'It is better so; between the doctor of the soul and the doctor of the body, what need I fear?'

He was taken before the porch of Saint Wulfranc, where he was to make amende honorable; but he energetically refused to pronounce the usual words of the formula. To confess my guilt,' he cried, 'would be to offend God by a falsehood; I cannot do it.'

When he was on the scaffold, my grandfather noticed that his colour vanished, but he recovered his self-possession in a moment. The monk was quite overpowered. Charles Henri Sanson told his assistants to give him his sword. The Chevalier wished to see it, passed his finger along the edge, and, having made sure that it was of good steel and sharp, he said to the executioner : 'Now, master, strike with a firm hand, for I am not afraid.'

My grandfather looked at the young man, quite surprised.

'But, Monsieur le Chevalier,' he said, 'you must kneel.'

'I cannot; I am no criminal. I refused to make amende honorable. Strike me as I am.'1

Now

Charles Henri Sanson knew not what to do. then, be quick,' added the Chevalier, in a tone of impatience.

Then occurred a fact singular enough to be recorded here. My grandfather handled his sword with so much

1 M. Charles Louandre, of the Revue des Deux Mondes, has adduced proofs that the Chevalier de la Barre was quite innocent of an offence which, in any case, it was monstrous to punish with death.—N. ED.

vigour and dexterity, that it severed the spine and went through the neck without dislodging the head from the shoulders. It was only when the body fell that it rolled on the boards of the scaffold, to the amazement of the witnesses of this extraordinary feat.

This unprecedented incident has been taken up by chroniclers, and all kinds of stories in prose and in verse have been invented thereon. They are all innaccurate. An unscrupulous writer has even asserted that my grandfather, proud of his success, turned to the crowd and said:

'Was it not a fine blow?'

It is my duty, in justice to my grandfather and to our sinister corporation, to contradict these shameless words, which would have soiled even the lips of a headsman. The executioner who exercises his profession because he likes it, and who admires his talents of destruction, is an absurd fiction. If there are, in history, monsters cruel by instinct and sanguinary by system, they are not to be found in our ranks. I have, of course, known many of my confrères; and if most of them were not, to the same degree as myself, victims of their birth and family traditions, I can nevertheless affirm that none discharged functions so antipathetic to the natural sentiments of men without a feeling of shame.

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CHAPTER XIV.

THE EXECUTIONER AND THE PARLIAMENT.

THE executions which have been described in the preceding chapters have compelled me to set aside for a while the part of these memoirs which relates to the autobiography of my family, and which, according to my plan, should be presented simultaneously with the documents quoted in the course of the present judicial history. I now return to our private matters.

When I interrupted these domestic records, Charles Sanson had just died, and his widow, Marthe Dubut, had obtained for her eldest son, Charles Jean-Baptiste Sanson, aged seven years, the position of his father. Man becomes used to everything, and of this I myself have been a sad proof; but it is from the time of Charles Jean-Baptiste that my family seems to have quite reconciled itself, and to have accepted a kind of identification with the bloody appanage which it already regarded as hereditary. Jean-Baptiste was a child, and he never knew the gloomy feelings of his grandfather, nor his father's melancholy. Prepared for the calling which he was to adopt, he never aspired to a higher one.

We

Marthe Dubut had tenderly loved Charles Sanson; in her reverence for his memory she desired that her sons should not be ashamed of their father; and to prevent this she decided that they should follow his profession. Not satisfied with the success of her eldest son, she also solicited and obtained for her second son the office of executioner of the Prévoté-de-l'Hôtel. have seen by the execution of Damiens how ill-fitted the poor fellow was for such an office. Not so with Charles Jean-Baptiste Sanson. He was like his mother, and almost liked his profession. I said that his extreme youth left a gap in our family annals; there was another reason for this lacuna: at a competent age, to use the expression which describes, in his letters of nomination, the time when he could discharge his functions, he continued his father's and grandfather's record at some intervals and with an unwilling hand. It is easy to perceive that, being less impressed than they were by the scenes in which he took the most conspicuous part, he had little to say about them. A few notes constitute the only tribute he thought fit to render to the old custom of his predecessors; and these notes are so vague that it is difficult to use them.

It is only in the month of January 1755, when my grandfather is holding the pen, that I find some interesting information with a few details. He dwells first on the execution of one Ruxton, who was broken for murdering M. Andrieu, a barrister; then that of De Montgeot, an engineer who, after an imprisonment of two years, suffered the same punishment for the

same crime committed on the person of M. Lescombat, an architect. This lamentable affair is well known. Blinded by a fatal affection, De Montgeot murdered Lescombat, and tried to ward off suspicion by calling the patrol to his help, and pretending that he slew his victim in self-defence. This statement met with no credit, and De Montgeot was executed. Exasperated by the heartlessness of his paramour, Mdme. Lescombat, he denounced her as his accomplice. The woman was confronted with him at the foot of the scaffold. She was remarkably handsome, and she tried the effect of her charms on her judges, but without avail. She was sentenced to die, and was hanged on the Place de Grève.

A month afterwards, the execution of one Dufrancey, a magistrate of La Marche, took place. This man charged a merchant named Roy with inciting a number of soldiers of the guard to murder him. He afterwards attempted to withdraw the indictment; but it was too late, and he was called upon to prove his allegations. Dufrancey paid false witnesses to corroborate his charge, and persuaded them that the prisoner was in no danger of capital punishment. When the fourth witness came forward, the unfortunate Roy, appalled by the evidence, exclaimed: 'What have I done to you, that you should bring me to the scaffold? I do not even know you, and I never saw you before!'

The witness, who was a painter, answered: 'What! to the scaffold? I was not aware that the consequences were so serious.' These words excited suspicion. The