranny and despotism, whether it is the will of a ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... 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 and practicable are denied ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... as I 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 ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... "I don't call them men. I call them monkeys! Men! Butchers, as cut off the head of their beautiful Queen Mary What-you-may-call-it, and then after shedding blood like that, sending no end of poor women who never did them a bit of harm to that guillotine. I'd be ashamed of myself, Mr ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... United States and England had a good deal of fun, not only with President Lincoln, but the latter's Cabinet officers and military commanders as well. It was said by these funny publications that the President had set up a guillotine in his "back-yard," where all those who offended were beheaded with both neatness, and despatch. "Harper's Weekly" of January 3rd, 1863, contained a cartoon labeled "Those Guillotines; a Little Incident at the White House," the personages figuring in the "incident" being Secretary of War ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... wrong for her to love? You know she dies struggling, but it is on the heights, where, Goethe tells us, "lies repose." There are many and many women martyrs who go to their graves unknown, suffering no pangs of the Inquisition, the gallows, or the guillotine, but tortured by unrequited affections,—by a love which it was not possible to gratify without a loss of principle or a sacrifice of conscience. Is it not better to break one's heart ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. "Do you not see," he said, "the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S., though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?" He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted. He had great abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... he has conceived for your daughter." "Your Majesty, I tell you it is a doll, and not a human being." "I don't want to hear nonsense! If you don't present your daughter to me in a fortnight, your head will fall under the guillotine." (Do you not know what the guillotine is? It is the gallows. He was to be hung if he did not take her his daughter within a fortnight.) The merchant went home, weeping. His wife said: "What is the matter; what has the king said to you at the palace, to make ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... 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 ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as he would almost certainly have been retaken. As it was, Antoine on more than one occasion concealed him behind the bundles of firewood, and once or twice he narrowly escaped detection by less friendly officials. There were times when the guillotine seemed to him almost better than this long suspense: but while other heads passed to the block, his remained on his shoulders; and so weeks and even months went by. And during all this time, sleeping or waking, whenever he lay down upon his pallet, the toad crept up on to the stone, and ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... then but fifteen years of age, and marvelously beautiful, was married to the young dauphin of France, subsequently the unhappy Louis XVI. As she left Vienna, for that throne from which she was to descend to the guillotine, her mother sent by her hand the following ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... a 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. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... applauded a furious despotism, trampling on every right, and sporting with life, as the essence of liberty; and the few who conceived freedom to be a plant which did not flourish the better for being nourished with human blood, and who ventured to disapprove the ravages of the guillotine, were execrated as the tools of the coalesced despots, and as persons who, to weaken the affection of America for France, became the calumniators of that republic. Already had an imitative spirit, captivated with the splendour, but copying ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... patriarchal rule which lies at the foundation of the whole social structure. Alas! in the case of the excellent Adrienne, this conseille de famille was easily assembled, and possessed perfect unanimity. The wars, the guillotine and exile had reduced it to two, one of which was despotic in her government, so far as theory was concerned at least; possibly, at times, a little so in practice. Still Adrienne, on the whole grew up tolerably happy. She was taught most that is suitable for a gentlewoman, ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... system this labor is avoided, and the sheet or block is fed in automatically by means of subsidiary rolls, which are driven by power. When it is required to cut the block or sheet by the guillotine, or cross-cutting knife, instead of the block being moved to the desired point by hand-labor, the subsidiary driven rolls work it up to the knife; and such perfect control does the engine with its hydraulic reversing ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive guillotine without troubling the judges. Even in 1880 there existed (and I presume there still exists) a certain 'liberty of the Savoy,' under the shadow of the new courts of justice, which can deal with keepers of disorderly houses after the same fashion.[177] From this primitive institution ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... him, and vows of vengeance were uttered, loud and deep, through the streets of Paris. His enemies in the Assembly took advantage of this to bring an act of accusation against him, which would relieve them of his presence by the decisive energy of the ax of the guillotine. Robespierre's danger was most imminent, and he was obliged to conceal himself. Madame Roland, inspired by those courageous impulses which ever ennobled her, went at midnight, accompanied by her husband, to his retreat, to invite him to a more secure ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... throne and the Church, impious, sacrilegious, revolutionary,—the authors of every evil. It was they who, for years, destroyed the harvests, shed torrents of blood, smote with the sword or the axe of the guillotine, crowded war upon war, heaped ruins upon ruins, bringing misery and disgrace to all mankind. The old nobility, once so proud of its coats-of-arms and of its sovereign rights, now enslaved, humiliated, shorn of its independence, knew no limit to its abuse of ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... portion of the dialogue our mouth was shut to all further interrogations by a copious supply of soap-suds, and now he became the tonsor only, and declares against the mode in which we have our hair cut: "They have cut your hair, Signor, a condannato—nobody adopts the toilette of the guillotine now; it should have been left to grow in front a la Plutus, or have been long at the sides a la Nazarene, which is the mode most of our Sicilian gentlemen prefer." We were about to rise, wash, and depart, but an impediment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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 ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... men who destroyed Robespierre. These, the Thermidorians, were faithful to the contract with the Plain, by which they obtained their victory. Some had been friends of Danton, who, at one moment of the previous winter, had approved a policy of moderation in the use of the guillotine. Tallien had domestic as well as public reasons for clemency. But the bulk of the genuine Montagnards were unaltered. They had deserted Robespierre when it became unsafe to defend him; but they had not renounced his system, and held that it was needful as their security ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... answered Michael. "Herod's daughter, who did such execution with her foot and ankle, danced not men's heads off more cleanly than this maiden of Morton. [Footnote: Maiden of Morton—a species of Guillotine which the Regent Morton brought down from Halifax, certainly at a period considerably later than intimated in the tale. He was himself the first who suffered by the engine.] 'Tis an axe, man,—an axe which falls of itself like ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... understood that the world had moved, and that new issues had arisen. We were inclined to forget these feuds of the last generation. France to us was no longer the murderous land of the sans-culotte and the guillotine basket; it was rather the glorious queen of war, attacked by all and conquering all, but still so hard pressed that her scattered sons could hear her call to arms for ever sounding in their ears. It was that call more ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... enacted in Paris, the gay French capital! for from thence also, the courier brought news. Blood, he says, flows like water, and not content with having taken the life of their king, they force the queen and the rest of the royal family to languish in prison; and the guillotine is constantly at work dispatching its wretched victims, whose only crime, in many instances, is that of ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... 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
... 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 ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... been drunk," thought he; "that woman must have intoxicated me with caresses. Good heavens! I was a fool and mad! I risked the guillotine in a business like that. Fortunately it passed off all right. But if it had to be done again, I would ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... here stood the Altar of Freedom; And though neither marble nor gilding Was used in those days to adorn Our simple republican building, Corbleu! but the MERE GUILLOTINE Cared little for splendor or show, So you gave her an axe and a beam, And a plank and a ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... always just one letter behind. He never understood this. Even when he laid his head under the guillotine, he felt that he was a much-abused man who had received a most unwarrantable treatment at the hands of people whom he had loved to the best of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... 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 ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... 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 fig. 72), and the book nipped in the press. To form a "French ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... 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 ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... '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, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... 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 ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... classes in power; but the latter, unfortunately, in every period of history, in times of political crisis, as in those of social crisis, have shown themselves unable to conceive of any other remedy than brutal repression—the guillotine or the prison—and they fancy that thus they can cure the organic and constitutional disease ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... cause of Christ, another king was dragged forth from the gates of his Renaissance palace,[27] to die, by the hands of the thousands of his people gathered in another crusade; or what shall that be called—whose sign was not the cross, but the guillotine?" ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... showed me 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 described as ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... frequent halts, and I had full leisure to gaze around; for, rapidly as the guillotine performed its terrible task, our procession had been extended by some additional victims from every prison which we passed; and we passed so many that I began to think the city one vast dungeon. What strange curiosity is it that could collect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... been signed—and that the sheriff was coming in the morning to execute the writ of possession in favor of our opponent." This was well meant by the speaker; but surely it was like talking of the machinery of the ghastly guillotine to the wretch in shivering expectation of suffering by it on the morrow. An involuntary shudder ran through Mr. Aubrey. "Sixty thousand pounds!" he exclaimed, rising and walking to and fro. "Why, I am ruined beyond all redemption! How can I ever satisfy it?" Again he paced the room several ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... she answered. "But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I have worn something red about me ever since, lest any ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... bill again. "I cannot legally protest this bill any sooner." And within myself I said—"Pay the price of your luxury, pay for your name, pay for your ease, pay for the monopoly which you enjoy! The rich have invented judges and courts of law to secure their goods, and the guillotine—that candle in which so many lie in silk, under silken coverlets, there is remorse, and grinding of teeth beneath a smile, and those fantastical lions' jaws are gaping to set their fangs ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... more than tragic shadows; and for a week there was no meal in that house to which she sat down earlier than half an hour Jate. She had a rightful property-interest in the Revolution, her own great-uncle having been one of those who "suffered;" not, however, under the guillotine; for to Georges Meilhac appertained the rare distinction of death by accident on the day when the business-like young Bonaparte played upon ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... the nature of a guillotine by which a person could chop his own head off neatly without chance of failure, and the other had to do with the improvement of science ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... that is a great help: but, when she goes dry, Heaven knows what we shall do; for I don't. But that is not the worst; better a light meal than a broken heart. Your precious government offers the chateau for sale. They might as well send for the guillotine at once, and cut off all our heads. You don't know my mistress as I do. Ah, butchers, you will drag nothing out of that but her corpse. And is it come to this? the great old family to be turned adrift like beggars. My poor mistress! my pretty demoiselles that I played with and nursed ever since ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... loyalty," said Langmaid. "I wouldn't desert my pals. I couldn't bear, Wallis, to see you go to the guillotine without me." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... middle of the room stood a very large table. At the one end were the bookbinder's tools; at the other, writing materials. The inkstand was a skull; the ruler was a fore-arm; the paper-weight was a guillotine, and the penholder ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... temperament and the soul. An old dying mother, children perishing of hunger, a despairing wife; have these pictures of their deeds ever arrested drunkards, gamblers, or profligates? No more have the tragic phantoms of the tribunal, the prison, and the guillotine, when, thirsting for gold, they kill to procure it. The scaffold is far off, the brothel is at the street corner, and the being sunk in vice kills a man, just as a butcher would kill a beast, that he may go thither, or to the tavern, or to ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... but he mounted the scaffold, laid his head upon the block, and the masked man lifted his sword and cut it off. All that is left for you is not to falter—to keep down that tremor and sickening of the heart; when Danton of the French Revolution reached the guillotine, he was heard to mutter, "Danton, no weakness!" And many an unrecorded Danton, on the night before his appointed death, has lain down and slept soundly. It recurred to my memory that my father, shortly before his death, had said to ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... are not only intellectual, but they are earnest and grave. 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 ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... atrocious crimes against the Neapolitan revolutionists, whom the Royalists hated more than they did the French. The fishermen and other miscreants came to a solemn conclusion that it was clearly their duty as a Christian people to combine, and each choose one whom they should privately guillotine when the opportunity offered. With the idea of paying a high compliment to Troubridge, who had so splendidly protected the Royalists, fought the French, and subdued the revolutionists, they made him the recipient ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... 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, ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... the colour of the hills, that only the strongest glasses could make out the position of the Guides; but apparent to the naked eye of all was the great straggling mass which was falling with relentless swiftness, guillotine-like, on the narrow neck of the communications with the bridge. With cool intrepid courage, with a deliberation which appeared almost exasperating to the onlookers, Colonel Battye and his men took ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... my present mode of life, ventured a few cheerful prophecies as to my hereafter and polished off a brisk ten minutes heart-to-heart talk by snapping her fingers under my nose and threatening me with the guillotine if I did not instantly remove my ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... Louis Quinze; that of Napoleon on the column of the Place Vendome. The only difference consists in the opposite character of the equality advocated by these two men; one is the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades; one brings a king within reach of the guillotine, the other elevates the people to a level with the throne. Observe," said Villefort, smiling, "I do not mean to deny that both these men were revolutionary scoundrels, and that the 9th Thermidor and the 4th of April, in the year 1814, were lucky days for France, worthy of being gratefully remembered ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... gone mad with national excesses committed in the name of civilization, in reality the price of our modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war in order to stave off the torch and the guillotine. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... make, on which, in words of gold, Shall be inscribed, so all the world may read: "Saturnine pleasure it to us doth give, To see them walk the plank from scuttled ship." Caesar: Ha Ha! but speak it not aloud, until 'tis done. Both: Whist! whist as mice! We'll oil the guillotine. Exeunt both while Caesar washes ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... wily politician who knew the uses of advertisement. The apaches are distinctively a Parisian produce, and if only Paris could be won over, intrigued by the romance and strangeness of the genius that had flowered in the gutter, and given to the world a star of art, all would be arranged and the guillotine would have but three necks to subdue. France at large would only shrug, for France is the husband of Paris and permits her her caprices. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... To start with, there is a good play back of it, though the verities of history were not permitted to hamper the imagination of Signor Illica, the author of the book. The hero of the opera is the patriotic poet who fell under the guillotine in 1794 at the age of thirty-two. The place which Saint-Beuve gave him in French letters is that of the greatest writer of classic verse after Racine and Boileau. The operatic story is all fiction, more so, indeed, than that of "Madame Sans-Gene." ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... grippe. Here was, in reality, the first wide breach made in France in the edifice of good-breeding and good-manners; and those who have been eye-witnesses to the metamorphosis will admit that the guillotine of Danton and Robespierre did even less to destroy le bon ton of the ancien regime than was achieved by the guard-room habits and morals of Bonaparte's glorious troopers, rushing, as they did, booted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar—a patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand—to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and stutters angrily ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... into many proud, brave faces of these delicate women, walking in high-heeled shoes, all too frail for the hard-dusty roadways. They belonged to the same race and breed as those ladies who defied death with fine disdain upon the scaffold of the guillotine in the great Revolution. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... mean with Miss Wilson, Ken," Boyd said. "I meant in general." He left, with the air of a man whose world has betrayed him. His back looked, to Malone, like the back of a man on his way to the scaffold or guillotine. ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... answered, which seemed to me inconsistent, when he told of the execution which he had witnessed in Paris, where a father had lifted up his little child that it might have a good view of the horrors of the guillotine. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... well what you are doing. The nobles, weak and exhausted, have fled for refuge to the famous fortress of the Holy Trinity,[1] and await our arrival, as men wait the knife of the guillotine. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... pursuing his Rose, and how he had lost the Rose, too, waking up at last to the dull memory of pain and sorrow and death, that "tout porrist." The world had still a long march to make from the Rose of Queen Blanche to the guillotine of Madame du Barry; but the "Roman de la Rose" made epoch. For the first time since Constantine proclaimed the reign of Christ, a thousand years, or so, before Philip the Fair dethroned Him, the deepest expression of social feeling ended ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... 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
... no justice in this miserable country, with such a partial and one-sided system of law. He began to fear that his life was in their hands; already he felt his head on the block, under the shadow of the awful guillotine. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... contact of seizure by rough hands, relaxed, and he allowed himself to be led. Truly, he was disgusted with his faintness and weakness. He had seen men die who knew they were going to die. His task as reporter had led him more than once to the foot of the guillotine. And the wretches he had seen there had died bravely. Extraordinarily enough, the most criminal had ordinarily met death most bravely. Of course, they had had leisure to prepare themselves, thinking a long time in advance of that supreme moment. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... 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 ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • 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; ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... lately been tried at Yssen-geaux. Seventy were acquitted; he and one other were the only ones condemned to death. The innocent men were released at once, but Laurent and his companion were put in prison to await the guillotine. But, pooh! Master Laurent had too pretty a head to fall under the executioner's ignoble knife. The judges who condemned him, the curious who expected to witness him executed, had forgotten what Montaigne calls the corporeal recommendation of beauty. There was a woman belonging ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... 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
... 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
... to paint from nature in the Campagna, either with Somerville or with Lady Susan Percy, who drew very prettily. Once we set out a little later than usual, when, driving through the Piazza of the Bocca della Verita, we both called out, "Did you see that? How horrible! "It was the guillotine; an execution had just taken place, and had we been a quarter of an hour earlier we should have passed at the fatal moment. Under Gregory XVI. everything was conducted in the most profound secrecy; arrests were made almost ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... illustrated by the following facts: "That an American jury had been compelled by the clamor of a collected multitude to acquit a prisoner without the unanimity required by law;" "by the circulation of caricatures representing President Washington and a judge of the Supreme Court with a guillotine suspended over their heads;" "by posting upon the mast of a French vessel of war, in the harbor of Boston, the names of twenty citizens, all of them inoffensive, and some of them personally respectable, as objects of detestation to the crew;" "by the threatening, by an anonymous ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... Rigby bored his audience too much with history, especially with the French Revolution, which he fancied was his 'forte,' so that the people at last, whenever he made any allusion to the subject, were almost as much terrified as if they had seen the guillotine. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... weeping; the other, Julie de Poopinac, was playing at cat's cradles. Her dress was of sprigged muslin, and she wore a rather battered Dolly Varden hat. She was haughtily impervious to the vile epithets of this mob. Upon reaching the guillotine, Marie Topinambour became panic-stricken, and swarmed up one of the posts before any one could stop her. In bell-like tones, Julie bade her descend. 'Fear nothing, ma petite,' she cried. 'See, I am smiling!' The terrified Marie looked down and ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... existence. This was a sentence, it was a refusal of justice. Poor poet! a deadly cold seized on him when he saw de Marsay eying him through his glass; and when the Parisian lion let that optical instrument fall, it dropped in so singular a fashion that Lucien thought of the knife-blade of the guillotine. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... however, prevented the fulfilment of these promises. It appeared as if this interview had exhausted her remaining strength. In 1786, a few days after the meeting with Trenck, Amelia died. Trenck lived but a few years; he went to France and died under the guillotine in 1793. As he sat with his companions upon the car on their way to execution, he said to the gaping crowd: "Eh bien, eh bien, de quoi vous eurerveillez-vous? C'eci n'est qu'une comedie a la Robespierre." These were Trenck's last words; a few moments afterward his ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Spaniards for their hearths, homes, and churches; the French fought all Europe with famine and the guillotine behind them, and empire and plenty in front. The English in India had the pride of superior race and the memory of inexpiable injuries to urge them against the Sepoys; but if ever a nation in this world sacrificed itself deliberately and manfully to an idea, this has been ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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
... I'll see him under the razor!" she exclaimed, meaning the guillotine. "He tried to drown me, the assassin! Yes, I know him for an assassin,—a murderer! It was he who ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... to give to those who have much? A fine thing such a law as that! It's as bad as guardians who, for nothing at all, talk about calling the police. Yes! I'd like to see 'em calling the police to me! Let 'em guillotine me! It won't prevent my saying that the rich are swindlers; yes, swindlers! and the people ought to make another revolution to get their rights; and then, my lad, you, and my daughter, and barrister Minard, and that ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... Guillotine, revised from the Quarterly Review, by the Right Hon. J. W. Croker, which forms the new part of Murray's Railway {456} Reading, is not only valuable as a precis of all that is known upon this very obscure subject, but for all its illustration of the difficulty of arriving ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... de Luxembourg, A vild oldt shdory say, A shtudent vonce pring home a dame, Und on de nexter day, He pooled a ribbon from her neck- Off fell de lady's het; She'd trafelled from de guillotine, Und valked ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... head of you that would startle you,' thought Dick,—this was before the red-haired girl had brought him under the guillotine,—but he only said, 'I am very sorry,' and harrowed Torpenhow's soul that evening with blasphemies against Art. Later, insensibly and to a large extent against his own will, he ceased to interest himself in ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... brought him in guilty of a foul murder and he was guillotined—gentleman and artist of merit though he was. They were kind to his young son; his friends made up a purse and sent him afar to be educated and reared in ignorance. But the shadow of the guillotine is projected afar, and I saw its red finger point to the assassin's offspring. I have found him. If my hand is not too feeble to ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... much misery flows! There is not a spot on that plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a career, at the end of which looms the guillotine or the pistol-snap of the suicide. All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a speculator might read a justification of the numerous suicides complained of by hypocritical writers who are incapable of ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... will not be asked to make any statement, except in writing—in what you in England call an affidavit. You do not realise, although you doubtless know, what our legal procedure is like. Not even in order to secure the guillotine for Madame Wachner and her Fritz would I expose Mrs. Bailey to the ordeal ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... have been broken by the French during the war. The figure was a very high one. There is no more forgiveness for the beaten General than there was in the days of the Republic when the delegate of the National Convention, with a patent portable guillotine, used to drop in at headquarters to support a ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it 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 party which ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell |
